Most of my messages are geared toward management, but today I want to talk to your sales staff. You should forward this to every salesperson on your team and suggest they sign up for my newsletters.

If you’re a salesperson, I want to help you re-frame what you do every day and what a great opportunity you might be missing. If you’re in management, this is a message you need to share with all.

Have you ever wanted to be in business for yourself?

Have you ever thought about going into business, to get someone else to invest the money and you reap the rewards?

Welcome to the amazing world of the automobile business:

You have free office space.

You get rewarded based on how hard you work.

You have opportunities for advancement.

You have healthcare, vacation and retirement opportunities and Christmas bonus programs.

You have a management team working to help you be productive.

You have a free computer system.

You have a CRM/DMS and other software provided free of charge.

You have staff and technicians available to handle customer problems.

You have free marketing, advertising, and a website developer.

You have an administrative staff to help process your deals, DMV work, etc.

You have millions of dollars of inventory to sell with zero personal investment.

You get special spiffs/incentives from the factory.

You get all the free training/coaching that you can stand.

You have a detail/clean-up department that gets your vehicles ready for delivery.

You don’t have to pay a penny for phone, electricity and other utilities.

You can demand an assistant when you become productive enough.

You have an Internet/BDC department begging you to take leads.

You have free janitorial service.

You have free coffee.

You have your own personal financial officer (F&I) working to put your deals together.

You work out of a multi-million dollar facility located on prime real estate.

You have an opportunity of a lifetime with no personal financial investment.

You need to “own” your own business.

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

Go to my website to “join list” tommygibbstraining.com

Without question, some people are luckier than others. It’s not always true, but some of the time it’s just a fact.

More often than not, luck is a by-product of being prepared.

The more you prepare, the luckier you get.

Being prepared means studying your craft.

Being prepared means making some mistakes and moving on.

Being prepared means willingness to change.

Being prepared means listening to other points of view.

Being prepared means getting outside of your comfort zone.

Being prepared is a constant thirst for knowledge.

Being prepared means having lots of residue on your hands.

Change is coming. Are you prepared?

Many have the will to win. Very few have the will to prepare to win.

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

How was your June?

How have your first six months been?

It’s been a crazy year and I know that most of you have set some all-time records.

I can understand why you might be beating your chest a little bit.

Your record-breaking pace may mean you’ve gotten lucky or it may mean you’ve got your act together.

Either way, you need to be cautious of becoming complacent.

Even though things have been going well, you would be very smart to review how you can make things better as you tackle the second half.

But let’s suppose you’ve not been setting records or maybe you recognize you’ve done well despite some flaws in your plan of attack.

Since we still have 6 more months to go, I have a couple of questions:

1. If you’re a record-breaker, what are you going to do to get better?

2.If you’ve not been breaking records or have broken some despite yourself, what are you going to do to get better?

Everything we do is about choices.

You can choose to let things be as they are, or you can choose to dial it up a notch or two.

Your other choice is to do nothing. Go sit in your office, stare at the wall and count your money.

If you do nothing, your pile of money will likely go down and the year will soon be over.

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

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.

These are unprecedented times we’re currently going through.

Never in the history of our business have grosses and profits been as high as they are today.

Somewhere between the pandemic and the laws of supply and demand, dealers have been put in the favorable position of selling new and used units at window sticker and above.

Salespeople are saying in so many words, “Take it or leave it, because if you don’t buy it, someone else will.”

While it’s a great situation to be in, I have to caution dealers, managers, and salespeople to be careful how you say it.

Telling a complete story of “why” is a much better road to long-term success.

If you’re coming across as “take it or leave it,” you may wake up one day to discover that they took your advice and have “left you,” and ain’t coming back.

Take it or leave it. That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs.

In 1983, against long odds, Jim Valvano led his underdog NC State Wolfpack basketball team to the NCAA basketball championship.

He’s also very much remembered for his inspirational 1993 ESPY Awards speech given just eight weeks before he died of cancer.
His motto was, “Don’t Give Up . . . Don’t Ever Give Up.” In that speech he said there are three things we should do every day:

1. Laugh.
2. Think. You should spend some time in thought.
3. Cry. You should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy.

His point was if you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day.

Matthew McConaughey won the best actor award at the Oscars in 2014. He said he needs three things in his life to survive:

1. Someone to look up to. I would also suggest you need someone to look up to. It might be God, someone in your family, business or someone who’s mentored you.

2. Someone to look forward to. In his case, and yours as well, he looks forward to his family. What do you have going on in your life that you look forward to? Is it accomplishing the next great challenge?

3. Someone to chase. He chases his hero. He said he was chasing himself in 10-year increments. That too makes sense. We all need something or someone to chase. Being in the chase makes us better.

Laughing, thinking, crying, having someone to look up to, something to look forward to and something to chase is what fuels the passion of life.

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