By Paul Cape, Director, Quazar Automotive
Last year, the Quazar team, working with a leading OEM in South Africa, ran the Quazar Business Accelerator to aid dealerships with improving their profitability.
Interventions are rarely well-received in the industry but this one has had positive results. The process is delivered by people who have worked in dealerships so understand the pressures faced by those who need to do something different – real solutions for real situations.
Quazar Business Accelerator involves engaging in a change process and employing what we call ‘ConCoMentoring’ principles of in-dealership engagement. Through our experience with in-dealership interventions, we have developed a blend of consulting, coaching and mentoring to deliver the result. We believe that to be effective you need to have industry-experienced individuals analyse and direct (consult), plan through working groups (coach) and mentor through-the-line management for implementation.
Our process is born of our experience in business strategy development and change management knowledge, applied to an industry that we have been engrossed in for decades.
It appears simple, but like any change management process, it requires engagement and implementation (which is the difficult bit).
We were able to distil down this process into five steps, taking six days over a four-month period:
- Stage 1 – Research and audit – deep dive analysis (2 days on-site)
- Stage 2 – Feedback and planning (1 day)
- Stage 3 – Communication (1 day)
- Stage 4 – In-Dealership Mentoring/Coaching (1 day)
- Stage 5 – Review (1 day)
For those that engage wholeheartedly, they can repeat the process for any opportunity or issue/crisis they face and carry on the review process for the plans/strategies that are being implemented already
So, what are the early results? It is vitally important in any change programme to get early wins/results from efforts put in but, of course, the success of the programme comes over time and needs constant measuring.
In this case, 10 dealers were engaged in the programme, identified by the OEM. The process started back in September 2017, with the final review in January 2018. Measurement comes from the OEM from composite submissions, allowing direct comparison based on dealer submissions.
In any intervention of this kind, we might expect that only a few of those involved would engage. This is not unusual especially for businesses who are struggling: low morale, high management and staff turnover, business owner changes and a lack of leadership, knowledge and experience.
Using PBT as the measure, nine of the 10 dealers have moved forward:
| Jul-Dec 2017 vs base (Jan-June 2017) | Jan-Jun 2018 vs base (Jan-June 2017) | |
| Best Dealer | 523% | 250% |
| Change Group (other 9) | 54.8% | 81.5% |
| Rest of the Brand | 10.4% | 12.3% |
A year after the programme started, these results are amazing.
These are exciting times for encouraging those at the line management level of our dealerships, dealer principals, sales and service managers in the process of analysing, planning and implementing actions that make for more profitable business.
To engage in the Quazar Business Accelerator programme, please contact me or my team on 021 701 2371 or email paul@quazar.co.za.
