Four Sure-Fire Ways To Fail Within Five Years
By Dave Anderson
1. Trivialize The Internet. If utilization of the Internet is a nine-inning ball game, 2000 is the pre-game warm-up. Dealers who downplay the potential impact of it in hopes it will go away or level off or who whine that it's "not a factor in my area" endanger their enterprise. These are the same people who wait until their house is robbed and ransacked before buying an alarm. How smart people can ignore the advantages of embracing this medium and the dangers of not, is mind numbing. I wish I had the opportunity to compete with them in my marketplace the next five years.
The Internet does much more than simply provide information or allow customers to bypass a dealer. Among other things, the Internet will become the fastest, cheapest way to buy and dispose of used cars, hire people, shop competitively for dealership purchases, inexpensively and effectively market and build relationships with customers for sales of vehicles, parts, service and finance. It allows faster communication with customers and employees; addressing their questions/complaints more effectively; saving valuable time, paper, postage and personnel. It permits executives with laptops to conduct business nearly as easily in any corner of the globe as from their office. It buys back time and increases productivity: both synonymous with dollars.
Dealers who use the Internet only for e-mail, stock quotes and sports updates are already behind. Those who never go online personally because they "have someone who handles that" are clueless. The only way to understand its potential and gain a vision for how it can transform business is to USE IT. Stop delegating it, reading about it, discussing it and listening to roundtables debate it. Take your blinders off, roll up your sleeves and go surfing. Buy something. Sell something. Swallow your pride and ask your 10 year old to help. If you haven't personally gone to carsdirect.com, autoweb.com or an online auction, come out of your cave and do it! You'll increase your perspective and credibility as a modern-day leader. Don't let a blind eye turn into a black one.
2. Failure To Develop Leaders At All Levels. Imagine the Concorde racing the Wright Brothers from New York to Paris and you'll understand how much faster change will happen the next five years than the past five. Change is no longer the exception: it's the rule. And dealerships who fail to develop leaders, are immersed in excessive rules, rigidity and bureaucracy, hoard power and decision making, discourage risk taking and independent thinking, fail to cast vision, seek cooperation over collaboration and compliance rather than commitment will never move quickly enough to survive, much less thrive. The key to moving quickly and effectively is to train and empower others to think and act as leaders and then loosen the harness and let them contribute at their fullest potential. Leaders are developed, not discovered and leadership mind sets aren't reserved for an "elite few." You need people at all levels who think and act as leaders. It's up to you to train them and create an environment where they can grow.
Dealerships that seize opportunities the fastest, change the quickest, attract the best people, raise their bar of expectations and build cohesive teams will be filled with leaders, not managers. You cannot "manage" your way through the next five years. You'll have to lead and have leaders at all levels moving you forward.
3. Failure To Make Tough Decisions. To survive the next five years you will need to make tough decisions daily, not just at monthly reviews or budget sessions. Too many bosses only make tough calls when things go poorly. Continually prune your dealership of unproductive people and activities: putting everyone and everything on trial. One of your biggest threats as a dealer is the high numbers of unemployed still on your payroll. You've never had less time to stick with under-performing people or profit centers. Go through the people on your roster and ask,
"Knowing what I now know about this person, if he applied today, would I rehire him?"
If the answer is "no," why is he still there? Use the same question for activities you're involved in. Develop an upgrade mentality. The problem with letting unproductive people hang around is they condition you to their performance. They get your thinking down. Instead of raising them to your standard, you compromise down to theirs. Perhaps there was a time when you could tolerate cellar-dwellers longer. That time is not the next five years. You need the right people in the right places doing the right things more than ever before. The best time to make tough decisions is when things are going well. You have more options and clearer thinking. Make tough decisions a daily discipline.
4. Embracing Past Success. Quite bluntly, what you did yesterday will never mean less than in the next five years. Borrowing credibility from the past will distort your worth and vision. When dealers get past the ego food of yesterday's success and realize it's irrelevant on today's playing field, they'll make great strides. Until then, they're endangered. Too many dealers and managers think they've gotten to the top of the mountain so they've built a vacation home there rather than look for a higher mountain. Darwin taught that the survival of the fittest is not the biggest or strongest, but the one most adaptable to change. Too many successful dealers give lipservice to change, but don't walk their talk. The "changes" they make are so insignificant they don't begin to defrost the hardened status quo. When dealers and managers cling to yesterday they reproduce their deficiencies in others, inertia takes hold and mediocrity becomes acceptable. With no visible crisis, too many dealers become enamored with the routine. Top leaders the next five years will sound alarm bells when all seems calm. They'll create urgency by raising expectations. They'll stretch "comfortable" employees with bold visions and demand they play bigger roles. They'll risk more. No one will be allowed to budget efforts or pace himself. They'll establish a standard that causes everyone to prove himself over again each day. They know that if what they did yesterday still looks big today, they haven't done much lately and if they dwell on it, their best days are behind.
Avoiding these four traps will require leaders with passion for higher standards, an appetite for opportunity, a willingness to abandon the past, and an ability to change before they must. Passionless leaders are fatal deadweight in faster times. They sap life out of their enterprise. And it will take plenty of passion to reinvent and reposition your business the next five years. Passionless leaders wed to strategies of the past, "sticking their toes in" rather than embracing opportunities before them should resign or sell out. Showing up, saying the right things and going through the motions without passion in order to pick up a paycheck, more interested in image than substance, is white-collar prostitution. It's not illegal: it's fatal.
Dave Anderson is President of The Dave Anderson Corporation, a sales, management and leadership training concern. Dave conducts "Leading At The Next Level" workshops and publishes "Leading At The Next Level" newsletter. He is the author of "Selling Above The Crowd: 365 Strategies For Sales Excellence" and his Web site, www.learntolead.com has free training articles and materials updated weekly. danderson@dealeronline.com
