THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT YOUR F&I AGENCY AND WHY IT’S HOLDING YOU BACK

Today we’re going to talk about the sad truth about your F&I support agency, and why it’s holding you back with your profits.

THEY ARE NOT AT YOUR STORE:
The First thing that we see consistently, day in and day out, is when we go to dealerships is they are not at your store. You have these support company, that you may or may not know that you’re paying them a lot of money by having their products and services in your dealerships but they are not there for you when you need them. Sometimes when you call them it would take them a day or two before you get a callback. You may think like “Okay, I guess my customer can wait”. That’s the first thing that we see which leads to the second thing.

LACK OF CONTINUOUS TRAINING:
We talk about this all the time, F&I is not something that you can master in a day, a month, even sometimes a year. It takes a lot of time to master. Not only is it a skill but it’s an art form. You’ll have to integrate aspects or administration, aspects of sales, aspects of accounting, and to get to the highest level, aspects of leadership in the F&I position. These are things that are not learned overnight. You need trust in the person, in the people that are actually going back and forth to be able to generate that trust.

LACK OF TIME SPENT WITH A BUSINESS MANAGER:
Number three is the lack of more time spent with a business manager, we see a lot of times and this is very common, once the representatives come in for your agencies, they’ll sit down and they spend the whole afternoon with you, they’re supposed to be there, training your F&I manager, so that they can be generating you more profits. Now, I’m not opposed to spending time with the dealership owner and going over different metrics, reviews and plans of where we want to take the store.

But there comes a time that you need to spend time with the business manager and start modifying and tweaking of different areas of their job, because I can assure you that, I don’t care how well they’re doing, there’s always something that they can be working on that can bring more value to your dealership. If you don’t have somebody looking at that all the time and bringing it to their attention and bringing the best out of them, then you’re losing out on the potential on the people that you’re already paying big money to work at your dealership.

TO FIND PROBLEMS AND NOT SOLUTIONS:
Fourth, to find problems and not solutions, this is something that is very small but it affects your dealership in a great way. When you have somebody that is grown into your store and just consistently looking at what is wrong versus how they can improve it. Granting that you need to identify the problem before you can actually address it. But once you identify it, then there comes a point that we need to stop looking at problems and we need to start investing time and energy in the solutions. Spending too much time in the problem is one of the biggest things that we see with support agencies out there fall flat on.

UNPRODUCTIVE MEETINGS WITH YOUR F&I MANAGERS:
Fifth, meetings with your F&I managers are just simply not productive. I have been in those meetings before I started my own company. It’s honestly sad with the type of conversations you’re having. I mean, you’re not having conversations that you’re drilling down with somebody’s numbers, what their performance is, what they can do to improve, what tools can they take out of that conversation today that they can actually get more out of, and plus there’s not that continuous support.

LACK OF SUPPORT:
Number six, that lack of support for your F&I department, where somebody can pick-up the phone and say, “How do I work this deal?”, “What’s the best way to approach this customer?”or “How should I do this menu?” or “How should I sell this product?” or “This is the situation that I have.”. Little details that make a big difference when it comes to the profitability of the store, especially when you have somebody giving you support that knows what they’re doing and that has been in the F&I hotseat. These are things that you need to keep in mind.

LITTLE TO NO RESPECT:
Number seven, your F&I department has little to no respect for your representative, unfortunately; Don’t take my word for it, go back to your store and ask that question, what you’ll find is that they’re just not helping your people the way that they need the help. Like I said, F&I is not something that is mastered in a day, in a week or in a month. It’s something that takes continuous training, continuous focus and working on each little detail of what we’re doin every single day.

And last but not the least, the sad truth about your F&I agency, is that it is NOT F&I Direct.your. Schedule a call so that we can determine on how we can generate your dealership an additional 30% increase in your F&I department. As I’ve mentioned before, we have a goal that we will be helping a thousand dealerships generate at least 30% more profits in F&I, and we want you to be one of those dealerships.