As Paul Sullivan took to the skies, he couldn’t help but look back on the days when it was unclear whether his family’s business would even get off the ground.
“In the early days, it was survival each day, each week,” Sullivan said from the cabin of one of the Goodyear Blimps, as it rose above the houses, bogs, and pine trees that surround Plymouth Municipal Airport on Monday. “It was going to take the whole family to not only support it, but make numerous sacrifices along the way.”
After patriarch Bob Sullivan Sr. bought a small tire business in Rockland 70 years ago when Paul Sullivan was 6, the family couldn’t imagine that someday they would have auto repair shops spanning New England, and be big enough to merit an occasional visit from that icon of the tire industry, the Goodyear Blimp.
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But today, Sullivan Tire is seen as one of the most successful family-owned businesses in New England — though technically it’s not really a family-owned business anymore. In 2023, Sullivan and his brother, Bob Sullivan Jr., engineered a sale of the Norwell-based chain to a newly formed Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The chain’s 1,500-plus employees can vest after six years, and they can redeem their stock when they retire.
The company continues to grow as owners of smaller repair shops look to cash out and move on. Since the ESOP’s formation around a year-and-a-half ago, Sullivan Tire has added six new consumer-facing locations and three business-servicing spots, per Sullivan’s accounting, with around 90 new employees joining. That one shop in Rockland has grown to a company with 134 locations.
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Goodyear, the Ohio-based tire maker, flew into Plymouth to honor Sullivan Tire’s 70th year in business, treating a number of employees and customers last Monday and Tuesday with flights above the South Shore. Goodyear operates three of its namesake dirigibles for marketing and goodwill purposes in the US, though technically they are “semi-rigid” airships and not actually blimps because of their internal structure.
Sullivan said his company’s relationship with Goodyear dates back roughly four decades, to when Sullivan Tire started distributing Goodyear tires in New England, and to an early ad shot with one of the Goodyear Blimps.
The Sullivan brothers were approached by private equity firms in recent years about selling out. But Sullivan said they couldn’t bear to do it. So they turned to an ESOP plan instead to take care of succession. A loan from M&T Bank bought out most of the equity held by Sullivan family members, on behalf of the plan.
Selling out to private equity, Sullivan added, “felt like greed.”
“We cared too much about the people who helped us get here,” he said, high above the Plymouth waterfront. “Plus, if I have to work on my own automobile, where do I go?”
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.