Corporate growth award winner: Schomp automotive: fourth-generation dealership started as an Englewood gas station by David Lewis.

• Author: Lewis, David

You would have to be a very recent Colorado transplant not to have heard of Schomp Automotive.

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First off, the company is a fourth-generation family business this year celebrating its 70th anniversary, a phenomenon about as rare as a 1954 DeSoto Coupe. Second, the voice of company president Lisa Schomp, media pitchperson for the company, is as ubiquitous as the '54 DeSoto is unusual.

Yet while the media image of Schomp is all Lisa, the force behind the scenes these days for the most part is 28-year-old Aaron Wallace, eldest child of Lisa Schomp and longtime General Manager Mark Wallace.

Business is usually a team sport, and the younger Wallace cheerfully describes his company's success as a combination of genes, hard work, family togetherness and team spirit.

Those qualities, plus long-term profitability, combined to make Schomp Automotive this year's winner of the Association for Corporate Growth-Denver Corporate Growth Award.

A little history -- a lot of history, really -- is in order first.

Lisa Schomp's maternal grandfather, Roy Weaver, started Schomp Automotive in 1941 as a modest service station in Englewood. Weaver displayed a couple of Oldsmobiles for sale, named the gas station Arapahoe Motors, and the Schomp saga began.

After World War II, Weaver's son-in-law, Ralph Schomp, joined the company, and in 1955 bought it and renamed it Ralph Schomp Qldsmobile.

Schomp succeeded and grew, but it likely would not have continued as a family business if it had not been for the extraordinary gumption of Lisa Schomp.

You may recall that the automobile business in the olden days was an entirely male preserve. Lisa Schomp was first pegged as the company's "coffee greeter girl," then advanced to sales, then service. She eventually earned her father's approval, and she and Mark Wallace took the company over upon Ralph Schomp's death in 1988.

Their career since was highlighted by the 2008 opening of the company's palatial $22 million BMW showroom in Highlands Ranch, the region's biggest BMW dealership.

So it's no great surprise that Aaron Wallace seems to have been born to run a vehicle dealership.

"I started with small summer jobs in eighth grade, but I've really been working full-time for Schomp since I finished college eight years ago," he says. "I started stocking parts shelves. When the trucks came I was the guy who put the parts away, or brought them to the counter when someone needs one. From there I went to two summers...