Big Mike OUR MAN ON THE INSIDE SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON THE CAR BUSINESS
Who is Big Mike? Well, that would be telling. What we can say is he’s had more than 40 years in the car trade so has probably forgotten more about it than we’re likely to know. 16 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
COMMENT
Gamble that won trip to Las Vegas highlighted what’s wrong with main dealership system
I
was chatting to a couple of mates the other day who are still working in the main dealership game a good 20 years since I got out. Now, don’t get me wrong – working for a main agent has its advantages. There’s a basic salary for a start, you usually get a car thrown in and some of the bonuses and manufacturer jollies can be worth having, especially if you hit your targets. But on balance, even though my basic salary is nil, my car is whatever heap of scrap I took in part-ex that’s still showing as taxed on the DVLA website and the only perks I get are a Halfords trade card and the occasional free cup of tea from the chatty hairdresser in the row of shops next to my lot, I’d still much rather be self-employed. When it comes to any form of work – especially for a grouchy, life-worn Brummie – the lack of any kind of boss is the most valuable thing ever. I’ll take that over a paid-for weekend in Las Vegas with a bunch of other car dealers. Speaking of which, I won one of those once – or at least my dealership did. At the time, I was sales director at a Citroen main agent that was part of a wider dealer group. At the end of 1991, all of the dealer management team was flown out to Sin City for a weekend of high rolling as a reward for achieving the best warranty revenue of any of the group’s outlets. This was a great achievement and a massive increase over the warranty revenues exhibited by the other brands in our portfolio, which was impressive really as we also sold Lada, for which at least one warranty claim per car was almost a writedown. For me, it was even better as I just sold them – I never got involved in the complexities of mending the bloody things, and when it came to Citroens of that era, they were indeed complexities. Anyway, over the course of the previous year, we’d somehow grossed an average of £972 per car in warranty revenue from Citroen head office, with the BX and XM topping the charts in terms of what we were being fed by the manufacturer for carrying out their warranty work. It may have looked to the rest of the group like we were selling cars that were inherently rubbish, but as many of you know already (especially if you sell Fords with EcoBoost engines), a car that has a common fault is good for service department revenues. It was all going very well until one day our service manager – multiple times employee of the month and the dealer principal’s Billy Golden Balls – didn’t turn up for work, his sick leave suddenly taking on a rather long-term status. Then he disappeared completely. It wasn’t until about seven years later when the DP retired that I found out why, after bumping into him enjoying his days of leisure a little bit too much at the 19th hole. Suitably lubricated by the golden nectar, when I asked why Derek (make your own mind up if that’s his real name) had left, he explained the situation.
Citroen was firing out turbochargers willy-nilly to any dealership that requested one so they could get their customers back on the road before they called Anne Robinson at Watchdog.
