The Gulf Coast Chain That Sells 15 Badges Under One Name
One Toyota store in Bradenton became 20-plus rooftops and 15 badges. Here is how a Florida family kept buying dealerships while national groups consolidated the rest.
In 1990, a Toyota store opened on the outskirts of Bradenton, Florida, with one name over the door: Gettel. Thirty-five years later that name sits over more than 20 dealership rooftops, from north of Gainesville down to Punta Gorda, selling roughly 15 manufacturer brands to a stretch of the Gulf Coast that most national dealer chains never bothered to consolidate. The store multiplied. The name never came down.
That is the short version of a company that is easy to underestimate. Gettel Automotive Group is privately held, family-run and headquartered in a market you have to squint to find on a national map. It does not do splashy IPOs or private-equity roll-ups. What it does is buy car dealerships - one at a time, held for decades - and keep them profitable across the full arc of a customer's driving life.
01 / What it isA full-line dealer, not a boutique
Most independent dealerships stake out a lane. They sell one or two brands and defend a corner of a metro. Gettel took the opposite approach. Its stores cover nearly every price point in the American showroom - the value end with Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, Kia, Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep/Ram; the near-luxury middle with Acura and Genesis; and the premium tier with BMW, Volkswagen and Porsche.
The strategic logic is simple once you say it out loud: a young buyer walks in for a first Kia, comes back a decade later for a family Highlander, and eventually upgrades to a BMW or Porsche when the paycheck catches up. Gettel would prefer that every one of those transactions happen under the same name. Owning the whole ladder is how a regional group holds a customer for 30 years instead of one sale.
02 / The growthOne dealership at a time
The expansion reads less like a startup hockey stick and more like a slow, deliberate accumulation. The founding Bradenton Toyota store came in 1990. A few years later the group reached more than 150 miles north to buy a Toyota franchise in Gainesville - an early sign it was comfortable operating far from home base. Acura arrived in Sarasota in the late 1990s. By 2010 the count had doubled from five stores to ten, picking up Porsche, BMW, Volkswagen and Hyundai along the way.
The 2017 move into Punta Gorda added five locations at once, folding in Lincoln, Buick, GMC and the full Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep/Ram stable. Kia of Bradenton opened in 2020. Then the pace picked up again: Stadium Toyota in Tampa in 2023, a store in Ocala in 2024, and in 2025 the rebrand of the old Gatorland Toyota into Gettel Toyota Gainesville, paired with a new Gainesville Collision Center.
03 / The businessWhere the money actually is
People assume a dealership makes its living on the sticker price of new cars. It mostly does not. New-vehicle margins are thin and getting thinner. The durable money in franchised auto retail sits in what the industry calls fixed operations - service, parts and collision repair - plus the finance-and-insurance products sold in the back office. A new-car sale is a one-time event; an oil change, a warranty repair and a bumper replacement are a relationship.
Gettel's structure leans into that. Every rooftop carries a service department and parts counter, and the group has invested in dedicated collision centers. Layer in used and certified pre-owned inventory - which carries healthier margins than new metal - and financing arranged in-house, and you get a business that earns from a customer long after they drive off the lot. Third-party trackers peg annual revenue in the range of $165 million, with some estimates running higher; the group does not publish audited figures.
04 / The differenceThe name is the moat
Auto retail has spent two decades consolidating into large public companies and anonymous online platforms. AutoNation, Asbury, Lithia and Group 1 buy stores by the dozen and often keep the original brand signage. Carvana and CarMax skip the showroom entirely. Against that backdrop, Gettel's edge is almost old-fashioned: it is a local name that Gulf Coast Floridians recognize, attached to a family that has run these stores for 35 years.
That recognition is not decoration - it is the asset. When a dealer group keeps the founder's surname over every door, every advertising dollar, every good service experience and every community donation compounds into a single brand instead of scattering across a dozen. It is a slow-building moat that a newly-arrived national operator cannot buy overnight.
05 / Beyond the lotFunding its own workforce
The car business runs on a scarce resource that has nothing to do with inventory: trained technicians. Gettel's community giving reflects a clear-eyed read of that shortage. Through the Gettel Foundation, the group has put money directly into high-school and technical-college automotive programs - a cumulative $100,000 committed to Parrish Community High School's Automotive Maintenance and Light Repair program, matching support for Loften High School in Gainesville, and a donation to Sarasota Technical College's automotive program in 2025.
The group also operates Hyundai stores that participate in Hyundai Hope On Wheels, the brand's pediatric-cancer research initiative, and has backed local causes such as Beds for Kids across Manatee and Sarasota counties. The through-line is local: money spent where the stores are.
06 / The peopleWho runs it
The group remains built around its founder, James Gettel, who has led the company as president since its earliest days. The operating bench has deepened as the store count climbed - Bill Finocchiaro was promoted to Chief Operating Officer in 2024 to oversee operations across the dealerships, and David Kelly serves as Chief Marketing Officer, steering the brand that carries the family name. For a group this size, the leadership is notably lean and long-tenured.
07 / The market fitThe regional middle
Gettel sits in a specific and defensible spot: too large to be a single-point mom-and-pop, too local and too rooted to be a faceless national. It occupies the mid-sized markets of Florida's Gulf Coast - Bradenton, Sarasota, Gainesville, Ocala, Punta Gorda, and now Tampa - the kind of territory the big roll-ups historically passed over in favor of glossier metros. In those markets, a trusted local name that stocks everything from a commuter Kia to a weekend Porsche is a hard combination to dislodge.
Whether that model holds as online used-car platforms and national groups press into secondary markets is the open question for Gettel's next 35 years. For now, the answer the company keeps giving is the same one it gave in 1990: buy another store, keep the name on it, and make sure Gettel's got it.