Eddie Brooker opens his newly redesigned North Georgia Toyota on East Walnut Avenue in Dalton.DALTON, Ga. - Eddie Brooker wants to make buying or servicing a car as easy as possible at his North Georgia Toyota dealership.
So over the past year and a half, the the 56-year-old car dealer has spent more than $3 million to upgrade the showroom and parking lot at his 5.6-acre business, adding a spacious waiting area with a 60-inch high definition television, a cafe stocked with complimentary coffee, water and snacks, and charging stations for customer devices.
The dealership's 49-person staff also has new offices in the 27,458-square-foot showroom, which Brooker and top Toyota officials celebrated during a ribbon-cutting ceremony Wednesday.
"Our top priority is to perfect the customer experience," said Brooker, the president of North Georgia Toyota who took over the 41-year-old dealership following the death of his father, Edgar Brooker, in 2010. "We've added 5,500 square feet and redesigned the entire facility to be more user friendly and to help everything flow better."
With the new facility, Brooker said he has tripled his inventory of cars from what he kept a couple of years ago.
"We actually got an additional 400 cars in our allocation that we will get over the next two years," said Brooker, who said he is currently selling about 90 new cars and 50 or more used cars a month. "We're enjoying record sales this year and I expect 2017 will be even better."
The dealership upgrade has added more customer and service area parking, a retail parts area, a quick-lube facility, a bigger showroom, new offices for sales staff and managers and an enclosed delivery area. The renovated dealership now offers express lube service with courtesy shuttles, three additional bays for expedited service and golf carts to transport customers around the dealership.
The new showroom showcases Brooker's hometown of Dalton with historic scenes from Northwest Georgia on the upper walls and a proclamation in bright red lettering that the dealership has "proudly served Dalton and surrounding areas since 1975."
The dealership grew out of an outdoor center that Edgar Brooker operated in the 1970s on Glenwood Avenue that sold boats, go-carts, chain saws and lawn mowers along with Toyota cars. Brooker pledge to Toyota, which at the time had only a small share of the U.S. market, that if Toyota car sales proved adequate he would build a stand-alone dealership by 1980.
Brooker opened Dalton's first Toyota dealership on Walnut Avenue in 1980. By 1997, he added another building, which has been expanded and upgraded during the latest renovation after the original store was torn down in 2014.
The dealership was one of the first for Toyota in Georgia. Eddie Brooker, who has worked at the business since graduating from the University of Georgia in 1982, said he has worked with other car brands, including Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, Hyundai, Isuzu, Buick and Oldsmobile over his 32-year career in car sales. He still owns a share of the Brooker Ford dealership run by his brothers, Bobby and Allen.
"But I've put all of my energy into Toyota, which I think has best evolved with the market and has some great cars and trucks to sell," Brooker said. "I knew when Toyota began building plants in America [including the car assembly plant built in Georgetown, Ky., in 1986], they were in it to win in for the long run."
Through its history, North Georgia Toyota has earned various accolades awarded by Toyota for customer satisfaction, including multiple company awards for Service Excellence, Parts Excellence, Customer Relations Excellence and Dealer Excellence.
But Brooker said sales were challenged during the Great Recession, which pushed the jobless rate here in the Carpet Capital above 13 percent in 2010 and forced dealerships selling other brands to suspend sales or move out the market, including some Chrysler, Nissan, Mazda, Volkswagen, GMC truck and other sales outlets to close.
"We want all these stores to come back into Dalton," Brooker said. "As a car dealer, I don't want to be standing alone on an island. We not only want more competition, we need it. People want to shop in an area where they can look at multiple brands at different dealers. We're seeing some new dealerships in the market again and that's good for the customer and good for Dalton and us."
Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6340.