Blog

How to Hire Dealer Technicians

Dealing With the Automotive Technician Crisis Few would debate the fact that there is a technician shortage for automotive dealerships in today’s market and the problem is going to get worse in the future. There are many reasons for this shortage that will be reviewed in this article as well as the ways dealerships need to deal with […]
Read More

Two Different Leaders

Today let’s look at two distinctly different leadership styles. The First style is called intimidation, where the manager of the department or dealership believes the best way to motivate somebody is to scare them. They might walk back into a shop with everyone together and yell and scream for 15 minutes, stating that if they […]
Read More

Appointments

Regardless what business you’re in the reason we make appointments is to save time. In the dealership world technician time is extremely valuable. However, if you want to grow your business and have consistent customer satisfaction and profits you had better understand the value of your customers time. If your customer shows up for an […]
Read More

“Fix It”

It’s interesting to me that the focus of day-to-day business operations in the dealership cover so many topics. The focus might be on customer satisfaction, parts loyalty programs, repair order performance, and the list could go on forever. What I find intriguing about this is that many times we lose the focus on the primary concern […]
Read More

Communication

The TeamMany years ago I did a training exercise that handed each participant an envelope. Inside the envelope was a thimble, paperclip, thumbtack, rubber band, and a golfer scoring pencil. The task was to use these items to make an object that could power itself across the desk.  The instructor took out a timer and began […]
Read More

“Advertising for Growth”

There are many forms of advertising dealerships use to generate growth in their fixed operations. There are newspapers, mailers, open safety campaign processors, handouts, and the list goes on. There are many ways to measure the results of these using the dealership DMS program as a source of information.  The DMS is an accurate source […]
Read More

Treat them like family

It always amazes me how much time and money we tend to spend on everything, but what really matters. It is very understandable that money must be spent on marketing for programs that will bring in new customers and keep them coming back over and over again. I also understand how important it is to […]
Read More

Hard Work…Together

There’s a Nike commercial on television that has such a positive uplifting point it should be a part of every one of our companies themes. It is Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the huddle prior to the game. Every professional sports team has a session similar to this where the spokesperson attempts to […]
Read More

Do You Want Success?

If I took the time to ask 1000 people if they wanted success, I have no doubts that far more than 900 would answer absolutely. However, if we listed several things that were requirements of potentially achieving success without any guarantees the results might be substantially less. There are some common threads or requirements of […]
Read More

Using Recalls to Build Loyal Customers

Many dealerships struggle through the winter months with reduced repair order counts. Most are fed up with manufacturer safety recalls however it remains the single largest opportunity to build profitability into your service departments. We looked at some different approaches to build your repair order counts; one might be to advertise low cost labor operations such as […]
Read More