Fast Lane

 

Giacomo Mattiolo stepped away from his corporate position at Ferrari so he could buy the Italian automakers’ Beverly Hills dealership

By ANDY FIXMER

Staff Reporter

 

Sent by Ferrari to turn around its troubled company-owned Beverly Hills dealership, Giacomo Mattioli ended up buying the business six years ago and making it the highest grossing Ferrari dealership in North America. During that time, Mattioli has served L.A.’s power brokers and Hollywood’s biggest stars. The dealership, with its display of exotic cars, has become a clubhouse of sorts to many local Ferrari owners, who drop by for a cappuccino and to chat about cars. Mattioli grew up in Modena, Italy, where Ferrari’s factory is located, and was one of the first attorneys hired by the company to license its name. Before being sent to the United States, he was on committees that helped design some models. Now, with a new house in Santa Monica, the 36-year-old Mattioli has applied for citizenship and is in the process of making the United States his permanent home.

 

Question: A basic Ferrari 360 coupe starts at $160,000. What makes a Ferrari cost so much?

Answer: Ferrari grows more sophisticated with each new model. They always want to have the most sophisticated car on the market. Ferrari designs and builds all its parts and uses the best materials and technology on the market. But to do all that internally and to be able to bring that to this market takes a huge investment. Ferrari doesn’t make a lot of money compared to American car companies. It makes most of its money on licensing and merchandise. Unfortunately, the cost of building and designing the cars continues to go up and so does the cost of a Ferrari.

 

Q: Your dealership sells the most Ferraris in North America, but how many is that?

A: We sell about 200 cars between Ferrari, new and used, and Maserati, new and used. The number of new cars we get a year is confidential. It’s very competitive. Ferrari only builds 4,200 cars a year, and 35 percent of those go to dealerships in North America, which is our largest market.

Q: Do you haggle?

A: Never. At any other company if a famous actor walks in and says he wants the car, you give him a deep discount because he’ll be photographed with it on some red carpet and that will get you business. At Ferrari it’s the opposite. They don’t care. They don’t want to know. There is no VIP treatment. All our customers are VIPS to begin with. There’s no haggling, and for some models, because they are so rare, people actually pay more than the factory’s recommended price.

 

Q: What’s the average income of a Ferrari buyer?

A: I think over a $1 million income is typical. Maserati buyers are about half that. The net worth of a Ferrari buyer could be several million dollars. These are guys who could come in and write a check, but they never do. It’s much more of a process. It goes way beyong purchasing a car. In fact, it’s incidental they are purchasing the car. It’s the process they like.

 

Q: What is it like working with these people?

A: You are not trying to sell the car. The car sells itself. You are not trying to convince them to buy this car. These are very strong-willed people, it’s very hard to convince them of anything. They need to trust you and they need to be comfortable to talk to you and from there it’s all downhill.

 

Q: You’ve said owning a Ferrari is like belonging to a club.

A: There’s this real sense of belonging. There’s a group of people who get together on Sundays to go driving. There’s another group that’s more interested in racing, and they get together to watch Formula One. Some people just like cleaning their car. There was this one executive at Paramount who spent his Saturdays cleaning his car in impossible detail and in every possible area. And that’s how he relaxed on the weekends. This is not about transportation.

 

Q: What’s the biggest hurdle to selling a Ferrari?

A: The most typical question is how extravagant, exotic and consequently unreliable these cars are. You have to get over that jump first. These cars are very reliable right now. They may not have been for all the 50 years Ferrari has been in the United States. But today Ferrari meets all standed of the environment, pollution and safety. Technically the cars can be driven every day, and some clients do.

 

Q: What do you drive?

A: Lately, I’ve been driving the Maserati a lot, trying out the new coupes. But I like to drive the (Ferrari) 575.

 

Q: How long does it take to sell a Ferrari?

A: You have the rock star that comes in and wants to drive it that night to dinner. Then you have the businessman who brings his family to choose a color and might come back three or four more times. We choose the car and pick the options to customize it. You can control all the little details that go into the car. Some go to the factory to watch the car being built. It’s not just buying a car.

 

Q: What did you do before selling Ferraris?

A: I was never that interested in going to university, but my dad is a cardiologist and a professor and I had to go. If I didn’t I would’ve had to live under a bridge somewhere. I studied law but within a month of practicing, I knew it wasn’t for me. The life was too slow.

Q: How did you get your start at Ferrari?

A: Luckily, at the time I decided practicing law wasn’t for me, the factory was terminating this major licensing contract with Cartier and they needed someone for six months to coordinate all this paperwork with different law firms all over the world. They didn’t have a legal department back then.

 

Q: But you stayed longer than six months.

A: They were a little naive about licensing. Enzo Ferrari had just died and people were using the Ferrari logo based on a verbal agreement they had made with Enzo over lunch or dinner. I wrote a letter to all model manufacturers saying Ferrari wanted a licensing agreement with them and required a $10,000 down payment and then 2 percent to 3 percent in royalties. I sent that to about 50 manufacturers around the world, and to the surprise of everyone at the company we got around 35 or 45 back with checks. After that, they were very impressed with me. We went from nothing to a lot of money a month on licensing. When my contract was up, they asked me to stay.

 

Q: Why did they send you here?

A: We just went through a major restructuring of our dealership network. They spent several years getting rid of some dealerships and recruiting new dealers. The guy who had my job before me, the dealers called him the terminator. The joke was if he asked you to go to dinner that meant you were going to be terminated. They sent me to America in September 1995 to oversee North American distribution. I was brought in to give hope to the new dealers and calm the older dealers.

 

Q: How did you get sent to Los Angeles?

A: They had two operations on the West Coast, one in San Francisco and this one. They had to take over the Beverly Hills operation because the dealership had some troubles. So they moved me here to oversee the two dealerships.

 

Q: When did you buy the business?

A: I knew they were going to sell and I knew this is what I wanted to do. So I asked them if they would sell the dealership to me in 1998. Piero Ferrari (son of founder Enzo Ferrari) is my partner and we found some investors. We’ve already paid them back. Piero is a vice president at Ferrari, and he owns about 10 percent of the company, but he’s much more interested in his airplanes than the cars. He’s looking to buy a house in L.A. now. He loves it here.

 

Q: Was it hard making the transition to the dealership?

A: At the beginning it was very challenging. What helped me was my experience at the factory because I observed enough clients who came to visit and listened to what they said they liked.

 

Q: When you go to parties and tell people what you do for a living what’s the first thing they ask?

A: Typically they want to know who buys the cars and I tell them I can’t say. They ask how fast I have gone in the cars. I did some racing when I was younger so I have probably driven these cars up to 190 or 200 (miles per hour).