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Neil Pascale
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The 20 club difference: A $70K net profit increase! Christmas in March for this Indian dealership

Fort Worth Indian Motorcycles is a smaller operator that has benefited from their experience in a Garage Composites' 20 club

Yolanda Retiz, general manager of Fort Worth Indian Motorcycles, jokingly refers to a data report that chronicles her dealership’s retail performance as a Christmas tree. That’s because the data report shows numbers in red and green, with the red indicating below-par retail performances and the green showing above-average results.

Fort Worth’s report now shows a lot more green thanks to the staff’s successful efforts in incorporating changes suggested in a Polaris Motorcycle 20 club. In fact, Fort Worth wrapped up its 2018 first-quarter with a $70,000-plus year-over-year improvement in net profit due largely to those changes.

What’s potentially even more significant is the improvements suggested by Retiz’s dealer peers and the moderators of the Polaris Motorcycle 20 club are creating a sales environment where Fort Worth is not only breaking records but surpassing them by leaps and bounds.

“We’re focusing on the traffic log because you told us to,” Retiz says, noting the importance the Polaris Motorcycle 20 club provider, Garage Composites, places on installing and implementing a lead management system. “If you don’t get your traffic log right, nothing else flows.”

Sales are certainly flowing in Fort Worth as Retiz instituted several changes recommended by Garage Composites and her 20 club peers, including:

* defining a sales process for her sales team and managing to it;

* insisting every customer be greeted, a process defined by Garage Composites as a customer interaction and information recorded on a lead management system. This was quite a change for the Fort Worth sales team that at times would not go to such lengths with every customer, especially those considered to be “just lookers”’;

* increasing sales personnel on typically larger traffic days to ensure greets are not only happening but happening in a way that increases customer satisfaction;

* a stronger attention on F&I results, with the dealership measuring their results on a per-unit basis. The additional scrutiny on every unit sale has led to a huge revenue gain, with the store’s F&I revenue per unit sale more than doubling.

All of these improvements started with the simple concept of measuring the store’s retail results and then comparing them to other Polaris dealers. Or as Retiz puts it, showing off the store’s Christmas tree, the data report that every Garage Composites’ 20 club dealership member completes each month.

Retiz shares much of this monthly report to her staff.

“I share it with them so we know what to focus on,” she says. “And they say, ‘Well if they (other Polaris Motorcycle stores) can do that, we can do it a whole lot better.’”

For information on the Polaris Motorcycle 20 clubs, contact Garage Composites' Neil Pascale at neil@garagecomposites.com.