Meet Snyder’s, PRP in Holland, TX!
The URG team recently sat down with Dan Snyder, owner and CEO of Snyder’s, to ask him about the launch and evolution of his business and how it has grown over the years from a small cotton field his family purchased, to a 60-acre, 3 location powerhouse.
“My family moved to Central Texas in 1987 from Arizona. I was raised in Arizona and while I was in college in Wisconsin of all places, my dad and mom and brothers and sisters moved back here to Texas! When I graduated in May of 1988, I came back to Texas and we started the yard at that time,” Dan recalled. “My younger brother Andy and I had been kind of car nuts, hot rodders in high school, that kind of thing. And we got that directly from my dad who was, the typical you know, James Dean rebel without a cause type guy, when he was younger, and he raised us to love cars!”
“I was an economics and management major. I wasn’t 100 percent sure we were going to do this (go into the salvage business), but it was something we had talked about growing up,” Dan said. “My dad was a pipefitter and welder, and in the construction business, but he wanted to get out of that business and work for himself. He encouraged us to go to college and learn how the money moves.”
Speaking about his father, Dan continued, “He always said that we needed to get in the ‘automotive junkyard business’. He used to call it a get rich, quick, scheme. As soon as I graduated from college, we came back here, bought 10 acres of cotton field, built this building, and bought our first car.”
Despite their enthusiasm, there was still a stigma of running a salvage business. “I remember talking to some of my buddies I went to school with and told them about getting into the salvage yard business. Of course, everybody looked cross eyed or down their nose or something like that, and thought I was absolutely nuts. I probably was, and my dad probably was! But we jumped into it, not really knowing anything about the business!”
“I pulled engines and transmissions, and we’d sell an engine or transmission, and we’d actually install it here. I was a half mechanic, half parts puller, half buyer, half wrecker driver, you know, whatever it was necessary in order to make a buck and we just worked out of our back pocket for the first few years.”
Dan was one of the first employees and family members of the business to work under Snyder’s banner, but he wouldn’t be the last! “It’s a family business and there’s lots of family businesses in this industry. Initially it was me and dad and I should include my mom because my mom did our books! What little bit of bookkeeping that we did, you know, she had a great big, huge paper spreadsheet that was laid out on the dining room table, you know, and each little line, every dollar that came in got logged in every day and all that stuff.”
“It was, you know, painfully old school,” he continued. “But that’s the way we got started and initially it was just the three of us. We had an employee or two that could come along and then Andy, who was out in East Texas, decided that he wanted to come back into the business. That was great because now, as well as my dad and I got along, we’re two different generations and when you have two different generations, you tend to think differently. That was kind of the way that things took off as far as the family members go. My wife also, I probably should include her in that. Still. After all these years, I met her when we were freshmen in college, and she hand painted our first business sign and delivered parts for us initially. All those things that small family-owned businesses in this industry do.”
When asked about the biggest challenge facing the industry, Dan advised the following, “I think the biggest challenge in the industry is people. In order to grow, you have to have quality people. As I mentioned before, I can’t do everything. Andy can’t do everything. Travis can’t do it all. Bonnie can’t do everything. Those are my brothers and sisters. What happens is you have to figure out how to get things done at the level that you want them done without doing them yourself. The key to doing that is to find and hire people that are better than you!”
He stressed that “It is really, really important to do that. A lot of people don’t have the confidence to be able to surround themselves with quality people. I’m not just talking about leadership, although leadership is important, but all the way down, always look for somebody that is overqualified for the position if it’s at all possible and then put the ball in your court at trying to make your company rise to their level as opposed to hiring low quality, bringing them up to the company level. There’s not a lot of high performing people that are out there, but it needs to be something of a never-ending quest for good quality people. That’s how you build a business.”
Dan Snyder is the CEO and Owner of Snyders in Holland, TX as well as the President of Team PRP. He will be in attendance at the URG+PRP 2024 Conference in St. Louis in April. For more with Dan, check out the full interview on the ‘U-R-G On the Go’ podcast, hosted by DJ Harrington.
