If you’re reading this and the sun is still rising every day, it’s likely 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…
HEDGE, HEDGE, HEDGE. There is an aphorism in the academic world that says, “publish or perish” in reference to advancing a career. Our aphorism is Hedge or Perish. Customers want and need some price certainty. Capped prices cost more to hedge (generally in the form of an option premium cost) but provide far more…
Are you a marketing company? A financial services company? An employee benefits company? Or are you a delivery company that spends more than half of your overhead on a fleet of vehicles and on wages for drivers, dispatchers, and mechanics? Picture yourself back in the 1980’s and let’s say that you were in the business…
If your drivers are making the right number of deliveries (20-30) per day and they are working the right number of hours (8-10) per day, AND you are dispatching the right way to optimize the deliveries based on the data you have (i.e., how many gallons are in your customers’ tanks), your trucks should come…
For the past 30 years companies have been offering pricing programs (fixed and capped), to give their customers peace-of-mind, maximize company sales margins, and minimize customer attrition. The methods to offer caps usually centered around a combination of Merc-related hedges, often locking in “supplier diffs”, and sometimes using physical inventory and/or weather hedges. The key…
As we approach the end of 2022, we have done some reflection on the top issues that dealers have faced this year. Above all, cash flow has been the issue that we have heard the most often, among the many challenges that dealers faced this year. In this article, we cover a few tips to…
A year ago, as we were exiting 2021, 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…
Weather hedging. It’s a concept that many fuel dealers have heard over the years but relatively few have fully explored. In short, weather hedging for fuel dealers can best be described as a method to recoup some level of the lost fuel delivery and service profitability that otherwise would have been earned in a warmer…
There is a scene that is attributed to Law School professors dating back to the 1930’s, telling students to “look to your left and then look to your right. By the end of this year, one of the two will no longer be in Law School”. In other words, if you don’t put in all…
Imagine if you had a job opening for a position with the following requirements: • Pulling data from BOS, budget, etc. • Creating automated custom reports for management on customer gain/losses, budget variances, delivery history, and performance, service data. • Analyzing your customer data for outliers • Working with the dispatch team and the BOS…
