It’s hard to get a sense of what a Jeep can do on the not-so-mean streets of Portsmouth. So Alissa Bournival decided to take a piece of land she owns adjacent to her dealership, Bournival Jeep on Lafayette Road, and develop a test track.
“We had never done anything like this before,” Bournival says, noting there are only eight dealers with test tracks in the country.
An employee suggested the track so customers new to the Jeep brand and four-wheel driving could experience the range of what the vehicle can do, and Bournival set about making it happen.
“It’s a whole experience with the environment,” Bournival says, adding that Bournival Jeep is part of Tread Lightly, a national program to educate people about responsible four-wheeling. “We teach people how to manage and respect off road (driving),” she says.
The 2/10th of a mile track takes drivers through three acres that include trees and a hill. Only one vehicle is allowed on the track at any point and customers must drive with a sales person trained in Tread Lightly principles. The track is also only open during business hours and it’s fenced in. Bournival says as her dealership sells only one brand, “We want to do it right…. I can give the customer an exceptional experience from beginning to end.”
This isn’t the first ambitious project Bournival has undertaken. After the death of her husband Richard in December 2010, she took over the dealership in 2011 despite never having overseen an entire dealership before. Richard had founded Bournival Jeep in the early 70s in Portsmouth and expanded his business to include dealerships that sold several brands in Maine, NH and Florida.
After he died, Alissa found she needed to consolidate the dealerships. “I had to make tough decisions,” she says. Having always been “a Jeep girl,” she opted for one dealership with one brand. In 2012, she moved the dealership to a renovated facility on Lafayette Road.
As one of the few women in the industry, Bournival says, “I’ve had people in the industry tell me, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. It makes me want to pursue my dream more,” she says.
Her dealership now has 124 new Jeeps on the lot and is the 36th largest company on the Top Family-Owned Businesses in NH list, which is ranked by annual revenue (see page 43).
For more information, visit www.bournivaljeep.net.
Current Issue - May 2024