Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel – SPOKE #5, Robust Marketing Process Drives Segment Sales (October 2020) - The fifth spoke in the upper right completes the Good to Great Flywheel — “Building your dealership brand with all segments” by employing a robust marketing process. Done right the process grows sales with all types/segments of buyers and generates momentum for the new to used cascade described in spoke 1. We’ll define the 5 steps of marketing and then the 3 critical elements of a robust process in a “great” marketing dealership. We’ll focus on element 1 in this article and will tackle elements 2 and 3 next time. 

Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel Spoke #4 - Build a Balanced Dealership that Sells Solutions and Earns Trust (September 2020) - How your entire dealership hears and serves the customer is at the core of the 4th spoke of the flywheel. Dealerships that are built with balance and whose people are trusted to deliver and serve consistently will retain those customers and attract more new customers.

Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel – Leveraging Technology Assessing Technology as a Force Multiplier (June 2020) - Technology is a “Force Multiplier” for your dealership. The force multiplier concept comes from the military but to explain it simply, think of a hammer. A hammer amplifies your effort to produce more output. This idea fits exactly with the flywheel analogy for building a good to great (G2G) dealership as the leveraging of technology tools exert forces, speed and connection to increase a dealership’s momentum.

Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel Spoke 3 — Part 2, Build a Performance Culture: Be the Employer of Choice (June 2020) - The best dealerships attract and keep the best people. To move from good to great, you must strive to be the employer of choice. Do you want good people to work for you or your competitor? This spoke of the Good to Great Dealership Flywheel is building a performance culture, and it involves processes and people. Processes was part 1 of this spoke and here we’ll expand to people or being the employer of choice. In both, performance means discipline, rigor, consistency and willpower to succeed.

Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel Spoke #3 Build a Strong Culture & Leverage Vital Processes (March 2020) - “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” — a quote attributed to management guru Peter Drucker defines the core idea of this spoke. The best plans fail without a strong culture to support them. On the flip side a strong culture means your dealership is more likely to overcome setbacks and changes even without a strong strategy. To grow from good to great requires more than a strong culture — being great requires a culture of performance.  

Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel Spoke #2 Invest to Grow: High Absorption (February 2020) - Absorption is simple to calculate, but to understand its “Good to Great” power in a dealership is complicated. Absorption is both a defensive and offensive strategy, and, although it is a financial metric that contributes to a high return on assets (one of two goals of a dealership), better absorption also contributes to creating repeat customers (the second main goal). 

Leadership Lessons - Good to Great Dealership Flywheel, Leveraging the New to Used Cascade (February 2020) - What is the New to Used Cascade and why is it important as the first spoke to describe in the Good to Great Dealership Flywheel? There are many implications for leveraging the New to Used Cascade, which is why I choose to start our journey here. The biggest implication is the fundamental approach a dealership makes to selling machines.

Leadership Lessons - From Good to Great – The Sustainable Dealership Flywheel  (December 2019) - What makes a dealership good? And what does it take to move a dealership from good to great? These questions are our subject for this column in 2020. Over the year, we’ll discuss each element of the Sustainable Dealership Flywheel, and how they link to build the momentum that distinguishes a “Good to Great” dealership.​