pay it forward

A man and two women cry outside a Dollar Tree, thanking God.

A masked waitress pats her apron just to feel the fresh Benjamin that one of her regulars left under the ketchup. At the Tim Horton’s window on a Thursday morning a man learns that his iced double-double’s already paid for. Ahead a license plate in a West Herr holder disappears into the morning commute. He checks his rear-view, where a line of cars wraps around the building, almost spilling back out ontoTransit. He tugs a fifty from the wallet in his cupholder and hands it through the glass–“You know what to do.” 

A four-year-old girl helps a stranger her own age pick out new shoes–the ones with unicorns, she encourages. Later in the Target parking lot she looks up to her father and asks, “OK ... who are we going to help next?” 

I watch a tall, well-dressed man with a slight hitch in his hip navigate the tables and chairs of the SPoT Coffee in Snyder and extend a broad, strong hand toward mine. Scott Bieler, Western New Yorker and majority owner of the West Herr Auto Dealerships, is three-score and three years older than the girl who once watched her father pay for another child’s back-to-school wardrobe, but he’s her equal in earnestness and optimism. He has a child’s restlessness for new ways to be good. 

The results of that restlessness are evident everywhere in Western New York, from the organizations Scott has supported, like Jericho Road, St. Luke’s Mission of Mercy, and PATH (People Against Trafficking Humans), to the buildings he’s raised, leased, or dedicated: Roswell Park’s Scott Bieler Clinical Sciences Center, the Rural Outreach Center in East Aurora, and a pediatric hospice center in Orchard Park. 

Then there’s the Pay it Forward program at West Herr, which selects 100 employees annually and gives each $500, with the instruction to go out into their communities to perform “random acts of kindness.” Some $200,000 over four years isn’t much in the context of Scott’s other philanthropic endeavors, but the sum belies the impact of the program. These gestures, which West Herr employees often perform with the help of their families, sometimes with small children in tow, become enduring lessons. And, just as each year 100 employees act as force multipliers, reaching more individuals in need than Scott or West Herr would alone, so too the encounters with neighbors, waitstaff, commuters, children, and the elderly, people who don’t even know they need the help until they get it, occasion a kindness transference, as the recipients redirect and radiate additional acts toward those in their own orbits and communities. 

“The generosity has already come to us,” Scott tells me. “We’re just trying to return it.” 

Born in Orchard Park in 1955, Scott Bieler was the model of an industrious eldest child. His father and uncle owned a janitorial business, which Scott was poised to inherit, but he had other interests. He saved up and bought used cars–$200, $500 a pop–fixed them, and sold them off his parent’s front lawn.The 1960s and 70s were the “wild west” of the used car business, Scott recalls–wound-back odometers, sawdust in the gearbox, parts of suspect provenance. But he found an honest broker in Brad Hafner, owner of the West Herr Ford dealership, then a single location in Hamburg.The two were business partners, in a sense, even then. 

After graduating high school Scott went to ECC for a two-year business degree, and this spark ed something in him. Before committing to cleaning, Scott would try something new. His aptitude for flipping car s indicated a general direction. His friendship with West Herr’s Brad Hafner, he hoped, suggested an opportunity. 

The year was 1975.West Herr employed nine salespeople.They were considering adding a tenth position. 

“You’re hired if we go to ten,” Brad told him. “But we’re not sure we’re going to go to ten.” 

Scott started as a salesman two weeks later. 

Imagine Glengarry Glen Ross remade with just the nicest guys. Al Pacino listening carefully to Jonathan Pryce and guiding him away from financing that he knew he couldn’t afford. Alec Baldwin offering each man in the office $500 to “pay it forward.” 

Scott Bieler is in man y ways the opposite of the salesman stereotype. He dresses modestly–standard white dress shirt and a blue sweater under a checked gray blazer. He listens and lets conversation go where it will. 

But he understands the business of selling better than anyone I’ve met. 

Scott scatters aphorisms like a Johnny Appleseed dispensing four decades’ worth of wisdom about selling cars, winning hearts, and growing a business empire. 

“Stop selling, start serving.” 

“We’re not creating the desire to buy the car; we don’t have a better mousetrap.” 

“What car sales has become is consulting.” 

“The customer is always second.” (For the boss, that is: Employees come first.) 

“Hire empathy, teach accuracy, management sets urgency.” “You can’t tell people what to do in 2021.” Quoting Gene Vukelic, owner of Try-It Distributing: “Never take the apron off.” Quoting Paul Newman on Larry King: “If anyone who’s had success in their life doesn’t use the word ‘luck,’ they aren’t telling the truth.” 

Scott is quick to point out his own luck. “I found the right thing early,” he tells me.“I had a longer runway.” 

For four years Scott sold cars at West Herr’s single Hamburg location. He excelled. He made friends and cultivated loyal customers. He impressed Brad, who called him “The oldest 21- year-old I ever hired.” 

Soon Brad was nudging his protégé toward management. He offered a promotion and asked for Scott’s answer the following day. 

February 1979. Lake effect snow was falling on the southtowns, clumps fat as babies’ fists. Scott and his father were parked in the driveway, engine idling. “If this business will be your life...” Scott’s father started. The elder Bieler’s words were heavy with implication. Scott was still a young man, only a quarter century old, but suddenly it seemed he had driven out past the point of youthful detours, years spent “trying something new.” Like his father and his uncle, he’d found an aptitude–one that had grown so much that his father might casually suggest it to be coterminous with existence. Scott knew his answer. 

Four years later–Scott was only 29–Brad informed him that he hoped to have less of a hand in the day-to-day. Would Scott be interested in a partnership? 

The offer was incredibly generous. Scott would be able to buy in at a relatively modest valuation and pay over several years. Now a proven salesman and a manager, he’d have the chance every day to turn his ideas into equity. 

Scott and Brad sat across a desk at the original West Herr dealership, ink beginning to dry. 

“This is more than I ever dreamed of in my life,” Scott said. But Brad shook his head.“You’ll want more.” 

The feeling of nothing where something should have been was becoming familiar. When Scott woke each morning, following a period of torpid mindlessness that was little like sleep, he no longer even attempted to rub his eyes, scratch his nose. 

But he needed water. Urgently. He looked down from his cushioned head like Gulliver on Lilliput, his arms bound by invisible strings. He had no more chance of bending them with his will than a tableside magician pretending to bend spoons with brain waves. 

For a time , quiet struggle. Eventually, through some combination of intestinal torque, gravity, and the response of a few loyal fibers, Scott flapped an arm onto his chest and depressed the sponge button the Mercy nurses had placed there, calling for help. 

Until then–January 2019–things had worked out for Scott Bieler. He had the love of a long-time partner, Kathy Lasher. Both his par ents were still alive, into their 90s. And West Herr had exploded, becoming the 25th largest dealership in the country, with annual revenues over $2 billion.Shortly after buying an ownership stake in ’83,Scott set about acquiring a few other small dealerships, first in Danville and Eden, then elsewhere in Western NewYork. Almost every year, it seemed, a dealership of the right size and the right distance fromWest Herr’s other locations would come on the market. 

Scott became president of the company in 1997. By 2000 he was majority owner. On Saturdays he would visit each West Herr location and try to talk to at least two customers–until there were too many dealer ships to reach in a week, let alone a working weekend. 

The average American household owns 2.7 cars–and it was Scott’s intention to sell them all, down to the decimal.That would require dealing for more than one manufacturer. So West Herr Ford expanded into Toyota, Chevrolet, Honda, Hyundai, GMC, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. The acquisitions continued at a steady pace for more than two decades. By 2019 it comprised 20 brands and 23 locations, with 2,100 employees. 

On a random afternoon in January 2019 you might have found Scott selling the latest Escalade in East Aurora, helping a freshman at SUNY Buffalo select a used Subaru, or cruising in his own Ford Taurus the eleven-and-a-half miles between South Lockport and Harris Hill, where clusters of West Herrs have sprung up like chrome cities along Transit, selling Chrysler, INFINITI, Nissan, Acura, Honda, Chevrolet, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram. 

But on this random afternoon, Scott Bieler was on his back in his home in West Falls, alone, limbs locking, a silent signal of distress dying where his C5 vertebra should have been. 

At a spry sixty-four, hustling toward his bedroom to grab something he’d forgotten, Scott had slipped on an oriental rug and fallen backwards, the base of his neck precisely striking a sharp orthogonal ledge on its six-foot tr ip to the floor. His C5 vertebra already had been deteriorating, though Scott didn’t know this.The blow crushed it completely. Prone and immobile, waiting for Kathy to wonder at his absence and come in from the barn, Scott prepared for the worst. He had lived a good life, a full life, a life immeasurably blessed. But it would change, now. That much was certain. 

That night at Mercy Hospital in South Buffalo, doctors advised Scott that without immediate surgery, he would forever lose the use of his arms and legs. Scott didn’t need to ask too many questions after that. 

Two weeks out of surgery, though, Scott hadn’t seen any evidence of recovery. 

He asked his physical therapists, Andrea Brockman and Emily Madeja, about the chances that the PT wouldn’t take, that he might stay this way forever. 

He wasn’t depressed–“I think it’s because I had a good run,” he tells me nearly three years later–but he needed to know the odds. 

“I need to be mentally prepared so I know what I have to do to live,” he told his therapists. 

They all but waved the question away. “No,” they said.“We see the gains.You can’t see it–but we do.” Kathy, too, entertained only the inevitability of a full recovery. And after four weeks, Scott started to see what the others saw. 

Two sessions a day, six days a week. His legs began to stir; the broken instruments of his fingers sparked again with intention. 

This isn’t A Christmas Carol. The brush with mortality didn’t fan some interior ember of altruism kept dim for decades. Quite the contrary, Scott Bieler had spent his entire career giving back in various forms. But increasingly, after his accident and recovery, Scott saw ever-larger fields of opportunity for good. From the beginning, those opportunities have involved West Herr. 

Scott’s long relationship with Roswell Park began at West Herr. In 2001 the Comprehensive Cancer Center reached out to ask if he would donate a van to help transport patients. Scott and Brad visited Roswell and spent hours, then days, learning about the experiences of cancer patients and the operational needs of the complex institution.The single van led to major gifts to Ride for Roswell, the Scott Bieler Clinical Sciences Center, and the Scott Bieler Amherst Center. 

Scott’s ties to People Against Trafficking Humans also began at a West Herr dealership–he met the founder Julie Palmer and got to talking about her mission when she was picking up a vehicle. 

Scott met Frank Cerny, Executive Director of the East Aurora Rural Outreach Center, through Steve Tasker, West Herr’s spokesman. 

“If we’re going to keep having this success we’d better do more than we did in the past”, Scott tells me. He notes that Paul Newman had given away $250 million by the time he died.It strikes me that Scott knows the precise figure, and that he delivers it with the same practiced quickness I heard earlier in 2.7, the average number of cars in the American driveway. The latter number was a target for Scott. I wonder if he thinks of Paul Newman’s lifetime giving in a similar way. 

Scott very well may be on track to hit this figure. Vans, cancer centers, and donations to the likes of Explore and More, the Waterkeepers, and the Naval Park certainly add up, but Scott’s values as a human being and as a businessman most clearly come together in West Herr’s practice of giving back in smaller ways, slow and steady, $500 at a time. 

Pay It Forward began in 2017. Melissa Attea, General Manager of West Herr Chevrolet in Williamsville, had been speaking to Scott about the concept of “Random Acts of Kindness.”The following day on a sales team trip to Florida, an employee’s fiancée told Scott about a stranger’s generosity–an unexpected gift, she said, with the parting instruction to “pay it forward.” Her voice w as full of emotion; Scott could see the experience had stirred her. Encounters like this seemed to give people new sight–a perception of the need that pulses mostly unobserved all around us. Scott didn’t just want to give back to more people in need–he also wanted his employees and their families to experience the transformational act of giving. And this way, as West Herr continues to sell, hire, and expand into new communities, the company’s ability to give back would grow proportionally–maybe even exponentially. 

The new Roswell Park Center is going up in Amherst behind the Walker Center, and ripples of kindness continue to radiate from check-outs, ticket counters, and drive-thrus across Western New York. 

What’s ahead? Scott can’t say. He only tells me that he’s “drawn to things that help a lot of people”–whether in large, transformational gifts or a hundred small gestures. That, and he’s continuing to feel an urgency in the wake of his accident and recovery. 

“You come out of it like you’re thirty again,” Scott tells me. 

I do the math. That would take Scott back almost to 1983– maybe even to the day he sat across from Brad Hafner, thinking that his wildest dreams had come true–and Brad, smiling, had told his protégé,“You will want more.”