If you practice management-by-number in your stores and yet don’t know with 100% certainty what your reconditioning times, costs and opportunities are, you’re not connecting to what you expect.
What we mean by connecting to what you expect is reconditioning driven by a time-to-line (T2L) strategy that takes the uncertainty out of this vital business function.
You might have made it intact through the previous couple of years, but you’ll want the T2L crystal ball to bridge your business into 2023 and beyond.
T2L reconditioning is a predictable forecasting model that:
• Organizes, structures and streamlines how you move vehicles from acquisition to sale.
• Equips everyone involved with your reconditioning game plan and notifies them of their role so the right work at the proper times is done to meet your T2L goal.
• Keeps your used cars from getting lost, languishing in processes, or being forgotten about at vendors and sublets.
• Enables you to annotate and analyze recon costs per car, speed approvals and share your recon investment with customers to build trust and value in your cars.
• Ensures any vehicles having active safety recalls are flagged for attention, whether on transport, in recon or on the lot.
• Maximizes your first 30 for ideal sale speed and margin.
Despite intensive evangelism about modern reconditioning directed to auto retailers in recent years, a certain type of dealer remains skeptical of these claims. I know some believe they retail too few used cars to benefit from reconditioning tools. Others, dealers of substantial size, still use accountability methods not fit for the task.
I was pondering this situation when I concluded that what we often believe is certainty is merely ingrained thinking toward something or someone, which becomes a truth for us.
That can make change difficult.
“We’ve always done it that way” is the hero of inaction — and the demise of competitiveness and profitability, especially for car dealers.
Until you track and monitor the flow of cars from acquisition to sale, you will not know how long that process takes your store. You may have close guesses, but not verifiable clock times. This not knowing for certain is too costly for you to ignore. Diagnostic data helps you manage-out delays, bottlenecks and waste so you can run your recon faster, more efficiently and more profitably.
Not only does running a recon department using reconditioning software create the data to manage and motivate by the numbers, but it also provides the why behind reconditioning performance. You can know what works and what doesn’t — and why — to improve recon efficiencies. And you can know what to expect.
