Category: Retail Operations

Cox Automotive Double Play

It is time to break out your game board once again and play “link the subsidiaries.”  I heard this one recently from a Cox person at a conference.  I don’t know if they have it in production yet, but it sure sounds good.

If you authorize vAuto to source new inventory as it sees fit, then it can connect to Manheim and automatically place the orders.  As soon as the gavel goes down, Dealer.com can pick up images and data from Manheim and immediately begin merchandising the vehicle.  Cox also owns the logistics company that hauls the vehicle, so they can report when it will arrive on the lot.

So, you could conceivably have a customer walk in to buy a vehicle that is arriving today, with the entire sourcing cycle untouched by human hands.  In fact, this sounds a little like what I described in Cox Automotive Home Game.  No mention (yet) of the COXML message format.

Update:  Details here from Mark O’Neil.  The chain goes: vAuto, Stockwave, Manheim, NextGear, and then Dealer.com.

Dealer Megatrends Part 3 – Process Change

In my previous Megatrends article, I wrote about how advancing technology is changing the role of F&I.  This week, we examine some new business practices.  You already know what I mean.  We’re going to talk about:

  • Hybrid Sales Process
  • No Haggle Pricing
  • Salaried Employees
  • Flat Reserve

High line manufacturers have tried to promote “one face to the customer,” since I was at BMW in the twentieth century.  Lexus Plus is the latest iteration.  Tellingly, BMW called it Retail 2000.  I fondly remember hearing a radio spot for “the last BMW dealer” in San Francisco, because we had styled all the others as retailers.  “If you want to pay retail, go to a retailer,” the ad went, “to get a deal, you need a dealer.”

So, it goes in cycles.  Lexus, or Scion, or AutoNation, will roll out a new process only to be outmaneuvered by the wily dealers.  Then they retrench and, five years later, someone else tries the new process.  They could literally be passing around the same procedure manual.  Look at me.  I have been advocating price transparency since Zag.

One Sonic-One Experience offers no-haggle pricing with one sales rep using an iPad who takes the customer through the entire vehicle sales process, including financing and the F&I product presentation.

A good example of the new process is Jim Deluca’s exposition of the Sonic One Experience.  In their EchoPark process, Sonic also eliminates dealer reserve.  The fight over flats and caps lasted from roughly 2012 to 2014.  See here, and NADA’s endorsement of caps here.  Next, Sonic will leverage their heavy investment in training to roll all of this into an online process called Digital One-Stop.

I suspect that Sonic would soon like to fire all their trained F&I professionals in their self-interest of saving a buck.

Forum comments reveal that old-school practitioners dislike the new process.  It’s funny to hear an F&I manager accuse a dealer of shameless self-interest, but there it is.  On the other side, Sonic’s Jeff Dyke reports good results from hiring people with no prior automotive experience.  Meanwhile, at rival consolidator AutoNation, 70% of the sales staff opted to go on salary.

Well-known F&I trainer Tony Dupaquier is here, advocating the hybrid process at First Texas Honda, and here is Findlay Group’s Las Vegas Subaru.  Savvy dealers everywhere are experimenting with at least two or three of the four new practices (online selling and iPads come up a lot, too).

Smart people have told me that the hybrid process will never produce four-digit PVRs, but many dealers – and certainly the consolidators – reckon that’s a price worth paying for a streamlined process, reduced turnover, and improved customer satisfaction.

Dealer Megatrends Part 1 – Consolidation

In the 2006 data, NADA noted a “moderate consolidation trend.”  Since the recession, sales have recovered but the dealer population has not.  My chart, below, is based on the last eleven years of NADA data.  You can go back as far as you like.  The dealer population has been shrinking steadily for fifty years.

chart

This means the surviving dealers are selling more cars per store, but the real story is consolidation – the powerful trend toward fewer owners and bigger groups.

In 2005, the top 100 dealership groups were 9% of the total.  In 2015, they were 17%.  The Automotive News ranking is by gross revenue but, for simplicity, I am counting stores.  I imagine that the big, efficient groups command more than 17% of the total gross.

Gee group’s purchase of 16 Tonkin stores, backed by private equity, is instructive.  Both groups are family owned, with seven and 21 stores respectively.  Brad Tonkin will join the combined entity as president.  The Automotive News article also describes a Soros-backed purchase by the McLarty group, bringing its count to 19 stores.

The owners may be public, like AutoNation and Penske, private equity, or something in between.  Larry Miller group, for example, is still family owned but independently managed.  An IPO seems the next logical step.  Broker Alan Haig predicts his buy-sell business will continue strong in 2017.

This is about economies of scale, obviously.  The New York Times mentions efficiency in staffing, technology, and inventory management (as I did, here).  There is a lot of money chasing this trend, and only so many operators who know how to exploit scale.  That’s why Haig also has a recruiting arm.

Small dealer groups can compete online only by joining platforms that aggregate inventory.

If you are running a small group, you might want to start thinking about M&A.  That’s not my area, though.  I am interested in the related trends toward technology and process change.  I’ll examine these more in my next post.

One example is online retail.  Small dealer groups can compete online only by joining platforms that aggregate inventory, like TrueCar or Autotrader.  What I am proposing is that the (relatively) little guys compete with the consolidators by consolidating themselves online.

Dealers should seek help from their OEMs and software vendors.  Well, maybe not the OEMs.  GM’s Shop Click Drive only searches inventory for a single dealer, and it makes you choose the dealer first.  Not only will it not give you a price, it won’t even present a model list until you’ve selected a dealer.  No one shops this way anymore.

Modern shoppers will have found a model and trim level, a price, and even a lender, before landing on a dealer.  While Shop Click Drive has the machinery to structure a deal, and even sell protection products, some genius decided to make the “choose dealer” button its primary focus.  Most GM dealers I looked at were also on Autotrader.

I did a survey of platform capabilities last year, with Cox Automotive far in the lead.  The other guys seem still to be in the world of single-dealer web sites.  I also noticed that these sites are mostly hideous, and lacking consistency in even simple functions like credit application.

The consolidators have strong tech teams devoted to online shopping.  Dealers may fail to see the threat, because it’s not a physical presence.  If you owned a hardware store, and Home Depot went up across the street, you would notice.

Raising the Bar

Armchair strategists are feeling vindicated now that AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson has abandoned his “asinine” plan to ground all vehicles under recall.  I see the same argument whenever anyone tries to change dealer operations.  They estimate the reduction in profits and write about that, as if that were the end of the argument.  It’s not.  That’s not how competition works.

If you talk about disclosing product prices online, you will hear that F&I gross is now $1,500 and who wants to screw that up?  Same story with TrueCar and their diabolical plan to disclose transaction prices.  You even hear this complaint about vAuto and the velocity method, which sounds to me like the most logical thing ever.

My back-of-envelope calculation says that AutoNation carrying an additional 10,000 units of inventory, at maybe 2%, would cost them roughly $5 million per year.  That’s 0.02% of sales.  For comparison, the related “Drive Safe” ad campaign was $10 million.

AutoNation, with investment-grade credit, enjoys a lower carrying cost than its private dealer competitors.  Selling diverse brands, they are less exposed to a recall by any one manufacturer.  They can also exploit their scale to mitigate the cost of such a policy, not to mention the PR benefits.

If federal regulators had followed Jackson’s lead, this would have raised the bar for all dealers.  Two senators, now disappointed, were lined up to make that happen.  Jackson’s policy, a minor challenge for AutoNation, might have proved fatal for smaller dealers.  That’s how competition works.

It is a mistake to look at process change only in terms of the costs.  Athletes training hard for a competition don’t think about how much it hurts.  They think about how much it’s going to hurt the other guy.

Update:  Motley Fool estimates the cost to AutoNation at $0.06 of EPS, a little higher than my estimate (and Jackson’s) due to the Takata debacle.