Michael Creer Does What’s RIGHT

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Michael Creer has counted Ken Garff Automotive Group as a client for as long as he has been an attorney. But he has been familiar with the Utah-based automotive dealer group (and the family who has owned the business since its founding in 1932) for even longer.

“I started doing legal work for Ken Garff and the Garff family in 1995 as an associate in private practice,” Creer says. “My relationship with the Garff family actually goes back way before that. I have known the Garff family for more than forty-five years now, so it was a fairly natural transition for me when I had the opportunity to join the company in 2007 as its first general counsel.”

In his seventeen years as general counsel, Creer has witnessed firsthand the group’s evolution as it has grown from twenty dealerships in Utah to now comprise more than seventy dealerships in nine states. He has also taken an active role in navigating that evolution by building out the legal team from scratch, encouraging the expansion of the company’s HR team, and helping to steer the creation of a company culture that upends automotive industry stereotypes.

Before coming on board at Ken Garff, Creer honed his expertise in the transactional space at two different Salt Lake City law firms. He did work for Ken Garff, then operating solely in Utah, throughout his years in private practice.

“In 2006, the Garff family, with an external partner, began buying dealerships in other states,” he says. “That was one of the things that precipitated them wanting me to come over and join them in-house. The strategy at that time was to look for opportunities to continue expanding the company into new markets, and we’ve been on a steep trajectory of growth ever since.”

“After surveying many of our employees about what was important to them, we came up with the acronym RIGHT—which stands for Respect, Integrity, Growth, Humility, and Teamwork—to describe the culture and values we strive for.

Michael Creer

In addition to leveraging his own transactional background to facilitate that growth, Creer has aimed to develop a legal team that can keep pace with the company. “We currently have two attorneys, a paralegal, and a legal admin. We intend to add two more attorneys this year because our growth has been so significant,” he says. “I’m in the process of further building out our legal department so that we can better and more efficiently serve the company and all of its entities.”

As Ken Garff focused on expanding its reach, it became apparent to Creer and his fellow executive team members that the company needed to adopt a more intentional approach to cultivating its employee and customer experiences. Creer, who in the early days doubled as the group’s vice president of HR, has helped Ken Garff craft a coherent vision that would honor the company’s long and rich history while outlining a new set of best practices to carry it into the future.

“After surveying many of our employees about what was important to them, we came up with the acronym RIGHT—which stands for Respect, Integrity, Growth, Humility, and Teamwork—to describe the culture and values we strive for. We’ve been using that acronym internally for many years as we focus on not only the company experience that we want our employees to have, but also the way we expect our employees to treat the customers who come into our dealerships,” Creer says.

Per Creer, Ken Garff holds monthly and quarterly trainings to reinforce each of its five core values, which employees initially come to know through streamlined new-hire orientation and on-boarding processes. Furthermore, a few years ago, the company hired its inaugural VP of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, to ensure that its culture will be as welcoming as possible to all current and future employees.

Although Creer had admired the business environment established by the Garff family at Ken Garff even while acting as outside counsel, he knew back then that there was room for change at the dealership level, and change has been a constant at Ken Garff throughout his tenure as general counsel. “One of our underlying goals as a company is to be ‘un-carlike,’ as our CEO puts it, in our approach to our customers and in our approach to our employees,” he says.

“I want my team members to feel like they have an opportunity to progress and grow by taking on new responsibilities and becoming a more integral part of our company.”

Michael Creer

That translates to breaking with the aggressive sales tactics—and with the type of salesperson who thrives on such tactics—once synonymous with the automotive industry. “The industry has always been predominantly male, and historically, women just haven’t felt as comfortable working in that environment,” Creer says. “We’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past several years focusing in on how we can create more gender diversity in our workplace, and we’ve made great strides in getting specific feedback from the female employees within our dealerships on the experiences they’re having and how they view growth opportunities within the company.”

Creer hopes that the steps Ken Garff has taken—and will continue to take—to celebrate diversity and foster an atmosphere of inclusivity and belonging will empower its employees to advance their careers. He wants the same for his legal team which he strives to lead with humility, with an emphasis on open communication, and without ever losing sight of the company’s core values.

“I want my team members to feel like they have an opportunity to progress and grow by taking on new responsibilities and becoming a more integral part of our company,” Creer says. “My goal is to see the legal team become what it needs to be to best protect the company’s well-being, while also serving as a shining example of what it means to treat people RIGHT within our organization.”

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