Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

When the boss is omnipotent

For these Christians, faith and business are not mutually exclusive.

By PAUL SWIDE, Times Staff Writer
Published September 26, 2007

Calvin Frazier owns 4Him Auto Sales at 6340 49th St. N. He sells most of the used cars on the phone after buyers consult detailed descriptions on his Web site, including pictures of a car's flaws.
	[James Borchuck | Times]

PINELLAS PARK- Buying a car can be an act of faith because it's hard to know if you're getting a good deal.

"Car dealers have a bad rap, pretty much deservedly so," said Calvin Frazier, who has spent more than 25 years in the business. "If you don't know somebody, you can get your head knocked off."

Frazier knows somebody. Early in 2006 he started 4Him Auto Sales on 49th Street in Pinellas Park. After working in every facet of the car business and seeing its underbelly, the born-again Frazier decided to open a religion-based used-car dealership, the operation of which would serve God.

"I wanted to do something where I could be me," said Frazier, 53, who had been a wild and lawless youth before finding religion in 1994. "I love the car business and I love helping people, but it became hard to be an honorable guy in a new-car franchise store."

The business name has clear religious meaning, but Frazier said he doesn't "hide behind a cross." He and other area business people struggle with their desire to run businesses according to their beliefs in a world where religious symbols are exploited and where trust is infinitely harder to earn than undermine.

"When somebody starts loudly wearing their religion on their sleeve, sometimes there's a suspicion," said Pete Mishler, a church elder and devout Christian who publishes America's Favorite Coupon Book and sells its ads to area businesses, religious and otherwise. He said some advertisers will include a cross or small fish in their ads to connote Christian beliefs, but he knows that not all truly abide.

"There's so many little advertising schemes people hatch," he said. "But the thing is whether or not somebody who subscribes to the teachings of Jesus, whether they really apply that in their business dealings or whether they live a two-story life."

Bad businesses can be punished through legal action, customer complaints or other negative feedback. But the honest businessman, religious or not, has only a reputation. Mishler notes that it is easy to show someone to be bad, but hard to prove he's good.

"Sometimes we have to live with a little ambiguity," he said. "The highest integrity pans out in the long run, but not always in the short run."

Frazier hears that. His business is growing rapidly, but carefully choosing cars, repairing their defects and then offering them at a fair price squeezes his margins. He knows all the tricks in the business, but he can't allow himself to cheat, even a little.

"It's expensive to do business the right way," Frazier said.

"If I did it the wrong way, I could make a lot more money."

4Him will take time to be profitable, but Frazier is already developing a national reputation. He sells most of his cars on the phone, he said, after buyers consult detailed descriptions on his Web site, including pictures of a car's flaws.

Other businesses are harder to describe. In those cases, the opportunity for deception makes a religiously oriented business harder still to operate.

"This business is a license to steal," said Tom Berry, who is trying to resurrect his Mr. Transmission shop in St. Petersburg from a previous owner's bad behavior. "There's such a technical side to it that it's easy to take advantage of people."

Berry lists his business in the Shepherd's Guide, an online directory of businesses that have taken a pledge to "hold the highest biblical code of ethics" in their transactions. But even that is no guarantee because, he said, some listed "aren't real Christians."

Lawyer Randall Hiepe is also in a profession open to distrust, but he finds it easier to reconcile his practices of religion and law. As a bankruptcy lawyer in Lakeland and St. Petersburg, he takes solace in the federal law's origins in Deuteronomy.

"The Bible tells us we are slaves to the lender," said Hiepe, who used to be a criminal defense attorney but decided to focus on bankruptcy because it fit his beliefs more closely. "Debt is sin, and you don't want people to live in sin."

Frazier, the car dealer, once declared bankruptcy, shortly before being born again. He said he'd done far worse before that but doesn't look back.

He is comfortable where he finds himself now and is moving forward trying to grow his business on his new terms, hard as that may be.

"I'm either going to impress you as somebody honest, or I'm not," he said of the suspicion of car dealers. "But I don't know how you ever really know."

Paul Swider can be reached at pswider@sptimes.com or 892-2271.

[Last modified September 25, 2007, 22:08:29]