A three part series on improving gross profit.

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. 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.”

3. 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.

4. 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?

5. 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. I suggested in a previous newsletter that you go back and review your grosses by age categories. Have you done it yet? The aging units you are selling are killing your grosses.

There are many parts to improving gross profit. Look for Part 3 next week. That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs