F&I and Showroom, December 2020

14 F I and Showroom December 2020 COVER STORY going to be but you never waste extra time We were able to totally reinvent ourselves No one was going to be making any money but if we were going to be here anyway we may as well be doing something F I MOVING FROM PRIMARILY PAPER TO A FULLY DIGITAL STORE HOW DID YOU LEVERAGE WHAT YOU ALREADY HAD WORKING IN THE DEALERSHIP INTO THIS NEW DIGITAL WAY OF LIFE KRAMER Some of my employees said it was almost like I had unknowingly set it up because I had been trying to advocate for this for a long time It had always been something I wanted to do not that we had to do but I said at some point this is coming I am blessed to have a very strong management team around me so it kept me freed up especially in the last year to really start looking at some of this stuff It played to our advantage because we already had a lot of the pieces in place but the difference now was that we had to do it So it forced us with no other option to connect all the dots We delivered our first digital deal in February and that was before the pandemic was even affecting us F I WAS THE END GOAL TO CONVERT PROCESSES TO A FULLY DIGITAL FORMAT OR WERE YOU JUST TRYING TO GET THE BALL MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION KRAMER I worked at Autonation for a period of time and got to spend some time with Mike Maroone One night when I was at the Autonation headquarters after hours he sat down with me and we spent about an hour talking about his vision and where I thought the industry was going I asked him where he thought it was going and it was like talking to Walt Disney He thought there would be digital F I video communication in the dealership a full virtual environment and at that time it sounded like he was talking about something out of a Star Wars movie He said My goal is to deliver a vehicle to a customer in Montana more quickly and more efficiently than a dealer in Montana could And I said Well how would that look He painted this elaborate picture that actually isnt too different from what is happening today At the time I thought to myself we may get there but I doubt it will be five years from now it ended up taking seven F I WHAT NEW PROCESSES AND PROCEDURES HAVE YOU IMPLEMENTED KRAMER At this point we have gone paperless and in order to do that we needed to streamline and even eliminate some of our forms because in this business there is a significant amount of redundancy Since we had all that time we just took every deal and examined it New car delivery what should that look like Trade in what should that look like Lease what should that look like Do we need this form and do we need that form Anything that wasnt 100 required from a compliance standpoint was eliminated F I YOU MENTIONED WORKING WITH GIL VAN OVER AS A COMPLIANCE ADVISOR TO GET EVERYTHING SORTED WHAT WAS THAT PROCESS LIKE KRAMER We have always been on the edge of compliance It wasnt that we werent doing it but it wasnt centralized and in one easy place for Gil to go in and audit and streamline So it was very inconsistent and frustrating for him and in return frustrating for me whenever he would ask me questions I could feel his pain and wished it had been more clear cut So I asked him to partner up with me and we started working on the virtual project together He would call me up and ask Well how would you do this or Have you seen this He referred some people to me I referred some people to him and as I kept building new procedures I would email it to him to check from a compliance standpoint I actually wrote a new F I compliance and procedures manual while doing this because we had the time I would send it to him and hed send back corrections because during this time everything was changing Ill give you an example We had gotten all the paper out of the way and were now working on all the e contracting elements setting things up correctly which takes days to go through and make it so it becomes frictionless I didnt understand how many different touch points and interactions there were until that time theres literally thousands of them And thats with every lender So maybe you have one lender streamlined but you need to get them all streamlined So we reverse engineered that with the end goal in mind of being able to deliver a car 100 end to end without the customer ever having to visit us Everyone thought that I was out of my mind for envisioning this but I thought if someone is going to do it why shouldnt it be us Our owner Mr Germain is amazing at empowering us to take calculated risks That trust is what makes our progress possible F I YOU MENTIONED WRITING A NEW F I MANUAL WHAT IS THAT USED FOR KRAMER We use it for onboarding new employees and it essentially acts as a living and breathing reference guide I had an associate ask me a question about a Darwin system and I turned around and said Well did you reference the reference guide Thats what its used for The natural thing is to just give them the answer but I want to teach my staff how to fish rather than catch it for them It takes a really long time and it keeps on changing but my goal is to have the F I managers focused on selling All of the compliance pieces should be automated so paperwork isnt something F I managers need to spend their time on Take tag and title as an example I kept on saying Why cant we get these forms digitally and was told that the state of Florida doesnt allow it as well as some other states that all require wet ink But since I had the free time I just kept calling the DMV ended up calling the main office in Tallahassee and kept working my way up the chain because nobody was giving me a definitive answer they all just told