As I watch new episodes of "Bar Rescue" on Spike I am amazed at some of the things that I have learned about the food and beverage industry.  I have been watching this show with a very open mind to understand what I can do to improve my business practices.  What I have found was that this show has business practices that even automotive professionals and managers need to consider taking a look at.  Let's take a look at what I am talking about.

1.…

Who owns the customers?  Where do your employees work?  Are prospects even being called back?  Some dealers don’t know.  All because we allow some of our sales team members to do it their way.  You’re feeding into their problem. 

I’m asking you to ‘Just Say No’ to…

1)   Letting salespeople use their own personal email addresses when responding back to customers.

2)   Allowing salespeople to make all of their (so-called) follow-up calls to happen from their…

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Make Money Mondays With Sean V. Bradley "How You Can Make More…

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to dealers and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple…

There’s no doubt that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to maintain your online reputation, and it may be tempting to look for ways to ease the burden. One way is to hire a company that specializes in reputation management. There are plenty of companies out there that offer seemingly quick and easy ways to improve your online ratings. Unfortunately, some of these…

The car business lost a great man this past Friday in George DuBois. I had the honor of working with George at the Bush Auto Group years ago. He was the GSM at Ardmore and I was at the West Chester Store. George always had a smile on his face and song in his heart. Some of the things I admired about George was that he never spoke a harm word about anyone and he always had something positive to say about everything and everybody. He was truly one of kind is this world, he was the kind of…

I am working late once again and while doing some research I ran into this start-up company.

I found them while doing some searching on Youtube. I was doing searches on Craigslist postings and something caught my eye where the ads are on the right. It read carcopia.com Buy the same place where dealerships buy from.

Obviously, I could not help but do a complete background on what this company is about.

Of course the consumer would be…

There’s something that is often missing in marketing and it’s even harder to find when you put the words “social media” in front of “marketing”. It’s God.

It is politically correct to keep religion away from business. We are part of the all-inclusive society where differences are ignored and disagreements are…

I am a small dealer and I can’t afford to hire a consultant!

Too many times I hear that statement from a dealer that sells less than 75 units a month. It puzzles me to think that a dealer that sell less than 75 units a month does not think that they need to hire a consultant to help them get better. It was just last month that I had the pleasure of helping a smaller GM dealer and after the first week he had to admit that he had already gotten his money’s worth even though I was there…

There are all sorts of tips, tricks, and techniques to drive more traffic to a blog. They usually involve either paying for it in some way, improving an avenue such as through search engine optimization, or building subscribers. The reality is this – all of these things take time. What doesn’t take time other than the effort that is required to make it happen is…

Each year thousands of new-hires sit through a dealer’s orientation and basic skills class to learn how to sell cars. In many cases that is the full extent of focused training they will receive in a career that will be an exception if it passes the 6-month mark.  Even the ones who survive are likely to end up with one year of experience many times, rather than…

An additional area of concern is within the CRM Inventory Tool. In our experience, not every store uses the Inventory Tool to its fullest capability.  The basics of having pictures, custom comments, pricing, aged inventory, hits, leads, etc etc, should excite every dealership sales manager within a store.  All of this extremely valuable information is essential to not only helping drive leads to your store, but also managing and caring for existing leads and converting them to…

When it comes to advertising today, things have changed. In some ways it’s due to social media. Oh, who am I kidding? If it wasn't for social media, most brands wouldn't be held as accountable as they are today. Even local businesses, car dealers in particular, rely on social media and review sites to tell their story beyond the cars themselves.

It's all about relationships.

Searching for…

I read an interesting quote the other day. Its a quote that I have included several times in many of my post's but for some reason this time I actually took it upon myself to meditate on it. It is found in Tim Tebow's autobiography, and it says "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard". One thing that I always found fascinating about Tim Tebow was his amazing work ethic. Here is a guy who is not built for the position of a quarterback, but adopts a take no prisoners work ethic…

Some succeed because they are destined. Some succeed because they are determined!!! Learn something new everyday and get out of your box!!!

You probably answered “no.” Who wouldn’t? I wonder how your customers would answer that question. Do your customers think you, your product and your business are boring? People want to be entertained. Entertainment = Sales. Boring = Broke.

Your customers get their news from FOX News and USA Today, their food from drive throughs, their coffee from Starbucks, their money from ATMs, their exercise from 7- minute abs DVDs and their information from the…

Written by Wayne George

Today's blog post is by Wayne George, an NCM Executive Conference Moderator for several NCM 20 Groups. Prior to joining NCM, Wayne spent 29 years in the retail automotive world. He was also a charter member of the NCM General Managers Top Twenty Group for seven years.

Your service department charging retail rates to recondition your vehicles isn’t really why you aren’t as competitive as you could be. Let’s look at some facts.

Domestic and import…

Back in the days when Yahoo was fighting against Alta Vista, when Bing was still called Microsoft Live, and when Google was trying to get the big Y to buy them, onsite content and meta tags were…