Another week down. Moving too fast without seeing an immediate impact. Just have to stay the course, though.
Feel like I'm going to have to figure out some outbound activities, but I'm not a big believer in it for many reasons we can get into (and I know many will argue with me on this), but because of that, I'm also not very good at it. I'm just going to have to get passed it and get creative. I have someone I plan on reaching out to for some guidance.
I'm also going to have to break my rule on trying to go with minimal to no advertising. I feel like I'm going to HAVE to do VLA to increase our presence on search. VLA seems to be the lowest cost option for this outside of maximizing our BGP.
Speaking of my cost strategy, Cars and AutoTrader let me pause our contracts so that I can do this, but (to no one's surprise I'm sure) CarGurus is refusing to help us. Shocking, I know.
I learned this week that they don't clean used cars for deliveries. Just new cars. Wow.
I also realized the depth of our finance manager's lack of experience this week. As I've mentioned, his background in finance has mostly been as a backup and the being the guy that handled more of the subprime deals. I'm going to have to work with him on how to structure deals, how to choose the right lenders, etc.
Communication continues to be a problem. It seems to me that people only listen enough to have a general read of what is going on and that their main focus isn't the thing we are working on, but the thing that they are planning on doing next. I'm going to have to work on everyone's focus on the task at hand and help them understand that everything is important and not just their current projects.
While Al West Nissan seems to have a good relationship with the community and there is a favorable view from the customer perspective on how well they take care of their customer's, I believe that the troubles the dealership has had over the years has lead people to ignore the dealership in their shopping. We're priced aggressively online yet we continue to struggle to get enough activity and leads. I may be asking for too much too soon, but you can't do much with as few opportunities as we are getting.
That being said, I've been very purposeful to do everything I can to try to raise the perception of us as a dealer and avoid any negative reactions or reviews from guests. While I always default to take care of the customer when it's even slightly reasonable to do so essentially, any guest complaint we take immediate care of whatever the problem is. No, "well they bought it as is," "the car is 15 years old," "it has 150,000 miles," etc. Just fix it. We need happy customers and can't afford unhappy ones. Agree or disagree with this?
To top it all off, Rolla was hit by a Tornado yesterday. The north side of town which the dealership is at did not sustain any damage. Unfortunately, the very south of town has seen some critical issues. Sadly, the CDJR store here received extension damage. No casualties or serious injuries in Rolla, but there were some in the area. Just terrible.
This tornado created an interesting scenario. There is a big St. Patrick's Day parade here every year (there is an engineering school here and, fun fact, St. Patrick is the Patron Saint of Engineers) and we were all getting ready for it today. After the tornado, many people were extremely disappointed (ok, they were mad) that the parade was going to go on. We decided to cancel our participation in the parade, but I wanted to do so in a way that wasn't critical of the folks who decided to continue to move forward with the parade. Here is my post. Tell me how you think I did.
"While we can understand the desire for some level of normalcy and trying to find joy in times of struggle, we have made the difficult and personal decision NOT to participate in the parade this year. We're disappointed as it is one of our favorite times of the year to join our neighbors in celebration, but we are going to leave ourselves available to help in the community today. If you hear of anything we can assist with, please let us know. Thank you to all the efforts by the community to prepare for the parade including our team members who helped get us ready to participate. We hope everyone understands our decision. While it is not our main priority, the dealership will be open today for anyone in emergency need. We will likely have limited staff as we will allow our team members to provide support in the area. We are having some internet difficulty, so we may be slower to respond than our normal standards. We are currently having some issues answering the phones even though they are ringing in."
Drone footage of damage: [MEDIA=youtube]iDZ3KMUq8fU[/MEDIA]
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDZ3KMUq8fU
