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My New Adventure - Al West Nissan

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#71
So two days of updates:

I have half of the new cars re-photographed. And yes, I do mean I. While I do have some else taking the exterior, I have been doing the interior. It's easy to get the exterior done well without forgetting anything, but I don't want anything missed in the interior right now. I can train someone to take that over full time when we aren't trying to get a bunch done. The other reason I've done the interior is because it's allowed me to get much more familiar with the product and features from Nissan. Honestly, I'm not 100% proud of all of the photography as it's been rushed with some cars that aren't clean enough or some weird lighting, but I don't think I can obsess about perfection right now.

85% of used vehicles have been re-photographed. We are now getting fresh units priced and with preliminary photographs the day after they arrive.

The management team is starting to show a little more urgency, but we are still struggling to get vehicles through reconditioning.

I am meeting with the sales manager and service manager daily now to go over WIP.

We are in the process of finalizing a WIP log.

We set up a process for where inventory is to be located such as creating a "trade row." I have had to explain how constantly chasing down cars and trying to figure out where things are is highly inefficient and adds unnecessary stress.

With the plan to cut paid advertising, I've been trying to focus on more organic marketing efforts. Examples:

Cleaned up the Google Business Profile for the dealership. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting but I did add a few things like a UTM tag on the site link, there were no locations entered, and I updated some categories as some service categories were missing. I will need to create separate accounts still.

I have Bing Places for Business set up now.

I have Apple Business Connect set up now.

I am posting content to the blog page on the site now.
We are posting on Facebook more often.

We've done some organic content including a massive fail on copying a viral Tik Tok. I thought the organic nature of the failure was funny so we posted it anyway:
View: https://www.tiktok.com/@alwestnissan/video/7475474517595508014?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7475532976543368746
 
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#73
BillVaughnAlWestNissan said:
I will have to try to come up with some kind of goal. As crazy as it sounds, I've been more obsessed with the details so far than even selling cars. Just feels like today is already lost and if I keep focusing on the short term we will be chasing it forever. So I've just been buckling down and focused on getting as much done as I can to set us up for success later.
Click to expand...

This is of course, your focus and goal, but from the standpoint of how many people work at the dealership that simply show up at work to do their job and at 5pm punch out to go home and don't think about work again until 8am the next morning.

You find motivation in building towards these future successes and the long term stability of the dealership, but not everyone at the dealership has that big picture field of view. Hopefully some of the managers and supervisors have that view.

I don't think the goals need to be simply sales based. They could be customer satisfaction based or simply the fact that they've made it 4 weeks of fixing a row of cars each day.

Something worth celebrating but something achievable with some effort to build on. Then of course some longer term goals. 6 months / 12 months.
 
#74
Nice work Bill. I see you mention that you want 2 GBPs, one sales and one service. Until then, I would remove service categories from the sales GBP. You will see the bump right away, especially in Maps. Also, the UTMs, keep them simple so GA4 can place them accordingly. :cool:(y)
 
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#76
flosho said:
This is of course, your focus and goal, but from the standpoint of how many people work at the dealership that simply show up at work to do their job and at 5pm punch out to go home and don't think about work again until 8am the next morning.

You find motivation in building towards these future successes and the long term stability of the dealership, but not everyone at the dealership has that big picture field of view. Hopefully some of the managers and supervisors have that view.
Click to expand...
Great perspective here.
 
#77
sukoseo said:
Nice work Bill. I see you mention that you want 2 GBPs, one sales and one service. Until then, I would remove service categories from the sales GBP. You will see the bump right away, especially in Maps. Also, the UTMs, keep them simple so GA4 can place them accordingly. :cool:(y)
Click to expand...
I've clearly done something wrong because now my Organic is down and I have this "Unassigned" category that jumped. :banghead:
 
#80
Saturday I made three decisions I felt were critical to our team.

1. I decided not to allow a salesperson that put in their notice to stay. This is normal in the car industry, but typically not my approach. Heck, I once let a salesperson that we were letting go work in detail for a little while so that they could find a new job without having to worry about not having any income. I understand the reasons for moving on from a salesperson that puts in their notice, but I have always felt it was essentially telling your remaining staff that you don’t care about their livelihoods and only about the business. In this case, I felt like we were simply too early in this experiment to have someone who was exiting stay. We need to focus or time, energy, and training on our people while enforcing new standards and policies. It would have been hard to hold this employee who was leaving accountable to process and policy and allowing them not to wouldn’t have been acceptable either. I made it a point to sit down with the staff and explain my reasons and give them an opportunity to give input and ask me questions.

2. We sat down as a team and made the decision whether or not to replace this person together. I have always tried to create a culture where the staff felt like they were part of the decision making and that things didn’t happen to them that was beyond their control. I also feel like doing so this early would help establish in our team’s mind that we ARE, in fact, a team fighting in the trenches together. I gave them both the pros and cons of either side of the decision and let them give their input on what they thought was best. We talked about how this might affect them negatively such as having to do more of the work keeping the lot and showroom organized and standing tall. We discussed how they may have to be called in on their days off to cover for someone who might have to call in sick. Then we discussed the positive of having more opportunities available to them and how it would allow us to focus on the remaining group more.

3. I asked the remaining salespeople to do their fellow salesperson a favor if we decided not to add someone. I asked that, if they decided at any point that this wasn’t a good opportunity that they let us know to allow time to get someone else in quickly so that they weren’t leaving everything to the last two salespeople. I brought this up because I want them to start thinking about how what they do impacts those around them. Again, this is about creating a culture of teamwork. I also promised that anyone providing notice would not be let go immediately and that they would be able to see through their notice.

Ultimately, we decided to move forward for now with the three salespeople and that we would reevaluate as we go together. I let them know that I won’t surprise them by interviewing people out of the blue and that I would let them know if I decided to add someone.

Thoughts on the 3 of these things?
 
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