Disclosure: the Honda Dealership in this case study – Rick Case Honda, Davie, FL is our client. Over the last couple of years we’ve had the opportunity to see strong leadership, sales planning, and technology implemented effectively at their dealership. We felt a little bit of their story would be of value to any dealership. It was our intention to omit some detail around tactics and strategies from this blog post. Any dealership that is interested in more specifics can reach out to Pureinfluencer or me directly at my contact info below.
This case study is about the team at Rick Case Honda in Davie, Florida, and what a team they are. This store is led by their General Manager Marc Riley and his “always involved, all in, all team” leadership style. Marc took over the already successful and nationally respected Rick Case Honda store two years ago and he brought with him automotive retail sales leadership that started in 1994 and includes 6 years as an Acura GM, and 2 years as GM for the Rick Case Hyundai store. Taking on a large and successful dealership has unique challenges; specifically, when it’s a dealership already at the top: your competition is always aiming to take your spot, additionally when you take over a successful dealership above all… you’ve got to keep it at the top and grow it.
That’s exactly what Marc and his team did. Whenever there’s new management at a dealership “fitting in” and chemistry with the existing team can be problematic. What Marc did was leverage his “all in, all team” style of management. He knows his numbers, but most wouldn’t call him a “numbers guy.” He knows sales and leadership, but those aren’t the skills that he deployed to integrate himself and then grow the store. What Marc was able to do is bring his skill-sets of empowering managers, empowering employees, and then getting them all focused on common objectives and goals for each month.
His first objective was to get his Business Development Center performing consistently and he did that by putting the right people in place that would understand and execute the right processes that he knew needed to be in place. Then he looked at his internal sales efforts and further empowered an already talented and tenacious goals achiever – his General Sales Manager Adrienne Bono. Working together Marc and Adrienne both knew that there was more opportunity for growth at their dealership and they worked together to inspire, motivate, and lead their sales teams to record breaking months of increase unit sales and gross revenue performance.
To give you an idea of the kind of dominant sales performance that Rick Case Honda in Davie was able to achieve, keep in mind we’re talking about one the top 5 Honda stores in the nation:
- They’re outpacing the previous YTD performance by 3+%
- In June they outsold every Honda dealership in their Zone
- In June they outsold every major off-brand Competitor in their District
- In May, the previous month, they had their largest month in 3 years… 750 Units
- Earned Masters Circle, Council of Excellence Finance, Council of Excellence Parts and Service, and the coveted Honda Presidential ELITE Award
- Rick Case Honda Davie, is the only high volume dealer to ever earn the Presidents Award for 9 consecutive years.
(calling this a team effort would be an understatement)
Listen to how their GSM Adrienne Bono characterized it: “It is because of all of your hard work that we continue to earn all of these amazing rewards; each of you playing a key part in our success.” This team lives and breathes team work. They’re “all in, all team.” And it’s not just leadership from on-high either. You always find Marc in early and at the store late. I’ve had the luxury of watching him walk out of the showroom to turn around a customer out on the lot that was leaving, they put a deal together. I’ve watched him work and re-work deals at the desk with his managers because as he says “every deal matters, I hate to lose even one.” While integrating an “all in” attitude and team-work focus he still leads by example showing his team that there’s no such thing as a little thing, for Marc everything matters.
They continue to grow in both sales and gross profitability. He focused on his BDC staff and processes, he then moved his focus to website performance and website visitor conversion. He knew he was spending a lot of money and effort to drive traffic to their website and he wanted to maximize those opportunities. He and the marketing team at Rick Case Auto worked to upgrade their website and that’s proved successful. For two years he’s leveraged the Pureinfluencer Conversion Platform to increase his number of website leads and sales by nearly 200%. Specifically what he recognized was that his website had a huge amount of visitors and like most dealership websites he was only converting about 1.8% of all his website visitors. With the PureInfluencer Conversion Platform the dealership was able to identify and influence their highly engaged visitors (people most likely shopping them and their competition) to choose Rick Case Honda, to submit a lead, and these leads close at nearly 20%. In short he leveraged technology to maximize the opportunities that his traffic generation strategies were giving him. And he didn’t spend his way to these record breaking months either, in fact during his 2 years as the GM the dealership has reduced its marketing costs while maximizing the results from his marketing partners.
This team has its sights on even bigger goals. They have the product, they have the market opportunities, and most importantly with Marc and Adrienne’s leadership style, they have the team to achieve all of their goals. I’d encourage you to keep a close watch at what this dealership will do over the next year to two. They’re a dealership that understands the power of team and they leverage that better than most.
If you’re so inclined, give Marc, Adrienne, and their team a shout out, fist pump, or share the post! Also, if you want to get more detail on the content in the post don’t hesitate to reach out to me at (408) 218-6407 or email me at ronmorrison@pureinfluencer.net.