In 1969, Ray Ciccolo opened a single-bay Volvo dealership on Route 1A. Fifty-five years later, the family runs eight brands across ten campuses — but the phone is still answered by a person.
The original storefront, shortly after opening.
Ray Ciccolo — our founder — was born in Cambridge to a family of decidedly modest means. His first paying job was breaking empty bottles into trash cans at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. He paid his own way through college, joined the Marines, and in the late 1960s opened a series of laundromats. None of that has anything to do with cars. That is the point of the story.
In 1969, Ray walked into a Volvo dealership in Massachusetts looking to buy a used car. He walked out having bought the whole dealership. He had no automotive experience and no franchise pedigree. What he did have was a conviction that if you build the kind of place where people want to work, the customers will follow. He has been proven right for fifty-five years and counting.
The early years were one storefront, one Volvo franchise, and the slow work of figuring out a business Ray had no formal training in. By the late 1980s, the group had earned a reputation good enough that Audi came looking for a partner. We took it. People assumed we wanted to grow into a regional empire — a multi-state group, a publicly-traded "automotive solutions provider," whatever the consultants were selling that decade. We did not.
What we wanted was simpler: more brands so our customers had more choices, more service capacity so we could handle them all in-house, and a bigger team — but the same kind of team. People who answered phones. People whose names you'd remember. People who'd still be there when you came back in five years.
"At Village, we care about people, not just cars." Ray Ciccolo, founder
So the campus grew, but on our terms. Honda Village and the second Volvo store joined the family. Porsche Norwell, GMC Danvers, McLaren Boston, Brigham-Gill Village CDJR — each new storefront added a new brand without diluting the rules: one service philosophy, one way of handling people, one family at the door. The most recent additions — Polestar Boston and Koenigsegg Boston — let us serve customers buying their first electric performance car and customers buying one of fewer than 200 hypercars built in a year. The same advisor relationship covers both.
Sometime in the 1990s, the cars stopped being just about cars. Ray established the Ciccolo Family Foundation in honor of two families: his own, and the family he had built at Village. The foundation funds work in education, historic preservation, sustainability, and direct community support across Greater Boston — the same neighborhoods that built Ray, and the same neighborhoods our customers come home to.
You see traces of the foundation throughout Village even if you don't know what you're looking at. The "Share the Warmth" winter coat drives. The Boston Lobsters team partnership. Solar arrays on the rooftops of Volvo Cars Danvers and Honda Village. The historic preservation work in Cambridge that helped save buildings Ray walked past as a kid. None of those are marketing. They're just what the foundation does.
"Both my own family and my Village family have played central roles in everything we've built. The foundation is how we say thank you." Ray Ciccolo, founder
Every Village customer is, by definition, part of why the foundation exists. The cars you buy from us put fuel in the work the foundation does. We don't talk about it much, but we should.
The single decision that defines us, more than any brand we've added, is what happens between when a pre-owned vehicle comes in on a trade and when it goes back out the door. We don't farm the inspection out. We don't run a checklist that fits on a single page. We pull the wheels off, we put the car on the lift for ninety minutes, and a master technician — the same one who'll service it for the next owner — runs through 150 specific checkpoints.
If anything is even questionable, we fix it before we list it. Sometimes that means a vehicle sits for a week longer than it would at another dealership. Sometimes it means we don't make the unit margin we wanted. We're fine with that. The deal we're chasing is the relationship that lasts twenty years, not the transaction that closes today.
Ray's instruction to anyone joining the team — sales, service, finance — has been the same for decades: spend time in service before you ever talk to a customer about a car. We want you to know what we've promised before you start selling against the promise. People who skip that step don't last at Village.
What that produces, over fifty-five years, is hard to summarize. The closest version is this: the customers who keep coming back are the ones whose problems we made our problem. A no-start in a parking lot in Bedford on a Sunday. A loaner that breaks down in Vermont. A trade-in valuation that doesn't make the numbers work — until we re-run them once more, with a sharper pencil and a more honest look at what the car is worth.
What's added more recently is technology that doesn't replace the front desk — it makes the front desk faster. A live inventory feed online. A 60-second trade valuation that's actually accurate. An OliviaAI assistant who knows every vehicle, every location, and every advisor — and routes you to the right human within sixty seconds. The desk still answers the phone. The technician still puts hands on the car.
The Ciccolo family doesn't run a five-year plan with a fifty-slide deck. We do have three commitments:
First, we won't outgrow what works. The campus has matured into ten Greater Boston storefronts, a Needham collision center, and Village Automotive Denver in Colorado. That's the right size. Bigger means worse service. We chose this on purpose, and we'll keep choosing it.
Second, every team member spends time in service before they ever face a customer. No exceptions. If you don't know what's under the hood of the cars you're selling, you can't represent them honestly — and we won't ask our customers to deal with somebody who can't.
Third, the phone gets answered. By a person. From 9am to 7pm Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 on Saturday, and somebody-on-call on Sunday. That has not changed in fifty-five years and it is not going to change now.
"While much has changed in this business, we haven't lost sight of the fact that treating people with respect defines us." Ray Ciccolo, founder
That's the whole strategy. We're a multi-brand auto group serving Greater Boston, we are family-owned, we are not for sale, and we will be here when you come back.
If you've never been to the campus, come say hi. If you have, you already know.
Village is a family-owned, multi-brand auto group serving Greater Boston since 1969. Ten dealerships across MA, the Village Collision center in Needham, and Village Automotive Denver in Colorado. Founder Ray Ciccolo and the Ciccolo family still run the day-to-day. Read more about the company.