The Dealer's Playbook for Lost-Customer Recovery: A Three-Touch Framework That Works
Nearly 40% of service customers who haven't visited a dealership in 18 months are gone for good—but not because the work was bad. They've simply drifted. A miss...
The Dealer's Playbook for Service History Customer Portals That Actually Drive Retention
Why Most Dealerships Are Leaving Money on the Table With Service History Sixty-three percent of service customers can't access their own maintenance records on...
The Dealer's Playbook for Mobile App Engagement Metrics That Actually Drive Service Revenue
Are Your Mobile App Users Ghosts, or Are They Actually Coming Back? Here's a tough question most service directors won't ask themselves: if you've built a mobi...
The Dealership Welcome Call Playbook: Building Loyalty Before the Customer Leaves the Lot
The first dealership in the United States to systematically call every customer within 24 hours of purchase was a small Chevy shop in rural Ohio back in 1987. T...
The Dealer's Playbook for Employee Referral Bonuses That Scale
Back in 1988, a Toyota dealership in Southern California started something that sounds quaint now. They hung a poster in the service bay offering $500 to any em...
The Dealer's Playbook for 20-Group Participation: From Attendance to Action
How Many Dealers Are Actually Getting ROI From Their 20-Group Membership? You're paying $8,000 to $15,000 a year to sit in a conference room with 19 other fran...
The Dealer's Playbook for Acquiring an Existing Dealership
Most dealership acquisitions fail because the buyer spends all their energy on the financial engineering and almost none on operational integration. You get the...
Reading the Market Before You Build
Reading the Market Before You Build You're sitting in your dealer principal's office on a Tuesday morning, and the conversation you've been avoiding finally ha...
The Dealer Group's Executive Recruiting Playbook: Hiring and Retaining Top Talent
The Dealer Group's Hiring Crisis Nobody Wants to Talk About Your group's been searching for a GM for eight months. The last two candidates looked good on paper...
The Dealer's Playbook for Open-Book Management: Making Your P&L Visible and Actionable
How many people in your dealership actually know what your dealership makes? Not just assume. Not based on vibes or what they heard in the break room. Actually...
The Dealer's Playbook for PTO Policies That Actually Work for Salespeople
Your PTO policy is either making your salespeople more loyal or quietly killing your retention numbers, and most dealer principals don't realize which one they'...
The Dealer's Playbook for Drug Testing Policy: A Practical Guide for Principals and GMs
Most dealership drug testing policies are reactive theater masquerading as compliance. You've got a form in a binder, you test when someone crashes a loaner or ...