Cruise Car President Wins Florida Business Award

In 2013, Cruise Car CEO Adam Sulimirski offered Nathan Kalin a job doing the company’s marketing. It seemed like a good fit for Kalin, with a degree in English.

In his marketing role, Kalin worked on a website and press releases and started to move into sales for the company, which now has some 15 employees and did $10 million in revenue in 2018. “It takes a little while to get the hang of it and really get the pitch down,” he says. “After about a year or so, I turned out to be a pretty good salesman.”

Kalin, now the company’s president, learned about the world of business through online research and voracious reading. “As an English major, reading was one of my favorite things,” he says. “That’s one trait that has been very helpful for me. I’ve read just about every business book I can find.”

He also built up business knowledge by tapping into his network of friends and family in the field and by working with Sulimirski day-to-day. “I knew almost nothing about business before I actually started this job in 2013,” he says. “It was real on-the-job training.”

Cruise Car President, Nathan Kalin (Left), and CEO, Adam Sulimirksi, (Right).

In 2015, Kalin leveraged the value he was bringing to the company into a junior partnership. He had two business partners — Sulimirski and company founder Ken Chester. By the beginning of 2017, Sulimirski and Kalin had taken over Cruise Car. “As I had more and more responsibility, that created the incentive to constantly look for better ways of doing things,” Kalin says.

As a company leader, Kalin likes to talk with employees about projects and goals and then ask the employees how they would accomplish them. “I’m a big proponent of giving other people ownership of projects,” he says. “If you know something needs to be done, instead of directing people what to do and telling them how to do it, I think it’s always better to bring them into a collaborative discussion. It’s the most effective way of getting things done and having people be happy to do those things.”

Kalin also thinks it’s important to constantly update employees about where the company is going. That way, he says, they feel ownership and pride in what they’re doing.

Coming into Cruise Car from a non-business background has made Kalin realize life is a learning process. “This career has been filled with challenges, and there will continue to be more of them,” he says. “I’m at a point where I’m looking forward to the challenges.”