Lucedale Auto Dealer Walt Massey Named Mississippi Nominee for TIME Dealer of the Year

Walt Massey, a Lucedale automobile dealer, has been named the Mississippi nominee for the 2020 TIME Dealer of the Year award — one of the automobile industry’s most prestigious honors, recognizing the nation’s most successful auto dealers who also demonstrate a long-standing commitment to community service.

Massey is one of 49 dealer nominees from across the country who will be honored at the 103rd annual National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) Show in Las Vegas on February 15, 2020. Massey, 48, was chosen to represent the Mississippi Automobile Dealers Association (MADA) in the national competition, putting a small-town Gulf Coast dealer on a stage that draws the industry’s national leadership each year.

From cutting grass to running the store

Massey began his career in the retail auto business at the age of 8, cutting the grass and washing cars at his father’s dealership in Citronelle, Alabama. After high school, he attended the University of Mobile but returned home when his father purchased a struggling dealership across the state line in Mississippi in 1993 — a decision that set the course of his professional life before he turned 21.

“The dealership was located in an old dilapidated building on Main Street in Lucedale,” Massey said. “My dad planned to hire a manager to run the dealership but could not find anyone who would take the job. I told him I would quit school and run the store.”

Massey opened the dealership 13 days before his 22nd birthday and slowly expanded the operation. Today he operates five new franchised dealerships employing more than 175 people — a footprint built store by store from a single run-down lot on Main Street, in an industry where family dealerships routinely fail to survive the second generation, much less multiply into a five-store group.

The early years carried the lessons that industry veterans recognize as the making of a dealer. A struggling store in a county-seat town demands everything of a young owner: sweeping the showroom floor, working the sales desk, handling service customers, learning the finance office and stretching thin capital across payroll and inventory. Dealers who come up that way — Massey’s generation calls it learning the business from the lot up — tend to run their stores differently from executives who arrive through corporate channels, and the TIME award’s criteria have long favored exactly that background.

An industry honor with a history

The TIME Dealer of the Year award is one of the automobile industry’s most prestigious honors. Recipients are among the nation’s most successful auto dealers who also demonstrate a long-standing commitment to community service — a pairing that reflects how the industry sees itself at its best, and one that makes the nomination as much about what a dealer does off the lot as the numbers on it.

Each state’s dealer association nominates one dealer annually, and the national program honors them collectively at the NADA Show — a gathering that brings tens of thousands of dealers, manufacturers and industry vendors to Las Vegas each winter. The 103rd edition, scheduled for February 2020, will mark the program’s long continuity: a recognition that predates most of the technology in the vehicles the nominees sell, and one that has tracked the industry through boom, recession and transformation.

For MADA, the nomination follows the association’s own deliberations. State associations weigh candidates’ business performance, tenure and community involvement before selecting a single representative, and Massey’s selection reflects standing within the state organization that goes well beyond a single year of sales success.

Leadership within the industry

Massey has served on the MADA board of directors and as the group’s chairman from 2008 to 2009 — a term that coincided with the financial crisis and the collapse of auto sales nationwide, arguably the industry’s most punishing stretch since the Great Depression. Chairing a state dealer association through that period meant guiding members through credit freezes, manufacturer bankruptcies and showroom traffic that fell off a cliff.

He is currently vice chairman of MADA SIF, the association’s self-insured workers compensation program — a role that puts him inside the risk-management machinery that protects dealership employees across the state. Self-insured funds like MADA SIF exist because dealership work carries real hazards, from service department injuries to lot accidents, and the program’s governance requires dealer-leaders willing to do the unglamorous work of overseeing claims, safety standards and reserves on behalf of their peers.

Those roles trace the typical arc of a dealer who earns industry-wide respect: run a successful store, then take on the association work that keeps the state’s franchise system healthy. For Mississippi’s dealer community — anchored in county-seat towns like Lucedale as much as in Jackson and the Gulf Coast — that association leadership is how shared problems, from regulatory fights to insurance costs, get solved.

Community service as a career theme

Massey is also passionate about serving his community. He is a sponsor of Mercy House Ministries, a local organization that provides no-cost rehabilitation to men struggling with substance abuse — a cause with particular weight in a rural region where addiction treatment options are scarce and cost puts most programs out of reach for the men who need them.

His relief work has stretched well past the state line. He aided employees of a dealership in Florida after Hurricane Michael in 2018, the Category 5 storm that devastated the Florida Panhandle, and in 2017 he purchased and helped transport generators to South Carolina for victims of Hurricane Irma. Dealers, with their truck fleets, parts networks and service capacity, were among the private-sector responders in both disasters, and Massey’s response in each case ran toward the hardest-hit communities rather than his own market area.

The car show and the kids

He is also involved in fundraising events that benefit children and schools, including the annual Walt Massey’s Classic Cruisin’ Car Show, which helps provide Christmas gifts to underprivileged children. The event has become a fixture of the Lucedale calendar — classic cars lining a small-town street, raised hoods, and a community turnout that converts a weekend of show cars into gifts for families who would otherwise go without.

The car show reflects the same instinct that drives the rest of his community work: use what the dealership business provides — vehicles, space, logistics and the reach of a five-store customer base — as the engine for local causes. For a town the size of Lucedale, the seat of George County in south Mississippi’s piney woods, an annual event of that scale is among the larger charitable gatherings the community hosts each year.

What the nomination means at home

In Lucedale, the TIME nomination reads as recognition of a local story. A 22-year-old who took over a dilapidated Main Street store because no one else would now stands among 49 nominees for a national award, with his name read at the industry’s largest annual gathering. For the 175-plus people his five dealerships employ, it is also a statement about the stability of the operation they work for — dealers earn this kind of recognition over decades, not quarters.

The February 15, 2020 ceremony at the NADA Show will honor all 49 state nominees, with one dealer ultimately selected from the field for the national award. Massey’s candidacy rests on the combination the program exists to celebrate: a business that grew from one failing store to five, an industry leadership record spanning two decades of association work, and a community service file that runs from substance-abuse rehabilitation in Lucedale to hurricane relief in two neighboring states.

However the national selection falls, the Mississippi nomination itself marks Massey as his state’s representative among the nation’s dealer community for 2020 — the latest chapter in a career that began with an 8-year-old cutting grass at his father’s Citronelle dealership and now reaches from Lucedale’s Main Street to the NADA stage in Las Vegas.

The timing of the honor also lands at a moment of change for the industry the nominees represent. Retail automotive has been remade in recent years by online shopping tools, shifting franchise economics and generational turnover in dealership ownership, and the dealer profiles the program celebrates increasingly emphasize adaptation alongside tradition. Massey’s own history — a store saved by a young owner willing to quit school to run it, then expanded into a five-dealership group across two states — is precisely the kind of second-generation success story the industry holds up as its model.

Back in Lucedale, meanwhile, the daily work continues as it has for nearly three decades: inventory arriving on transports, service bays running at opening, sales floors staffed by neighbors, and a car show on the calendar for the following season. The nomination does not change that rhythm; it simply records, on an industry-wide stage, what the town has watched build since 1993.

For south Alabama and south Mississippi alike, the nomination also carries a regional note: the Gulf Coast’s dealer community, bound together by the corridor that runs from Citronelle through Lucedale to the Coast, produced both the man and the career the award recognizes. That geography — small towns, family businesses, hurricanes shared across state lines — is the context in which the 2020 nominee list will read his name.