from left: Joe Agresti, Dream Motor Group; Nick Saban by Kevin Sabitus/getty images
Meet the little-known car dealership billionaire, and potential future politician, who’s quietly building an empire with the college football great.
Joe Agresti was on a conference call in his Baton Rouge office when an unknown number left a message. Nick Saban, the legendary University of Alabama football coach, was calling. He wanted to open a car dealership. “I thought it was a prank call,” Agresti, now 52, recalls. “I thought one of my buddies left me a bullshit prank Saban thing.”
Within a few weeks, Saban and Agresti—whose Mercedes-Benz of Baton Rouge was considered one of the nation’s best-run dealers—met for a 30-minute sitdown that lasted four hours. The next day, they agreed to go into business together. Now their Dream Motor Group sells 20,000 Mercedes-Benzes a year, plus a couple hundred Infinitis and Ferraris, across nine dealerships in Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas and Florida, where the pair bought two Miami-area stores in a $730 million deal in 2023. Annual revenues are nearing $2 billion.
“It’s one of the best decisions I ever made,” Saban says of the partnership. “It’s been really good for both of us.”
So good, in fact, that Agresti—who runs the day-to-day and owns majority stakes in the dealerships—is now a billionaire, worth $1.1 billion. Saban, a minority partner in many of the ventures, likely isn’t far behind, meaning he’s set to become the first billionaire college football coach, thanks in no small part to a little-known car salesman with big ambition.
A huge personality who races through his story at a mile a minute, but doesn’t spare any detail, Agresti pulled himself onto the World’s Billionaires list by fixating on operations, obsessing over corporate culture—and leveraging connections, from his early days as an accountant at Arthur Andersen to teaming up with Saban. Over the course of a three-hour call, Agresti mentions 14 “buddies,” a half-dozen “friends,” three “good dudes,” one “excellent dude,” and names four people his “best friend.”
“Coach and I get deals left and right because of our connections,” says Agresti, phoning from Miami in late March, after spending the morning negotiating a deal to expand into a sixth state. “Right now we’re at our all-time biggest—all our chips are on the table.”
Agresti wasn’t always going for broke. He grew up in working-class North Bergen, New Jersey, just outside Manhattan, the son of an architectural woodworker father and a nurse mother, who also manned the family’s small apple orchard when they moved 60 miles west, near the Pennsylvania border. A wrestler, he chose Rutgers over Bucknell because he got a partial scholarship and his parents were willing to chip in more for the cheaper school. He studied accounting, deeming it a safe choice, and took a CPA gig in the metro New York office of Big Six firm Arthur Andersen. “It was conservative, it was a guaranteed job, it was pretty good money coming out of college,” he says.
He quickly got ambitious, handling due diligence for mergers and acquisitions, including auto deals, then parlaying his skills into a high-level operations job with dealership giant (and Andersen client) Asbury Automotive, eventually managing Asbury’s Mississippi business. Then, in 2004, an Asbury exec gave him a chance to branch out on his own by investing in, and running, a Mercedes dealership in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. To buy a 20% stake, a 31-year-old Agresti chipped in his $200,000 life savings, convinced his parents to take out a $300,000 mortgage on their house and borrowed the remaining $500,000 from the exec. He waited out most of a yearlong noncompete agreement with Asbury by learning how to run everything from the wash rack to the financing department at a “buddy’s” Subaru dealership in Maine, driving back and forth from his home in New Jersey every week.
Within a few years, he had quadrupled the Baton Rouge car lot’s sales, bought out his partner for a highly-leveraged $32 million and caught the eye of higher-ups at Mercedes, who eventually awarded him the right to open a new dealership near Houston in 2013. Around then, Saban, whose father had owned a small service station in West Virginia, was mulling going into the car business himself. The coach—who had already won a national title with LSU, three with Alabama and was on the way to winning three more with the Crimson Tide—had done several events with Mercedes, which built its first major plant outside Germany near Tuscaloosa, not far from Alabama’s campus. Execs gave Saban a couple of star dealership operators to talk with about partnering. He called Agresti, who won him over with his focus on customer service and creating the right culture, something that resonated with Saban, who’s famously known for emphasizing process over results.
“I interviewed Joe and didn’t interview anybody else,” Saban tells Forbes. “It’s like interviewing a good offensive coordinator—you just know it’s the right guy.”
Jamie-Squire/Getty Images
The duo took over a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Birmingham in 2014, expanded to Nashville with Mercedes-Benz of Music City in 2017, and built a palatial dealership with an in-store bakery on the other side of Birmingham in 2018. They added a Ferrari dealership, Prancing Horse of Nashville, to their stable in 2022, complete with three guest libraries and a cocktail room. Then, in 2023, they made waves with the $730 million agreement to buy two Miami-area Mercedes megastores.
Saban, who collected nearly $150 million in (pretax) earnings over his 51 years in football before his 2024 retirement, is a full partner, but Agresti—who splits his year traveling between homes he keeps near all his dealerships—runs the daily operations. He and Saban speak upwards of three times a day about ideas as big as expansion plans or as small as how a specific manager is performing. A third partner in Dream Motor Group, former Mercedes-Benz USA CEO Steve Cannon, has joined them on recent deals. “Joe operates at a different cadence than most people,” Cannon says. “He’s pure entrepreneurial energy.”
Agresti is obsessed with company culture, personally interviewing as many potential new hires as possible and asking them questions like, “What’s one thing you’ve done in your life that has changed somebody else’s life?” If employees spot a Mercedes on the side of the road, he expects them to stop and help, customer or not.
He’s even more obsessed with the financial details. The former accountant compiles his own monthly statement for every store. “If you say to me, ‘How’s March going?’ I can look and say Cutler Bay sold 13 cars last night—eight new, five pre-owned. I can tell you who the salespeople were and I can tell you that Evelyn bought one. I know every name, what car we sold, how much money we made, and then I track them on parabolic curves to make sure that we’re not overcharging anybody or undercharging anybody.”
Besides the dealerships, Agresti has a fledgling bourbon company in Kentucky (Saban and Cannon are partners) and created a medical supplies business, Dream Medical Group, that sold nine figures worth of PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Next up: Agresti, decrying big government and the “nanny state” of the Covid-era, says he’s considering running for federal office in Alabama. “The way it happened was such a turnoff to me as an American,” he says. “That’s when I started to seriously think about politics.” He has close ties to senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who he says asked him to put together a weekly meeting with auto industry leaders to help shape automotive policy, including Moreno’s proposed Transportation Freedom Act. President Trump’s tariffs might raise car prices, and Mercedes has reportedly considered pulling its entry-level vehicles from the U.S. market in response, but Agresti seems unconcerned, telling Forbes that sales at his dealerships spiked 30% after the tariffs were announced as buyers rushed to pick up cars before any price increases. In the long-run, he expects Trump to offer a credit for cars manufactured in the U.S. and exported elsewhere, softening the blow to automakers. “I trust him,” Agresti says. “Is he doing it perfectly? No one will ever know. Let’s see how it ends.”
In the meantime, Agresti says he, Saban and Cannon are eyeing investments in “three or four” professional sports teams in Tennessee (he won’t say which) and an “automotive-related” business in South America. Then there’s the agreement to expand his dealership empire into a sixth state and “a whole myriad of different brands” besides Mercedes, Infiniti and Ferrari, which the hyperactive Agresti signed “two minutes” before his call with Forbes—and continued to negotiate during our interview.
“Sorry pal, this is rude,” he says at one point, going uncharacteristically silent while he answers a text, “but I don’t want to miss this deal.”
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