Who Founded CarMax?

Richard L. Sharp was the Circuit City chief executive who conceived CarMax as an internal venture. In the early 1990s he pushed his team to find a new retail category where Circuit City's strengths in inventory management, point-of-sale systems, and customer service could be applied. Strategist Austin Ligon led the study and the team chose used cars, a fragmented market with no trusted national brand. The resulting 'CarMax' concept combined large selection, fixed prices, inspected vehicles, and salespeople paid a flat amount per car. The first store opened in Richmond in September 1993. CarMax eventually outgrew its parent and was spun off as an independent NYSE company on October 1, 2002; Circuit City filed for bankruptcy in November 2008 and was liquidated in 2009. Richard L. Sharp was born in 1943.

Austin Ligon led the Circuit City team that designed CarMax and ran the company from its 1993 launch in Richmond, Virginia until 2006. He built the core elements that set CarMax apart from traditional dealers: posted no-haggle prices, sales consultants paid a flat amount per vehicle rather than on gross profit, consistent appraisals for any car whether or not the owner bought one, and a centralized reconditioning standard. Under Ligon, CarMax expanded beyond Virginia, listed a tracking stock in 1997, and became independent from Circuit City in 2002. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).