DEALERS looking to improve staff efficiency around car movements in the dealership as well as make better use of the time of apprentices and other junior staffers who are hijacked from their jobs to drive cars hither and thither, would do well to acquaint themselves with FCV Parking Solutions.

Additionally, dealers wanting to drive up Customer Satisfaction Index scores would be similarly well-served.

FCV Parking Solutions is the new name for the well-known First Class Valet service that for the past decade has been providing outsourced labor hire to dealers wrestling with the manpower challenges of moving vehicles around the dealership, driving vehicles to the outside traders who service the dealership, and driving cars to customers.

FCV Parking Solutions supplies trained valet and concierge teams who work onsite at dealerships.

At dealerships, FCV teams receive vehicles, move them between service areas and storage, handle deliveries and pickups and protect technicians’ productivity. 

Team members complete screening, academy training, customer-service instruction, hazard identification, site orientation, buddying, and induction before working independently.

The company emphasizes low incident rates, backfill coverage, cross-trained staff, and replacing poor site fits without burdening dealerships.

For dealer groups and OEM partners, FCV’s national offering includes: 

• Driveway and vehicle movement management; freeing technicians and apprentices to focus on their trade
• Car wash and detailing, supporting pre-delivery presentation and demo fleet upkeep 
• Car deliveries, covering new vehicle handover logistics and premium home delivery 
• Fleet and bulk vehicle management, including stock movement, demo fleet handling and transfers 
• Car park management, designing and operating layouts that maximise constrained dealership real estate
• Shuttle and buggy services, covering customer transport during service visits 

“Every dealership principal knows the maths of forecourt space,” FCV Parking Solutions managing director Robert Horton told GoAutoNews Premium.

“What is harder to see is the maths happening on the driveway, where qualified technicians and apprentices, hired to learn a trade or turn a spanner, are instead spending their day parking, retrieving and shuffling vehicles. 

“It’s a hidden cost most dealer groups have simply absorbed, site by site, state by state.”

FCV Parking Solutions staff are embedded into the dealership (often white labeled in the dealership’s team uniform) but HR and payroll administration is handled by FCV.

“We cover penalty rates, superannuation and PAYG,” added Mr Horton.

“We cover payroll tax, all of those expenses, but we also give dealers a skilled, capable and competent person to be able to work on their driveways.

“We don’t just put anybody on their driveway. We give them a skilled, well-trained labor hire who is trained for their business.

“FCV’s workforce arrives trained, inducted and ready to work, with the training and development investment sitting with FCV, not taking valuable time away from the dealership.

Robert Horton, managing director of FCV Parking Solutions

“If somebody reports ill, we have such a big pool of valets or concierge attendants to pull from then we cover them. Whereas, if a dealer has somebody employed and they report ill, then they are back on calling in the apprentices and the cadet sales staff.”

Mr Horton said that every person who works with FCV goes through five hours of training “before they even step foot in a client’s driveway”. 

“We go through about six stages of screening before we even put them into our training academy,” he continued.  

“We don’t hire P platers. We hire people who can drive manual vehicles.

“There’s a standard we set and dealers find that when they implement and integrate our team into their operation, their incident claims literally fall off a cliff because we’ve got skilled labor hires, skilled people who come and work in the dealerships.

“That is our huge point of difference to many competitors.”

He said the academy covers basic fundamentals on dealing with customers.

“We cover the valet fundamentals including ensuring they know how to park and retrieve a vehicle; identifying moving hazards and fixed hazards and how to report them is a big thing,” he noted.

“When it comes to the customer service piece, we train in how to talk respectfully to customers but also how to deal with difficult customers.”

Mr Horton said FCV Parking Solutions has built its model around solving the problems of driveway manning at a national scale.

“FCV is built for national accounts. It isn’t chasing one-off, single-site arrangements,” he stressed.

“The business is structured around national account partnerships, currently operating across NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, and WA, giving dealer groups a single, consistent partner rather than a patchwork of local providers.

“That footprint means one point of contact, one standard of training through the FCV Academy, and one set of reporting across every state a group operates in, along with the more competitive rates that come with operating at that scale.

“The problem dealer groups don’t talk about is that managing hundreds of vehicle movements a day isn’t part of any dealership’s core business, but it consumes real time from people who are meant to be doing something else.

“Genesis Australia started with FCV as a single-market engagement. The relationship has grown into a national partnership, with FCV now supporting Genesis operations across multiple states under one consistent service standard.”

Mr Horton said the rebrand reflects the remit 

“The move from First Class Valet to FCV isn’t a cosmetic refresh. It reflects a business that today manages thousands of vehicle movements a week for some of the world’s most exacting automotive brands, including Porsche, Audi, BMW, Ferrari and Genesis, alongside premium hospitality and aviation partners such as Crown, Sydney and Adelaide Airports, and W Hotels as well as a national portfolio of shopping centres, and gaming venues,” he said.

“For dealer principals and group operations managers assessing whether driveway, fleet and delivery operations are worth managing site by site, the groups already asking that question have landed on the same answer: it isn’t part of their core business, and with a partner operating across four states, it doesn’t need to be.”