A Leader in Good Times and Bad

Born and raised in the area around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim Cozzie began living out his dreams at a very early age.

“I pretty much knew when I was five or six years old that I was going to do something with cars and performance automobiles, because while everyone else was reading Dr. Seuss, I was reading Hot Rod,” he said.

Cozzie was 15 when his father passed away, so it was his uncle—an engineer for a company that made avionics for airplanes—who fueled his passion.

“One day, a fellow engineer showed up in a ’27 Ford Roadster that had a Cadillac with trips and a LaSalle transmission, and from that day on, that was it,” he said.

Cozzie worked at a service station at night and on the weekends and, as with many back in the day, the owner of the station raced a ’55 Chevy Gasser. Cozzie began attending races and soon became a racer himself.

“When guys were going on dates, I was going to the dragstrip,” Cozzie joked.

In 1978, he tried over-the-road truck driving for several years but felt compelled to work in the automotive industry. He heard about a position as customer service manager at Hurst Performance.

“In those days, Hurst was a magical name in the performance world,” Cozzie said. “I think I took a $6,000 pay cut to go there. My mom thought I was nuts.”

He began there at age 22 in 1979 and stayed 10 years, “drinking it all in, burning my fingers along the way. That’s where I got schooled and really learned about the business end.”

He rose through the ranks to director of marketing for the corporation. While there, he headed every brand at one time or another and developed a racetrack supply division, which involved developing parts exclusively for drag racing, and built a list of client racers. He was also behind the development of the GM 500ci DRCE racing engine and the Hurst Olds Pro Stock team with Oldsmobile in the early ’80s.

Where Cozzie ended up next was the other extreme: vice president of operations for a T-shirt company, Super Press, which was meeting the growing demand for souvenir T-shirts at races. After three successful years, he became restless for the parts business again, so when B&M Racing and Performance Products called, he answered.

His initial regional manager position there evolved 14 years later to vice president of sales and marketing, wherein he grew the business and expanded distribution to include OE suppliers to the Ford GT and distribution programs in Europe, Australia and the Pacific Rim. By 2005, Cozzie was recruited by the performance division of Berkshire Hathaway to resurrect the Zoom Performance Products brand and guide the company through a portfolio-building program, and he became president of the enterprise. His path then turned toward automotive entertainment, first with RTM Productions and now as managing partner of Brenton Productions.

Cozzie became actively involved in SEMA while at B&M, although he’d attended his first show in 1979 and hasn’t missed one since.

“Brian Appelgate asked me to serve on the newly formed Motorsports Parts Manufacturers Council [MPMC],” Cozzie said, and he joined the council in 1996. A year later, he became its chairman. Since then, he has served on the International Task Force, the SEMA Executive Committee, the SEMA Political Action Committee, and he chaired the SEMA Show Committee. He also served multiple terms on the SEMA Board of Directors and was its chairman in 2008–2009 during the recession.

“I believe that Jim had the toughest job any SEMA Chairman has ever had in navigating the worst economic times our industry has ever faced,” said Mitch Williams of TrimParts Holding Corp. “SEMA’s existence wasn’t at stake, but certainly SEMA’s future health was. Some of the tough decisions were ones SEMA had never had to make, so there was no precedent—no one to ask. Jim just had to figure out the right course of action largely on his own. I believe that anyone can look good during the good times, but it takes excellent leadership to look good during the tough times, and that is exactly what Jim and Chris Kersting showed.”

Cozzie also became a driving force behind the SEMA Education Institute and the CU-ICAR program with Clemson University. He was inducted into the MPMC Hall of Fame and, in 2004, was named the SEMA Person of the Year for his ongoing commitment.

“Very few people in our industry have given so much to it and have worked as hard to leave it a better industry for generations to come,” said Bob Scheid of McLeod Racing and SERES. “Jim always has his eye toward success.”

At the Forefront of the Future

Nile Cornelison grew up in Creston, Iowa, where his favorite class in high school was metalworking. Like most of us, tinkering on cars came early. His first vehicle was a 1954 Olds, which he was able to buy with money he made as a machinist at NAPA. Those late teen years also gave birth to a voracious appetite for racing cars, and he parlayed his love of the adrenaline rush to racing Top Fuel in the 1960s and 1970s.

Through racing, Nile found himself the person competitors were turning to for tips on how to build performance engines. That led to an engine-building side business outside of his NAPA job. He soon left to start his own speed shop, specializing in machine work for race cars. At that time, tractor-pulling was a fledgling motorsport, and again, Nile became the person competitors turned to. Only now, it was farmers; they wanted hot rod tractors.

The distribution of speed parts, from manufacturer to speed shops, was beginning to formalize. That would be a career-changing observation, and Nile launched National Custom Warehouse around 1970. “NCW was probably one of the first eight to ten warehouse distributors in the U.S. buying parts from manufacturers and selling to other speed shops. That operation ultimately sold parts in 48 states,” Nile explained.

But he also spotted flaws in the system. “Warehouse distributors did a fantastic job of buying and selling the parts, but they did an absolutely lousy job of moving printed catalogs and price sheets to the parts store front counters so the parts could be sold.”

“So my idea was, why not put together all the jobber/customer lists of all my competitors and create a database—although in those days the word ‘database’ hadn’t been born. The concept was a single file that got rid of all the duplications and facilitated the distribution of catalogs and price sheets, wall posters or anything paper and ink, to the 30-some-thousand outlets so we could cut the time from end of the press to the front counter. We took it from taking 6 months to a year to get catalog information out down to a matter of a couple weeks.”

As you might guess, competitors were reluctant to share their customer lists, so Nile sold NCW to start Direct Communications Inc. (DCi) in 1982. DCi became a direct mail clearinghouse for performance and accessory catalogs and price sheets. “He was an early pioneer in trying to get companies to mail new catalogs on a timely basis to the country’s jobbers and dealers. He did a lot in direct mail and that was in the early days of computers”, explained Chuck Blum of Chuck Blum & Associates, who has known Nile since 1981. “Communication was poor, especially in our growing industry. We didn’t yet have the sophistication of hard-parts distributors, who had been in business for years and years. Getting that information down the line was something our guys just weren’t used to.” In 1996, DCi added electronic cataloging data development and distribution services.

“He truly was a pioneer in the beginning of electronic cataloging,” explained Trina Wilson, an account specialist with DCi. “He helped the industry by getting data into the hands of those who needed the information to sell product. Without data, you’re unable to sell the product and accurately get the right part for the vehicle.” According to Nile, today, DCi facilitates $7 billion in performance and accessory parts sales through 60,000+ business outlets throughout the world.

Nile still made time to become an extremely active volunteer within SEMA, serving on the Board of Directors for eight years, during which time he chaired the Educational Services Committee. From that came SEMA Innovations Day, an effort to connect OEMs to the aftermarket for information-sharing, which was also Nile’s brainchild.

The first keynote speaker lined up got other OEMs to stand up and take notice of the SEMA Show: Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca. Nile also led SEMA’s initial entry into market research, introducing the annual SEMA Market Study. And while serving on the SEMA Show Committee in 1981, he created the show-within-a-show format-a display area for new products now known as the popular New Products Showcase.

Among his numerous accolades, Nile was named SEMA Person of the Year in 1982.

As Trina explained, “Without Nile’s vision, there wouldn’t be the same large number of businesses selling specialty parts today and our members wouldn’t have the success in the new internet marketplaces we have today.”

“Is he the guy with the moustache?” If the name Dennis Gage is not instantly familiar to someone, his handlebar moustache certainly is.