Drama free zone

I'm happily married and we have four boys. This crew ranges from a freshman in high school to a third grader. There is Always a chance one of the boys are not happy with one of his brothers. Now we don't allow drama with them why would I allow it at work.

Drama in the work place is a productivity killer. We can't afford to carry team Members that thrive on drama. This is something that should be addressed quickly.

I recommend coaching in the moment. The longer you allow things to continue the more it is costing you. Drama staff chase off the good people, are unproductive and strive to effect as many staff members as they can. If your job is causing you to be a drama queen get a new job. If your boss lives for drama fire them and get a new boss/job. Don't allow the drama to suck the life out of your day. Now go make a difference today and add a positive attitude to some ones day.

Turn used equipment

To maximize your working capital you must buy used equipment the right way. It is a mind set that must change from the top down. Trent Hummel has a concept that can increase your turns and make your accountant happy. Go to www.jccservices.com to learn about a free webinar we will be hosting next week. It's time to put your capital to work for you and the dealership.

A Painless Annual Performance Evaluation

What is the time of year most managers and employees dread? You guessed it performance evaluations. You want to pick a time of year that I was always was excited to take a telemarketing call that was then. I don’t know who is more uncomfortable about evaluations the manager or the employee. I likened the feeling to a dentist pulling a child’s tooth; you don’t know who will end up with the most discomfort in the end.

Be proactive; don’t wait until four weeks away and start working on the evaluations. Make notes through out the year of successes and have your employees do the same. Insure they know what skill sets they will be evaluated on at the beginning of the year. Don’t make it a surprise and change the tool mid stream. Nobody likes a pop quiz; give them a copy during orientation and set the expectations then.

Before you start; ask everyone to give you a self-evaluation with a list of successes they have had through the year. This will fill in the blanks you have missed and help set the tone to be a positive one. Be very constructive and detailed. Don’t make vague opinions and recommendations. Tell them exactly what you’re seeing and would like to see in the future.

Above all keep everything positive. I know some of you are thinking I have someone that should be getting a negative review. I will challenge you that performance issues should be addressed on an ongoing basis and shouldn’t be a surprise on an evaluation. IF you want these to be painless don’t over look your sacred cows and team cancers all year and think you can address them in an annual review. Great leaders coach in the moment not in the future.

Good Luck and Have Fun With Them.

Sales Management 101 Are you there yet?

Sales Management

Do you get a sick feeling in your stomach when you look at your used inventory levels? I’m headed to Pennsylvania next week; we are working with some dealerships on sales management. You know the department that we manage the least.  With lower margins how can we not track this teams daily performance and hold them accountable.  Instead we allow them to dictate what we give on trades and don’t hold them accountable for the inventory. Many let them walk away and allow the dealership to take all the risk on the used equipment.

Is your team pitchers or catchers? Are they hungering for the next deal or waiting for the marketing department to get them their next sales lead.

Set the expectations.

Give them the tools to perform.

Observe and track behaviors.

Follow up and Coach.

Make it FUN.

Today is the day to look at the sales department in a different light. Don’t wait for the manufactures to take away volume bonuses to make you decide to make the sales department a profitable department every month. Lets develop those rising stars.

That is awful; we didn’t get anything out of that training!

Top reasons people don’t change behaviors after training courses.

No buy in

The student doesn’t want to attend. The student was mandated by owner/manager or manufacture.

Lack of support

The student doesn’t feel that lesson learned can't be applied in the dealership because no one will support the changes.

No follow-up

The training has no follow up by the trainer.

Distractions

The student comes back to opportunities with customers, staff and family.

Little Accountability

The training doesn’t have any accountability tied to the course for behavioral change.

Sometimes you get what you pay for. So what can you do to insure you get the ROI out of your training dollars?

Organization Development

We did a Webinar for a dealership today. Helping them with some organizational opportunities. This is the best part of my job; spending time with clients talking about strategic and organizational development. 

Having open discussions about plans, obstacles and desires of their businesses. Then having the ability to guide them to solutions. I will never get tired of helping people develop their staff.

Have you taken the time to review your aspirations and the obstacles that are keeping you from reaching them?

Is the shop ready for slow times this winter or is it going to be busy?

How do I keep the shop full in the down months?

I hear that question all the time. And my response is what are you doing about it? If you always do what you have always done you will always get what you have always got.

This is so true; if you continue to allow the shop to be empty it will stay that way. By now you should have a winter maintenance plan is place and actively seeking work. I work with dealers that do a good job with this, dealers that say they are going to do something and those who just plain ignore it. Who do you think asks the question how do you keep the shop full in the down months?

I just got back from a peer group meeting where two of the dealers have put programs together and are having great success with them. So are you always going to do what you have always done?

How are you preparing for Change?

The state of the industry is in constant change. You cant bury your head in your day to day and think Market changes are not effecting you and your business. Now is the time to review what is going on in your regional market. You can no longer just look at your local competition; you have to look at the bigger picture.

Those who are focused on just today will be overwhelmed when tomorrow comes. Quickly I have seen the dynamics change over night in some cases. So how are you preparing for change? Are you looking to grow, exit or just get better at what you do?

http://www.jccservices.com/mergersacquisitions.html

Have really you created brand differentiation?

Many brands have set themselves apart from their competition by creating gaps in product technology. That does not last long when manufactures build almost identical products to compete with each other.

When your tractor has all the same features as the color down the road you have to create brand differentiation through superior customer experiences and service. Ask your self this; as a customer what does it feel like when I walk through the front door? What does it feel like when I call for a part? What does it feel like when I'm looking for service? Can you answer these questions knowing that your customers see your dealership experience to be the best in your market. Do your customers get WOWED by your team?

Have you had a WOW experience before? You know what I mean; you walk away from some where and want to tell some one about how your routine day was turned into an exceptional one. When the next time you need something you drive past two places to get to that place you are now Loyal to. Now I'm going to tell you the disheartening part to this. That experience wasn't by accident; businesses that have a strong Customer Service Culture work hard at it everyday. They Plan, Train, Communicate and Celebrate Customer Service EVERYDAY; not just hang a sign over a desk and put a check mark in the box.

So the challenge is how do you create that culture? You have to Create the Brand Within the Brand. You have to make your customers Loyal to You, Your Team and Your Store through great service and winning attitudes. Don't wait for tomorrow start planing and executing today.

Smile it never hurt anyone before.

Operational Excellence

There are key steps to achieve operational excellence.  The challenge i see is many leaders want to skip steps and blame others when results are less than acceptable.

A common step I have seen being skipped is giving quality training to new and existing people through a proper mentor-ship program. The days of Sink or Swim are long past us. On The Job Training is a quick way to get a new person up to speed on some basic skills but also can be away to breed bad habits throughout a team or an entire organization. When choosing a person to mentor new team members select wisely. Dont make your most experienced person your mentor based on their years of service.

How do you improve our mentoring team? You should first look at a potential mentors strengths and opportunities. Create a personal developmental action plan for your mentor to reduce their weaknesses and polish their strengths. Give them the tools to be the best they can be and then give them the game plan to help develop others. Highly trained mentors can increase productivity and efficiency quickly in any organization.

Financial Analysis

Just spent 2 days with one of the sharpest minds in the Equipment Industry. It was a great approach and style of teaching numbers to dealership personal. You have to understand how you calculate the key indicators before you can plan on how to effect them. 

The dealers, store managers and aftermarket managers walked away with a wealth of knowledge and many tools to take back to their dealership. 

The conversations were lively and fun. Its fun job when you get to help others grow.

What’s the Strategy?

 What’s the Strategy?

Does your team get to pop the cork and celebrate every year? As a leader your focus is on beating all your goals and objectives. How do you and your team know they are taking the correct actions every week to accomplish this task? That would take properly executing a Strategic Plan.

Do you have a Strategic Plan in place to motivate your team to the results you are looking for? Most Dealership’s don’t and if they do does the team clearly know what it is? The first step is for the key decision players to review their current position; I would recommend a SWAT Analysis. Now they have to set the milestones they want to hit in the future. From here they should pick three key objectives that they want to achieve this coming year. For Example increase market share by 5%, or cut used inventory by 50%.

With the Objectives set you must educate your team about them. They need to know what you want to accomplish this year and what the Long Term Goal is. You have to put the expectation in place for them to understand what they need to focus on. And give them the tools and knowledge of how to get there. Successful dealerships invest in their staff’s education to achieve great results.

Then a tracking system needs to be put in place and kept up to date. Superstars can’t win if they don’t know the score. Records cant be broken if no one records the results. So often dealerships keep results to themselves and lose the opportunity to motivate their staff to victory. 

A wise friend always told me the following. If you always do what you have always done; you will always get what you have always got. What’s the Strategy; Its time to get one in place before it’s too late.

5 Keys to Implementing Strategic Plan

1.    Gain Knowledge

2.    Set Expectations

3.    Observe and Track Results

4.    Follow Up On Performance

5.    Have FUN

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
Sun Tzu

Change is not a destination, just as hope is not a strategy.
Rudy Giuliani

Passion: Why do we kill it?

I watched a webinar on Passion and how people suck the life out of others.

Look in the mirror and think about who's Passion you are sucking the life out of.

Are they preforming at the level you want them to? Are they happy when the come to work? Are the happy when they leave?

So what are you going to do about returning the Passion to your team?

As a Manager don't allow your team to function with out the Passion it takes to be a Winner.

Born Leaders

Anyone Have One They Can Spare?

Through out my life I have heard many times, “he was a born leader”; that’s a load of you know what. I bought into that for many years early in my career. I found out the hard way when I gained the task of hiring or promoting managers.

Being a young hardheaded manager it took me some time to learn that Leaders are created not born. Before I learned that pearl of wisdom, I often found myself promoting or hiring some of the best workers I knew. I filled open leadership positions with these A+ workers only to have that position become open again when I got frustrated that the A+ workers didn’t become A+ leaders.  What a friend called “Promote and Destroy” trapped me for the longest time in a cycle of burning through great workers. I was replacing ineffective leaders with talented workers only to destroy them by not preparing them to lead others. It wasn’t until after I grew completely frustrated that my mentor let me in on his secret to success. This secret wasn’t something he learned at an Ivy League school; no, his mentor taught it to him.

Oh by the way if you don’t have a great mentor to help you along; find one quick. Life is a lot easier to travel if you have someone to help guide the way.

So back to the pearl of wisdom my mentor shared with me. Leaders are created they have never been born. We worked together on creating Developmental Action Plans for all my leaders and key personal. He taught me how to assess my team’s talent compared to the skills of effective leaders. These developmental plans were built to increase the skills sets that they were lacking. I can attribute all my previous management success to evaluating my team’s skill sets and creating Action Plans to give them the tools they needed to be effective leaders.

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Skill Sets of an Effective Leader

Positive attitude
Can Accept and utilize feedback
Gives constructive feedback to others
Effective communicator
Team motivator
Resilient through adversity
Self confident
Personal accountability
Holds others accountable

The Key To An Accurate Inventory

The heart of all retail and wholesale business is inventory. The key
to one of the dealerships largest investments is having the right
amount of inventory. Long term customers and mildly happy ones often
judge the dealership by the amount you carry on hand. Your balance
sheet in turn also judges you by the amount of dollars you tie up in
inventory. A lesson I have learned is great leaders learn to
effectively control this major investment.

To effectively control inventory is to first insure you have accurate
inventory counts in the system. Garbage in garbage out; with out
accurate system data you can't follow where you are or get to where
you want to be with out sacrificing customer service. Complete
physical inventories are dreaded by everyone that has experienced
one; but are necessary evils. They can be very labor intense and
physically draining. I have never looked forward to a physical
inventory, but have been extremely happy with the results after I
learned many successful inventory management procedures. Early in my
career I spent many hours chasing product that staff couldn't find.
Finally I decided that my energy could be spent more wisely on bigger
rocks than trying to help one customer at time. I sat down and looked
at where the gaps where in my inventory management procedure. I made
the commitment to stop chasing inventory and put processes in place
to effectively control my inventory. When these proper day-to-day
processes and procedures where in place I don't get surprising
results after a physical inventory anymore. Standard operating
procedures should be put in place from the ordering of inventory all
the way to the final collecting of funds.

One of the standard operating procedures that I insured was in put in place was
a weekly cycle count calendar. This calendar rotated key items that
were to be counted and adjustments made that calendar week. The
calendar was planned out to insure that quarterly all categories were
touched.  A dollar amount was set for a total weekly adjustment and
individual line adjustments. If there were any discrepancies that
exceeded those dollar amounts it was required for a manager to
investigate and document all discrepancies copying a senior manager.
All adjustments required two managers signature. Inventory control is
an every day task. You can't take your eye off of the ball and be
extremely successful. As you can tell I'm very passionate about
having an accurate on hand inventory.

I love satisfied customers and happy balance sheets.

Financial Management: I Know My Numbers Now How Can I Effect Them

When I first started running stores I didn't know a thing about
Income Statements, P&L's or General Ledgers. I spent countless hours
convincing myself that if I worked hard, drove top line sales and
focused on customer satisfaction that it wouldn't matter how
Financial Illiterate I was. I believed blood, sweat and tears would
cure all my deficiencies. After years of long day's and nights,
missing my kids events and family activities; I had an epiphany.
There had to be a way to work smarter not just harder.

Through self-study I began to learn financial management. I studied
to be a true manager not just a hard working operator. I worked with
my mentor on a monthly and quarterly basis reviewing all my financial
statements. The first thing was to learn where to find all the data
and reports. We then analyzed the P&L Statement and General Ledger
line by line. Learning what each line meant and where the numbers
came from. I then learned how my day-to-day actions and decisions
affected the numbers both positively and negatively. After I knew
what the numbers meant and how I could affect them; I created action
plans to attack my opportunity areas. With a little knowledge and
focus I put my energy in the right places to drive my team to
success. The next step I taught my key leaders to analysis their
departmental numbers. Teaching Financial Management to yourself and
key leaders can be a gift to your dealerships bottom line and
longevity. It's never to late learn Financial Management.