Now that the winter is behind us, dealers are reflecting on how things went financially and how to shift gears for the remainder of the year to get back on track with their annual profit targets. Before you can decide how to pivot, you need to know what target to aim for.
It's a great time to improve your profitability in your Service (and Installation) department. In the past, the Service department had traditionally been a loss leader for most dealers and, therefore, represented one of the biggest and quickest opportunities for a dealer to grow their profitability. This remains true to this day, despite the fact that most full-service dealers have already transitioned their Service departments from a loss leader to a profit center.
Your biggest expenses are the fleet that delivers fuel to your customers and the wages for the drivers, dispatchers, and mechanics who make those deliveries and keep the fleet running. In many cases, those expenses can equal 75% of all of your operating expenses. You are (or should be) aware that there are new and modern ways to improve your economics. The costs are minimal relative to the benefits, the implementation is fairly easy, and the results outweigh just about anything you can do with any other delivery and dispatch technology.
If your drivers are making the right number of deliveries per day & they're working the right number of hours per day, & you're dispatching to optimize based on the data you have, your trucks should come back close to empty. But they aren’t!
A year ago, there was a lot of relief to be finally leaving perhaps the darkest times we have seen in our lives. Leaving that in the rearview mirror was exactly what we needed. We ended 2021 with a sense of relief and a sense of excitement. The world wouldn’t be the same, but great things were ahead in our new reality.
