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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504918497 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 116 |
| File size: | 186 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Little Book of Broken Car Thoughts
By Tom Santospago
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2015 Tom SantospagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1850-3
CHAPTER 1
BROKEN THOUGHTS
Part of my job as a consultant charged with turning dealerships around involves some detective work. I go through the entire business with a fine-tooth comb to see how every department functions. I look at how the employees interact with management, and how all the employees interact with customers. This process of analysis inevitably turns up what I define as "broken thoughts." Essentially, broken thoughts are excuses management makes for not moving forward or for not making the changes that are needed — all because of the fear of change.
But what the owner and managers forget is that the fear should be centered on what happens if things continue the way they are. When broken thought is eliminated, there is no limit for growth! When I begin pointing out the broken thoughts that permeate a company, the dealers start giving me reasons why they have kept the same people year after year even though the number in fixed sales continues to drop. The dealer starts the conversation with how loyal the team has been to the dealership, so the dealer has been loyal to them regardless of the performance and end results. So I always ask the dealer the same question: Why do you think your management team has become so ineffective over time?
Look out; here come the broken thoughts. Let me give you the top five broken thoughts about why you and your management team cannot be as successful as the same brand dealerships in your marketplace.
1. We almost never make a change in the staff due to low performance; we usually do it for other reasons.
2. My management team has tried that before, and it just doesn't work at this store.
3. The general manager would like to change things, but he can't get the buy-in from his management team.
4. The management team feels they would lose key staff members if they had to dramatically change the way they have been doing things.
5. My management team may not be aggressive, but they always show up to work on time, and I'm sure they would never steal from me.
These are all reasons that prevent dealerships from moving forward, but I would like you to take a different approach to this. Assuming you have separate managers for each department, have them list the top five functions they do as managers that make them extremely successful. Also have each of them list all the day-to-day activity, breaking down what makes each of them successful at managing their teams.
This is where you can label the type of managers you have. It's important how each manager lists his or her duty and what's most important to them. What a manager was hired for and what he actually does could be two different things. Here is a classic example.
A Dealer Scenario
A dealership in the state of Maine had a sales manager who worked deals on the desk and managed six salespeople. The owner of the store decided to get him some help on the desk and hired him a floor manager. The owner's thought was that this newly hired manager could get involved when it came time to close a deal. The owner also thought that he could help follow up on all the deals with the salespeople each day. Some other tasks the owner had for him included following up with each new delivery so they could improve their customer satisfaction. Also, this new sales manager would get involved with training the salespeople.
Sounds like a good idea, right? The new manager at this point had been at the dealership for over two years and was handling these tasks he had been hired for — or so the owner thought! When I had that manager list his day-to- day activity, the list was a lot different than what he was hired for.
The first thing on his list was to make a fresh pot of coffee (I kid you not!). The next was to make sure everyone on the sales team clocked in. Then he had the stocking of new and used cars. The next item on this list was writing the used-car keeper checks. The list went on and on, but guess what wasn't on his list? Closing deals, training the salespeople, customer follow-up, and daily sales meetings. This new manager filled his day with administrative duties.
This gets even better. The sales manager, whose title was general sales manager, had the new manager closing the store most nights so he could leave early. Instead of having one manager penciling deals and the other manager working with the salespeople and customers, one manager was tied to the sales desk without the ability to move around the showroom and talk to customers while helping the sales staff make deals. In addition, this new manager wasn't allowed to appraise trades, so if there was a trade, the customer was told to come back the next day.
This is why it's important to have a clear understanding of what to expect out of your staff, especially your management team. You don't want them to be operating with broken thoughts. It's just bad business.
Making No Excuses
Here's something I hear all the time: "If I make my sales staff sit every customer down and get some information before they head out to the lot and pick out a vehicle, my top earners will run screaming from the room. And if my top sales staff quits, I will never be able to replace them."
That sort of thinking is a prime example of broken thoughts. The broken thought actually has a couple of levels. The first is thinking that your staff would not follow a three-car system that requires a little more work but will also generate more cash for everyone in the company while beefing up customer satisfaction. The core premise behind the three-car system is based on the belief that the customer will tell us how to close the sale if we only listen and respond to what we hear. This takes time, and it takes effort as well. Some sales staff won't want to go with the flow, but the best of your people will see that a more customer-oriented approach is in everyone's best interest.
Bear in mind that resistance to change almost always stems from fear. If you are afraid that requiring your staff to learn and follow the three-car system will cause a stampede for the door, then you'll never take the action necessary to implement new ways of doing things that will grow the business.
Living in fear is actually harder than making the necessary changes to get you out of a broken-thought modality. You will find them in most departments. Don't be afraid to search for them. Flush them out of the weeds and get rid of them as soon as possible!
Let's take a quick look at some broken thoughts as they apply to your sales and service departments.
Sales Department
Have you ever made the following excuses for not making changes?
• We cannot compete with the megadealers.
• I cannot afford to pay good people to work here.
• We can never generate the floor traffic in this market to have any kind of volume.
• Customers pay cash in this dealership or use their own bank, so we can't make money in finance. Besides, our warranties cost too much, and the customers don't have the time to wait for a finance manager.
• Our salespeople like to close their own deals.
• Our customers don't want to see lease or finance figures; they just want the bottom line.
• The sales staff won't like doing it that way; we will lose them if we try to change the sales process.
The bottom line is that excuses are reasons for failure, not success. Making excuses for inaction plays into your fear of change.
Parts and Service Department
Do you readily accept broken thoughts when it comes to efficiency and profitability in your parts and service department? The following are some common examples of broken thoughts. Some may sound disturbingly familiar.
• The service manager has been here for years, and he cannot see us competing with the Quik Lube franchises. There's no way we can make any money competing with quick service at the price the franchise is able to charge.
• We don't have a true system for our service advisers, but we really don't need one; my guy knows what to do.
• We let our advisers make all of our service appointments; they know how to fill the schedule.
• We can't find good techs who want to work here unless we overpay them.
• We can't teach our own techs from scratch, and even if we did, someone else would steal them once they got good.
The list goes on and on with all these excuses and misconceptions of why this "will never work." Ideally, you would simply realize that the fear of change is stopping you from the growth that the company so badly needs. You'd understand that some of your thoughts are broken. Does this sound familiar? Are you making excuses for failure?
Let's take the small dealership that has never done much volume as an example to make some key points.
A Dealer Scenario
The store owners made a moderate amount of money and watched every expense. No real decisions were made by anyone, including the owners who seemed to spend most of their time in front of an office computer. The dealership was eventually purchased, and I was given the task to run it for the new owners. Although this dealership was on a fairly busy road, the population of the town and surrounding area was much less in comparison to the large city dealers where I had worked before.
The story is almost always the same in every dealership in need of a 180-degree flip. Good people, good owners, and a parts and service business that's been plugging along for years. The thought process is also the same: "We are doing a great job for what's in our market."
But ask yourself if that's really true. It's easy to say everything is fine, because if we admit that there's room for improvement, it means we're not totally fine. It means we have work to do. It means we have to stop making excuses. At Dealership-180, we take the same team, move the right people around to best fit their skills, and we all agree on the plan moving forward.
The ones who embrace the new team plan quickly become a part of the strong results. The ones who live in fear of change go down two different paths. Some witness the entire staff do well and grow — so much so that they finally move over to the positive side. Others take the easy path. They say, "I can't work here, so I'm leaving." I wish that person luck and send him or her away.
Six months down the road, after the dealership is thriving under the auspices of the three-car system, some of the employees who left return to see if they can get their old jobs back. They tell me that they can't believe how successful we have become, almost as if it is the biggest surprise in the world.
In some cases, I do rehire them and find them to be some of my best employees and team players. In other cases, I don't rehire the employee. Negativity can do just as much harm as fear. It's always a judgment call, but it's one where a broken thought can create lasting negative impacts on the company.
After things turn around, I also get a kick out of the reaction of the store's previous owners. They inevitably speak with some of their old employees who had typically worked for them for twenty years. They ask how things are going, and when they find out how great things are, they get a little flustered, a little puzzled, and sometimes a little annoyed.
"How did you turn the dealership around so quickly?" they ask.
"How did you motivate Joe when I never could?"
I never would have guessed that! The former dealer's principals are like little children opening gifts at Christmas, only they can't keep it because it's not theirs to keep anymore. They can't believe that the bar was set; a plan was put into process; and surprise, it's a success! In some cases, we would sell more cars in three months than the previous dealer would have sold in a full year.
In one case that comes to mind, the dealer grossed about a $150,000 a month profit between new and used cars and the finance department. Three months later, we rose to $500,000, and a year later we were at $800,000 a month — not to even mention what happened in the parts and service department.
Working with What You Have
What do you really want to accomplish in your dealership? Ask yourself: Can I sell the volume I really want to? Do I have the right people? Can I get the right people? Can my building take the increase in volume? Will my people leave me if I change too much? Will customer satisfaction turn from green to red? Will I lose everything I worked for? These are some tough questions, but they must be asked and answered.
As I walk through a dealership, I make contact with each employee as he or she goes about his or her business. I make small talk with all employees, and I look at the way they handle customers and other employees. I ask them if I can have a few minutes later in the day to get their opinion on something. Hours after my walk through the dealership, the owner/general manager starts asking me questions about each employee.
Quite often the owners/general managers are very surprised on how I envision utilizing their current employees in new roles or ways within the dealership. Change doesn't mean blowing everything up and starting from scratch (or at least, usually it doesn't). Chances are you've got all you need. It's just a matter of rethinking how you operate to create better efficiency that can lead to increased profitability.
After meeting with the employees, I often find they are the right employees but in the wrong departments or in the wrong positions. Let me clarify this with a few examples of the right employee in the wrong job. In one store, I had a finance manager who had a good understanding of his department, but his finance numbers and after sales were on the average side at best. In talking to him, I discovered that he had been a finance manager for about five years. He said he took the promotion from the sales floor when it was offered to him.
During my conversations with him, I quickly realized that he belonged on the sales desk, not as the full-time finance manager. He found himself restructuring the deals that the sales manager had put together. He found that the structuring of the desk manager made no sense to salespeople presenting the numbers and less sense to the customer receiving them. After spending a day with him on the sales desk, watching him structure deals and working with the sales staff, I knew he belonged on the desk.
The next day I had the same conversation with the desk manager who had been on the desk for about eight years. I do what I always do; I position myself at the sales desk and watch the interaction between sales manager, sales staff, and customers. I found that the sales managers would put some figures on a work sheet and send the salespeople off to present the figures to the customer with very little interaction between manager and the salesperson. And when a salesperson could not close his or her own deal, he never offered to step in and assist the salesperson. Not only did he not talk to the customer, but also he didn't even call over the salesperson to see why the customer left in the first place.
As I talked more with him, I realized that his expertise was on the finance side of things. He had a love for finance and had been very good at it. I had to ask him the question, "If you love finance so much, why did you move onto the sales desk?"
"I'm not sure why I did," he said. "The finance department comes easy to me." When I took a finance turn on the finance manager's day off, I made $300–$400 more per deal than he did. I asked a second question: "Would you go back into finance if you had the opportunity?"
He looked at me and said, "Would that even be possible? We already have a finance manager, and I'm not sure two of us can make money with the sales volume here." I said to forget about sales volume for a moment. I repeated the question: "If you had the chance, would you move into the finance office?" He looked at me and said, "Yes, I would!" With a slight pause he then said, "The last few months I have been inquiring about finance jobs at other dealerships."
I asked him if he had ever talked to the owner of the dealership about how unhappy he was at his current role. He said, "Yes, a few times, but the owner told me to stay in my role as a sales manager and that over time I would grow to like it."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Little Book of Broken Car Thoughts by Tom Santospago. Copyright © 2015 Tom Santospago. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
About the Author, ix,Introduction, xi,
Chapter 1 Broken Thoughts, 1,
Chapter 2 The Three-Car System, 13,
Chapter 3 Indifference, 24,
Chapter 4 Overcoming Objections, 37,
Chapter 5 On-the-Job Training, 48,
Chapter 6 The Whole Deal, 63,
Chapter 7 Customer Options, 73,
Chapter 8 Aligning Departments, 88,