From academia to autos, Tim Kelly has variety of business interests

He's very entrepreneurial - an out-of-the-box thinker.

Tim Kelly, owner of Kelly Subaru on Riverfront Parkway, has a variety of business interests in addition to the downtown Chattanooga dealership.

Tim Kelly was a comparative literature major, a John Jay Scholar at Columbia University in New York and well on his way to a career in academia when he returned to Chattanooga.

"As the only remaining child in the [auto] business, I got lured back to Chattanooga to run the business," says Kelly, the owner of Kelly Subaru downtown, who succeeded his father and grandfather in the auto business. "I came back to Chattanooga at a pretty gold moment, right before the Tennessee Aquarium was being built. It's been great."

Kelly, 49, says the dealership recently marked 45 years at the Riverfront Parkway and M.L. King Boulevard location where the Subaru store recently underwent a nearly $2 million upgrade.

While the makeover didn't increase the store's footprint, the work included a variety of improvements with an emphasis on the environment. For example, a solar panel array was installed to generate electricity, while the use of thicker glass windows, LED lights and other environmental enhancements will cut consumption.

"All of them save a ton of energy," Kelly says. "It saves us a lot of money in utilities. It's a great fit with our customers."

Kelly, who has been in the auto business now for 27 years, has a string of other business interests. Those include Southern Honda Powersports, a Chattanooga dealer of all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles located on Workman Road that is a destination for riders from Florida to Ohio.

Also, he is a partner in Zipflip, which bills itself as the Airbnb of car shopping. He says that business recently kicked off version 2.0 of the app and he's expecting "great things for that."

"There are people who like to buy cars on Craigslist who are not comfortable with the dealership process," Kelly says. The company went through a Facebook accelerator and integrated that product with social media, he says.

The idea is "to help people buy and sell cars person to person," Kelly says. "There's space for that in the market just like a dealership."

Last year, Zipflip won the $20,000 grand prize at the third annual Hackomotive competition sponsored by auto research site Edmunds.com.

In addition, Kelly is a co-founder of Chattanooga FC, which was created in 2009 to play in the National Premier Soccer League and regularly draws large crowds to Finley Stadium. The Chattanooga club led the nation in attendance last year among NPSL members, drawing more than 5,000 fans per game.

"Everybody knows how that's doing," Kelly says.

Kelly calls himself "a multi-tasker extraordinaire." But, he adds, he has used technology to institute a streamlined, integrated system related to his businesses "so we can stay on the same page."

Kelly is a board member for the River City Co., the nonprofit downtown Chattanooga redevelopment group, and he adds a lot to that panel, says Kim White, the entity's chief executive.

"He's very entrepreneurial - an out-of-the-box thinker," she says.

White notes that Kelly fought to keep the auto dealership downtown when others were going elsewhere in the city.

"He was ahead of the curve," she says, citing the new development around Kelly's Subaru dealership that shows the city is coming back to downtown.

Steve Marlin, the dealership's general manager, says that going green is "great for business," and he believes the makeover has already helped the store sell more cars.

"It's important for the morale of the associates in the store to invest, and being on the riverfront, it's important to the city and very important to the product," he says.

Kelly says the dealership's sales are surging. It sold 95 new vehicles in August, nearly a 50 percent increase, he says.

"A lot of things have come and gone," he says about other brands his dealership has sold in the past. "We wound up with the best."

Subaru, a Japanese company specializing in all-wheel-drive cars and SUVs, is experiencing a sales surge, with 57 consecutive months of month-over-month sales growth, according to the company.