![]() ![]() The brick and mortar part of the place has vastly improved.Īt our Honda facility, we built a 6,000-square-foot reception area for service customers. We’ve spent $4 million in renovation in the past three and a half years. A year and a half ago we completed our renovation of our Honda facility. Basically it all wraps around customer service.Ĭan you describe something specific about your customer service?ĭoug: We just completed renovating our Buick GMC facility to meet GM’s image standards. We strive to make our customer service the best it can be, and I believe that’s what has kept us profitable, and on track to exceed each prior months projections. As a result, we are able to give real-time information to our customers. Gregg, our Body Shop production manager, follows each service and body shop job from start to finish and time stamps it. We’re a direct repair facility for all the major insurance companies and we have good relationships with them.īasically, our success boils down to our excellent customer service. But through our processes, we’ve made tremendous strides. Working with insurance companies can be very difficult at times and it’s very hard to make a body shop profitable. What things in particular have you done to make your fixed ops excel?Ĭarrie: In the body shop, specifically, we have instituted new processes. They have helped us remain profitable through some very tough times. Our service department, body shop and parts department have excelled over the past four years and are carrying the load to cover the dealership’s fixed expenses. Even though we have a way to go in terms of increasing our new and used car sales volume, we have an unbelievably outstanding fixed operations program. What’s happening with your sales revenues in fixed operations?ĭoug: That’s the good news. You can see it very well from the main street now. The Buick GMC store is still in the same location and we did not increase the store size, but we did make the store front bigger and more visible. That should help increase our sales volume. It was somewhat hidden by our Honda dealership that has been remodeled.īut, in the last month, since we remodeled our Buick GMC dealership, we’ve seen a lot more traffic in there. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that our Buick GMC dealership wasn’t very visible, even though we’re on the main street in Ft. This year has been better in that sense, so we have sold a lot more Hondas. We had a lot of trouble last year with the Tsunami and product availability from Honda. However, I think we can anticipate an increase in sales volume in 2013. Markley Motors is still among the top 300 dealerships nationwide in sales volume, but our variable operations sales have remained rather flat.Ĭarrie: We now have only two dealerships in the group - the Buick GMC and the Honda stores, both in Ft. That seriously affected our sales volume. In 2009, when General Motors made the decision to no longer build Saturn and Pontiac vehicles, we lost 2 Saturn franchises and a Pontiac franchise. What is the biggest challenge to your dealership today?ĭoug: Our biggest challenge is that the retail car industry, and our business specifically, have changed tremendously in the last four years. Markley Motors Dealer Doug Markley and his daughter, Chief Operating Officer Carrie Baumgart, talked with Dealer magazine recently about how they’ve stayed profitable through good times and bad, and how, recently, Markley’s fixed operations department has become a robust engine driving up revenues.Ĭlick here to read the December 2012 issue of Dealer magazine.
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