1. Can you reduce your recon cost? Are you being as efficient as you can possibly be? Does service have carte blanche? Is service still selling the used car department the same old same old?

2. Would you sell more units if you could keep more units? In other words, are you letting some of your less expensive units get wholesaled because they cost too much to recon?

Try using this coupon to encourage your used car manager to keep and retail some of that cheaper stuff. It’s found gross profit.

3. Can you speed up reconditioning? Very few of you really know how long it takes to get a car through service and clean up. Is your sales management team constantly crying about how slow service is? Might be some truth to it. Check it out. “It’s not the big that will eat the small, it’s the fast that will eat the slow.” Our Recon Tool will show where the pitfalls are. It’s easy to use and doesn’t create brain damage.

4. Re-evaluate your packs. Have they outlived their usefulness? Are packs ultimately affecting your average gross in a negative way? Are they giving you a false picture?

Dale Pollak refers to packs as taxing yourself. I think we are all taxed way too much. If you got rid of packs could you buy and trade for more units? If you bought and traded for more units, wouldn’t you sell more units? If you sold more units wouldn’t you have more gross going to the bottom line?

5. Have you made an all-out effort to convince your sales and management staff to sell the value of your company, your product and the fact that you have the best prices in the market? You’re becoming a one-price dealer whether you want to or not. Deal with it.

6. Re-think what you are stocking and the when, how and how often you tweak your pricing. Far too often prices are not massaged soon enough so you end up pricing your cars at the end of the cycle at crappy grosses.

It’s also important to know which units you can shoot the moon on. You don’t have to give everything away, but you have to know the difference between a unit that you can make gross on and a unit that needs to be moved quickly. Know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.

It’s a safe bet that anything you have that’s 45 to 60 days old isn’t going to make you much money. Lord help you if you have units over 60. Retailing out of that hot mess alone will eventually improve your gross.

There are many parts to improving gross profit. Look for Part 3 next week.

That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs