|
Newsday, Melville, N.Y., Money & Power column: MONEY & POWER
(Newsday (Melville, NY) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Mar. 12--When Juliana Terian came to work at Rallye Motors, she arrived as "widow in mourning."
Her husband, Peter, and a partner had started the company selling used cars from a trailer on a dirt lot in 1958, eventually building it into a North Shore dealership for Mercedes, BMW and other luxury auto brands.
He knew the car business. She didn't.
But in his last months, Peter Terian had encouraged her. "If you want to run it, you can run it. You're able, you're smart enough," she recalls him saying while he was ill with prostate cancer. He died in 2002 at the age of 65.
As if the pressure of taking over the business while grieving wasn't enough, Juliana Terian was immediately faced with a crisis.
"BMW came to me right after my husband died to say our facilities needed upgrading," she says. "They gave us two years to find a place." For support, she had her father sit in on the meeting with BMW, since he had a brother who had run a used-car lot in her native California.
The message was clear: If she didn't upgrade the cramped BMW part of the dealership, based at Rallye's Roslyn headquarters, the company could lose the franchise.
That explains why Juliana Terian, a novice at running a car business, ultimately decided to plunk down $30 million for a huge new home for Rallye BMW.
The 92,000-square-foot contemporary structure in Westbury displays cars on a tiled ramp in a light-filled showroom and features a service department with more than 60 bays, an indoor drop-off area, a cafe, a playroom and wireless Internet access.
It helped that she was an architect, determined to add sustainable features to the new building. It also helped that she was a car buff from childhood.
What Juliana Terian's career demonstrates is the role of chance in determining the challenges people face in business.
She points out that women encounter more detours than men. Since they're often thrust into the role of caregiver for a child, a parent or an ailing spouse, they are likely to take breaks in their careers and wind up pursuing unpredictable paths.
Juliana Curran grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Her first car was a 1966 Chevy Bel Air "with body rot" and 155,000 miles on the odometer. The gas gauge didn't work, and Juliana ran out of gas so many times she got a letter from AAA warning her she was abusing the privilege of emergency road service.
Design was an early interest. As one of seven kids who had to share rooms with siblings, Juliana started making models, using cardboard from her father's laundered shirts, of fantasy houses with seven or eight bedrooms.
She studied art and architecture at California Polytechnic State University and eventually got her bachelor's in architecture at Pratt Institute in New York. She helped pay for her schooling by modeling in ads for cigarettes, lingerie, bathing suits and in catalogs.
When Juliana met Peter Terian in 1987, she was running her own architecture firm in the city, which specialized in interior design for businesses, particularly in medical settings.
"So he was trying to chat me up at a dinner, sort of flirting a little bit with me," she says. Juliana didn't find a car dealer all that interesting -- not until Terian mentioned that he was holding an architectural competition to design Rallye's Roslyn showroom.
"And then I found out about the contestants . . . top New York architecture firms, and I got very intrigued," she says. It turned out that Peter Terian was a self-taught art collector who was "more precise in design than I am," she says. A noted architect, Ulrich Franzen, won the contest.
Peter and Juliana got married and lived in a landmark New York apartment building, the Dakota. In 1996, they bought Leonard Bernstein's old 12-room apartment there from the conductor/composer's three children for $4 million.
Bernstein had bought it in the 1970s, and the ceiling had been lowered, concealing moldings and other design details, she says. Juliana restored the classic style of the apartment, which overlooks Central Park.
The Terians had a daughter, now nearly 9 years old. But while Juliana was pregnant, Peter became very ill.
Last fall she put the Dakota apartment up for sale, hiring Dolly Lenz, a high-powered real estate broker of trophy properties, and asking $25.5 million.
The apartment is in contract to be sold. Lenz, who has represented Bruce Willis and Barbra Streisand, denies reports on Gawker, a popular city blog, that Tom Cruise bought it. She won't name the buyer but adds, "It's certainly not a movie star or anybody like that."
Juliana confesses that some of her car marketing ideas didn't work, but she's pleased other initiatives have stuck -- including hiring more women and cross-training staff so they can pursue opportunities to move into management.
One of her decisions was to bid $2.1 million at a charity auction for the first official production model of the 2005 Mercedes SLR McLaren. Even though Rallye sold the car last year for less than a million dollars, she thinks it was worth it for the advertising value.
Last year was the company's best sales year since Peter died, she says, though not quite as good as 2002; she says she's confident the new dealership and new car introductions will help set a record this year.
Rallye sold 2,459 new BMWs last year. It is hoping to sell more than 3,000 a year at the new location, says the firm's general manager for BMW, Nick Toomey, who has worked for Rallye for 17 years.
Peter Terian believed in the importance of retaining your staff over the long term, and Juliana says that philosophy still applies.
When he died, the staff of Rallye feared the company would be sold. They told her Peter had put them in their jobs and they ran the company capably while he was ill.
"I said, well you're going to have to support me because you have to teach me," she says. "You need to trust me, and I need to know that I can trust you. So let's try it."
Over the years, people have expressed interest in buying Rallye, she says. Selling is "appealing to me because I'm a mother, my daughter lives in the city. I live in the city."
But Juliana, who is 51, says she loves the car business and has been able to balance work and family life. In June, she promoted Rallye's chief financial officer, Joseph Stanco, to chief executive and took a less intensive role as chairman of the Rallye Group. She doesn't rule out the possibility of a sale someday.
As her daughter gets older, Juliana is learning about the trade-offs in juggling work and family. "Because women still have the burden and pleasure of the family in life," Juliana says, "she's going to have to be adaptable as well. So this is a good lesson for her to see how you work it out."
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Activate Email 
TMCnet LOGIN
Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO West, October 4-6, 2010. Los Angeles, CA.
