My finance manager quit and this is the weekend that I promised my sales manager off for his son's birthday. So it's just me today. Small dealer problems!
My New Adventure - Al West Nissan
- Thread starter BillVaughnAlWestNissan
- Start date
Hang in there Bill. You will get there.
When a new business is acquired, all of the existing employees will be gone. Maybe not today, Maybe not tomorrow. Unfortunate time to have one leave.
Yessir. I've already had that as my expectation, so if I keep anyone I'll be happy. I don't believe it has any negative reflection on what I'm doing. I have a proven track record of creating longevity and reducing turnover.
Truthfully, I feel like it's addition by subtraction. Good guy, but he just wasn't built for this. I will be moving my sales manager to the finance role and I think he will kill it there. Just having to make due at this point.
I will be hiring a new salesperson now, though. I try to take the approach that my manager's assist salespeople when they are busy or unavailable, but with moving him there and me having to take more of the floor responsibilities we won't be able to provide that same level of support.
I've shown the sales staff that I want them to make money and I've advised them what the plan is every step of the way, so I think they are comfortable. Last month, two of the three made the most money they have ever made here before. I purposely set it up that way and didn't hire, because I wanted them to see the value in what we were building. That helped me get the trust that I need to add another person.
Truthfully, I feel like it's addition by subtraction. Good guy, but he just wasn't built for this. I will be moving my sales manager to the finance role and I think he will kill it there. Just having to make due at this point.
I will be hiring a new salesperson now, though. I try to take the approach that my manager's assist salespeople when they are busy or unavailable, but with moving him there and me having to take more of the floor responsibilities we won't be able to provide that same level of support.
I've shown the sales staff that I want them to make money and I've advised them what the plan is every step of the way, so I think they are comfortable. Last month, two of the three made the most money they have ever made here before. I purposely set it up that way and didn't hire, because I wanted them to see the value in what we were building. That helped me get the trust that I need to add another person.
Hey @BillVaughnAlWestNissan , checking in on the dealership progress.
I know you are busy and documenting as much as you have is time consuming. This isn't a request for a 2,500 word write up. Just a check in.
I know you are busy and documenting as much as you have is time consuming. This isn't a request for a 2,500 word write up. Just a check in.
How's this going?
I noticed that Al West doesn't come up for Used searches still. I tried this once only because my owner came back from a 20Group with a dealer who lead the composite and "doesn't do any digital advertising". I knew there were a number of other factors like he had all the Ford dealerships in the area and had been a loved dealer for 20+ years but for the sake of a grand experiment I complied and went cold turkey. This was in late 2018 and early 2019 so we were getting chunks of in-store visit data from Google at that time so could verify we dropped 700+ in-store visits and our group suffered. In fact, it took another 90 days after going dark for 90 days to just get back on track. I understand your controlling expenses but I'm a believer that going dark on digital is a high risk strategy. Have you changed your approach since March?
I have one more hurdle to clear before running VLA's.
As of now, I have not changed the strategy. We've still kept up our numbers (and increased some) in spite of it. But that's largely because of the things we've been doing to clean things up like merchandising, pricing, etc.
Fully intend to start adding things back as we go. Right now there still isn't any money to add anything. It's a hell of a thing trying to bring a dealership back from the brink with no funds to promote all of the changes we've made.
Holy crap the time flew by! I had a WHOLE LOT more that I wanted to say. I wanted to touch on some more high level stuff. I think I talked to much about the low-level stuff. Plus I missed his question about net to profit. WHOOPS.
Thanks for checking in. I'm going to try to get more consistent at posting on here again. Got buried for a minute there.
As I mentioned in my reply to Dan, it's quite a slog trying to bring a dealership back up with no budget. Trying to do as much organically as I can.
It's honestly pretty hard to keep up with everything. I'm down to just me, my old sales manager who is now doing finance/backing me up, and 3 sales people. It's hard to do things to progress the dealership when I'm having to handle so many of the day-to-day functions; especially trying to learn their systems and processes along with how Nissan does things.
Unfortunately, while I see small gains in several areas, I think things need to really start moving soon or we might be in trouble.
