Exotic Car Salesman Reveals Biggest Bank Made in a Month
Former salesman and transcontinental record holder Ed Bolian presents 101 class on the art of the deal.
What’s better than driving the exotic car of your dreams? Helping others make their wildest dreams come true as a sales rep in an exotic car dealership. You’re surrounded by all sorts of Astons, Porsches, Ferraris, and more, all day. You have well-moneyed customers looking to flex their wealth. And the best part comes at the end of the month, when your paycheck puts you closer to owning your dream car.
So, how much bank can you make selling exotics? VINwiki invited Ed Bolian — he of the famed 28:50 transcontinental run across the United States, and recoverer of two stolen Lamborghinis — to talk about his time as a salesman at Lamborghini Atlanta from 2009 to 2015. While he does acknowledge “that it’s fairly gauche to talk about income in any kind of public context,” he understands a lot of the YouTube channel’s audience is interested in how the sausage is made, then flipped for big bucks.
What occurs over the next seven minutes is a 101 class on what it takes to be a success in the car sales game, whether it’s Honda Accords or Acura NSXs. Bolian begins with how sales reps are paid, which starts with a 25 percent commission of the dealer’s gross profit on a sale. Other factors, like flat commissions and caps, affect the final take-home amount at the end of the month.
Bolian warns that selling cars is all work, that if you don’t sell, you won’t make any money. There’s no paid vacation or paid time-off, no sick days, and maybe not even a base salary with most commission-based car sales jobs. To succeed, you’ve got to develop an entrepreneurial mindset: be able to sell in the first place, process transactions efficiently, and “be able to make a deal where there wasn’t one.”
If you can do all that, you, too, can have the success Bolian had. On his best month, which happened to be November 2013—the month after Bolian announced his record run across the U.S. He was able to turn the publicity into 17 cars sold and $49,000 in his bank account. Bolian says sales can be a lot of fun, and you can learn the skills needed to make a deal for yourself one day.
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