Joseph Samuel Gerard, better known as Joe Girard, (born November 1, 1928 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American salesman. He is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's greatest salesman for twelve consecutive years, selling 13,001 cars at a Chevrolet dealership between 1963 and 1978.
Girard worked from childhood on. A high school dropout, he started working as a shoeshine boy, then he worked as a newsboy for the Detroit Free Press at the age of nine, and then as a dishwasher, delivery boy, stove assembler, and home building contractor. In 1963, the then thirty-five-year-old walked into a Detroit car dealership and begged a skeptical manager for a job as a salesman. He sold a car on his first day and, by the second month, was so good, some of the other salesmen complained and got him fired. His next job was at Merollis Chevrolet in Eastpointe, Michigan, which he held until his retirement in 1977. There, he set consecutive sales records over a fifteen year period.
One of America's most sought-after speakers, Joe Girard appears before such companies as General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, and Kmart.
Mr. Girard's awards include The Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, and he has been nominated for the Horatio Alger Award by the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and the late Lowell Thomas.
Joe Girard now resides in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan.
In 2001, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
Read more about Joe Girard: Personal Achievements, Publications
Famous quotes containing the word joe:
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)