Dealership groups often acquire stores clustered in one area to take advantage of synergies, and Mountain West Automotive Group’s acquisition of two dealerships in Burley, Idaho, was certainly motivated by the presence of its other stores in the area.
On July 27, Mountain West Auto Group acquired Young Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram and Young GMC in Burley, Idaho, from Young Automotive Group. Young has some 20 new-car dealerships in Utah and Idaho, as well as powersports dealerships and collision centers.
But the group also has close personal ties to the small city the dealerships are in, which Mountain West figures will help it make the two stores more successful than with their previous owner.
“We evaluated a couple of other stores at the same time,” Mountain West founder and CEO Jake Casperson told WardsAuto on a Zoom call, “but ended up going with these ones as they fit into, kind of our growth pattern of southern Idaho. We really like the Northern Utah and Southern Idaho markets.”
Mountain West Auto Group, headquartered in Logan, Utah, now consists of four new car franchised dealerships and seven independent — also known as used — car dealerships in Idaho and Utah.
It has a new and used car presence on the Utah/Idaho border including its other two new car dealerships, which are a Ford store and a CDJR store in Idaho “three minutes from the border,” Casperson said.
Buying the Burley stores will allow Mountain West to “be a little bit more aggressive and take some market share in those areas,” Casperson said.
Small town touch
Young Group, which is “a well-established, 800-pound gorilla” in the auto retail industry, sold the Burley stores because they were outside of the corridor in which the Group was looking to grow, Jonny Mecham, a senior partner at Performance Brokerage Services, told Wards Auto in a Zoom call. Performance represented Young Automotive Group in the transaction.
Selling the small store was a portfolio management move for the large group, Mecham said, “almost like a nuisance, you know, to get it done in order to do other stuff.”
The two parties were “such different buyers, you know?” he said. “It wasn’t a one-time buyer with a one-time seller. It was a major, major dealer-sized network with new up-and-comers.”
Mountain West, which is run by Casperson and three of his closest friends, whom he considers partners, will bring “totally different energies” to running the dealerships, Mecham said.
The previous owners weren’t “tearing it up” in Burley, Mecham said, and the Mountain West Auto Group will be able to give the two stores the attention they deserve.
Burley, in Southern Idaho about two hours from Logan, Utah, has a population of some 12,500. It is less than an hour from Twin Falls, Idaho, where Mountain West has independent dealerships.
Casperson’s wife is from Burley, and his employees drive through it to visit other Mountain West stores, Casperson said. That kind of connection to the community is important to the success of small-town dealerships, he said.
The Burley dealerships were “fairly underperforming,” Casperson said.
While he hesitated to criticize the former owners, in small town Idaho, “the community talks,” Casperson said, and “the way the previous owners did business was very much about money and not about that local feeling that you can provide to the customer.”
Starting in the wholesale business
Casperson has never worked for any other car dealer. His entry into the auto industry came almost by chance. On a ski trip in Canada in January of 2017, Casperson, 31, noticed that the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and Canadian dollar was very favorable, and he bought a 2010 Ford F-150 Lariat pickup there.
When Casperson sold it in the U.S., he made money due to the exchange rate. “And about six months after I brought down the first car, I realized I had a real business,” he said.
Casperson began buying U.S.-manufactured used vehicles in Canada, importing them, and wholesaling them to new car auto groups in Utah.
Casperson would tell the U.S. buyers “price it like frontline ready, and then send me the recon bill after the fact,” he said.
Those reconditioning bills were not small when the labor rate was added in. So Casperson brought reconditioning in-house, including fixed operations and body and customization shops.
Soon they were reconditioning up to 200 cars a month, Casperson said.
In 2021, “we decided to go retail-facing” and opened a Mountain West independent dealership in Logan, he said.
Mountain West’s first two new-car franchise acquisitions came when a wholesale client approached him about acquiring CDJR and Ford dealerships in Preston, Idaho, just 27 miles north of Logan. He bought the two stores on Jan. 1, 2024.
There are synergies between his new and used car dealerships on both the retail and fixed operations side, Casperson said. On the sales side, “our inventory is fluid,” he said, “meaning we have over a thousand cars in our group and any salesman at any store can sell any of those cars.”
Given the close proximity of all the stores, a vehicle purchased from another store can be delivered on the same-day, he added.
“The more used cars we process, we have more fixed ops that from it, dollars, whether its body shop, whether its mechanic shop, whatever it may be … parts sales. And so, there is a symbiotic relationship.”
Vertical integration
Mountain West isn’t averse to acquiring more new car dealerships but “new cars is honestly just a part of our business,” Casperson said, “it’s not our main focus by any means.”
He sees opportunities everywhere.
The group is still importing used vehicles from Canada. It only imports U.S.-made used vehicles that were sold in Canada so it doesn’t face tariffs. “We love Ford,” Casperson said.
On Jan. 1 of this year, it acquired East Idaho Auto Auction in Blackfoot, Idaho, “which is very central to our dealership footprint,” Casperson said.
Mountain West is also looking into getting into the logistics business, transporting vehicles from Canada to the U.S.
After all, it is already importing vehicles for other businesses, he said, and people regularly come from the Calgary and Edmonton area to one of Mountain West’s holding facilities in the U.S.
“We’re already doing the paperwork, we are doing everything for them, holding vehicles,” he said. “Why don’t we also transport the cars on the exact same route every time?”
It’s all about staying in the same area, however. Mountain West isn’t interested in picking up vehicles in random locations, Casperson said.
”It is just this I-15 corridor from Blackfoot, Idaho to Calgary is really where our focus is,” he said.
