A dealer told me once that he was one finance manager short of a good month. He was actually one process short, and he had one manager too many.
The second BMW rooftop in a three-rooftop luxury group went from three finance managers to two. Back-end gross rose $818,912, the largest dollar gain in the group. Total F&I gross went from $2.63M to $3.45M, up 31.1%.
Two chairs outproduced three.
This one was won on price, not on line count
Here is where it gets interesting for anyone who tracks products per deal as their only F&I scoreboard.
Products per deal actually eased, from 2.27 to 2.18.
Gross per product sold rose from $1,086.10 to $1,333.69. That is up 22.8%, the biggest move in the group.
The prior panel carried commodity appearance products that were cheap, easy to write, and worth very little. Those were replaced by a single ceramic line, and the desk wrote it on more than half its deals, 28.4 to 51.2 per hundred. Fewer lines. Better lines.
If you only manage line count, you will grade this store as a step backward. Its checkbook says otherwise.
The products that were already sitting there
- Bundled coverage: 0.1 to 9.7 per hundred
- Key replacement: 0.5 to 4.6 per hundred
- Prepaid maintenance: 21.4 to 25.7 per hundred, on a product whose vendor never changed
- Service contract: held at 43.7 per hundred while its gross per contract rose with the rest
That last line is the harder half of menu discipline. Anybody can raise a number by writing more of something. Holding production steady while raising what each contract carries takes structure, and it takes a manager who is not afraid of the conversation.
Program or volume
The store did sell more cars, 1,186 against 1,065, so the fair question is how much of the gain was traffic.
Per-deal performance contributed $519,981, or 64% of the increase. Volume supplied the other $298,931. Roughly two thirds of a very large number came from how the deals were worked, not how many showed up.
The before-and-after I keep pointing at
The returning finance manager went from $1,474 to $2,438 per copy, up $964, while his volume grew from 56 units to 676. Same person, same store, radically different output.
The new desk lead opened at $3,533 per copy, the highest figure anywhere in the group.
A rebuilt desk is usually a rebuilding year. It does not have to be, if the process gets installed before the people do.
Full numbers, product families, and methodology, including the fact that products per deal declined: A rebuilt desk, and the group's biggest F&I gain.
If you are staring at a desk you need to rebuild, let's talk before you hire.