John Clay Wolfe: “I Was In A Wheelchair—So I Started Buying Cars Sight Unseen From The Public”

And we returned to Our American Stories. Up next, a story from one of the largest car wholesalers in the world and the host of The John Clay Wolf Show. We’re talking about John Clay Wolf. Here’s John to tell the story of his love of all things automotive and how, through the worst of circumstances, he created Give Me The Vin.com. Take it away.

John, I always paid more attention to cars than I should have. A friend of mine in grade school, I think his parents were drug dealers, really, because his dad drove a Countach, and this is probably 1980, and his mom drove a Rolls. Now, they both went to jail, but the cars really stuck out to me. My first car that I loved, loved, loved was a 1988 K5 Blazer. It was a newer version of the 1977 K5 Blazer that my grandfather gave me the keys to when I was about nine, that I drove around on the ranch. That’s what I learned to drive in was a ’77 K5, and that was going to be my first car with my license. So I had this whole list of modifications I wanted to do to it, and I showed it to my dad. It was lift, wheels, tires, winch, all the stuff I saw in four-by-four magazines that I always grabbed when I was at the newsstand, and he surprised me with a new one. He was like, “Hey, we got to go by Wayne Bell’s ranch and look at a horse.” And Wayne Bell is the guy that owned a company called Western Hauler, and Western Hauler was one of the first conversion cowboy Cadillac companies that ever was. Wayne and my father both were into dressing up their dually trucks. They were in the horse world, cutting horses, so they were always trying to outcompete each other with how they could dress up their duallies. And Wayne was in the car business. He owned a Chevy store. So he’s like, “Hey, we got to go by Wayne Bell’s place and look at a horse.” I’m like, “Whatever. I did this whole time.” So on the way back from work, we stopped at Wayne’s, and he went in there and was messing with the horses, and there was this white K5 Blazer sitting out by the barn and had a window sticker. $16,373 was the window sticker price. And I was just sitting there licking the paint off of that thing. And, you know, he’s like, “Come in here and look at this horse.” Like, “No, I’m looking at this truck.” And I was just dying, you know, in love with it. And then I went in and messed with the horses with him, and we came back out. I was getting in his car. He said, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “We’re going home.” He’s like, “Yeah, you’re in the wrong car.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He said, “That’s yours! Happy birthday!” I was just floored. You know, it’s your first car, man. You just… it’s your first real freedom ride. It just opens the door to the world, too. So I drove that truck home and put it in the garage, and I slept in it that night, like, literally leapt in the car, and I started messing with the radio. I took the speakers apart, I took the head unit out. I had my tools, and I started messing with it already. And he came out and he said, “Dude, I bought you this new one so you wouldn’t do anything to it, because you were going to build that other K5 Blazer that I was over.” He said, “I really don’t want to mess with this one.” I’m like, “Okay.” And that lasted about two months. I got him to give me a lift for Christmas and put larger tires on it. And then the next thing I did was put wheels inside those tires. They were BFGoodrich All-Terrains, 33 by 12.50s, and I put a stance on it. And then I cut the exhaust pipes off and put glass packs on it, and man, it looked good. I had the best car in the high school parking lot, for sure, until my junior year summer, and I was at my brother’s house in Fort Worth, and I heard it start up, and I looked out the window and I saw it drive off. I was so mad. So that would be the first car that I ever sold, which was sold to an insurance company. I’ve sold half a million cars since then. I always wanted to be mobile. I was always wanting to leave the house and go somewhere. I was always tinkering. I was always moving, always. My parents were divorced when I was really young, two or three. I don’t even remember them married. But about fourth grade, I really wanted to live with my dad. He lived on a ranch, and it was just more fun out there. So anyway, I moved out to the country with my dad, and in the mornings I would drive to his construction office, and I had a couple of hours—an hour and a half—before it was time to leave for school when I was about nine, and I’d start messing with this equipment. Then I started working on his jobs in the summertime, and Christmas break and whatever break we had from school. And he would come out to those job sites when I was in fourth grade running that equipment and tell them to get me off that little piece and put me on that bigger piece of equipment. He’d say, “He’s only eight years old! He can do it better than you! Get out of my way! Who owns this company, John Clay? Get over here! Get up there and do it!” I mean, there were days when the operators for—I’m talking huge equipment—would like not show up for work, and my dad would grab me out of school to go fill in for the guy. So that work ethic, that responsibility that I feel today, this has been going on forever. And it was a family business, and this construction company had like 300 employees, and my granddad started it from a bicycle, running the wires. Is that Westinghouse? They would deliver messages, teletypes, between Southwestern Bell Telephone Company offices from his bicycle, and that’s what he started ABC Utility Construction with. And he built this thing up to a full-service underground construction company that worked for the telephone company, the power company, the gas company. So I watched all that—I mean, not all of it. I watched the part of it that I was alive for and watched him work crazy hard and have crazy success, and it was very inspiring. And my grandfather Wolf, you know, he’s the one that was making me drive at 8 years old. We would go through gates. He was like, “Keep going. Quick, crawling, go through it!” Remember, I hung a fender on the gate one day. I was just crying. I just knew I was dead. You know, he’s like, “It’s okay.” And he would push me to do things that I wasn’t comfortable to do. And if I made mistakes, he didn’t, you know, beat me up about it. And I remember one thing that was really important to him is that I had the ability to stop. If you’re driving, you better be able to stop. And he’s like, “When I say stop, at any time you stop, show me you can stop.” And we were driving down the road, and I was going about 30 miles an hour, and he said, “Stop!” And I mean, I just laid on it and threw him into the dash. He hit his head on the windshield, started bleeding, and I looked at him. I’m like, “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!” He said, “No, son, you did exactly what I told you to do. Now I know you can stop.” I still do that with my kids when I take them out riding dirt bikes and teach them how to ride four-wheelers and stuff. I yell at them, “Stop!” I mean, if you can’t stop, then you can’t be safe. And that goes along with a lot of things. You’ve got to know when to tap the brakes. In business, you’ve got to know when to be able to pull back and stop when things are getting out of control. I mean, I’m in the middle right now of a twenty-million-dollar buy of a gazillion Sprinter vans, and the excitement of the money potential is wonderful, but I keep hitting the brakes on the deal to make sure we’re following my guidelines and rules of being careful and not getting screwed. When you’re doing a deal that big, it’s so easy to be like, “Yeah, yeah, everything’s great,” but you always have to look at it with an evil eye. How do I get hurt here? How do we get screwed? Wire fraud, trade fraud, title fraud. You just have to be able to be reserved and don’t let the greed or excitement get in front of you where you go make a big mistake being a liar and a crook, sneaky and tricky. Yeah, there’s plenty of people that are successful financially from that. But the guys that had good teams around them and really built something, they had integrity. I had an opportunity to work when I was 18 at Ford in Fort Worth, and I went there as a salesman and went through their salesman training where they taught people how to lie, which is really—I mean, that’s not what they said. But when you’re looking at what’s going on in the manipulation tactics they were teaching salespeople, I’m like, “There’s a better way to do this.” You can do this without lying. And I was there for three months, and I was salesman of the month my third month, but I wasn’t lying. Like, I was just being more straightforward, and here’s the price. And I’d get in trouble for it, too. I’d get written up because they wanted to get you on payments so that they could manipulate the payments and forget about the price. Because the price and the payments obviously add up together. But if you can focus the customer on the payment ranges, then they agree to this payment, and they sign off on this payment. Then when they get to the backroom, the price is high. And I was like, “Man, that’s sorry. That’s just not who I am.” You can tell these people the truth and not have to do that. Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. And that’s hard to find in any car dealer at this time, even worse back then.

And you’ve been listening to John Clay Wolfe tell his story, and in his own way, his family’s story, brought up on solid, traditional American values, Texas values, and the old-school values of hard work, risk-taking. And my goodness, that grandfather of his! He said, he pushed me to do things and didn’t beat me up when I made a mistake. What a wonderful, wonderful grandfather. And my goodness, his father buys him that car. The car gets stolen, and the first car he ever sells, as he put it, was to an insurance company. And by the way, when his dad bought him that new car, he was hoping his son wouldn’t modify it. Ah, hopes! And what did he do? He did exactly what he would do the rest of his life: be obsessed with automobiles. I love that line about being able to stop. Be able to stop. Entrepreneurs and any other type of daredevil risk-takers who can’t stop are a danger to themselves and everybody around them. When we come back, more of the story of John Clay Wolfe, the Howard Stern of cars, here on Our American Stories. And we returned to Our American Stories, and with John Clay Wolfe, the host of The John Clay Wolf Show and the founder of one of the largest car wholesalers in the world, Give Me The Vin.com. When we last left off, John was telling us about how his love for cars started at an early age, but he never thought he’d make cars his career. Let’s return to the story. Here again is John Clay Wolfe.