Do you always seem to run out of money before all of your bills are paid each month? Do you fluctuate buying cars from month to month based on cash flow on the day of the auction? Does payroll dictate what types of cars you buy each week? You are not alone. Many facilities face these exact issues every week, if not every day. The question becomes: What can you do to help mitigate these issues? These issues are symptoms of a larger issue: Cash Management. As cars become more expensive, customers become pickier (is that possible?), and competition from the internet forces us to turn a lower gross profit per car than ever before, we must become keenly aware of our cost of goods, gross sales, returns, fixed expenses, variable expenses, and profit in order to stay in the game. But, what is the secret sauce? What is the secret mixture of cars that produces the highest net yield? These questions have different answers based on which facility is answering them. However, we all should...

It Won’t Happen to Me “Fire! Fire! Run!” That was the cry of an employee in the dismantling area of one of my sites on a cool March morning of 2009. The improper handling of gasoline coupled with a fellow dismantler working to cut a core support off of a vehicle resulted in a fire that ultimately forced us to completely rebuild the entire building. I never thought we would have a fire of this magnitude and had done nothing to proactively safeguard us from the possibility. “Your Files have been Encrypted” It’s Monday morning and this message appears on the screens of every workstation and the YMS Server. Your heart races and you are thinking, “Do we have a backup?” You are the victim of a ransomware attack that results in five days of lost sales, a draw on your Line of Credit at the bank in order to make payroll, and two salespeople are threatening to quit because their commission pay was low. Are you prepared for an attack like this? Proactive versus Reactive After mult...

Service Creates Loyalty Is there a such thing as loyalty these days? Are the customers simply shopping for price? Does our level of service influence the chances that a customer will order another part from us? I believe it does! It takes years to build a reputation with a customer, yet it can be lost in a matter of a few interactions, if not sooner. We all know this statement is true, yet we don’t train our people to think this way. Let me explain how two interactions with a new car dealership service department caused us trade our car in for a car from a different manufacturer. In 2018, we bought a new Volvo XC60 for my wife to drive. We loved the car. It performed well, it had lots of cool technology. We actually decided that it was a better car than the 2017 Mercedes GLC300 that we traded in to buy it. After zero issues for the first 10,000 miles, it was time for a free oil change. My wife attempted to schedule the oil change only to learn that there were no technicians on du...

Frequency, Reach, & Yield How have you worked to increase your gross sales in the past? Have you sent out mailers? Hired an outside sales rep? Made cold calls? Shared your data through a third-party? I stumbled across a simple idea a few years ago that changed the way I focus on increasing gross sales. Before I get ahead of myself, let me backup and explain another truth I live by: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. By measuring anything, you focus on it and start working to influence it. An example of this would be weighing yourself every morning when you get out of bed. By making a simple, mental note of your weight, you modify what you eat and how much you exercise on that one day. If you weigh on a daily basis, you will probably be working to lose weight or, at least, maintain your existing weight. By measuring it and knowing where you stand, you empower yourself to make minor adjustments on a daily basis that allow you to eventually reach your goal. My goal is 175 l...

New Year's Resolutions The health of your business is equally as important as your personal health. Have you made New Year’s Resolutions for your business? If not, I would like to challenge you with three ideas for the new year. Empower an Employee to Do More (Delegate) Delegation is a word that we all hear more and more, but we don’t truly understand what it means and how we can grow our operations by simply turning over responsibilities to someone else. If you are anything like me, you struggle with the idea that someone else will not do as good a job as you are doing. We are all alpha-leaders that think that we know best and don’t want to trust someone else with important tasks. However, delegating responsibilities allowed me to grow my facility much faster than I could have done it otherwise. I developed a rule of thumb about 5 years ago: If someone else can do what I’m doing and do it 80% as good as I can do it, let them do it for me. I started empowering other ...