In the car industry, I have built a reputation for being “Mr. Fix It.” In other terms, I have been recognized for my ability to turnaround struggling businesses. I didn’t start off that way, but once I learned the ropes of managing a team and I became an expert in my craft, the sales followed suit.
This skill set eventually granted me the opportunity to own my first dealership, United Nissan. In 2000, I was offered a position running the store, which has been failing miserably. At the time, the store was $400,000 in the hole and was averaging roughly 150 cars a month. Knowing this was the path to advancing my career, I left my current position, took a considerable pay cut, and went to work on April 1, 2000.
In just 45 days, the store was back to making a profit. In June, just three months later, the store had doubled its numbers. That year, I was awarded the “Fastest Turnaround” award — something the group had never done before. In total, it was a $1.8 million dollar turnaround.
Fast forward over 20 years and United Nissan is still thriving, even post-COVID. In today’s market, the value of assets like this has skyrocketed. And because of that, today’s entrepreneurs are met with the choice between either spending tremendous capital buying a high-performing asset or searching for opportunities in “undesirable” ones. For me, I prefer the latter. As they say, “The bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward.”
United Nissan was the first of many opportunities where I’ve taken an underperforming business and turned it into something more valuable, and the following steps I still utilize today with new business ventures.
1. Find the baseline.
The first thing I do when scouting underperforming businesses is I evaluate how the company is managed. What my team and I find most with dealerships is how little they measure. They may measure services and parts because that is primarily handled through the manufacturer, but they have no performance metrics to determine the state of sales. So, the first thing we establish is the natural traffic.
It’s crucial we understand the baseline. We need to know how it’s performing and unless we know the absolute bottom, then we cannot determine the next level. Before adding marketing campaigns or a top-selling sales team, we need to know where the store lives naturally. From there, we can draft a plan to improve it.
2. Build your team.
The most important asset in any store is your team. In the case of United Nissan, they had a good team that was misdirected by a very poor General Manager. This manager was not of the opinion that selling cars was a top priority – which, I’ve stressed before the importance of avoiding crab mentality in my post about planning your life.
Unfortunately, we had to relieve some of the team because they were already tainted. They thought the store sucked! However, we kept the good leaders, which worked to our benefit, such as in the case of Nick Voss who now is our General Manager at United Nissan Reno. We also brought team members who knew how to sell, and for the ones who didn’t, we trained them thoroughly.
When building a team, especially when you have multiple locations, you need to look for leaders. You cannot be at each store all the time, so you need people there that you can trust and who can manage. To put it simply, they have to be good with people and processes. It’s the responsibility of both your team and you as the leaders to orchestrate a superstar team. I know very well that it’s not an easy task, and many dealers today struggle with the outdated mentality that for your team you “chew them up and spit them out.” That attitude is long gone.
3. Maintain longevity by maintaining your team.
As mentioned in the last point, your people are the most important thing in the store. To maintain longevity and ensure your store is performing at its best, you need to keep your team. You do that by training them well and most importantly, listening to their needs. At my businesses, we do team trust meetings for this exact purpose. We get incredibly useful data and we’re able to let our teams know that what’s important to them is important to us. In the most recent round with our team trust meetings, we learned so much and now we have an action plan to fix it. That is proactive leadership and management. And while I follow this religiously now, I admit this isn’t how I always managed teams.
Years ago, I was the opposite. I was in the mindset that if I fired and replaced enough people, I’d find the right fit. To some extent I did, but I also lost a lot of great people and damaged my relationship with my team in the process.
When I acquired United Nissan Reno nearly two years ago, it was of the utmost importance to keep everyone intact at that store. A majority of the leadership team at that store has been with the company for decades. By doing so, we’ve been able to boost our numbers up by 70% on some metrics.
A happy team that feels supported will perform better. And in the case of dealerships, stores that sell better have higher-producing service departments. Sales are leading the train, while the other departments are the caboose. Once you start selling cars, the faster the other departments start moving.
