Dealership health checklist

How is your dealership doing? This is a hard question to answer for many owners and managers, who are often so busy in the day-to-day that the big picture gets lost. Below are 10 simple questions with Yes or No answers to help you assess the health of your dealership.

#1) Does your dealership have a mission statement and corporate values?

Owners and managers need to understand why they’re in business and why they come to work every day. We all work to make money, but we also want to feel that our work is valuable in other ways. A mission and values will help motivate employees and guide your dealership, especially during challenges. Lacking these underlying concepts implies a lack of heart to the business.

#2) Does your onboarding process focus on the mission statement and corporate values?

A huge part of a dealership’s success is based around talent. Hiring and training employees effectively is key to efficient operations. When building your team and onboarding new talent, the most important fact is that culture matters most. Focusing on culture during training, including mission and values, will help you build a resilient and focused team.

#3) Does your dealership have a customer complaint resolution process?

Your dealership’s reputation is one of your most important assets. In a digital world, unhappy customers and bad reviews can spread far and linger for years. No matter how hard you try, you’ll always have some complaints and you must have an established and effective process for handling complaints.

#4) Is there a Code of Ethics displayed in the showroom and website?

Having a tangible and prominent code of ethics is one of the most effective techniques you can implement to really improve customer satisfaction and dealership success. Customers appreciate when dealerships take ethics seriously, and employees will be motivated to honest behavior when managers take tangible steps to show ethics are taken seriously.

#5) Does your dealership provide comprehensive compliance training and audits for all employees/departments?

Compliance must be a core part of your dealership’s operations. Today’s fines and penalties are more aggressive than ever before and the cost of non-compliance simply isn’t an option. You must provide real comprehensive training to all employees on how compliance impacts their jobs and their interactions with customers.

#6) Do you offer dealer-branded F&I products?

Having dealer-branded F&I products is a core path to F&I success and a sign that your F&I department is being managed effectively. Dealer-branded products are proven to be accepted more often by customers and be more profitable as well.

#7) Does your F&I vendor provide regular training and set PVR benchmarks?

Most dealerships are nowhere near true F&I optimization - and F&I vendors are partly to blame. Your vendor should be offering regular training to increase product knowledge to your team. Your vendor should also be providing you a PVR benchmark so that you can compare your per-vehicle income to the industry and set appropriate goals for your team.

#8) Are your F&I products reinsured?

Owning a separate reinsurance company is a common practice of effective dealerships that are able to operate highly profitable F&I departments. A separate reinsurance company will allow you to keep a greater share of your service department contract profits.

#9) Do you offer Service Contracts in the Service Drive?

Service contracts are a highly profitable product that dealerships should be promoting aggressively. However, many dealerships fail to offer service contracts in the service drive, despite this being perhaps the most obvious time and place to make the sale.

#10) Do you provide clear information about F&I products on your website?

This is a great test of your dealership’s digital presence and savvy. If your website is missing F&I products, or deliberately doesn’t list them, you have the wrong mindset to survive the coming digital disruption! Customers expect complete information from your website, and if you want to make money from F&I products you have to include strong F&I information on your website.

Those 10 items should give you a good general sense of your dealership’s overall health. Of course there are many other factors to consider, but these 10 offer a glimpse into many areas of dealership optimization. If you answered “no” to more than a couple of the above items, your dealership may be at risk. Contact Max Zanan today for a free initial consultation.