In 1959, Henry Bergman Levine and Fannie Bella (Meyer) Levine opened Midway Auto Supply in Dallas, Texas with a single store and one conviction: serve your customers right and the business will take care of itself. For sixty years, it did. Then the family ran out of road.
Last Part Standing is the unvarnished account of three generations inside a family business - from the immigrant hustle that built it, to the sibling conflict that fractured it, to the pandemic that finished it in 2020. Andrew Hillman grew up stocking shelves, watching deals get made, and absorbing lessons his family never meant to teach. Now he is sharing them.
This is not a success story. It is something more valuable: an honest autopsy of a business that did many things right and still failed - and the ten lessons every entrepreneur, family business owner, and operator can extract from that failure before it becomes their own.
You will learn:
- Why adapting to industry change is not optional - it is survival
- How family conflict destroys businesses that market disruption never could
- What financial discipline actually looks like when you are fighting for margin in a commoditized market
- Why succession planning is the conversation every family business avoids until it is too late
- How COVID did not kill Midway Auto Supply - it just arrived last
Sixty years. Three generations. One pandemic. Ten lessons.
Some businesses get to write their own ending. Most do not. This is the story of one that did not - and everything you can learn from it.
A personal note from the author: My grandfather Henry Bergman Levine died of lung cancer - a disease that was treatable, caught too late. That loss changed the direction of my life. A portion of proceeds from this book supports Targeted Osmotic Lysis cancer research at fixcancer.org, a non-toxic therapy for advanced solid tumors that I fund in his memory.
