How Russ Darrow Automotive Group Stays Connected
For over 60 years, Russ Darrow Automotive Group has served the state of Wisconsin, becoming its all-time #1 vehicle retailer. Its dedicated technicians have serviced over two million vehicles and counting. In addition to keeping Wisconsinites on the road reliably for six decades, the team at Russ Darrow remains true to its values and persistently seeks ways to serve both its local and employee communities.
We recently met with Marketing Director, Alyssa Mazur Hulbert, to learn how the Russ Darrow Automotive Group supports its diversely talented employee community of over 1200, keeping them connected, engaged, and informed across 24 locations.
Despite its large footprint, the team at Russ Darrow Automotive group maintains a closely knit employee community and cultivates internal talent with an environment that supports personal and professional growth.
“We’re small and big at the same time,” Mazur Hulbert said. “We do a lot of internal training, and internal promotions,” Mazur Hulbert explained. “You can really make your role your own.”
Mazur Hulbert is a shining example of that commitment to employee growth and development in action, and the results a supportive work environment can achieve.
“I was brought on as a social media manager, initially. I had a few other job offers at the time, but I was drawn to Russ Darrow because I knew this was a place that gave people the room to grow and make things their own.
Over the next five years, I was promoted to Marketing Manager. Eventually, when our Marketing Director was ready to move on, I got the opportunity to fill that role, and here I am!”
"I was drawn to Russ Darrow because I knew this was a place that gave people the room to grow and make things their own"
Core to its decades-long relationship with Wisconsinites, Russ Darrow Automotive Group places a major emphasis on giving back. Even before the hiring process, that message rings clear for anyone interested in joining the team on the company’s careers page.
“Working for the Russ Darrow Group is working for your community. We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community at large.”
That mentality harkens back to the earliest origins of the company. As Mazur Hulbert explained,
“Russ Darrow opened his first Jeep store in 1965 in West Bend. He knew he wanted to invest in the community that invested in him, and everything grew from that core value. We continue growing to support our community because without their support, we don’t exist.”
Once again, it didn’t take long to find an example of the company’s authentic dedication to its core values.
“My entire team actually just got back from volunteering yesterday at Junior Achievement. We got to work with 140 kids, and help them learn real world skills,” Mazur Hulbert mentioned. “This was an amazing opportunity to share the knowledge I have gained throughout the years with kids who are excited to learn.”
But time, effort, and knowledge aren’t the only way the organization encourages employees to give back to their community. “We’re also really involved with United Way,” Mazur Hulbert said. “Every year we do a 1:1 match for any amount employees give to benefit United Way.”
Even the tightest-knit crew of 1200 can be challenging to keep connected, aligned, and informed without a dedicated toolkit—so Mazur Hulbert and her team set out to find a one-stop shop for their employee community.
“As the marketing director for 24 locations, I needed to share everything we’re doing, and have one spot for everything to land. Instead of people having to call and ask about budgets and ads, and collateral, they could just have everything in a central hub. Those one-off communications weren’t just taking up my time, they were taking up everyone’s time.”
As Mazur Hulbert and her team began to zero in on the challenges they wanted to solve, they uncovered the need for a comprehensive solution.
“We’d initially attempted to make our own intranet on Wix, thinking we just needed a place to store a bunch of information. I quickly realized this was a bigger opportunity that we should really invest in to modernize some of our more archaic processes.”
In 2024, Mazur Hulbert and the Russ Darrow Automotive Group adopted Haystack, dubbing their new intranet “Darrow Dashboard.”
After deciding Haystack would power Darrow Dashboard, Mazur Hulbert and her team set out to begin organizing six decades worth of organizational knowledge.
“Groups have also been very helpful. There are so many jobs in a dealership, spanning from roles like titling, to salesperson, to service manager, or technician.”
Take that complexity of roles and diversity of expertise, multiply it by 24, then add individual manufacturers into the mix, and it becomes crystal clear why Mazur Hulbert and her team found so much value in a centralized employee hub.
“It gets even more complicated because of our different locations. One might be a Kia store, or Mazda, or Honda, and the information a tech might need at each can be different. You might need to know the store’s phone number, or which manager to talk to about what, and that’s different in every location.
We have groups dedicated to each of those roles and locations that have all the relevant information people need to be successful. That knowledge base has been growing and growing. Giving employees access to all the knowledge they could possibly need, from day one, has been really big for our company.”
"Giving employees access to all the knowledge they could possibly need, from day one, has been really big for our company.”
It’s nearly impossible to deliver all that content exclusively from a top-down perspective. Cross-departmental partnerships were an important strategy for the team to ensure Darrow Dashboard had all the information each of the 1200 employees needed at any given time.
“I’m a marketing director, and I have no idea what a technician needs to get their job done right. It takes coordination to bring all that knowledge together, and luckily, I’ve got great partners,” Mazur Hulbert said.
The best organizational knowledge base in the world is only helpful if people use it, and as Mazur Hulbert shared, the Russ Darrow Automotive Group had a unique challenge to solve.
“I would say about 75% of the people who work for us are on the move constantly, not sitting at a desk to work. Some of our employees don’t have computers or company email addresses, because it isn’t necessary for them.
That used to get in our way when it comes to communication—especially for my colleagues in the HR department. Getting all of the information about things like benefits, open enrollment, company events, and things of that sort to people is a use case we’ve always been trying to solve.”
With their new intranet implemented, the team had access to a full-featured mobile app that made it easy for employees to bring Darrow Dashboard anywhere their work took them.
“In the past, we had no way to communicate with everybody at once. Now we have everybody here in Darrow Dashboard, and we’re able to push information out instantly.
Instead of sending an email that may not get seen, or gets filed away, with the app it’s also getting pushed directly to your phone (which we know everyone is on). That has really helped us to fill the gap and reach people who don’t use computers, but still need access to information.”
“In the past, we had no way to communicate with everybody at once. Now we have everybody here in Darrow Dashboard, and we’re able to push information out instantly."
Busy people often gravitate toward the path of least resistance in order to stay efficient and keep making progress in their work. That makes ease of use essential for adoption—both for end users and administrators.
“I’m very tech savvy, and normally I’d be in the position to help people out with new tools,” Mazur Hulbert shared.
But there was something different about Russ Darrow Automotive Group’s new platform. It didn’t require training sessions or a large, dedicated team of experts to get the most from it.
“When people want to produce content on Darrow Dashboard, they come in with the expectation they’ll need support. Most of the time, I just show them the tools and they’re shocked by how easy it is.
That alleviates a lot of pressure from me, because when a manager or director needs to add or change something, they don’t have to come to me for it—they’re empowered to just do it.”
And while creating content effortlessly was a game changer for leaders and subject experts, finding content effortlessly impacted everyone.
“One of my favorite things is the search function,” Mazur Hulbert said. “The information in Darrow Dashboard is well categorized, but there’s a lot of it. With the search functionality, people can find anything they could ever need, even if they don’t know where to look for it.”
Having people, knowledge, and resources accessible in one place didn’t just make it easier for individual employees to find the information they needed, it helped eliminate a major organizational challenge that affected nearly everyone.
“We called it ‘Email Wars,’” Mazur Hulbert said. “In the past, someone would email the wrong person with a question because they didn’t know any better. That person would forward the question to the next person, who would still be the wrong person, and it created this never ending cycle.
What’s worse, it’s generally the busiest people who get the most questions asked of them. Now the email wars are over. We can just say, ‘check Darrow Dashboard.’”
Having that resource available not only made it easier for individual contributors to get the answers they needed quickly, it reduced time burdens for several layers of peers and management.
As the team continued to use the platform, they noticed a shift in their perspective. “We started to think, instead of just using it to collect and store knowledge, what if we could improve or automate processes?”
Once again, Mazur Hulbert’s cross-departmental partners proved to be incredibly valuable sources for inspiration and creative solutions.
“A colleague of mine in the service department who isn’t usually a big tech enthusiast is constantly coming to me with ideas on what we can include on the Darrow Dashboard.
We had just opened up a new detail center, and he had the idea to bring the tracking docs for all the cars straight into the platform. That enabled detailers to update their status in one place, and everyone could see those updates live. It was a great idea.”
“We started to think, instead of just using it to collect and store knowledge, what if we could improve or automate processes?”
Mazur Hulbert and her team continued to find new ways to improve access to organizational knowledge, and upgrade legacy processes to be more efficient and accessible.
“I really like all the integrations Haystack has. One of my favorite parts is how they can make integrated tools more valuable, and allow us to automate more processes. For example, we love Cognito forms and use them a lot. Having Haystack grew my thought process around what we could use them for.”
That theme of identifying opportunities of automating manual processes, and smoothing out sticking points in old processes guided Mazur Hulbert and her team as they expanded their use of Darrow Dashboard.
“Employee reimbursements used to be complicated and drawn out, with lots of back-and-forth,’ Mazur Hulbert explained.
“I made a simple form where people can enter the relevant information, then it gets sent out to all the right people automatically. No back-and-forth emails about ‘who do I send this to?’ or ‘don’t forget to add a copy of the receipt.’ They can just search “reimbursement” on Darrow Dashboard, fill out the form, and they’re done.”
“We’re big Google Drive users, and I love that when you update a Google Sheet or a doc, everyone automatically sees the latest version in Darrow Dashboard.”
And finally, some integrations were valuable not just for their ability to improve processes, but to bring more fun and a sense of playfulness to the experience.
“I also love the GIF integration,” Mazur Hulbert mused. “It’s always fun to get people smiling at work.”
“I really like all the integrations Haystack has."
As a company dedicated to supporting its employee community, it was important for the Russ Darrow Automotive Group’s new digital employee experience to showcase their achievements, and the value they bring every day.
“A big reason we wanted a tool like Haystack was to bolster recognition,” Mazur Hulbert explained. “I love to use the shoutout function when we get good reviews, or a customer calls in to say how much one of our team members was able to help them.”
While shoutouts are a popular feature across the company, Mazur Hulbert and her team look at employee recognition holistically. “I also really like that we can call out when new people are hired, celebrate anniversaries, and birthdays,” she said.
Just like everyone in the company brings something special to their role, they also bring their own unique personality, background, and experiences. Mazur Hulbert found Darrow Dashboard to be a great way to get to know some of her newest colleagues that she might not otherwise bump into in person right away.
“When I have downtime, I check out people’s profiles. We have over 1200 employees across 24 locations, so it can be hard to get to know everyone. The profiles are a really nice way to put faces to names and get to know people better.”
“I love to use the shoutout function when we get good reviews, or a customer calls in to say how much one of our team members was able to help them.”
As someone who was able to architect and implement an engaging experience for an expansive organization with a complicated web of knowledge and expertise, Mazur Hulbert had an important piece of advice to share:
“Start with a really solid organizational plan, and get stakeholders involved. Otherwise, you can end up putting a bunch of effort into up-front work that may need to be changed later.”
We’re excited to see all the creative ways the Russ Darrow Automotive Group has been able to leverage Haystack to support its amazing employee community, and look forward to the new innovations they’ll come up with in the future.
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