Speed of
the boss, speed of the crew. As the leaders think and act the crew shall too.
How do the leaders think and act at your dealership? Leadership is part science
and part art. The right direction given in the right manner makes all the
difference for any business.
Good
leaders must pay attention to four areas: People, Product, Process and
Positioning. Each category feeds off the other and creates a synergistic
formula for success. Great people with lousy process, bad market position and
incorrect product will lead to less than great results in spite of the people.
Each segment must be maximized for the maximum results to occur.
The biggest
impact that can be made on a dealership’s long term performance will be
determined by your ability to attract and select the right people. How much
time and in what manner does your leadership recruit people? What you focus on
is what you get. If you spend a lot of time and effort to recruit the right
people in the beginning, everything else becomes much easier. In the book,
“Good to Great”, Jim Collin’s research showed that great companies got the
right people and put them in the right positions before they did anything else.
The right foundation is the key. Are you recruiting personnel through multiple
channels or are you just running ads in the paper? Do you have established
interviewing procedures and guidelines that include pre-determined interview
questions and personality profiles? If you wing the recruiting and interviewing
process you get less than favorable results.
Do you have
written and clear processes and expectations established for every area of your
dealership.? Unless processes are established, written and communicated they
cannot be clear and will cause even good people to under perform. Create
routing procedures that contain job descriptions, responsibilities and
expectations. Routing procedures should contain any black and white rules that
are never to be violated. Be careful not to have too many black and white rules
that create an atmosphere of too rigid micro-management. Simply, people do
better when they know what is expected of them. Spend the necessary time
getting your team to understand why you have the processes and not just how to
follow them. When the why gets strong the how gets easy.
Make your
product purchases, ordering and inventory controls match your dynamics and
personality of the marketplace. Just because your twenty-group suggests that
you should have a forty-five day turn doesn’t make it right for you. In
analyzing your wholesale losses, you might notice that the largest majority of
your losses are occurring from purchase units that $20,000 and above. When you
look at that segment of your used inventory and realize it has the most down
side market potential, the shortest window of profit potential and ties up more
cash flow or credit line, it might make sense to create a shorter turn policy
for those units. In turn, it might make sense to create a longer turn policy
for lower end units that don’t have as much downside risk and tie up less
capital and cash flow. Tailor your policies to fit your needs
As a
leader, if you select the right people, put in the right process and have the
right product, you must now also be positioned in the market place correctly to
make everything you else you do work effectively. The right market position is
deeper than just advertising, networking or marketing. Positioning takes into
consideration the complete picture of all aspects of your ability to acquire
and keep customers. Traditional advertising by itself is dead and has been for
years. Gone are the days of running lots of ads and watching people come in the
door. Branding, differentiation and synergy between your mediums and messages
are crucial. To create market share, you must create market share of mind. In todays
extremely competitive and over hyped market that takes better strategy than
ever before. As a leader you must ask your employees and customers the
following, “What does our company do better than anyone else?” Once you
determine your strength, play to it.
Establishing and strengthening your market position is essential
to the long term success of your business.
Once you
have established the foundations for the right people, product, process, and
positioning, you must monitor and improve them consistently to improve your
performance, profit, customer service and retention. The success in making
everything happen is in usually determined by the pace of the leader. “Speed of
the boss is the speed of the crew.”
