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Maddie’s Motor Sports, a powersports dealership in western New York state, has taken a Garage Composites’ 20 club strategy and turned it into huge revenue and profit gains.

The strategy? Measure unit sales against store transactions to identify potential headroom in the sales department. Then staff to that sales potential, enabling more engaging customer conversations and ultimately more unit sales.

The result? For Maddie’s, a 28 percent increase through June in unit sales compared to the previous-year period and a 68 percent rise in overall profit.

“We’ve been able to get that increase by having better conversations with more customers and developing better relationships,” says Graham Marcus, owner of the Dansville, N.Y. store.

A year ago, Marcus weighed the advice of his Polaris Motorcycles’ 20 club group to add more staffing to his sales department. At the time, the dealership was selling one unit for every 15 customers walking into the store. The Garage Composites’ unique ratio comparing store transactions to units sold showed that 15-to-1 ratio had plenty of potential room for growth.

So Marcus took the advice of his 20 club, added a salesperson to his staff and in the months since, has seen the dramatic increase in new and used unit sales.

All of this happened despite the store seeing a decline in overall customers walking into the door.

“In 2017, when we joined the 20 club, it was a big learning curve,” Marcus says. “In 2018 we put a lot of the philosophies into action and got a lot more organized.”

And the results show.

Not only has the dealership’s bottom-line profit increased by nearly 70 percent but Marcus and his family felt financially secure enough to extend their powersports business. The family recently acquired and opened a second location in western New York state.

“The 20 club is a very big part of our growth as a dealership,” Marcus says. “Without it, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in today.”