Friday morning, Darmstädter Landstrasse: Stefan Göbel sits at a high table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and next to him is a red Mitsubishi car – one of the vehicles that potential customers can discover here with a cup of Gorilla coffee. But not everyone does that. A man with a shoulder bag enters the room, orders a coffee and leaves. For Göbel, this is everyday life. “People quickly grab a coffee and leave again,” he says. The car dealership has more to offer: In a relaxed atmosphere, customers can not only enjoy hot drinks, but also look at vehicles – if they want to. This location of the Heinrich Göbel car dealership group is different. Most of their nine other branches are classic car dealerships. But here Göbel combines tradition and innovation. “This used to be a Porsche,” says the master car mechanic and remembers childhood days when he drove past here with his father when they got spare parts. One of the best-known car dealerships in and around Frankfurt. Today he uses the very building that is for him holds so many childhood memories. In 2013, Göbel dared to experiment at this location: together with his friend Andreas Hühsam, one of the minds behind the Gorilla Coffee brand, he made cars and coffee a shared experience. Mitsubishi was the only brand to embrace this concept – a bold step. After all, the success story of his ten-location, multi-brand car dealership group has long been closely linked to Mercedes. This year, Göbel has many opportunities to look back on the car dealership’s eventful history, as it is, after all, the hundredth anniversary of the company’s founding. It started in 1924 Heinrich Göbel in Neu-Isenburg as a motorcycle dealer, today the company is one of the best-known car dealerships in and around Frankfurt. Stefan Göbel, grandson of the founder Heinrich, knows that life and work in the company has changed over the years. For many years, the company pursued a strategy that focused solely on Mercedes. The company’s current size was not planned from the start. Old meets new: Previously, only cars were sold here. Röth But those days are over. “You have to increase the noise floor,” says Göbel, meaning the variety that is necessary to meet the manufacturer’s requirements. Today, Göbel’s employees repair and sell vehicles from Mercedes, Mitsubishi, Smart, Ford and other brands. Even owners of commercial vehicles are not turned away by his employees. According to him, this strategy has, among other things, the advantage that fluctuations in the popularity of individual providers can be better compensated for. “There used to be a car dealership of one brand in every city with 20,000 inhabitants,” says Göbel, but today this specialization has softened, Most companies operate for several manufacturers. Its approximately 300 employees work at ten locations, where they sell 1,000 vehicles a year and work over 100,000 hours in the workshops. The company’s current size was not planned from the start. When Stefan Göbel took over management in 1991 at the age of just 22, he was faced with an enormous task. His father Heinz died unexpectedly at the age of just 55, and Göbel had to continue running the car dealership, which at the time consisted of two locations in Neu-Isenburg and Langen. “I actually wanted to study,” he says. But a month before starting his studies, he had to jump into the deep end when his father died. “For me, the social aspect counts more than sales.” The workforce that had previously worked with his father was significantly older than Göbel. “I had to tell people ten years older where to go,” he remembers. In 2008 he officially took over the GmbH from his mother, and with his wife Stefanie, who supports him in the management, he continuously expanded the company. This was often associated with pain and insights that he liked to have learned from his father or during his studies He says that he would have even seen any generational conflict that might arise as an enrichment. Nevertheless, Göbel continued to develop the house and today the company generates sales of around 50 million euros per year. Göbel hastens to say that they were only able to grow because they always had good employees. “For me, the social aspect counts more than sales.” Despite the successes, Göbel remains grounded. His goal is to set up the company so that it can function without him. His children Gina and Patrick should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want to take over the family business one day. “We are now gradually appointing managing directors so that the two of them can calmly think about what they want to do,” he says. The location is a symbol of tradition that is changing. At the same time, Göbel wants to ensure that the “hundred-year-old structures” like him called, be modernized. With a mix of classic services, innovative offers such as the coffee house idea and a wide variety of brands, he wants to make the car trade fit for the future.More on the topicWhile Göbel is sharing these thoughts, another customer enters the café in the car dealership on Darmstädter Landstrasse. She orders a kilo of Gorilla coffee, pays and leaves immediately. She won’t take a closer look at a car today, let alone buy one. But that doesn’t bother Göbel. The concept in which coffee and cars come together has long been a success for him; for him the location is a symbol of tradition that is changing and of innovation that combines with history. The long-standing concepts occasionally need a refresh says Stefan Göbel. The boss also has to admit that the approach with coffee, snacks and cake also works in his own case. “I’m here almost every lunchtime.”
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