Your inability to move fast is a killer for your used car business. Moving fast puts you in the winner’s circle. Not moving fast puts you in the loser’s circle.

Oh sure, speed has mattered to you all that much over the last year.

What better time to pick up your speed and improve what you’re doing than when you’re making record profits?

The speed of your recon operation has a direct impact on your ability to produce gross in the used car department.

And without a doubt, it impacts how fast you get a car out in the Internet world. You cannot afford a 7 to 10-day window.

I’d be preaching to the choir if I went over all the reasons the recon/service department needs to cooperate and for you to get your used cars through service just as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, many service managers haven’t been trained to understand that your inventory is costing you a lot of money when it’s sitting.

Continuously educating your management team about how fast the market can change on a used car and what it does to your bottom line is critical to your long-term success.

If you want to improve your speed, then you need to take a hard look at my “Life Cycle Management” process.

“Life Cycle Management” will change your used car world forever, make you lightning-fast, eliminate wholesale losses, improve turn and gross profit. Y

You don’t need to buy anything from me. You just need to understand the concept.

If you’re dead serious you will get off your duff and improve your speed.

If you’re not then you’ll soon be giving back some of those record profits.

Speed Wins. Speed Kills. You get to make the choice.

That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs

I often wonder what dealers, managers, and leaders are looking at. At times it seems they are looking, but they don’t see.

Yogi Berra once said: “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

And sometimes even when they see, they don’t hold people accountable and take corrective actions.

Believe it or not, people want to be held accountable. It’s hard to hold people accountable when we haven’t set or determined what the expectations are.

Once expectations are set then we have to have a way of measuring the progress. Measuring progress is probably one of the easiest things to do in the automobile business.

When the measurements are not satisfactory we have to communicate the results and seek corrective action.

Once the corrective action plan is in place it all starts over again and at some point, there has to be, there just has to be, a consequence for failing to measure up.

And that’s where the biggest problem occurs. Not wanting to hand out the consequences is when leaders look, but don’t see.

I see it all the time. That’s all I’m gonna say. Tommy Gibbs.

“Showing up” is a term that is sometimes used in sports when a player performs well, has an exceptional game, or makes ESPN’s top ten plays.

In reality, it doesn’t actually mean what it says.

Anybody can “show up.” People show up every day. Sometimes you wonder why they even bothered to show up.

Showing up and performing, excelling, kicking butt and taking names is a whole different kettle of fish.

Great players and great leaders “show up” every day for every play. The great ones don’t pick and choose which day or which game they intend to excel in. It’s ingrained in their DNA to “show up.”

They don’t say to themselves, “Hey, I like this day, I think I’ll show up.” They say, “I’m here, let’s get on with it.”

Of course, they have days when they don’t feel like giving 110%, but they dig in, they grind it out, they push through the mess and they make it happen.

The automobile business is a tough game. If you’re going to have sustained success you have got to show up every day and “get after it.”

Getting after it means guarding the processes.
Getting after it means creating high energy.
Getting after it means holding yourself and others accountable.
Getting after it means making those tough personnel decisions that you know you need to make.
Getting after it means amping up your training to be the best you can be.
Getting after it means paying attention to what’s going on around you.
Getting after it means not ignoring “the elephant” in the
room.

Here’s The Biggie:

Getting after it means removing those obstacles that keep your team from reaching their goals.

If you’ve not been showing up, maybe it’s time you did. That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs.

I’m thinking about half my readers know what a “wash out sheet” is and the other half probably don’t. For those that don’t, in the early years of the retail auto business, dealers used a “wash out sheet” to determine how much money they made on the sale of a vehicle.

Here’s the way it worked. A new car comes into your inventory. You don’t know how much money you made until all trades are sold and thus “washed out.”

Follow the sequence. A new car creates a trade; you sell the trade. You trade in another and finally sell the last one with no trade. You then calculate the total gross generated by the sale of that one new car plus all the trades.

In this case, it took 3 transactions to determine how much total money was made. You would do the same thing if you purchased a used vehicle. If there were no trades or maybe one, the washout occurs much sooner.

With the technology that dealers have today, I believe it would be prudent to track the total gross each unit brings to the table. That would include F&I, Parts, and Service Gross generated from reconditioning on each unit as well as packs and doc fees.

Your first reaction is “We’re already doing this.” But you aren’t.

You might have a vague idea of what a single unit brings to you on the front side of the business and you might even know what a unit creates from the reconditioning gross, but you don’t have any idea what the total gross is when you track it in totality going from the first sale to the last sale that was created from the first unit sold.

The washout sheet is kind of like suits and ties. Keep them around long enough and they will come back in style.

Let the washing begin.

That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs.