Chip Miceli
Pulse Technology
One of the harbingers of spring is baseball season. The sport has undergone a major metamorphosis in the last 20 years, particularly in the way that performance is measured.
For years, batters were judged by three primary statistics—batting average, home runs and runs batted in. Pitchers took pride in their number of wins, earned run average and strikeouts. Today, the sport has wins above replacement (WAR) for offense and defense. Pundits discuss a hitter’s exit velocity and launch angle of contact. Pitchers have fielding independent pitching (FIP) and batting average for balls in play (BABIP). And this only scratches the surface.
While the old guard may sniff at the modern methods of measure, there is certainly value to be found in increased and different methods to evaluate performance, and that holds true in business as much as it does for sports. Measures may seem esoteric, but once they are benchmarked, the questions becomes: How did a business perform to that statistic, and what can be done to either increase (or decrease) a number to be more aligned with the best-performing companies?
OK, so you don’t need to become part of a peer group to benchmark against a standard; you can avail yourself to BEI Services or any other provider of business analytics. But the value comes in seeing your performance stacked up against 40 or 50 other dealers within the peer group, and gaining insight as to how other dealers have been able to achieve their stats. The best way to leverage the value of a spreadsheet is to glean the anecdotal information that drives performance.
Evolving Models
“We really benchmark off the model, which I’ve done from the beginning of time,” said Chip Miceli, president of Pulse Technology (formerly DPOE) of Des Plaines, Illinois. “I think the model has to evolve a little more. I’m doing so many different things now that the model has little to do with us. But we still benchmark against it…we want to be better and more profitable than anyone else. When I find someone who’s making a lot of money, I want to pick their brain and find out, OK, how do you do it?”
Miceli recalls the early days of print management yielding some surprising results on the benchmarking front. He saw it as a fantastic profit tool and was baffled by some dealers who bemoaned their inability to turn a buck with managed print. With managed IT, Miceli learned he needed to reach a certain level to break even before his company could be in the black.
“A lot of dealers got out because they weren’t going to make money, they didn’t have enough time or they couldn’t put enough money into it to get it done right,” he said. “It really comes down to the time you put into it. We had one group member who really blew up IT and did a great job growing that part of their business. That’s our future—we need to get into that business if we’re going to survive.”
Behind the Numbers
Dean Swenson,
The Swenson Group
Dean Swenson, president and CEO of The Swenson Group (TSG) in Livermore, California, believes the Select Dealer Group has improved the benchmarking model. Swenson tracks against the model on a monthly basis and uses the data in the surveying stats model as kind of a runner.
“Each dealership has its own uniqueness to it, so when we see we’re crushing a certain segment and we’re so much better than the model, we have to understand why,” Swenson said. “If we find we’re not doing as well as the model, we have to understand why. We do analysis and ask ourselves how we can impact that. That’s where you really work with your peers to say, what is unique about the way you’re doing certain things. The good news is that through sharing and learning, there are things we can take away and implement that move the needle for us in certain areas.”
Immeasurables
Deb Dellaposta,
Doing Better Business
In the end, this is a people business and not a numbers business. But the analytics open up those conversations necessary to take a dealership to the next level. Deb Dellaposta, president and CEO of Doing Better Business in Altoona, Pennsylvania, values the relationships as much as she does the insight toward hitting benchmarks for service and supply expense. After all, dealers can always do better.
“The friendships I’ve made and the mentors we’ve had are invaluable to us,” she said. “The tendency is to get tunnel vision in your own organization and market. It helps to get out there and find out that other people are experiencing the same things you are and to hear what they’re doing about it. I would encourage every dealer to find a peer group.”
