The Right Fit: Serra firing on all cylinders 18 months after Bill Marsh acquisition
October 2025
It was January 2024 when the Marsh brothers announced the sale of their dealerships to Serra Automotive, a move that had both auto insiders and the general public buzzing.
How would the large, multi-state outfit handle the acquisition of a long-standing local company with well-known owners and considerable goodwill?
Now, about 18 months after the deal closed, local Serra leadership sat down with the TCBN to discuss the transition and what lies ahead.
A perfect marriage
Bill Marsh Sr. started the Bill Marsh Auto Group in 1982 after purchasing a single local Buick dealership and rebranding it as his own. Over the years, the company grew to more than 300 employees who sold and serviced eight automotive brands at several dealerships in Traverse City, Kalkaska and Gaylord.
Bill’s kids – Bill Jr., Mike and Jamie – eventually bought the business from their father, who died in 2016. When they decided it was time to sell, they had a “very short list” of people to approach. Mike Marsh told TCBN’s sister publication The Ticker that Serra Automotive Chairman Joe Serra was his first call.
Fenton-based Serra Automotive, like Bill Marsh Auto Group, is a family-owned company that started off with a single dealership – a Chevy store opened by founder Albert M. Serra in 1973. Since then, the company has evolved into one of the top 10 privately held retail automotive groups in the United States, with more than 60 dealerships in seven states.
Serra already had established a presence in Traverse City about 10 years back when it bought Traverse Motors and Cherry Capital Cadillac/Subaru from famed local
The former Bill Marsh dealership on Garfield Road. businessman Otto Belovich. When the call came from the Marsh brothers, it was a no-brainer.
Not only was the Marsh group a very solid business, but it was also a good cultural fit. Bill Sr. and Al Serra were friends who shared a lot of the same principles, Serra Traverse City executive manager Jim Tuohy says.
“The Serra organization is a privately held organization that believes in family values, and the way that Mr. Marsh ran his operations were almost identical,” he said. “Family values, ethics, etiquette, all of those kinds of things.”
Tuohy and co-executive manager Jerry Zezulka absorbed Marsh’s Traverse City operations, a move that added about 200 employees and made Serra Traverse City by far the largest dealer in the region, selling about 10,000 vehicles a year, Tuohy says.
Marsh’s Kalkaska and Gaylord operations also went to Serra, but they’re managed separately under Serra’s network, which works in many ways like a franchise system.
Ultimately, Zezulka and Tuohy are glad the Marsh brothers sought out – and placed their trust in – Serra to continue the family legacy.
“They could have went anywhere,” Zezulka said. “What a great opportunity it was for us.”
Together and onward
There were many, many meetings before, during and after the acquisition that set the stage for a smooth transition. Despite its own successes, Serra leadership was determined to learn as much as it could from Marsh operations.
“We wanted to make sure that we weren't going to just go in and say, ‘Hey, we do it better,’” Zezulka said. “We wanted to analyze what they were doing.”
The approach paid off in spades, Tuohy says.
“You look at a playbook of one football team versus another team, and they're similar. The whole goal is to get to the end zone, but how you get there is totally different,” he said. “[Both Marsh and Serra] got to the end zone … but the really nice thing is that they had a number of plays that were much better than ours.”
It meshes well with something Tuohy says he’s preached to his staff and coworkers for his more than 40 years in the business.
“Be humble,” he said. “Have your eyes open and realize that we've got something to learn every day.”
The community and customers handled the transition from Marsh to Serra mostly fine, Tuohy and Zezulka say, though the most dedicated Marsh clients were a bit guarded at first.
“In the beginning, not so much anymore, the customers would challenge us a little bit – ‘I’ve been doing business with Marsh for 15 years and I love them, let’s see how you guys do,’” Tuohy said. “It was a pleasure for us to prove to our customers that we would be able to offer them the same level of service that they received from the Bill Marsh team.”
Serra has a strong presence in the southern half of the state (especially in the Flint area), and Zezulka believes this helped jump start trust in a town filled with out-of-towners.
“There are a lot of people that know Serra from downstate,” he said.
No major structural changes were made to business operations, and it wasn’t long before the two formerly separate Marsh and Serra teams melded, settled in and got to work. After more than a year of seeing them in operation, Tuohy and Zezulka have been impressed with the folks they brought over from Marsh.
“Usually when you acquire another dealership, the most valuable asset is the people inside of it, and that has proved to be true once again,” Tuohy said. “The associates we gained from the Marsh team are amazing people.”
The management team is almost entirely the same, Tuohy says, though there has been some turnover among the rank and file. Staffing is a big problem, as it is with virtually every single business in the region.
“[Hiring] and retaining good people is a big challenge,” Tuohy said. “Our job is to get good people on the team on the bus and then figure out what the best position is for them, and there's not another asset of our company that has more ability to help us or hurt us than our human capital does.”
The problem is particularly acute in the “back of the house,” Tuohy said.
“Skilled trade, skilled labor, technicians, painters, parts people, people that work repairing cars,” he said. “That’s been the hardest to find, retain and grow.”
The business has been strong overall, Tuohy says. They do not plan at this time to acquire or expand any further, but instead to lean into the daily things that will improve their core business as now structured.
“Our goal from a business standpoint is always to do a little bit better than we did the same month last year, and we have been realizing that,” he said. “Both the front of the house [sales] and back of the house [service] operations have been as expected, if not better. We’ve been very pleased."
Pictured above: Jim Tuohy and Jerry Zezulka
