As my sister and I began to grow the business, we were big on getting people trained and figuring out a way to help them become the absolute best at what they did. When we first entered the business, we learned the importance of “20 Groups”. Twenty Groups are a group of twenty dealers of similar size that meet three times a year to exchange “ideas” on how to better operate the business. Furthermore, each of the twenty dealers shares their monthly financial statement and is ranked in a composite based on the best to the worst. This is done on a monthly basis.
Thus, one can see who is doing the best job in each department. For example, one person might be great at used vehicles or have a super service department. One can see how they are doing and thus, ask questions to help improve one’s department.
As a result of these meetings, we began to expand certain areas of our business and some of the ideas helped us to become the largest Chevrolet Dealer in the State of Indiana. There were numerous ideas that we took back home and implemented. I will just list a few of our favorites and how they affected our business.
A cool thing about Twenty Groups is that they meet three times a year in some very awesome areas of the USA that we probably would not have visited had it not been for these meetings. I remember attending one meeting in Nantucket and we had a new member to our group. I sat next to him and we started talking about how many vehicles we sold. At that time we were both selling approximately 330 units per month. However, he was selling 300 used units and 30 new units while we were selling about 175 new units and 155 used units. As I sat next to him during the meetings, I decided that we had to see his operation.
Thus we took our key managers to the rough side of Chicago to visit his dealership. We learned about developing a Business Development Center, about using Postcards to “get people’s attention”, and how to develop better relations with the banks so that we could “attempt” to get more people approved for financing. As a result of some of these ideas, we would eventually get our used vehicle business up to about 250+ used units sold per month.
On a different occasion I was on stage at an event with a dealer from Ohio and we started discussing what was helping our Dealerships. He mentioned that he had a lot of luck with a computer program that showed when customers were in an equitable position to trade vehicles. We immediately contacted the guy that set him up with the computer program and began contacting our own customers on a regular basis. Suddenly, we were doing an additional 35-45 car deals just from this process.
My sister found a dealer who was having incredible luck with selling prepaid maintenance. She contacted the dealer and we signed up with the vendor the dealer recommended. We became a huge seller of prepaid maintenance. We started having dealers from all over the Country contacting us to find out how to best setup a Prepaid Maintenance Program.
We learned the importance of continuous learning and how we could find something small from a dealer somewhere in the United States and thus, we could continue to grow our business. Thus we developed the saying, “there are riches in niches” and every year we worked on getting both our people and ourselves in constant training so that we were always developing ways to increase our business. Furthermore, it also gave us an opportunity to travel and see different parts of the Country and the different ways that successful people do business.