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A FORMER EGYPTIAN ENGINEER FOUND THE SECRET TO BUILDING A BIG NORTHWEST
GAS-STATION CHAIN

Jan. 4, 2020 at 6:01 am Updated Jan. 5, 2020 at 9:02 am

1 of 2 | Sami Said, of Emanuel Inc., is the owner or operator of 34 gas stations
in the greater Seattle area. Here he’s at his Shell station on Seattle’s Beacon
Hill. (Ellen M. Banner / The Seattle Times)
By
Paul Roberts
Seattle Times business reporter

If “Fixer Upper” did a spinoff on gas stations and convenience stores, the
entire first season could be devoted to a Bellevue man named Sami Said.

For more than two decades, the former engineer from Egypt has made a career out
of turning underperforming gas stations into cash cows.

Said’s formula is simple: He finds locations that are ideally located but poorly
maintained, upgrades the equipment and the store, and institutes a
spit-and-polish customer-service regimen. Even the handles on the gas pumps get
buffed down regularly so that “the customer does not put his hand on something
dirty,” he says.

The makeovers nearly always boost business. After Said took over the Shell
station on Beacon Avenue South, for example, gasoline sales there went up 60%.

They’ve also turned this soft-spoken 62-year-old into one of the biggest
independent gas-station operators in the Puget Sound region. The 34 locations he
owns or operates as Emanuel Inc. — 22 Shells, 11 Arcos and one 76 — stretch from
Puyallup to Bellingham, generate tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and
provide jobs for more than 180 people.

In the process, Said has done something of a makeover of a culture cliché — the
immigrant in the gas station — by making it into his own, distinctly American
success story.

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LOOKING FOR FREEDOM



A sprawling gas-station empire wasn’t Said’s plan when he came to Washington
from Cairo in 1986. He was mainly seeking religious freedom — his family is
Coptic Christian, a sect long persecuted in Egypt.

But Said was also keen for economic freedom: After three years as an engineer
with General Motors in Egypt, he was eager to try something new.

He had stints as a newspaper deliverer and maintenance technician. But his
defining job was working at a fellow Egyptian immigrant’s gas station in
Ferndale, where Said got a crash course in English and his first real chance to
“understand the American customer.”

It wasn’t long before the former engineer, trained at “getting better efficiency
for less cost,” was coming up with ways to improve customer service. It was also
in Ferndale that Said met his wife, Brenda.

When he heard that the lease for a Shell station on Mercer Island was for sale,
in 1998, he scraped together the $75,000 down payment, much of it from family
and others in the local Egyptian community, and went into the business. Brenda
chose the company name, Emanuel, which means “God with us.”

After a “very difficult” six months, Said settled into what would become his
trademark strategy of experimentation and improvement. After repainting the
store and sprucing up the property, Said polled his new customers on their
product preferences — then spent precious capital adding things like hot-food
items and higher-quality coffee.

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Within a year, Said had boosted fuel sales by 50%.

When the local Shell representative, impressed by Said’s numbers, pushed him to
take on another location, Said was dubious. “I told him, ‘I cannot run more than
one store.'” The rep persisted. With oil prices then near historic lows, oil
refiners were desperate for dealers who could move more volume. In early 2000,
Said took over a Shell in Lynnwood.

Somewhat to Said’s surprise, his Mercer Island strategy transferred fairly
easily to Lynnwood. One key factor: Said staffed his new location with fellow
immigrants from his church, Saint Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Lynnwood.

Three months later, Said took over a third station, in Everett. By 2003, he was
running nine Shell stations. By the following year, he had 15. 



In 2008, Said went from merely operating gas stations to owning some, after
Shell offered to sell him locations in Beacon Hill, Fife, Kennydale and
Parkland-Tacoma, for around $1 million each. Financing such a large deal wasn’t
easy. Said was an immigrant businessman looking to buy into a volatile industry
on the eve of the Great Recession. But with the help of a broker — another
member of the local Egyptian community — Said got a loan and closed the deal.

As his enterprise expanded, Said added a small office staff and systems to
manage the stations’ finances and the thicket of regulations and safety codes
that govern the gasoline business.

But Said never lost his engineer’s obsession with efficiency and improvement — a
useful trait in a business where high prices don’t always translate into high
profits. 

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Gasoline is a surprisingly low-margin business. In the 1980s, discounters such
as Arco began selling fuel at just above cost to drive sales of beer, junk food
and other higher-margin items in their then-new convenience stores. This
low-margin reality intensified in 1990s as grocery chains started offering
at-cost gasoline to boost their own “inside” sales.

For much of the past two decades, the gross margins on gasoline — that is, the
gap between what gas stations pay suppliers and what they charge motorists — has
been between 5 and 10 cents a gallon, say Said and other retailers. And much of
that margin goes to expenses such as credit card charges, which take around 2%
of the total sale price.

The saving grace: the gross margins on beer, chips and other “inside” items are
around 30% — and, for most gas stations today, are the biggest source of profit.


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In such a marketplace, Said has hedged his bets. In 2010, he himself became a
discounter with the first of 11 Arco stations, whose customers tend to
prioritize cheap gasoline.

At the same time, Said stepped up efforts to upgrade his Shells, whose
customers, generally are more tolerant of higher fuel prices if the location is
super convenient and, especially, if it’s clean, safe and loaded with inside
amenities.

Those amenities don’t come cheaply. Adding a new hot-food deli, for example, can
easily run $30,000, plus another $50,000 in yearly labor, says Mike Leake,
Said’s general manager. But the investments can pay off. When Said put in a deli
at his Parkland location, overall store sales jumped 20%.

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Said has also gotten better at finding potential fixer-uppers: stations with
prime locations — preferably, busy corners in housing-dense neighborhoods — but
poor upkeep. “All the stores we’ve had — they were so bad inside,” says Said
with a laugh.




COMMUNITY-BASED HIRING



Once or twice a month, Said visits each of his 34 gas stations. He checks for
general cleanliness and gaps on the product shelves.

Mainly, Said checks in with his managers and staff, many of whom are Egyptian
immigrants looking for their own start in America. Many are referred to Said
through his church or the local Egyptian American community; some hear of Said
even before they leave Egypt.



“Sometimes they just get off the plane and come straight to us,” says Jennifer
Hovey, Said’s accounts manager. Hovey says Said often helps the newcomers find
an apartment and other local services, much as he was helped 30 years ago.

Such community-based hiring, which sociologists say is common in immigrant
communities, also pays dividends for employers. It means Said and Leake can
spend less time recruiting and interviewing, Leake says. It can also means
dealing with fewer calls from store staff, who often bring problems to their
co-workers instead. “If they have a question on anything, they might not even
call me,” says Leake. “They’ll call the guy who brought them on.”

In some respects, Said’s success is simply a larger version of an increasingly
common story in the gas- station business.

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Nationally, immigrants own 61% of all gas stations, according to the National
Immigration Forum, up from 53% in 2010.

Anecdotally, that trend is clearly evidenced in the Seattle area. When Said
arrived in 1986, he says, many local stations were still owned by white people.
Today, he says, it’s “mixed — immigrants, like me or Indians or Koreans.”




FEWER STATIONS



Retail gasoline isn’t the growth industry it once was, however. Environmental
regulations have grown more expensive, and the risks can be prohibitive: A fuel
leak can close a station for years and cost several million dollars to clean up.
Safeways, Costcos and other “hypermarkets” continue to woo gas- station
customers.

Little wonder that in the past decade, the only new retail gasoline locations to
open in Seattle haven’t been traditional gas stations, but supermarket fueling
centers, according to the state Department of Ecology, which regulates stations’
underground fuel tanks. The last new traditional gas station to receive permits
in Seattle — a 7-Eleven on Leary Way Northwest — was back in 2001.

In fact, since the recession, the Seattle area has lost traditional stations.
Since 2007, the number of gas stations and convenience stores in Seattle dropped
from 115 to 94, while countywide they slipped; from 314 to 301, according to the
state Department of Revenue. More than a few have been replaced by apartments:
In urban areas like Seattle, the best locations for gas stations — along busy
arterials — are also the best places for apartments, which are far more
profitable.

That trend is likely to intensify. Harminder Momi, a 52-year-old Indian
immigrant who bought the first of his four gas stations in 1998, says he gets
“three or four calls” a week from real-estate brokers about two of his Shell
stations, in Crown Hill and Wallingford. He says the real estate has become so
valuable that he doubts a buyer who tried to run the locations as gas stations
could make enough to pay the mortgage. “They’d probably go underwater,” he says.

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The shrinking number of stations has allowed surviving dealers to bump up their
gasoline prices and even pad their gross margins to nearly 35 cents a gallon, in
some cases. But that’s probably short-lived, given that overall gasoline sales
at many Seattle-area stations appear to be falling, in part as newer cars use
less fuel and as residents drive less.

Momi reckons his volume is down 10% since 2014. Even Said, for all his skill at
boosting volumes, sold almost 2% less fuel in 2019 than in the previous year,
says Leake.

Eventually that trend could well overwhelm Said’s ability to compensate with
higher inside sales — at which point “we’re going to have to do something else,”
he says.

But Said says that day is still some ways off. For now, Seattle-area drivers are
still buying a lot of gasoline — and a lot of corn dogs, jojos and beer. And
Said is still looking for fixer uppers — most recently, a 76 station in Redmond.

Standing in front of his Beacon Avenue location, Said glances across the busy
street at a rival station, also a 76.

Does Said want to buy it? “If it becomes available,” Said says. “And the price
is right.”

 

This story has been updated with the correct address for Said’s gas station on
Beacon Avenue South.


Paul Roberts: proberts@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @Pauledroberts.
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