More than the inventory, customers, reputation, and team, the walled off door is probably the most important conveyance from Kempthorn Motors to Great Lakes Auto Groups. And after the signatures and photos, Eric Kempthorn took Joey Huang, and his sons, to see it.
Behind the door is his father’s old office as detailed in this article from last June. Dick Kempthorn ran the dealership on Cleveland Avenue from 1965 until he died in 2019, at 92. When the Volvo complex got renovated a few years later, the crew built the new interior walls around that office on purpose. Nobody wanted to touch it.
“Everybody treats this like a museum,” Eric said.
He wanted Huang, the new owner, and Huang’s two sons to understand his father as much as they understood the dealership. Then he told them the part every longtime customer already knows. Dick Kempthorn did business the old-fashioned way, on a handshake. One family alone has bought a hundred cars there.
On August 17, Kempthorn Motors was sold to Great Lakes Auto Group. After 88 years and three generations, Eric Kempthorn didn’t announce the sale like a loss. He talked about legacy, choosing a buyer who “shares our family values,” and making sure the name, the staff, and the story would all still be standing after the sale, even without a Kempthorn behind the counter.
The scale of Great Lakes presented the best opportunity to grow the Kempthorn Legacy, and it’s employees.
The same week, a few miles away, the Canton Repository ran a different kind of story. Jessie Newlon, 33, is co-owner of Gold’N Krisp Potato Chips. She started riding shotgun on the delivery route with her sister at fifteen and officially as an employee five years later. She learned production on the floor under her dad. And somewhere along the way her role turned to the financial and administrative side. Somewhere after that she became a co-owner alongside her mom and both sisters.
Sixty-five years and four generations of making one perfect thing.
Two Stark County business featured in the same week. With two different decisions about what to do with the business their parents and grandparents built. One sold. One is still all in the family. Neither is the model, and both are worth paying attention to.
Gold’N Krisp got where it is by roles sorting themselves out, in real time, over two decades. Delivery route. Production floor. Books. Ownership. Nobody handed Jessie Newlon a title. She grew into one, and so did her sisters, until four women each held a distinct, named piece of a business that used to be one man’s.
Kempthorn got where it is by asking a harder question early and answering it honestly: what actually needs to survive here, the family’s ownership or the family’s legacy? They chose Great Lakes specifically because it would keep the name, keep the staff, and has the resources to keep almost ninety years of history intact.
Different decisions. Same discipline underneath both of them.
That’s the part worth sitting with if you’re running a business right now. Clarity doesn’t tell you whether to keep the business in the family or sell it. It just makes sure that whichever way you go, you go on purpose. It’s about whether anyone inside the business could tell you right now what’s actually being protected and what isn’t. The name. The building. The relationships. The paycheck. The mission. Pick two people in your business and ask them separately. If you get two different answers, you don’t have a succession problem yet. You have a clarity problem that will become one, whichever direction you eventually go.
Dick Kempthorn’s advice to his kids, according to the family, was simpler than any of this: if you want something done, do it now. Jessie Newlon has her grandfather’s version of the same line tattooed on her arm, “do it now.”
Neither family waited for a plan to arrive from somewhere else. They just kept getting clear, out loud, with each other, one decision at a time. That’s the whole method. It’s not more complicated than that, and it’s not easier either.
What have you recognized, is worth protecting in your business, and what have you just never gotten around to deciding?