“39 Cars To 62” - How A Store Fixed A Decade-long Sales Plateau In 60 Days | Jonathan Dawson, Dealer Principal at Cherokee Mitsubishi
The Dealer Playbook
“39 Cars To 62” - How A Store Fixed A Decade-long Sales Plateau In 60 Days | Jonathan Dawson, Dealer Principal at Cherokee Mitsubishi
The Dealer Playbook · Jul 14, 2026
Annotations will appear as you listen
0:00
42:19
Concept
sales plateau
A “sales plateau” means sales growth has stalled and the dealership keeps landing around the same numbers. It usually suggests something in the dealership’s process or setup needs fixing.
Term
Pinnacle Society
“Pinnacle Society” sounds like a group or club for dealership owners. The point is that members share strategies and compare what’s working to improve results.
Term
FNI manager
In car dealerships, “F&I” is the office that handles the paperwork after you pick the car. They also manage things like the financing paperwork and optional add-ons the dealership sells with the car.
LIVE
Can I ask you this? You've had a very successful career training, helping others build their
dealerships. Now you're an owner of a dealership. In all of the experience you had leading up to
this, what are maybe some things to this regard about what we're talking about here that you found
some deeper nuance to from your training to actually like lived experience now being a
dealer principle? Either you have two options really. You either raise your people to your standards
or inevitably you will lower your standards to your people and those are in fact the only two
options in culture. You are the only other person in the industry that I have heard use this word
and it was a word you've attributed all of your success to. Can you bring me into that? How do
you come to that conclusion that that's the thing that's going to make you the most successful?
Now at my dealership, one of the things that I enjoy most about producing the dealer playbook
is hearing from you the messages that I get of people who are getting so much value out of the
podcast, applying it to their day to day workflows and finding a thriving career right here in the
retail auto industry. It means the world to me and you know one of the ways that we make doing
this possible is through my agency Flex Dealer and of course in the spirit of providing value,
I think this is a perfect time to head over to www.flexdealer.com to show even further support
for you, my beloved DPB gang. Right now, if you go to my website, flexdealer.com, you can get a full
free PDF of my number one bestselling book, Don't Wait Dominate. And the reason I think it's so
special is that a lot of the topics that are discussed in this book are even more relevant
today than ever with this surge in popularized AI and people wondering, well, what can I do next?
How can I have a competitive advantage? Well, that's all here in this book. And so I'd love to
be able to offer you a free copy of this. If you go to flexdealer.com, it would mean the world to
me because that is how we continue to produce this show for you. Perhaps the longest episode
guest in the making, only I think like 14 years in the making. We have crossed paths so many times,
it's like, we got to do this. And then it never materializes. And I own that. But I am so glad
that you're here because I have probably 20, 20 questions that I that I just want to get answered
as I've thought about this. And I want to start here. The kids tell me I got to be on TikTok.
So I go on TikTok last night, and I see a live and there you are. And there's a 14 year old child
prodigy or a car dealer car. What does he call himself a car sales prodigy? Yeah, he's a car
automotive prodigy. Anyway, he self proclaimed prodigy. I don't know the kid from Adam, but
he seems like a sharp kid. And he seems like you got some personality. Yeah, he I mean,
he was articulate. He had some charisma. Anyways, you know, everybody prods you to say hey, give
this kid some advice. And the reason I want to start here with you is you are the only other person
in the industry that I have heard use this word. And it was a word you've attributed all of your
success to and the word is stewardship. Everyone talks about leadership, everyone talks about
management, everyone talks about discipline. But you go to stewardship and I thought it was so
timely because I had I'd written a post on LinkedIn. It might have even been yesterday morning.
No, it actually was Sunday morning because I was talking about how I'm a Sunday school
pastor in my congregation and that stewardship has been such a gift to me. And then here you
are a couple days later and I'm hearing you attribute so much of your success to this
concept, this principle of stewardship. Can you bring me into that? How do you
come to that conclusion that that's the thing that's going to make you the most successful?
Well, so first of all, thank you for that question, because this topic is literally it's
near and dear to my heart because it is the thing I attribute my success to in relative
degrees of success. But what I attribute what I have to which is the combination of my stewardship
and God's grace and buying those two things I give credit to those two things for what I've achieved.
I did youth ministry for over 20 years. And one of the things of course teaching young 12 year
olds and 13 year olds about life is I would try to talk to them about this idea of stewardship,
this idea that every season that you're in, whether that season lasts a couple weeks or
months or years, every season that you're in, you have a responsibility to act as if you are
responsible for that season. So for those who aren't familiar with the word stewardship, and
this is not like a dictionary definition, it's just my working definition. But it's the idea
that you act as if you own something even when you don't. An illustration I think that really
drives it home is how many people have washed and vacuumed a rental car that they had for a weekend,
right? Like you don't treat a rental car as your own because you know it's not,
temporary. So your care and concern for that rental car is very minimal because it's not your property
and you don't want to get an accident in it necessarily, but you also don't really care
if you turn it in, you know, a dirty, doesn't matter to you, it's not your car. Whereas your
own car, you will detail, you will wash, you will vacuum, you will clean your car. Why? Because it's
your car, right? So this idea of stewardship is acting as if the season that you're in matters,
that the season you're in may be in fact and unlikely actually is a season of preparation.
And that there's a really good chance that whatever you're doing today, that there are skills,
there are relationships, there are opportunities being developed within this current season,
that will be potentially necessary or even be exclusionary, depending on what happens in the
next season. So that there's certain things, like for example, when I'm, I would say I go back to
Youth Ministry for just a moment just to illustrate the point, but if I'm talking to young men and
I say you want the woman that you believe God has prepared for you and God has called you to,
well that woman, that future woman also has a man of her dreams and this is a line that I
actually heard from a pastor that I think really again, communicates the idea is if you want the
woman of your dreams, become the man that the woman of your dreams is dreaming about. So if you
become the man that the woman of your dreams is dreaming about, then when she sees you, she'll
recognize you. But if you see, if you're out there kind of playing the field flirting with all the
ladies, the woman of your dreams, that's the real godly character woman, the right woman who sees
you being careless and frivolous and playing the field, that's not attractive to her. So the woman
of your dreams could be missed because you're out being goofy with women who aren't the women of
your dreams. So this is idea is while you're in the season you're in, you're a porter, you're a
salesperson, you're a sales manager, you're a janitor, whatever you're doing, the skills you're
developing and the way you steward that season, there's somebody who would promote you that's
watching you. There's somebody who has the potential to recruit you that's watching you. And so, you
know, in joking, when I talk to sales people about this, I kind of say, hey, constantly be
recruitable, act as if you want to be recruitable. And that means like, do your task at such a level
that somebody thinks you're underpaid and need to work for them. Stewardship is just operating at a
high level of responsibility. And that's the advice I gave this young man is 14 year old. He said,
one day I'd like to be a dealer, what would your advice be? And my advice was be just steward
the season that you're in, act like everything matters, the decisions you make on who you be,
friend matters, who you spend your time with matters, what you watch matters, who you talk to,
what you read, it all accumulates and it eventually becomes a door opener or a door closer,
because time eventually will either promote you or expose you given enough time.
Hmm. Well, that's all we have time for today. You know what, like,
as you're saying this and I'm feeling it and it's resonating with me,
where my heart yearns is that more people would understand that what you just taught
is the make or break of whatever you do in your life. In this, you know, context,
we're talking about the auto industry, we're talking about car dealers and car sales and marketing
and all of the things that we we consider. But everything you just taught, John, dispels this
idea of, Oh, well, I can't because my leaders dot dot dot, or my leader will never blah, blah,
therefore I can't. You're completely removing that from the table. You're like,
what does I have to do with anything? Yep, self responsibility, self accountability.
These are words that again, sound good, might make a good meme or might make a good Facebook post.
But when it comes to, you know, preparing yourself for, for whatever your heart's desire.
See, I actually genuinely believe that God will give you the desires or heart meaning
to possible meanings. Number one, that he will seed them within you so that you have
the right desires that they're God given desires. And that as he gives you them,
he equips you with sufficient grace, sufficient faith, and sufficient capacity to do that what
you can with what you have until he equips you for the next thing. So really comes down to
what do I have control over right now? You know, what can I influence now? What value can I add
now? In fact, I was recently talking to somebody about getting a raise. And they said, you know,
they said, well, I feel like I just do a really good job, you know, in my role, I'm just looking
for that raise. And I said, I said, but can I ask you kind of push back a little bit? The job you
were hired for that you're doing a good job, isn't doing a good job at the job, you have the like
expectation of the job? Like, you want to raise for doing that, what you're expected to do.
Like, if I say I'm going to pay you this many dollars to do this task, and you do this task
really well, isn't that the standard, though, to do the thing you're being compensated for really well?
Like, you can't say I want more money because I do what I'm being paid to do well. You need to say
that I'm going to do above and beyond and more than expected, beyond into the scope of what I'm
currently compensated for, until the marketplace, in this case, either your employer or another,
recognizes how much value I bring and says that person's underpaid or underutilized.
That's how you become promotable. That's how you become recruitable. That's how you become more
valuable to the marketplace is you add more value than what is expected, not you do a great job at
your job. In your observation, why do you think I've always called it employee mindset? You know,
we kind of expect to be paid more for doing that, to your point, doing what was expected of us.
What has contributed to that mindset? How do you in your organization extract people out of that
mindset so that they can really get it? Like, nothing great. I think you even said it last
night, something about like, anybody who's developed wealth or any measure of success for
themselves have understood this concept, that they go above and beyond. How do you extract that
out of people? Well, I think obviously it comes with recognizing that the default setting of the
average person is average, right? So their brainwaves are average, their thought process are average,
their habits are average, their reading is average, their TV watching is average. So you take
and you say, first of all, with grace, you say a leader is supposed to see beyond where the people
are now and be able to take them there, right? That's the nature of being a leader is you can
see a person's potential better than they can. That's why you can lead them there.
So with grace, I say, look, I don't expect them to be entrepreneurial mindset. If they were all
entrepreneurial mindset, they'd be all trying to run their own businesses, right? So as I'm
developing businesses within the business, it's about partnering with them in the things that
help them become owners of their business. What are things like that? Well, you know, the mantra
for forever managers will say, yeah, I don't understand, you know, I tell these guys, you're
a business from the business, okay, they're a business from the business so they can set their
own hours. Well, no, they're business within business so they can have their own business
cards or they have to have the company business or no, they're business with the business so
they have a marketing budget. Well, no, they're business with the business so they have a branding
strategy. Well, no. So in what way exactly are they actually a business within the business?
How does that look in real life? And the reality is most management have no plan
around how to create a business from the business. Now at my dealership, we actually do. So we
equip them with marketing budgets. We equip them with branding strategies. We want them to build
a portfolio. I tell my people, my salespeople, I tell them, I want you to become recruitable
and I want you to have enough leverage to renegotiate your pay plan with me.
Here is the pathway to opening up your schedule. Here's the pathway to setting your own schedule.
And I tell them, I want you to have enough leverage to sit across from me and say,
John, for me to stay here, I need this, this, this and this. And the day you do,
you should have the leverage when you do because whoever has the most leverage will win that
conversation. And I've even told my team, if you're not sure if you have leverage, talk to me about
it. I'll tell you what you can do to increase your leverage because I want people at their maximum
optimal performance, even if that means I'm only going to keep them for two or three years on my
team. If I can get somebody to sell 50 cars a month for three years and then they move on to
become a real estate agent or become whatever. So you're like, okay, I'll start over then with
somebody else. And I'll probably have a pretty good pipeline of people like that. So I'm trying to
develop that with my new store that I just bought. I want to, from the beginning, tell them, here are
some business models, here's some pathways, which pathways attracted to you, you know, which models
attracted to you, what kind of support do you need for you to build that kind of model. And
that's what we're trying to do at our store because we have to train people to take ownership because
unfortunately, the average person is not wired to do that. Can I ask you this? And this is a,
I feel genuine about this question. And I think you will receive it in the right way, right? You've
had a very successful career training, helping others build their dealerships. Now you're an
owner of a dealership. In all of the experience you had leading up to this, what are maybe some
things to this regard about what we're talking about here, that you found some deeper nuance to
from your training to actually like lived experience now being a dealer principle?
That's fair. And just for a little bit of context, you know, for over two decades now,
I have been in the what you might call training consulting, you know, space. I've been in over
3000 dealerships physically walked in the board of I've now trained in nine different countries,
and I'm a 26 time NADA speaker. So most people who know that with a significant, you know,
client base of really high performing stores and sales would say, what were you thinking?
What were you thinking getting into retail operations, you crazy person? Because
as we know, and we even know some people, but we know that the industry has shown this,
it is hard as hard to take a store and to grow it from scratch or to take a very broken store and
grow it from scratch. And many people have tried and failed and it's difficult to do.
Yesterday was our one year anniversary for our dealership. So, you know, the things that I've,
I guess, nuanced, you know, it's easier, I think, as a consultant trainer to say, just write them up,
just fire them, you know, they won't do what you're doing. Change the people change the people as one
friend often screams from the podium. To me, the nuance of that is, especially in a smaller
operation and with something, and I don't mean this as a slight against any other dealership,
I'm just saying, because of how much value we put on relationship community and core core values,
when I have to write up an employee, it stings at a level I didn't think it would,
because I used to become more objective about it and just say, it's just think it's a necessary
part of the business. But recently at my store, I had to write up my top salesperson salesperson
a month for four months in a row. I had to write them up on the last day of a month, then literally
on the first day of the next month for two completely unrelated things that they violated in our
policies that were just, they were process things. They didn't follow a understood part of our process
and they didn't follow it on the very last day of the month. Then the first day of the next month,
they didn't follow a different one. And to have to write up your top person who's the number one
for four months in a row and have to start the month with that was like, oh, God, and I wanted
to just let it slide. I just like, you know what, I don't want to ruin their mojo. It's the last
day of the month. I don't want to ruin their mojo. It's the first day of the month. I don't want to
ruin the mojo. And then I thought, yeah, but that's the compromise. That's the little leaven
that leavens the whole munch. That's the little foxes that ruin the vineyard. That's the little
bit of slip that creates the slippery slope. And so I did it anyway and it was hard to do.
And then I had another team member, actually, one of my management team members who also had to
be written up again for a different thing. And we have a process for this and this is not something
that hits them entirely by surprise. There is a sequence, there is a verbal, clear
definition of what needs to be done. Then there's the expectation with the write up, there's a verbal
right before the write up, which is to say, I say, hey, look, because of our last conversation,
you knew the next step would be this, if it happened again, I need to inform you now you will
be having a formal write up. It's going to be painful. It's going to suck. Here's what it's
going to say. You are going to get it soon. I just want you know, but I actually lost a management
member because they didn't like having being written up for something. And they disagreed with
it. And instead of talking it through, they just they got upset and heated in the moment, said some
things that I think crossed the line of what I could tolerate. And it was time to part ways.
And it was unfortunate because, you know, two days later, they're like,
um, what did I do? But at the same time, from a standards perspective,
I cannot allow, because here's the reality, Michael, this is my philosophy and I tell my
clients this all the time, and I'm living it daily now, but I'm telling this all the time,
either you have two options really, you either raise your people to your standards or inevitably
you will lower your standards to your people. And those are in fact the only two options in
culture. You either raise your people to your standard or you will lower your standard to your
people. And over time, little by little by little, you and I have seen this in the market where
there's a store that used to sell 200 cars and then they had a month where they sold 190,
and then they sold 193, and then they sold 182, and then they sold 180, and then they sold
187, but then they sold 174, and all of a sudden creep, creep. And now
they're at 120 car a month store instead of what used to be a 220 car a month store, and they're
going, what happened? Well, I can tell you what happened, a bunch of little compromises, where
you didn't hold people accountable, where there wasn't clarity, which is a form of kindness,
where there wasn't an accountability that's done with again, with kindness and firmness.
So there's things we built into my store that are processes that again, having been in 3000 stores,
looking for best practices everywhere I go, I'm like, this is a non-negotiable for me,
this is a non-negotiable, this would be really hard, but it's a non-negotiable. So stuff like
that, the nuance of the humanity of our business has been the hardest thing for me to really just
navigate because it's like, these are relationships, they have families, it's painful, and so that would
be one of the top ones for sure. I love though hearing you walk through your thought process,
and how many steps it took, like you started by talking about grace in the beginning of the
conversation, and here we see an example of how you deploy grace to your team. It's like,
no, we have a mission to accomplish here, we have a standard, and I love that visual of,
I was just, just before we hopped on this call, I was talking to my pastor,
and we were talking about an individual that our hearts yearn for, and we realized we can't
dive into the depths of where they are, we actually have to throw the line kind of a thing,
and you make me think of that again, because that's what you're, that's what I'm getting from
what you're saying, Jonathan, it's, I have a standard, and I've created the why around these
non-negotiables, and I love the visual too of like the fox and the vineyard, and you know,
that sort of a thing, because you're right, like I even think about my journey in building my business,
how long I've, or how much longer than I should have, I've held on to toxic people, or you think
you can change them, and that they have no responsibility in that change, you know,
and just different things like that, I think means a lot, especially as you're
in this environment, you're now a dealer principal, and you have an ambitious brand, and you're trying
to get your rally your people, and I learned a little bit about your story in acquiring the
store at a SoduCon, and you said so many things that I want to touch on that fascinate me,
touching on something you said earlier, the, to quantify building a business in the business,
it sounds like what you're doing with your people is, it's almost like a hard reset,
the Thanos snap saying however it was then, it's not going to be that way now,
and here's what it actually means to build a business within the business, so you were talking
about doing fun stuff like personal brands, and the way they do their staff photos, and
all these sorts of things, what is, why is that an important place to start for you?
Well, because it goes back to, again, a general understanding of basic psychology of motivation
or activation of a person, so here's a kind of a general broad strokes of the way brains work,
the thing that we own, or the thing that we create, we care about differently than the things that we
don't own, and we didn't participate in the creation of, right? So, if I give you business cards,
you don't care if they're thrown away, because they weren't, you know, I just gave them to you,
it's like, we all know this with a, you know, a 15 year old, you give them a car, they're going to
wrap it around a mailbox, but if they from the time they're 12 or mowing lawns, stacking up
in increments of $20 bills, so that they can one day afford a $2,000 car, and they buy the
2,000 car with three years of sweating in a field, they will wax and wash that car daily,
and they'll make sure there's not a bug smudge on it, because they earned it through work,
and it's theirs and they own it. So, what I want to do is with any sales team, whether I'm coaching
them as a client from a training company perspective, or in this case, my own store,
is bring them in as co-collaborators and co-creators of the idea of what they want it to look like.
So, I usually start with a really simple framework, and these are all, by the way,
actual examples that exist in real life that are my students or friends, who this is what their
business looks like. I say, imagine for a moment, if it were possible, Michael, that you could have
a business where you sell 20 to 25 cars a month, and you only work two weeks every single month.
You have two weeks off, two weeks on, two weeks off, on, but let's say for now,
you just work the last two weeks of every month, and you're off the first two weeks,
and you sell 20 to 25 cars a month, or let's say, for example, you work three days every week,
but you sell 30 cars a month, 30 to 35, but you work three days every week, but that's all you
work, or what if I said you work 40 days, or sorry, four days a week, and you sell 40 to 45
cars and you're working four days a week, or what if I said you could work five days a week,
but you'd sell 50 plus cars a month. If you heard those different models, and you said,
if it were true of you, that two years, three years from today, whichever one of those you heard,
is your actual life. Do you have a preference right now? And everybody does. By the way,
I've done this with a survey of 100 salespeople in a room and asked them this question,
and it's not a uniformed answer. Everybody has what they perceive to be, I would like this model,
I would like this model. I'm gonna say, okay, let's pretend for now that it is in fact true
that that is going to be your future. That will be true of you. Now, in order for that to become
true, let's reverse engineer starting as Christ, and God tells us in the scriptures, you know,
we learn that God is a God who sees the end from the beginning, right? He's a God outside of time,
so he can see the whole scope of time. If you can kind of, from creation, imagine the end result
and work yourself backwards. If I said, okay, so imagine that was true. In order for that to
be true, what type of things would have to be true now to make that likely to be true then?
Like what kinds of things would we have to put in place? And in order for you to have that kind
of business model where customers are only coming in on your days that you're there,
if you're coming in three days a week and you're having essentially a hat trick every time you
walk in, what kind of clients would those be? Like, would that be converting total strangers?
Would that be hoping to catch good ups on the lot? Would that be hoping to catch good internet leads?
What would be the customer type that would most likely honor that business model?
And they go, gosh, they would have to probably be like, you know, repeats and referrals. Okay, so
if it were true that in two and a half years you were going to have a business primarily
relational customers, repeats and referrals, what would have to be true today to ensure that you
have enough repeats and referrals then? And all of a sudden they start going, that's really good
follow-up. Okay, great. What else would you have to do? I'd have to be the kind of person,
I'd have to give a great experience. Okay, what would that look like then? And by helping them
co-create a possible future that they want to be true, then it's all about down just small
nuanced things. It's obviously techniques and specific things you have to do, but the vision
is there. You know, the scripture teaches that people perish for a lack of vision, right? It's
like they don't have clarity of vision. They don't know where they're going. And so you have to give
people a vision. Otherwise, what they end up doing is sitting on the lot all day watching cars
driving by and raindrops from the sky, praying to God on high that someone will come in and buy
while they sit in corner and cry, oh me, my. I sit here until I die. Like that's
the mantra of the salesperson who's stuck in mediocrity because they have a management team
that's so focused on managing tasks that they've forgotten the role of developing people.
So that's the philosophy that I want to instill both in my clients and in my team is the idea
that if they co-create and if they own the idea, if it's theirs as well, they protect it different.
They care about it different. In fact, I'll tell you one quick caveat, anecdotal story about that.
I had a salesperson that I got on a phone call with and we started talking and we were talking
about their business. And when I hung up about a week or two later, the general manager calls me.
He's like, John, I've been talking to this guy about follow-up for years. This guy's been on
our team for 10 years. He follows up with nobody. But for the last week or so, this guy is sending
out probably 20 pieces of mail a day. He's sending out emails every day. He's leaving voice smells
like crazy. What did you tell him about follow-up that I didn't tell him? How did you activate that?
And I say, that's funny. He's like, why? I said, because we didn't talk about follow-up even one
sentence. We didn't spend 10 seconds on follow-up. He said, what did you talk about? I said, I talked
about the importance of building a personal brand, being outstanding and being memorable and having
your customers be truly loyal to you so that you can build a business that will one day work as hard
for you as you work for it to get a real return on the investment of the 10 years you've spent
so that you can have a raving fan advocacy network that's driving you traffic. We talked about the
importance of building a business you're proud of. I never told him to send an email, a text,
or a piece of mail to anybody. He's like, wow, that's fascinating. I said, it's not really
fascinating. It's interesting, but it's not shocking to me because he took ownership of his
business. And in his mind, one of the actions that an owner would do is make sure their owner base
remembers them. So I didn't have to tell him to do follow-up. I had to give him a vision of what
a business could look like if his customers loved them and never forgot them. You're making the
vision real for them so that they take it and they get clarity about the possibilities for
themselves. I think sometimes it's like kids, right? You go, hey, what do you see for your future?
I don't know. But you didn't do that. Your story is giving them something to achieve,
20 cars a month, or 25 cars a month, 35 45 cars a month. You're not letting them
go to an I don't know position. You're saying, no, these are the options, which one resonates with
you. I think it's so powerful. In your own, it doesn't have to be one of the ones I gave you.
Tell me what it looks like to you, but give us clarity. What are we working on? When you show up
in eight, 10 hours away from your family today, what is the reason why you're going to suffer
at a car dealership? Because again, this is a scriptural principle. It was for the joy that
was set before him that Christ endured the cross. See, there's a principle there that when given
enough joy or hope, people can endure incredible suffering, pain or stress. The challenge is you
have sales floors with everybody suffering and no clear reason why. They don't know what they're
doing there. They're wandering on aimlessly like zombies. Give people vision, whether it's
corporate vision towards what we're building as a unity or individual vision as to what we're
going to create for them for their personal family and future.
Let me ask you this. For the individual that says, because we are notoriously a growth,
grow, grow. For the person that's being honest with you and says,
I'm like 18 cars a month. And that creates a version of me that's bigger and bolder and
better than I've ever wanted. What do you say to that? And how do you reconcile it as an operator
or as a principle to say that you coached them to where they want to go? They're achieving it,
they're happy, but now we got to go the extra mile. We got to go to the next step.
Yeah, there's a couple of ways that I've helped unlock some people. One of my favorite stories
to share is a gentleman by the name of Jeff, and I'll tell this story about him.
So he was the number one salesperson in this dealership and had been for north of 10 years
by a stretch. He was in a classroom. I happened to be there speaking to the entire store
in the training session. And as I was talking about this potential of what's possible to
store hitting some of these bigger numbers of 50, 60 cars a month, as again, you're aware some of
the people in my Pinnacle Society that I co-founded with Ali and Frank, you know, we have members
who sell 60, 80, 100 plus cars a month. I'm telling this story and he raises his hand. He says,
you know, John, that's all well and good. And I mean, no disrespect. Right. He said,
that's how he opens this. I mean, no respect. I'm like, great. Here we go.
And he, I mean, his owner's in the room, everybody in the room. And this is the veteran
number one salesman. And he says, but I think I know better than you what's possible in my store.
I think I know better than you. He says, I tell you right now, I've been through three owners
since I've been here. And let me tell you what it'll take. I've been trying to hit 40 cars for
over a decade. I've been trying to hit it. I've hit 35, 36, 38. I've hit all the way to 39.
40 cars I've been aiming for for over a decade. And let me tell you what it'll take,
fire five of these other guys, put 50 more used cars out there and hire me two more FNI managers,
then I can get past 40 cars. And that's what he said boldly in front of everybody with the owner
and every fire five of these guys. Right. And I said, you know, Jeff, I'm going to, I'm going to
ask you a question back and I'm going to take you to a place. But let me, me ask you a
question. Is it fair to say, am I being fair when I say, based on everything that you know,
that everything you said is true? He said, absolutely. I said, is it accurate to say then
that based on everything you know, everything you said is 100% true. He said 100%. I said,
so based on everything you know, based on everything you know. So, so Jeff, the only way
it wouldn't be true is if there was something you didn't know that could make that not true.
Now you've been at this store for almost 20 years, Jeff, but I've been in 3000 stores.
So, is it possible, just possible, would you concede, Jeff, it's possible I know something you
don't know. Is that possible? He said, well, of course it is. I said, okay, is it possible then
that if I gave you the thing that I know that you don't need to fire five guys
or hire two more put 50 cars, that's possible. He said, well, I guess I said, then let me show
you what I know that you don't know. And so I walked them through an exercise I do on potentials.
And this is an exercise I actually teach in sales classes called the mathematical potential of your
business. Now, I won't do the whole exercise, but I'll give you like the 30 second version.
I said, what was the, what's for you personally, the most cars you've ever sold in a single day?
He said, six. I said, great. Now you're scheduled 22 days. So if I take six times 22,
is that 132? He said, yes. I said, so, so if you only did that, which you've already done,
and I'm only talking mathematical potential, if you only took that, which you've already done,
which is a six car day, and you simply replicated that, which has already happened, and you just did
it consistently 22 days a month, that'd be 132 commands. I said, may I ask you this question,
Jeff? What was your goal this month relative to 132 actual potential? He said, my goal was 30.
I said, so now Jeff, I have to ask you a completely different question, but let me poke you a little
bit, Jeff, because I want to help you. I said, didn't you just tell me for 10 years your goal
has been to get to 40? He said, yeah. I said, didn't you just tell me this month's goal was 30?
He went, well, yeah. I said, so how does a man who's trying to get to 40 for 10 years have a
goal this month of 30? How's that possible, Jeff? And he said, well, it's just a number I know I can
hit. I said, yeah. And I said, and here, Jeff is the rub. Your goals have nothing to do with your
actual potential. Your goals are based on your past designed to protect your pride and have nothing
to do with your potential. And I said, and that, my friend, is how we unlock you. I have the video,
happy to share it with anyone who would like to see the receipts. I have the video two months later,
he hit 62. We did not fire five people. We did not hire two more FNI managers. We did not add
50 cars in two months. And I have the video where he politely concedes and says, John, it was me the
whole time. And it took someone like you helping me see that I had just normalized, you know,
my stance. I just, I wasn't really trying to get to the next level, not really. I was telling myself
a story. So when I look at an example like a Jeff, and he's one of many stories I can share like this,
you know, how do you unlock it? It depends because it's the same way. And I'm going to
illustrate this back to the biblical principles because I try to both live my life by that and
lead by that. You know, how did Jesus interact with and heal people? Well, some he spit in a pile
of mud and made mud pies for eyes and some he touched spoke a word. You know,
there isn't what I wish every manager I think wishes. There isn't this cookie cutter,
just do this one thing and everybody's going to get in line. It's not how beings are wired.
And so when you're trying to motivate a staff, I asked this to a room recently at a convention
I was speaking at and I said, how many of you relate to the pain of throwing a $500 spiff at a
room of salespeople only to have half of them duck so it doesn't hit them?
The whole room wouldn't we feel you Jonathan? Like, yeah, if you've ever done that, you know,
it's painful because there's a party that goes back in the day when I sold cars, I'd have crawled
over somebody for that spiff. It's like, yeah, I get that. But that's, that's misunderstanding
what leadership is. Leadership is not what would you care about? It's what would they care about?
So when I'm trying to motivate somebody who's already towards the top, you know,
sometimes it's about talking about a relative degree of selfishness that they've achieved.
So like, for example, Michael, if you were a salesman and you're saying, John, I don't really
need much because I'm taking care of this. I'm taking this. I say, you know, Michael, I'm going
to press back a little bit on you and I want to challenge you. But you don't strike me as an
egotistical selfish person. But what you just said is highly egotistical and highly selfish.
Because what you've implied is I've covered my own as though I don't live in a world where I can
impact others. How many wells in Africa are you putting up? How many orphanages are you funding?
How many missionaries are you sending? Because yes, you take care of yours. But if you don't need
more than the 15 grand you're already making a month, what you're telling me is if you had an
excess five grand, if you had that five grand, you could deploy it for something meaningful.
If it's kingdom work, or if it's a cause you care about, or if it's a family member you could
support, like, like there are things you could do if you had excess, but you don't have it because
you've convinced yourself to take care of your little silo of your world is all there is. That's
selfish egotistical position. And so I would challenge you to unlock that and say,
because, and this is my conviction, my conviction is one day you'll have to give account not just
for what you did with what you had, but what you could have done with what you could have had.
And that matters, especially the person who has an internal, eternal perspective,
that matters. That question starts to go, what am I actually doing? And am I going to have to give
an account? And how will I justify that I only took care of my little world in a world that was
suffering and broken? I mean, it's like the parable of the talents, isn't it?
It's another great principle of leadership. I wish my cup wasn't overflowing right now,
but it is, which kind of ties into the whole point because I'm like, wait, what could he
tell me that would make me get a bigger cup? I need a bigger cup. This is tremendous stuff.
I'm so glad that you were able to join me today and share your time and your wisdom with us.
How can those listening and watching connect with you?
Well, I like to jokingly say, I'm all over the web like Spider-Man, right? So you can't miss me
if you're looking for me. You can either throw Jonathan Dawson into the interwebs. You can
Google Cellcology, which is my primary training company. Pinnacle Society is my mastermind for
Atlanta. And then, of course, Cherokee and Cherokee Mitsubishi all over the social to see what we're
doing at our dealership. But if you're a dealer and you're exploring resources and you'd like to
consider how conversation with what we do, because we have AI technology, we actually, we just built
an AI technology that I'm super proud of, spent a year building it. But it's an AI tool that absolutely
equips what I do, boots on the ground. It makes the whole difference. I mean, one of the biggest
challenges Michael forever has been, you can tell a salesperson what you want them to do. And as soon
as they walk out the door, you're wondering, are they going to do it? Are they going to do it remotely
close to what I asked some managers? What's your personal level of confidence that the version
that the salesman just told you of what happened is in fact true? And all of them go like basically
zero? Well, my AI tool that I co-created has a complete scoring metric in it. It actually listens
to the entire customer conversation. It pulls the transcript, runs it through the AI metric,
tells the management what's working, what's not working, what they're doing, what they're not
doing, makes it a wonderful coaching tool and a wonderful save a deal tool. So if a dealer
wanted to talk to me about that, I'd love to do that. If they want to send people to our live
classes at our Pinnacle Training Center in Atlanta, you can go to PinnacleWorkshops.com.
And at PinnacleWorkshops.com, you can find out about our live classes. If you want to find about
cellcology, you can just go to cellcology.com or cellcologyuniversity.com for my online platform,
PinnacleSociety.com for my mastermind. Again, if you're looking for me, you will find me. I'm
out there, right? So that's it. And then otherwise, find me on social media, send me a DM if I can
add value. I'm on a mission to save the world one salesperson at a time. And opportunities like
this and the opportunities dealer clients give me is an ability for me to live out my mission
statement. So I appreciate this introduction to your audience. And Michael, yeah, I mean,
it's been almost a decade. I think since we first talked about we should do this,
we kind of slow rolled this one, I would call you and me the chief procrastinator when it came
to this particular conversation. Procrastinate on purpose, as they say, because now look at
how much we had to talk about. Jonathan, thank you so much for sharing your time with me on the
Dealer Playbook. My pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much for the invitation. Hey, thanks for
listening to the Dealer Playbook podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please subscribe, share and hit
that like button. You can also join us and the DPB community on social media. Check back next week
for a new Dealer Playbook episode. Thanks so much for joining.
About this episode
Jonathan Dawson, dealer principal at Cherokee Mitsubishi, breaks down how a store climbed from “39” to “62” sales in 60 days by rebuilding culture and accountability. He argues dealership leadership has only two outcomes: “raise your people” or “lower your standards,” and that small compromises quietly erode performance. Dawson also shares coaching frameworks—like “mathematical potential”—and explains how an AI tool “listens to the entire customer conversation” to coach and save deals.
Original notes
Jonathan Dawson has spent over 20 years training dealerships as the president and founder of Sellcology and co-founder of the Pinnacle Society. A year ago, he became an owner and operator himself at Cherokee Mitsubishi.
This episode centers on one story: a 10 year veteran salesperson who'd been chasing 40 cars a month for a decade, topping out at 39, and told Jonathan flatly that the only way to get there was to fire five coworkers and add more staff and inventory. Jonathan walked him through a simple math exercise instead, built entirely off the salesperson's own best single day. Two months later, he sold 62 cars. No new hires, no new inventory.
Jonathan also gets specific about the moment he had to write up his own top performer twice in two days, why he didn't let it slide even though it stung more than he expected, and the principle he now runs his store by: you either raise your people to your standard, or you eventually lower your standard to your people.
Michael's takeaway: the ceiling most salespeople hit isn't a real ceiling, it's a number they made peace with a long time ago, and the fastest way to break it is math, not motivation.
(00:00) Standards Dilemma
(00:45) Show Support And Free Book
(02:11) TikTok Prodigy And Stewardship
(04:08) Stewardship Defined With Examples
(08:24) Self Accountability And Value
(11:56) Building Owners In Business
(14:50) Dealer Principal Hard Lessons
(19:01) Non Negotiables And Accountability
(21:58) Vision And Personal Branding
(30:45) Unlocking Bigger Potential
(36:12) Motivation And Kingdom Impact
(39:25) Connect And Closing Remarks
The Dealer Playbook
Michael Cirillo
0:00
42:19