Motoring through the cycles.

Motoring Through The Cycles

Thirty years ago, late-night passers-by who stopped to check the used cars at Wholesale Motors would have found the 24-year-old proprietor asleep in the back seat of his merchandise, his dog, Wholesale, and a rabbit named Repo sharing the front. The weird scene

on Ala Moana Boulevard was part of a grander scheme dreamed up by Joseph P. Nicolai. By foregoing luxuries like a home, working 18-hour days and hitting the airwaves with Honolulu's first used-car TV commercials, the budding entrepreneur reasoned he could make a dent in what was then a low-key car-buying town. "It was kind of a Sleepy Hollow," Nicolai says. "I was prepared to work harder and to sacrifice a lot more than what I felt the dealers at the time were doing."

The sacrifices paid off. Nicolai - the son of an Italian auto craftsman-technician, a car and motorcycle racer who'd also won distinction as the top West Coast salesman at Ford Motor Co. - poured his skills and energy into a fledgling enterprise that generated $300,000 in sales in its first year. Over the next three decades, Nicolai would steer Wholesale Motors through a war, an oil crisis and an all-out recession, fine-tuning and overhauling whenever the engine stalled. Nicolai grasped the key to survival early on, when the Vietnam War plunged his business into red ink: A multiwheel vehicle could keep running even when one of its tires blew out.

Wholesale Motors today encompasses sales of Chevrolets, Geos, Mazdas and Maseratis, Kawasaki and Harley-Davidson motorcycles, jet skis, an extended warranty company, a leasing division, real estate development and management projects, and advertising arm and a small construction firm. With $46 million in 1989 revenues - and an anticipated $55 million this year - the company has finished its diversification drive. So what is the grander scheme for the future? Says Nicolai, the 54-year-old former racer adept at shifting business gears: "Constantly improving what we have and maximizing its potential." Into high gear. Potential was what stopped the discharged Army private in Hawaii en route to a life in Italy in 1960. In those days, when Thunderbirds and Impalas ruled the streets, Honolulu was still an under-dealered town whose players included Aloha Motors, Lippy Espinda's used car operation, Schuman Carriage and Honolulu Ford.