From Where I Sit
Things To Do While Bouncing Along The Bottom
Denise L. Rondini | Editor | drondini@rrpub.com
he good news is most people in the trucking industry think we have hit the bottom of the latest downturn in truck sales. The bad news is most of them also think we will be bouncing along the bottom for a while longer. Depending on whom you talk with, that could be the third or fourth quarter of this year, or sometime in 2011. The truck dealers I spoke with for this issue's cover story (see page 14) all have survived the downturn by paying close attention to their businesses and cutting costs wherever they could. Mark Gillam, president of Floyd's Sales & Service believes the tough times "are where we earn our stripes. This is where we will become good managers." However, in addition to tightening their belts, many of these dealers also have used this slowdown to prepare for the upturn that they know is coming. Their efforts focused on two key areas: People and facilities. Throughout my 28 years as editor of Successful Dealer, nearly every dealer I have spoken with credits his success in large part to the people who work for him. And while many dealers laid off employees during the curent downturn, Jack Saum, chairman of Beltway Companies, has used this time to add to his staff. "We have had the opportunity over the last 24 months to be able to hire some really strong people. We bit the bullet and brought them into the organization. We feel this has put us in a strong position as we start to come out of the recession." Like Saum, Ron Meyering, president of M & K Quality Truck Sales, and Greg Lesher, president of Lesher Mack Sales & Service, recognized that while their dealerships needed to save money where they could, they also needed to keep their core people.
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And in Lesher's case, to add people in anticipation of growth in the area of contract maintenance. People are not the only area where dealers have made investments that will position them to take advantage of the anticipated market upturn. Facilities are another. Jay Ellison, president of French-Ellison Truck Center, explains that he has spent money updating the dealership's facilities. "I am not going to say we are super optimistic about the future, but I think we are going to be here five years from now and so we will have to have the personnel and facilities in place." Gillam says he is fairly optimistic about the future and has backed that up with a recent acquisition. Blake Jackson, president of The Jackson Group, has continued to add what he calls "little stores" to his dealership's holdings in order to ensure that his dealership has a location with an hour's drive of any of its big customer centers. Perhaps Gillam did the best job of summing up the efforts of the dealers I spoke with when he said, "we are using this time to regroup and look at our policies and procedures to see if we can't come out of this a better dealership than when we went into it." If you have not yet done so, maybe now is a good time to ask yourself what you can be doing today to make your dealership better when the market rebounds, even if that is not until 2011. If you wait for better times to put people and facilities in place, you likely are going to be left behind. And, unlike Ellison, perhaps you won't be here five years from now.
2 | SUCCESSFUL DEALER | April 2010