Dealing well with success
John Esplen makes the best of neighbourhood life

Which comes first - business or pleasure? Let me rephrase that. Are all John Esplen's enthusiastic ideas and high-spirited promotional antics a matter of building his very successful auto dealer business, or are the car stores simply his excuse to have a blast?

A quick look through an extensive, well-organized photo album at Humberview Chev shows hundreds and hundreds of snapshots.

There's Esplen with the gang climbing the CN Tower. That's him in his Bart Simpson costume. Here he is with his kids, dragging cars in off Bloor Street for a charity car wash.

Esplen missed the arm-wrestling fundraiser this year, but you can find a photo showing him posing with a pickup his staff has loaded with toys and food for their Christmas drive.

You might think Esplen is the auto business' 24-hour party animal, except that his family's business is so successful and so serious.

Still in a renovated version of their original General Motors store on Bloor Street at Islington, Esplen founded Humberview when the street was a two-laner. At that time everyone was building a nuclear family with a Chevy Bel-Air or Oldsmobile Rocket 88 in the driveway and his business bloomed with the emerging area.

Today the Humberview Group is part of five GM franchises in the Greater Toronto Area, plus Dodge and Mitsubishi stores in Mississauga. It also runs a huge, national vehicle leasing operation called Jim Peplinski's Leasemaster.

Peplinski, who heads up that operation, is an 11-season veteran of the Calgary Flames, former member of Canada's national hockey team, and Esplen's brother-in-law.

Esplen's brother, Scott, also at Humberview for a long while, now operates another of the Group's dealerships.

The family business has expanded into the financial and real estate sectors as well. So Esplen, as president and CEO, is certainly not fooling around.

Or is he? Let's look at the photo album again.

Clearly he's a hockey dad who spends much of his time in his Chevy Suburban, identical to the ones he sells to hockey parents all over the West End. He has a wife, Jane, and four kids who all need simultaneous chauffeuring to games and activities.

And he spends a lot of time with three close buddies - they spend several weekends a year with Esplen on golf and other trips. The foursome is what he describes as 'his hobby,' an escape for a busy business man/family man paralleling the lives of the people on streets just like his.

Involving his family in everything is Esplen's hallmark. In those photos, the kids are running around the dealership with Dad at the endless series of public and staff events he stages to keep morale and profile high.

Humberview is also heavily involved with the United Way. This year's United Way schedule included a dozen events from that arm-wrestling competition and CN Tower climb, to a bake sale, all-you-can-eat breakfast and a movie event kick-off at the nearby Kingsway theatre. It's good for business, but it looks like there's a party every day! Perhaps the best part of it all is that the community is benefiting from all the fun.

The idea of the dealership being an integral part of neighbourhood life sounds a bit like Leave it to Beaver, but that's Etobicoke and Humberview.

Unlike some areas of the GTA, the neighbourhood has simply evolved into a bigger version of what it was in 1955. It's not surprising then that Humberview looks little different from those early years. It's allowed John Esplen, a local boy making good, to expand and enjoy business just around the corner from where he grew up.