He didn’t know it at the time, but Mitch Williams literally grew up with SEMA. The second-generation hot-rodder came of age as the organization negotiated with scale-model builders for accurate representation in model-car graphics. “Well, I was the kid building those model cars,” he says. “I knew all the SEMA brands well before I could drive.”
He spent part of his youth within earshot of Atlanta Motor Speedway. His grandmother taught him to drive in the speedway parking lot. He took himself to his first NASCAR event there. He was 12.
But it was the newly opened Road Atlanta that kept him going. “I saw people driving basically hot-rodded street cars,” he says. “I thought, ‘Hey, you know, maybe I could do this.’” A few years later, he did.
He earned a psychology degree at Emory University. But the Gulf station job that helped him though school taught him something else. “I realized that I was more passionate about cars than I was about psychology,” he admits.
Upon graduating, he headed to Detroit. He drew from inspiration gleaned at the 24 Hours of Daytona. “You can have all the horsepower in the world, but if you can’t see where you’re going, the horsepower is useless.”
The name on the most decals said Cibié, so he went there. He got a job working alongside Bob Patteri (SEMA Hall of Fame 1999). “When you meet a SEMA Hall of Famer on your first day of your first real job in the industry, it’s going to be a pretty good career,” he says.
He described his as a vagabond’s life, roaming the country in an RV to attend races and train clients. “That was the greatest job in the world,” he brags. “I mean, for a guy 23 years old, to be on the road constantly? I was living, eating, sleeping, and breathing cars and racing!”
It was during his presidency in the North American division of Hella that he got a call from future Hall of Famers Russ Deane (SEMA Hall of Fame 2007) and Corky Coker (SEMA Hall of Fame 2008). “They said, ‘We think you ought to run for the SEMA Board.’
“SEMA to me was still kind of, you know, drag racing Southern California scene—which I love,” he says. “But it really wasn’t the direction that my career had gone in.” His was the direction the organization should go, they said. He served six terms on the SEMA Board of Directors, including three as a board member, one as Incoming Chairman, one as Chairman, and one as Outgoing Chairman.
Williams introduced the organization to an adaptation of Roger Penske’s lean principles. His manual, “Introduction to Quality Systems for SEMA Members,” explained quality-control systems and how to implement them. “I wrote that to help SEMA and its members understand that quality is free, and it absolutely will improve your bottom line,” he says. “I tried to open our eyes as an industry that it is a global market now.”
He also prepared SEMA to respond to inevitable legal issues that threatened to hamper its members’ emerging technology. His industry embraced LED technology, but, as he explained, lighting laws were stuck in about 1940. “I felt the best strategy was to keep the government close and [by] explaining who we are and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” he says.
Williams leaned into the organization’s recently formed SEMA Political Action Committee (PAC) to educate lawmakers. “At that time, about 25% of the members of Congress were members of the SEMA coalition…and I [didn’t] think we were tapping into that resource. I think that was a very important step for SEMA to take to be a real force in Washington. And I would say SEMA is, today, one of the more influential lobby organizations in Washington.”
Mitch Williams never practiced psychology on a clinical level, but he applied it daily and we’re all the better for it. “It turned out to be a very good degree to have,” he admits.
“I’m a believer that all business runs on the same thing, which is just people. And if you can get the people side of the business correct, then everything else gets easier. So I never was a clinical psychologist, but business is just applied psychology. And I use that degree every day.”
Few people entering an established industry can literally invent a position. And even fewer can land that position at one of the industry’s biggest hitters. But as the first service rep for speed-parts giant Mr. Gasket, John Iannotte can claim both accomplishments and one more: He did both before his 21st birthday.
Iannotte’s roots in the industry are literally grass: He met veteran speed-parts rep Bob Barker by mowing his lawn. “Bob told me one time, ‘You work hard for me here, and one of these days I’ll bring you on the road with me,’” he said. “October 4, 1974, I went on the road for Joe Hrudka, Herbie Goldstein and Bob Barker.”
What differentiated his role was its scope in the aftermarket industry. “Before then we had tech [and sales] reps,” he noted. Though other industries employed reps to service products after the sale (warranty, recall, returns, etc.), the hot-rod industry had only recently risen to the point of warranting them. And Iannotte was the kid they taught to do that work.
“When I left Bob in 1981, I was stepping out on faith,” he continues. Thirty days later, Ken Parks of Parks Auto, Jim Payne of Master’s Warehouse and Perry Turnipseed of TASCO fronted John $25,000 worth of stock to peddle. And when Joe Hrudka bought back Mr. Gasket, he offered Iannotte his old territory.
Iannotte returned to Bob Barker Marketing and Sales in 1989, but under unfortunate circumstances: as one of the beneficiaries of Barker’s estate. “He was like a dad to me,” Iannotte lamented. But as if channeling his mentor, he reinvented himself once again. “That’s when I went out and bought my first trailer to do service work out in the field for the warehouse distributors and jobbers.
“You had all kinds of guys working with NHRA and the manufacturers to go to the races with big trailers and everything,” he explained. “This trailer was to go out and make jobber calls with it, do jobber events, weekend events. We’d all come together as competitors and put on an evening seminar, and I ended up hauling everything from place to place.” In 1997, Iannotte’s agency won the SEMA Manufacturer’s Rep Agency of the Year award.
But it was Iannotte’s work in SEMA’s Manufacturer’s Rep Council (MRC) that probably left the biggest marks. “Ellen McKoy always challenged me to do more for SEMA,” he says.
They devised a certification system for aftermarket technicians. “Well, before ASE would put their blessings on it, each [applicant] had to get ASE A6 certified,” he says. McKoy urged him to get certified. It proved invaluable. “When I was trying to get installers to do the test, they’d say, ‘Man, I don’t know; I’m not good at tests.’ I’d say, ‘Well, I’m just a salesman. If I can pass it, you can pass it.’ And that’s how I got quite a few of them to do it.”
While serving on the MRC, “one of the things I did was to figure out another way to raise the professionalism in our industry,” he continued. Urged by fellow rep Tom Wilson, Iannotte pursued Certified Professional Manufacturer’s Rep accreditation. “I learned a lot that I thought I knew about repping,” he admits. “I learned a lot on the money side, a lot on the logistics of how to go about [it].”
Just as he did with ASE certification, he leveraged his CPMR title to encourage other reps to follow suit. In 2001, he merged his agency with the N.A. Williams Co., the country’s largest traditional rep firm. In 2015, another great opportunity came Iannotte’s way—he joined Kunzman & Associates for the Southeast as the company was building a national rep agency.
Typical rep, Iannotte is always on. But what he’s selling isn’t necessarily something that benefits him, at least directly.
Instead of hoarding the blessings of mentorship, he literally gave them away. ASE certification didn’t benefit him. The guy devoted a part of his career to telling other reps—literally his competition—how to operate at a higher level. Read between the lines and it looks like he wants everyone to thrive.
“You don’t ever know when you need a friend, just even a competitor, whom you can just call and ask them a question,” he says. “Now we’re competing, but we are one big family.”
