Hidden on a back street of the Farmers Branch warehouse district near Midway Road is the world’s most unusual used car dealership.
There’s no sign on the building.
The bay doors are artistically camouflaged.
Most of the time, there are no customers inside.
There’s a bit of designed intrigue to all this.
Welcome to the new headquarters of Tactical Fleet, the largest purveyor of previously owned luxury and exotic sports cars in the nation.
The 75,000-square-foot showroom is filled with more than $30 million in prestigious vehicles waiting for someone to drive one off. This year, about 750 buyers will pay an average of $275,000 to do just that.
Some will drive off for a bargain $100,000. More than a dozen will pay upwards of 900 grand.
“Porsche, Lamborghini, Bentley and Rolls-Royce are our bread and butter,” said Chris Barta, who co-founded the company four years ago with his buddy, Jason Putnam, as we wind our way through rows of about 300 ultraluxe vehicles.
This is a far cry from the days of being two dudes with a few cars operating in a nearby weathered warehouse in Addison. Their office furniture was a folding table, four plastic chairs and a $10 fan all bought on sale at Target.
The only employee was a do-it-all guy.
Today, Barta, 42, and Putnam, 36, are employees of Charlotte, N.C.-based Sonic Automotive – which has nothing to do with hamburgers – having cashed out for an undisclosed sum to the nation’s fifth-largest car retailer at the end of 2020.
“Chris and I were confident we could grow the business on our own, but working capital was our Achilles heel,” Putnam said in their upstairs industrial-chic office that looks over the expanse of cars. “Partnering with Sonic has allowed us to compress a decade of growth into a year and half.”
So far, it’s been pretty much hands-off yet collaborative. “We still have a lot of autonomy,” Putnam said.
That’s extremely important to the longtime duo, who met during their sales training days in 2010 at Park Place Motors on Lemmon Avenue.
Neither had been able to get a job in the Great Recession. Both saw selling cars as a means of temporarily dodging unemployment.
Then they found out that they were really good at it – and how much money they could make.
Barta became Park Place’s top gun for Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Maserati and McLaren. Putnam was the Porsche guy.
“I didn’t know people bought $250,000 cars. That was news to me,” Barta said. “When I started at Park Place, I was like, ‘Who am I ever gonna sell a Rolls-Royce to?’ We sold four Rolls-Royces here last weekend.”
They’ve grown numb to the numbers, Putnam added. “Our average price point is almost 300 grand, and we’ll probably sell a hundred of them this month. Pretty crazy.”
Go online to Tactical Fleet’s website, and you’ll find a low-mileage 2016 Bentley Mulsanne in Hallmark Metallic for $149,900 and a 2022 Ferrari SF90 Spider in Tour de France Blue for $879,900 with only 1,757 miles on its odometer.
At least they were there this morning.
Running with Zeke
Their first sale at Tactical Fleet was to Ezekiel Elliott.
Shortly after the former Dallas Cowboys star running back arrived in Dallas, Elliott bought a new 2017 Bentley Bentayga from Barta at Park Place.
The two became buddies and were having lunch when Barta was starting Tactical Fleet. Elliott asked whether Barta had a black Bentley convertible.
Barta couldn’t believe it. The only car he had was a black 2014 Bentley GTC Speed convertible that was on consignment.
“I got my cars from Chris when I first got to Dallas,” Elliott said in a text. “So it only made sense for me to be a customer at Tactical Fleet. But the customer service and family atmosphere is what will keep me a loyal customer for life.”
COVID-19 hadn’t been much of a game-changer for them.
“A lot of our sales are done online and out of state so we don’t rely on people coming through,” Barta said. “The pandemic hit. We locked our doors and continued selling cars and doing service.”
But their business benefited significantly from supply-chain shortages. Traditional new car buyers were willing to pay just about any amount for one of Tactical Fleet’s pre-owned darlings.
Then there was a strange twist of fate.
In February 2022, a ship carrying thousands of new luxury vehicles sank off the coast of Portugal.
“A lot of those were Bentleys, Lambos and Porsches headed to Dallas,” Barta said. “So it pumped up the value of our cars.”
With the pandemic in the rearview mirror, Barta and Putnam are enjoying schmoozing with clients and offering a well-stocked common cocktail area when deals are completed.
Getting back to basics
Tactical Fleet is Sonic’s first local foray into a new “third leg” of specialty business that also includes Black Hills Harley Davidson of Rapid City, S.D, home of the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Sonic also owns 120 auto dealerships, including McKinney Mercedes-Benz and North Central Ford, and EchoPark Automotive, a CarMax competitor with a location in Grand Prairie. Its revenue topped $5.6 billion in 2022.
Barry Byrd, Sonic’s senior vice president of strategic operations, put the Tactical Fleet deal together.
“We came across Chris and Jason and really valued that they were disruptors in the industry for these types of cars,” he said, during a recent visit. “Look at the place. Great reputation. Great operators. They totally fit into the culture of Sonic Automotive.
“It’s been two and a half years and they’re both still here. We have a very entrepreneurial slant. That says a lot about Sonic leadership that allows us to have an entrepreneurial spirit tucked inside a Fortune 300 company.
“We didn’t buy Tactical Fleet to flip it. We bought it to grow.”
Before the acquisition, Tactical Fleet had $4 million in inventory and was bursting at the seams.
“We had to pull out the cars every morning and tuck them in at night,” Barta said. “You couldn’t even walk around, there were so many cars in there.”
Now they have a combined inventory of $50 million in Dallas and Charlotte, where they opened their second location in 2021.
In 2018, Barta and Putnam had to scrape together $30,000 for three Big Ass Fans. Now they have 20 of the ceiling monsters and have just completed air conditioning and heating their entire 100,000-square-foot facility.
But they’ve also taken the pedal slightly off the metal, closing their third store in Beverly Hills earlier this month. Turns out the pockets in Hollywood aren’t quite as deep anymore.
“Instead of prices being way over MSRP, we’re now working in and around MSRP,” Putnam said. “We intentionally cut back inventory to between $40 (million) to $50 million [from a high of $100 million] just to watch and see what’s going to happen.
“We’re also getting a little bit more competitive with our pricing and sticking with the core product that we know well and know is going to sell. Now it’s back to basics.”
Weird name and no sign
Barta and Putnam admit that the name Tactical Fleet is a bit of a head-scratcher.
When they set out to go into business together in 2016, they were going to be the fleet manager for an electric company’s vehicles, but that deal fell through.
“We’d put so much time and effort into it, and Jason was already moving back to Dallas from Nashville, so we decided to do something else and keep the name,” Barta said. “We didn’t know if we’d be selling lifted trucks, exotic cars or just regular cars.
“People kept bringing us more and more expensive cars to sell, and we finally realized we could actually make money off the high-end, exotic cars.”
Putnam nodded and said: “Sold my condo. Moving back. Chris reached out to an old client, and pitched it over the phone. A week later, he said ‘Yes,’ and we had a half-million bucks. We got a lease and a warehouse, and we were off to the races.”
Besides, they already had a logo drawn on a cocktail napkin.
So why no sign on the outside? A big storm blew off the sign from their original building, and they never replaced it.
“We decided to run without signage on our new location,” Putnam said. “We are a destination location and like being incognito.”
But they’ve also developed a significant social media presence with more than 60,000 Instagram followers.
Knowing what will sell
Barta and Putnam know how to pick likely bestsellers.
“Chris and I sell really pretty cars with unique specs,” Putnam said.
Barta filled in the details: “Cool colors, low miles, one or two owners. No accidents. No paintwork.
“We stopped doing consignments a couple of years ago. We own all the cars, but we do get calls all day long from people trying to sell us cars. We weed through them to find which ones we want.”
Their busiest days are Saturdays when 20 to 30 potential buyers show up. Another 75 to 100 will come in the remainder of the week.
So do they get lonely?
“Not really,” Putnam said. “We’re on the phone almost all day. I bounce between the two stores and talk to people trying to sell us stuff constantly.”
Barta agreed. “I basically pound the phones all day trying to drum up business, calling people, texting people, emailing people, answering the phone, answering emails.”
No test drive needed
So who buys these gleaming machines?
“We don’t really have a customer profile,” Barta said. “It’s anywhere from a young crypto kid to your 80-year-old attorney or doctor.”
Zach Fusilier, a 43-year-old owner of a large civil contracting firm in North Texas, has dreamed of paying cash for a Ferrari as a personal reward for working so hard since he was 19.
A friend, who’s been a client of Barta’s for 10 years, insisted that Fusilier check out Tactical Fleet the next time he was in Dallas.
Last month, when he and his wife and another couple were on their way to Las Vegas on business, the foursome made a pit stop at Tactical Fleet.
“I’d never seen that many great cars in one place,” he said. “It’s such a cool concept.”
They needed to be in and out in about a half hour to make their dinner reservations at STK, a McKinney Avenue steakhouse.
And they were.
It took less than 15 minutes for Fusilier and his wife to choose his dream Ferrari from an array of about two dozen on the floor. They landed on a 2017, gunmetal gray Ferrari 488 GTB with 12,000 miles and a $259,900 sticker price.
He didn’t dicker. He just pulled out his driver’s license and wrote the biggest check of his life. He left with the paperwork 15 minutes later.
It was two weeks before he could get back to Dallas and actually turn the ignition and give it a test drive.
A $5.4M world record
In the last four years, Tactical Fleet has sold numerous million-dollar Ferraris and McLaren Sennas.
But its most fun and remarkable sale happened in December, when it sold a Ferrari F50 at Sotheby’s in Miami for $5.4 million – a world record for the Italian classic. Only 349 of the cars were made with powerful engines derived from Ferrari’s famed Formula 1 race engine.
The car was brought to them in October by Tanner Williams of E.M. Collections in Southern California, who is a longtime friend and Ferrari broker.
Tactical Fleet didn’t make that much money on the two-month flip, but there was something else at play, Putnam said.
“Given the low mileage and like-new condition, it was a once-in-a-career opportunity to buy a significant Ferrari and find a new home for it.”
The owners and company at a glance
Chris Barta
Title: Director and co-founder, Tactical Fleet
Age: 42
Grew up: Dallas
Resides: Prosper
Education: Bachelor’s degree in marketing, Arizona State University, 2003; MBA in brand management and strategic leadership, Southern Methodist University, 2009.
Personal: Married to Heidi for 11 years. They have a daughter, 10, and son, 8.
Usually drives: 2022 Rolls-Royce Cullinan SUV, white with black and red seats.
Jason Putnam
Title: Director and co-founder Tactical Fleet
Age: 36
Grew up: Springfield, Mo.
Resides: Dallas
Education: Bachelor’s degree in business administration, management and operations, Pepperdine University, 2009
Personal: Single
Favorite wheels: “I probably hop into a Ferrari more often than not.”
Tactical Fleet
Founded: 2018
Ownership: Subsidiary of Sonic Automotive, which had revenue of $5.6 billion in 2022.
Locations: Farmers Branch, Charlotte, N.C.
Projected 2023 sales: Over $225 million
How many cars: 1,000
Average price: $275,000
Employees: 13 in Dallas, plus five in its custom wrap/clear shield department; six in Charlotte.
SOURCES: Chris Barta and Jason Putnam
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