The Marsh brothers are getting out of the auto dealership business.

Bill Marsh Auto Group, owned jointly by brothers Bill Marsh Jr., Mike Marsh, and Jamie Marsh, will sell its three northern Michigan auto dealerships to Serra Automotive. The transition is scheduled to occur in late April or early May, after which the three brothers will leave the company for good and the dealerships will rebrand as Serra stores.

The news marks the end of a major northern Michigan business dynasty. Bill Marsh Sr. started the Bill Marsh Auto Group back in 1982, purchasing a local Buick dealership and rebranding it with his own name on the sign. The company has grown substantially since then: Bill Marsh Auto Group now boasts approximately 300 employees across three dealership locations – in Traverse City, Kalkaska, and Gaylord, respectively – and sells or services eight automotive brands, including Buick, GMC, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, RAM, Hyundai, and Ford.

Bill Jr., Mike, and Jamie eventually bought the business from their dad, who passed away in 2016.

The Ticker reached the three brothers on Thursday afternoon, while they were traveling between the three Bill Marsh dealerships to announce the news directly to staff. Father-and-son team Joe and Matt Serra, who own the Fenton-based Serra Automotive brand, as well as Jerry Zezulka and Jim Tuohy, who oversee the existing Serra Traverse City franchise, accompanied the Marsh brothers.

Why sell? Bill Jr. says the three brothers have actually always planned for this kind of exodus from the company.

“The biggest thing is that we are three brothers and three equal partners,” Bill explains. “We operated the company for years before we bought it from Bill Sr. in 2005, and when we purchased the company as partners and brothers, we all agreed that, just as we’d entered together, we would exit the business together, as well. We never planned for any kind of situation where one of us would leave and the others would buy him out. The idea from the start was that we would be all in, and then we would be all out.”

Last year, the brothers decided they were ready to start thinking more seriously about riding off into the sunset.

“We took more deliberate steps to research the marketability of the company, trying to assess whether it was the right time [to sell], given conditions in the industry,” Bill Jr. says. “And we ultimately decided to take that step.”

“We were told there'd be a lot of interest in the business,” adds Mike Marsh. “But we had a very short list of people that we thought we would want to approach before we made any decision. The first call was to Joe Serra.”

Serra Automotive, like Bill Marsh Auto Group, is a family-owned company that started off with a single dealership – a Chevy store opened by founder Albert M. Serra in 1973. Since then, the company has evolved into one of the top 10 privately-held retail automotive groups in the United States, according to its website. Today, Serra operates 54 dealerships in seven states and employs more than 3,000 people. In 2015, the company broke into the northern Michigan market, where Zezulka and Tuohy now manage seven stores, including dealerships for Subaru, Volkswagen, Nissan, Cadillac, Toyota, Volvo, and Audi.

“We’ve known the Serra organization for quite a while,” Mike explains. “We were both Saturn dealers back in the day Saturn was a small group. The initial dealers were very progressive and looking to make positive change in the industry, and so we all got to know each other well. We spent quite a bit of time with Joe Serra, getting to know him and really seeing the alignment we had with him in terms of our values and the vision for our companies.”

Joe Serra ended up being not just the first call the Marsh brothers made, but the last one as well. Quickly, Serra expressed interest in not just buying the Bill Marsh Auto Group, but also retaining nearly everything about the business.

“Joe was very interested in continuity, and in not changing,” Mike says. “He has a lot of respect for our organization and the things that made us successful, and he is not looking to make a lot of changes.”

“Joe has been essentially begging our people to stay,” Bill Jr. adds. “His message is ‘We need you, because the people are the biggest source of value in any organization.’”

So, what actually will be changing at Bill Marsh Auto Group come springtime?

“From an operational standpoint, the only thing that’s going to change is the three of us are exiting,” Jamie Marsh says. “The way we do business now will remain; our teams, especially after today, I know are feeling really positive about this change. Now, that doesn’t mean that things aren’t going to change over time, but they change over time anyway. So, we're confident that customers will still get the same level of service and be treated the same way as they always have been.”

As for the Marsh brothers themselves, the three will retain ownership of one part of the Bill Marsh Auto Company: a trio of franchise stores for the used car financing company Byrider, located in Traverse City, Grand Rapids, and Saginaw. Otherwise, the brothers are looking forward to stepping outside of the automotive world for the first time in their adult lives.

“We’ve talked a lot about how we don’t want to retire at our desks as old men,” Mike says. “So, part of the decision here is that we’re relatively young and can do other things. We grew up in the car business because of our father doing that, and we have worked in it ever since. So, while none of us have specific plans [for what comes next], it’s exciting to think that, for the first time in our lives, there are a whole lot of options for what we can do.”

Pictured, left to right: Jamie Marsh, Bill Marsh Jr., and Mike Marsh

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated that Joe and Matt Serra are brothers; Joe and Matt Serra are father and son.