Rick Alcon of Team R&S Powersports Group said that through the pandemic, even bad dealers were able to be successful. Times are changing and he tells dealerships to expect to work hard for future success. That starts with gathering valuable information available to them, rely on it for making business decisions, and have a solid process in place.
"Feelings are not fact," Alcon said. "Do everything you can to be data-driven, do everything you can to get the best information you can, employ your tools, and execute your tools to the best of your ability. (For customers), you need a relationship-based sales process that makes it easy for them to buy. If you have that, and you're committed to it, and you can understand it, and you can articulate it, and you can train to it, and your staff buys into it, it will minimize the downtimes and it will maximize the uptimes."
Alcon moderated a panel featuring Bob Althoff of Farrow Harley-Davidson and Brent Gyuricza of Maverick Motorsports. They covered a variety of challenges for dealerships, from staffing to successful community building and active involvement.
"If we want to continue to grow our businesses, as well as the industry, it takes active involvement," Gyuricza said. "It takes actually looking at your business as a business. It takes coming to events like this, meeting with the vendors, meeting with the OEMs, participating in 20 clubs. The days of COVID…those are gone, but the opportunity to grow for a dealer always remains when you're active in your business."
Althoff reminded the audience to also focus on customers. "If we keep our focus on the customers, and I know we will, we're going to be just fine," he said. "The greatest advertising for our industry is if all those folks, that bought that product, if they just happened to leave their garage doors open a little more often. And everybody on the block looks in there and sees that beautiful bike, or that great side-by-side so the family can go out and enjoy the desert this weekend… The first thing you know, everybody on the block wants one.
Future's bright and I'm quite confident that we're going to do a great job,” concludes Althoff. It's what we've done for a hundred years. We don't sell units. We build community. They're going to be well-served."
