Digital Dealer - March 2020 - 27

We're known for our wide product choices. We
also offer a 3-day Buy Back Guarantee for our
pre-owned vehicles that's very popular with customers. It gives them peace of mind to know they
can love it or bring it back.

DEALER MAGAZINE: Dealerships are
getting pinched by lower new vehicle sales
gross profits. What is Feldman Automotive
doing to compensate for the lower numbers?
No question about it, margins are shrinking in
both new and used sales. That's the reality. What
we've focused on is just doing our very best to
maintain sales while, at the same time, growing
our business. Even under the conditions you
describe, we've been in a serious growth mode.
We've increased our annual sales year over year
and have really focused on our F&I dollars. We've
also focused on reducing expenses.
There's a tremendous opportunity in the
service department that I don't think all dealers
have figured out how to maximize yet. Putting a
greater focus on your used car inventory can also
yield profits.
We realized profits are going to come from
different places, which is why you have to be
at the very top of your game, whether it's F&I
products, reinsurance or whatever. And we're
constantly looking at opportunities from a Fixed
Ops perspective.
Some dealerships are focused on their shrinking margins but haven't focused on growing their
service business or used cars. You can get someone who complains about that one aspect of their
business, but they haven't really done the proper
things in their organization to take advantage of
it. Some single-point dealers are more profitable
than somebody with five or ten stores because
they run their store the right way.

DEALER MAGAZINE: What steps do you
take to ensure customer satisfaction?
JAY: We do a lot of things. CSI is a huge focus
of ours, and we look at it every single day by
store. We're constantly looking at reputation
management, with a team dedicated to tracking
and maintaining our reputation. We have very
strict compliance and guidelines on how we sell
our products and don't just let people do whatever they want. We have a lot of processes in place,
such as texting customers to keep them informed
of service being performed on their vehicle.
We always look at ways to improve our satis-

March 2020

faction rates. Take, for example, waiting in our
customer lounge for car service. What does it
look like to a customer at our dealership? Do
we offer them fresh fruit and fresh coffee and
fresh popcorn, or are we careless and provide
stale coffee and a dirty popcorn machine?

DEALER MAGAZINE: What do you see
as the biggest opportunities and the
biggest challenges on the horizon for
dealers?
JAY: You can't just set up your dealership
and forget it. You have to constantly monitor
your business. Whether it's your digital presence or everyday expenses, you really have to
do a deep dive into your business every day.
There hasn't been a year in the last 25 years
where the business has been the same. It's
constantly changing. You know, we have manufacturers trying out different ideas all the time.
We have shortages of technicians, shortages
of people who want to get in the car business.
It can seem like an onslaught, and you just
have to be on your game. Unfortunately, many
dealers have let the business pass them by. Or
maybe they've lost interest, no longer have the
fire or the hunger. Perhaps they've bought in to
press stories about the end of dealerships.
Again, I'm a glass-half-full believer and think
if you embrace change and passionately look
for little nuggets of opportunity within your
own business, if you do that, I think you'll be
successful over the long term.

DEALER MAGAZINE: More specifically,
what's ahead for Feldman Automotive in
the next five years?
JAY: We're going to continue to acquire
stores. We've grown a lot through some great
partnerships. We've had some dealers that
we're not quite ready to get out of the business
at the moment, so a partnership made a lot of
sense for them. We're looking for more of those
opportunities, and we've identified a few things
on the horizon this year. But we don't have a
set number in mind, such as needing to acquire
x-number of stores by such and such date. Partnerships and acquisitions have to make sense.
We're not growing just to grow.

DEALER MAGAZINE: What one word or
expression best defines you?
Driven.

[ d i g i t a l d e a l e r. c o m ]

http://www.digitaldealer.com

Digital Dealer - March 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - March 2020