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Brian Fellowes

KPMG’S Foundations of Dealership Performance workshop – a four-day boot camp for introducing dealership staff to the business imperatives across the total car retailing business – has concluded successfully in Sydney.

Brian Fellowes, director of training and dealer performance at KPMG and convenor of the first workshop to be conducted by the new KPMG Motor Industry Services division, told GoAutoNews Premium that the course was designed to lift dealership staff out of their silos so they could appreciate what the total dealership looks like and what they could do to influence the bottom line of the entire business rather than just their own areas of responsibility.

Mr Fellowes said that an early focus of the program is to address people management and people performance, including leadership skills.

“This is one area that requires more focus to assist managers understand that this is a people business which requires much more than just operational and or financial skills”, he said.

“It isn’t uncommon for someone working in the service or sales department to be promoted without being given any formal training or development, unfortunately, a lot of people who get promoted are not prepared for the role.

“Of course I’m generalising as some dealerships do this really well, however it may be left up to the person themselves to do a bit of self-development which is very difficult due to the hours people put in at the dealership – especially in Sydney where there is seven-day trade.


Foundations of Dealership performance: 

13-16 November 2017:

Melbourne

20-23 February 2018:

Melbourne

Click here for all 2017 – 2018 KPMG dealer workshops


Laura Pestell

“Many people learn from the previous managers they worked for, of course this means they have picked up some good traits however it can also include old traits that may not be as relevant in today’s market, education could basically be the school of hard knocks.”

Mr Fellowes, who began his career in the industry with John Trivett in 1985, said the industry is going through constant change and disruption and needs to realise that the automotive customer had changed dramatically, especially in their expectations, their needs, their knowledge and their access to information.

“The product has also changed dramatically through technology yet what we do in dealerships is not much different to what we were doing when I started in the mid 1980s.

“Except today we don’t advertise in newspapers because the ads go on Carsales and we’ve got computers on our desks. But the rest of the process hasn’t really changed.”

Mr Fellowes said the development course addresses the various avenues that need to be addressed by these new managers, making them aware of where they can identify the need for change and introducing them to ideas, methods and structures that may in fact improve their performance.

He said “our courses are very interactive and inclusive, we basically discuss industry best practice – what we see working in high performing dealerships. We introduce that sort of thought process consequently people say to themselves”.

Rohan Myers speaking at the KPMG workshop

“These are the things they are doing. Will that work for me?”

After people management and leadership skills the workshop moves on to understanding dealership financials and operations across the whole business.

“A lot of the people in the sales and service side of things get to see their own monthly financials, but may not see the rest of the dealership’s financials.

“What we try to do is get the business to work as one as the industry at both wholesale and retail level is very prone to operating in silos.

“We set out to explain that if they do certain things in their business in new cars then it may have a certain roll on effect on the service side and vice versa.

“You have new cars versus used cars versus parts versus service, etc. These are all individual profit centres that can all manipulate their numbers to improve their results by influencing what happened in other departments.

Participants at the KPMG workshop in Sydney

“What we find with best practice dealers is that their teams still work to their own budgets, but help each other so that the overall business has a better result.

“We essentially introduce our participants to the total picture of the dealership. In other words we show them what their input can mean to the total business and its bottom line, however we do this from both an operational perspective as well as from the financial perspective.”

Mr Fellowes said that just reviewing the numbers used by the financial controllers was not helpful if staff did not under understand what the numbers told them about the operations of the business and how those operations could, in turn, affect the numbers but more importantly knowing how to fix it from an operational perspective.

“We look at the operational effects – what operational processes affect those numbers. If we change that (way of doing things) will it influence this result?

“We focus on a simple mantra, we look at the Actions (possesses) that influence the Outcome however we analyse the Activities that can be fine-tuned to improve the final Outcome – A + A = O.

“The result is that the entire dealership benefits from better productivity and a better financial result.”

Mr Fellowes said that, in the workshop, this process of analysis takes place for all the different departments and then “at the end of the day we pull it altogether by joining the dots”.

Workshop participants were provided with a complimentary tablet computer on which the entire seminar course material is loaded. Case studies are included in which course participants can put their own numbers into the template and see what they might have to do to get a result in their own dealership.

Participants will be linked in a cloud-based social media site where they will receive ongoing information in a newsletter, various hints and tidbits from others on the course as well as posts from anyone who has a best practice that works for them.

Course participants will also soon be linked into an online follow-up session “to see how they’re doing”.


Mr Fellowes said: “The foundation course is the entrée. KPMG is also now adding two-day courses specifically tailored for:

  • New Car Sales Management
  • Used Car Sales Management
  • Aftersales Management
  • Dealership Financials and Fraud
  • Leadership and Management

KPMG is now taking bookings for the Melbourne Foundations of Dealer Performance four-day course from November 13-16, 2017. More than half the total places have now been booked.


Who attended in Sydney

THE Foundations of Dealership Performance course in Sydney was attended by 17 people including two group general managers, financial controllers along with departmental managers and HR managers. Four of the 17 participants were women drawn from senior roles within their dealerships.

“We had two HR attendees who wanted to learn more about the industry as a whole,” Mr Fellowes said.

“They came along to learn about the business, to take a holistic look. They were finding it challenging to understand the different imperatives for employees recruited for roles in service department versus the imperatives of sales department employees and so on.

“It was a really good cross-section of people.”

 

By John Mellor

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