25 Questions

The summer is over. It has been a pretty good year for most of you. It’s easy to become complacent when times are good.

Dealers make the most money when they are coming off tough times. When things are tough, dealers get back to the basics and grinding it out. As business gets better they are in a great position to make a lot of money because they have cut out all the fat.

But as business gets better, dealers tend to get lax with spending, processes and their daily disciplines.

Ask these questions of yourself:

1. Have you dissected every expense on the expense page?
2. Do you have too many people in the wrong places and not enough in the right places?
3. Is your selling system the selling system you think you have?
4. Are you evaluating every trade that you don’t make?
5. Are you holding a daily “save-a-deal meeting?”
6. Are you doing a trade walk?
7. Are you utilizing my “life cycle management process?”
8. Are you evaluating all the wholesale pieces to see if they have life in them?
9. Do you have a photo booth and is your website the best it can be?
10. Have you shopped your own dealership? Have you shopped CarMax?
11. Do you hold your staff accountable?
12. Can you shorten your selling process?
13. Are you using vAuto to buy and price your units correctly?
14. Does your current inventory level match your seasonal selling rate?
15. Are you still doing business the same way you did 10 years ago?
16. What’s the turnaround time for a used car from the time you own it until the time it’s ready for the line?
17. Are you leading the way or are you talking the way?
18. Are you mining your customer base for nice used cars?
19. Are you relying on packs to save your gross profit?
20. Are your pay plans old, outdated and not in tune with today’s market?
21. Is your volume and gross going up or down?
22. How many turns a year are you getting with your used inventory?
23. Are you tracking ROI/GAP?
24. Are you forecasting or “hopecasting?”
25. When was the last time you let Tommy Gibbs coach you?

These are great questions you should be asking yourself. That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs