Selling cars is like journalism.

You put in the time, talk to enough people, and you get results.

Ask Jack Fitzgerald, founder and owner of Fitzgerald Auto Malls, which did $740 million in business and performed 159,000 repairs across 16 locations in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Florida last year.

“I worked hard, and I learned to listen to the customers and get them what they wanted,” the gravelly voiced veteran car dealer said.

Fitzgerald is a character.

“Nobody outworks me,” he said. “Pete Rose was known as Charlie Hustle. I try to be the Charlie Hustle of the car business. That’s my formula.”

That’s part of the formula, for sure. Another part is buying troubled dealerships at bargain prices and turning them around. He did it in Bethesda; Wheaton; Chambersburg, Pa., and Florida, although he lost a few during the financial crisis, when Chrysler cut back its dealerships.

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“Most of my stores were losers before I got them,” Fitzgerald said.

His secret sauce is offering customers “no haggle” sales, an approach that removes negotiating from the sales equation.

Customers pay a vehicle price that is set by the sales team based on the age of the car, its availability, even color and equipment. Period. That way, 20-somethings get treated the same as a “Philadelphia lawyer,” Fitzgerald said.

That’s nice for new car sales, but most car dealerships make their money from repairs, parts and used cars. And Fitzgerald is no exception.

“We have a very robust service business,” he said.

Fitzgerald employs 1,514 workers, and I estimate that his organization pulls down around $10 million a year in profit. Fitzgerald owns the land under most of its stores, from up-and-coming locations like North Bethesda to established ones like Annapolis, on West Street.

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That makes the real estate, alone, worth tens of millions of dollars.

He has trained an army of “car guys,” including a former sales manager he employed, John Darvish, who went on to found Darcars Automotive Group.

Through his ubiquitous television ads and the sheer length of his career, Fitzgerald is a fixture in the business community. The Catholic Business Network of Montgomery County is giving him an award as its Person of the Year on Nov. 20.

At 80, the understated millionaire gets up at 5 a.m. at his southern Montgomery County condo and drives a Hyundai or Subaru three miles to his office near the White Flint Metro stop on Rockville Pike.

“I read that CEOs of Fortune 500 companies get up around 5 or 5:30. I figured I have to get up before them.”

He may be 80, but he acts younger. He has a Facebook page, and former Washington Post publisher and chairman Donald E. Graham was his first Facebook friend. He teaches a course on business ethics at Strayer University.

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He still has his pilot’s license, which he uses to fly his company’s Beechcraft Premier jet — with another pilot always in the cockpit.

He arrives at the office around 7 or 7:30 (9 on weekends), and brews the first of several pots of Maxwell House coffee. A Depression child, he prefers making his own.

Fitzgerald has handed over control to a management team that includes his sister, son and stepson. He rarely sells vehicles anymore, although the bookkeeper’s son stays on top of the numbers.

His business philosophy comes from a book by the late ITT founder Harold Geneen, based on the idea that you should “never assume facts. It’s never what you think it is.”

Fitzgerald has been scratching for an edge his entire life. He had to. He started as a lower-middle-class kid growing up in the District on North Capitol Street. An undiagnosed dyslexic, he performed poorly on intelligence tests.

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“I miss words. Flip paragraphs. I once gave away a dealership because I didn’t read something correctly,” he said. “My father had taught me that I had to work harder than anybody else if I wanted to get along, and he was right.”

I like the curmudgeonly Jack for the same reason many reporters like someone: He takes my calls.

He begrudgingly told me his age when I refused to write this column without it.

“I’m in denial,” he explained.

His father worked for Trailways bus company and drove a milk truck for a local dairy, but earned an accounting degree at night school and moved inside to become the bookkeeper. His mother was employed at Harris & Ewing photography studio.

Fitzgerald’s first job was with DGS District Grocery Stores in Northeast Washington. He swept floors and stocked shelves and did whatever the bosses told him to do — for $10 a week.

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He was drafted into military service after graduating high school in 1953, and worked as a door-to-door salesman before talking his way into serving in the Air Force.

First, he sold Charles Chester mail-order shoes, keeping the $2 deposit as his commission. Then, he sold Kirby vacuum cleaners and home fire alarm systems.

“I had to pitch people door-to-door during the day and then come back at night to show the equipment when everyone was home. It consumed the whole day.”

When he walked into a car dealership to buy his first car, “it dawned on me that here it is in the middle of the day and here are people coming in to buy cars. I figured I could be talking to people and do business all day long” instead of waiting for evening.

By 1956, he had talked his way into being a salesman for a Ford dealership near what now is Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.

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He found his calling.

“I outworked everybody. I was the first one in and the last one out.”

By 1965, he was selling more than 500 Fords a year, including one to the late McGeorge Bundy, who was national security adviser to President John F. Kennedy. Fitzgerald was one of the top five Ford salesmen in the east and was earning $60,000. That’s like making $451,000 now.

Thinking it would be better to work for himself than someone else, he teamed up with his best customer, an appliance store owner named Bob Dowd, and in December 1966 bought a tiny dealership, Diver Dodge, from the estate of its owner.

Fitzgerald took a pay cut to $20,000. He and his business partner lost money the first two months, but by the end of 1967 Fitzgerald’s little dealership was one of the top Dodge franchises in the country.

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Dowd, who died of a heart attack decades ago, handled the financial end while Fitzgerald took care of sales. In 1970, they bought Wheaton Dodge from the Internal Revenue Service. He kept with the turnaround theme, buying more ailing dealerships.

His Lakeforest Toyota in Gaithersburg, with Hyundai and Subaru franchises, is one of the most productive and profitable in his portfolio.

Fitzgerald estimates he could sell his empire for north of $100million.

“I get calls all the time. It’s not for sale. I might be 80, but I’m not dead yet.”

He sure isn’t.

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