Experience: Benefit or Liability to Future Proof Your Dealership?

For this ‘Leadership Lesson’, let’s look at how experience impacts the future of a business. My career path has led me into many businesses and many roles. Each step on the path brought new and challenging opportunities. Anxiously accepting challenges, successfully accomplishing opportunities and occasionally failing along the way have given me a depth and breadth of experience that make me who I am today.

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to serve as an instructor at a training center for a major agricultural and construction equipment company. You may think that being an instructor training dealer sales, service, parts and management personnel is not a significant role. My experience in that role and what I learned from serving others had an impact on me. I learned a key point from my manager/leader and that lesson lives in me today. 

The point and key takeaway, “Each of us is a product of our experiences, so in everything you do; impact others positively ensuring your interactions with them make them better.”

Delivering positive, helpful experiences builds others up. 

Experience is a Benefit

Individuals who have built depth and breadth of experience are likely to perform better as leaders. A Jan. 26 LinkedIn post by Pelagia M. explained experience as a leadership advantage. 

Those advantages include:

Experience builds the capabilities that disruption demands — judgment, composure, long-term thinking — qualities that speed alone cannot produce.

Pattern recognition is a strategic advantage. Experienced professionals distinguish signal from noise, anticipate downstream impacts and make balanced decisions under pressure.

Calm is a leadership multiplier. Leaders who’ve navigated crises bring steadiness that improves trust, decision quality, team performance and psychological safety.

Experience reveals how organizations truly operate — the informal networks, cultural dynamics, governance nuances and stakeholder influences that shape real outcomes.

Experienced professionals strengthen organizational capability by mentoring emerging leaders, transferring hard-won lessons and preserving institutional memory.

Their impact extends beyond roles or projects, shaping culture, accelerating others’ growth and reducing avoidable mistakes.

Many articles and sources support the importance of experience. This is an excerpt from a Forbes article by Wayne Elsey, Forbes Councils Member.

‘Experience’ is as Relevant to Your Organization as Ever

By focusing on experience, you can optimize your company’s internal operations — as well as your relationships with customers.

• A focus on experience helps you build a team aligned with your company’s goals and mission.

• It can help you find the best ways to interact with customers and build trust.

• It can help you utilize digital tools and other modern technologies more effectively.

• Using experience effectively will allow you to stay competitive in your market and win new customers.

Ultimately, experience can be the key to making your company more effective and efficient in serving its customers. By focusing on experiences and playing to your team’s strengths, you can better serve your customers, whether virtual or physical.”

When Experience Becomes a Liability

Experience means the individual has faced years of challenges, overcome them, remembers what worked and may feel that what worked in the past is the way of the future. They walked through the fire. They remember what burned them and what put out the fire. This may breed rigidity, overconfidence or a failure to adapt to new technology, new ideas and new methods of work. There may be less understanding by them of younger people in the work environment and in the customer base. 

Need for Balance

As I grew in my career and life, living and working with balance in all things became core. A diversity of experience leads to a balance of knowledge, capabilities and skills. Different experiences in business functions, industries and cultures create balance. 

Yes, cultures! As a person gains experience in various areas of a business, various geographies and various industries, they will encounter different cultures. All the benefits of more varied experiences build their cache of knowledge, capabilities and skills.

Why is it important to understand the benefits and liabilities of experience? 

In “Future Proofing” your business, people are core. In the organization, ensure you have the depth and breadth of experience in every position and in each function of the business. Review your personnel. Assess talent, skills, capabilities, behaviors and experience. Identify gaps. Develop and implement training, coaching and mentoring actions to close the gaps. 

Closing experience gaps will take patience and time. Experience develops over time. Build succession and career path strategies and actions to increase depth and breadth of experience as your business continues. In areas where you need greater experience immediately, hire it.

In your hiring strategies, openly seek out experienced candidates. Appreciate that you may search longer and pay more to hire experienced personnel. Hiring experienced personnel will deliver higher ROI returns quickly and impact the personnel around them positively. In most roles, fellow employees and customers highly value experienced people.

Start now. Future-proof your business with experienced employees and leaders. 

Dave Dell is a member of Machinery Advisors Consortium and owns DellServ, LLC. During his 30+ year career in the New Holland/CNH, Dave held leadership positions in service, sales, training, product management, parts, aftersales and marketing. He founded DellServ LLC providing a broad spectrum of consulting services.