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He had no product, no experience, and no money. But that didn't stop Harvey Lamm from building one of the most successful car companies in America

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Do you associate Subaru with rugged landscapes, with skiers happily taking off for the slopes? If so, you have gotten the message -- a message worked out by the company many years ago with its marketing focus on rural areas, its introduction of four-wheel drive to passenger cars, and its long-term association with the U.S. Olympic ski team. Do you also associate Subaru with Japan? If so, you have received only half of the message and the least interesting half at that.

Subaru of America Inc. is a most unusual automobile company, best defined perhaps by what it is not. It is not a Japanese company. It is not the sale-and-marketing division of a Japanese company. There is nothing, corporately speaking, Japanese about it. It is a publicly owned American marketing company -- founded, managed, and staffed by Americans -- and it is the exclusive importer of cars and trucks manufactured by Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd., in Japan.

It began in 1967 in good entrepreneurial fashion -- scratched out on a sheet of paper by two men who wanted to "do something together" that would be fun, challenging, and exciting. The two men were Philadelphians Harvey Lamm and Malcolm Bricklin. Bricklin has since gone on to found another company, Bricklin Industries, which imports the Yugo and the Proton Saga from Yugoslavia and Malaysia, respectively. The separation -- an amicable one, by all accounts -- left Lamm in charge of the new company's rugged road to success. Today, Lamm is president and chief operating officer of a company that does $1.8 billion in sales and enjoys a net worth of $275 million. In February, INC. senior editor Steven Pearlstein and senior writer Bruce G. Posner visited the company's new $25-million office in Cherry Hill, N.J., to find out how he did it.

INC.: Let's begin with you and Malcolm Bricklin -- how did the two of you get together?

LAMM: We were personal friends. Malcolm was from Philadelphia originally, like me, but had gone down to Florida when he was young. We met when he came back and took up residence in the same apartment building where I was living. I was a newlywed at the time, 31 years old, and we began spending almost all our free time together, playing golf or whatever it was, and soon we were saying to each other that we ought to go into business together.

Any business?

LAMM: Any business. Malcolm is a promoter. He likes to take ideas and concepts and bring them to the marketplace, help build the financial support for a company, and get it started. That's what is exciting for Malcolm. Once he reaches the point where the thing is off the ground, his interests change. I'm different. I was working in my family's furniture business at the time, and it was financially very successful, but I was spending most of my time looking for ways to get out of the business. But even as Malcolm came up with these ideas, my focus was always on the long term. I like to get involved in something and then bring it to new levels of growth. That's what is exciting for me.

INC.: How did you hit on the idea of importing and marketing Japanese cars?

LAMM: Malcolm had just come back from Japan very excited about this company he'd visited -- Fuji Heavy Industries. He was thinking about importing its motor scooters. But he had this brochure with him, with pictures of all its products: airplanes, cars, buses, trains, everything that's a piece of transportation. It's 11:30 at night in my apartment in Philadelphia, in 1967, and I'm looking through this brochure. And as a way to get Malcolm off the subject of motor scooters, which I'm just not interested in, I say, "I'll tell you what. If you can get them to develop this car, we can talk about it." He said, "Are you really serious?" and I had to think about that for a minute, because I wasn't sure I was, but then I said, "Yes, I am really serious. I think it would be fun."

INC.: Did you know anything about the car business?

LAMM: Not a thing. But you had only to look around to see what Volkswagen was able to do, importing cars into the United States. We even promoted the first Subaru as "the Japanese Beetle." There was also a man named Max Hoffman -- probably the grandfather of the car-import industry in America -- who did the same thing, only 15 to 20 years earlier, with almost every European line that's in the marketplace today. He brought in the Porsche, the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW. But in those days, the late 1960s, nobody was bringing in Japanese cars except the Japanese. They were exporting their own cars and marketing them, but Japanese cars weren't all that visible yet, especially on the East Coast. Nissan (Datsun it was called then) wasn't selling many cars, about 50,000 nationally and Toyota was maybe selling less than 100,000.

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