This is a different way to pay and schedule sales teams. Instead of pushing sales with commission and long weeks, the dealership tries a shorter work schedule and pay structure that can make employees stay longer and focus on helping customers.
This is a specific Hyundai dealership location. The guest is the general manager there, and they’re talking about how they run the business differently than many other dealers.
Concept
antiquated sales processes
This means the dealership is using older ways of selling cars that don’t work as well anymore. Those older steps can make the buying experience slower or more stressful for both customers and employees.
High turnover means people keep quitting their jobs at the dealership. When that happens a lot, it can hurt how smoothly the dealership runs and how consistent the customer experience is.
F&I is the part of buying a car where the dealer tries to sell extra products like warranties and protection plans. The “F&I box” means that step is handled like a separate, bundled sales pitch, and removing it changes how the deal is presented.
A car breakdown is when the car suddenly stops working the way it should. It usually means you need a repair shop, and it can cost more than you expected.
Midas is a car repair shop you can walk into for things like maintenance and fixes. Here, it’s where she took her car when it broke and where she started working with the shop to help other people get repairs.
This usually means being the person who writes up the repair work for customers. You listen to the problem, document it, and help get the car scheduled for service.
Company
NAP auto repair shop
They’re mentioning a specific repair shop they worked at early on. The point is that they started with a small job while learning the business.
Some car lots sell you the car and also handle the payments themselves. If you can’t get a normal loan, they may still approve you—but the interest and total cost can be higher.
That 14.9% number is what it costs to borrow money for the car. The higher the interest rate, the more you’ll pay overall, not just the monthly payment.
A franchise dealership is a regular car dealership that sells one brand’s cars (like Hyundai) under an agreement with the automaker. They usually don’t do the financing the same way a buy-here-pay-here store does.
At a dealership, “the lot” is the parking area where the cars are kept and shown. Salespeople spend a lot of time out there helping customers look at vehicles.
Concept
receptionist
A receptionist is the person who answers the front desk and phone calls. In a dealership, they’re often the first person customers talk to, even if they’re not the salesperson.
Topic
car business schedule (open Sundays, 6-7 days/week)
They’re talking about how dealership jobs used to be much more demanding, with longer hours and fewer days off. That kind of schedule can change how sales teams work and how quickly customers get help.
Credit issues mean the customer’s credit history isn’t perfect, which can change whether they can get a loan and what the monthly payment might be. Dealerships often talk about this early so they can suggest workable options.
A needs assessment is just asking the right questions to understand what the customer really needs. It helps the dealership avoid wasting time and puts the customer into the right car and deal.
A BDC is a dealership’s lead-handling team. They talk to people who call or message, figure out what they’re looking for, and set up appointments so sales staff can focus on customers who are ready to buy.
Audi is a luxury car brand. In this story, the speaker is comparing a high-interest financing environment to a luxury dealership that can offer much better promotional rates.
Term
0%
“0%” means you’re not paying interest on the loan for that promo period. It’s usually only available if you qualify and it may depend on the car and the length of the loan.
Appointment setting means getting interested shoppers to actually come in or book a test drive. It’s a step between “they’re interested” and “they’re buying.” The host is saying their system was good at getting lots of appointments.
An internet director is a dealership role responsible for online sales lead management—how leads are captured, followed up, and converted into appointments and sales. The transcript contrasts an internet director’s lead volume with actual sales results, highlighting that lead handling quality matters, not just lead count.
A lead is basically someone who shows interest in buying a car. They might fill out a form or ask for details. The key takeaway is that a lot of leads doesn’t automatically mean a lot of sales—you have to follow up and convert them.
The transcript points to a shift toward more internet-driven shopping and greater transparency in how leads and pricing information are shared. In dealership operations, this increases the importance of fast follow-up, consistent lead tracking, and measurable conversion from online inquiries.
A service advisor is the person at the dealership you talk to about your car’s repair. They take your request, coordinate with the mechanics, and keep you updated on what’s being done.
Podium is a software company that helps car dealerships talk to customers. They use AI to handle things like answering questions, booking appointments, and routing phone calls so the dealership can respond faster and more consistently.
AI agents are computer programs that can do tasks for the dealership, not just chat. For example, they can help schedule appointments and direct calls to the right place based on what the dealership wants to happen.
A workflow is the sequence of steps a dealership follows to help customers. In this case, the hosts are saying the AI is helping carry out those steps for both buying (sales) and repairs/maintenance (service).
Disconnected systems means the dealership’s software tools don’t talk to each other well. When that happens, customer messages and phone calls can get delayed or lost between different programs.
Voice AI is like an automated caller assistant. It can answer the phone, understand what the customer needs, and either schedule something or pass the call to a person when it’s time.
They’re mentioning Chick-fil-A to show what kind of job history the candidate had. The hiring managers were basically saying, “They’ve only done that, so they might not fit car sales.”
The front desk is where customers are greeted and directed. They often answer phones, help with appointments, and connect you with the right department.
She’s talking about bias—how people assume certain types of workers “fit” sales roles. That can lead to unfair hiring or promotion decisions, even if someone is capable.
Instead of working five shorter days, the dealership works four longer days. The goal is to make appointment times line up better so customers aren’t getting passed around when someone’s off.
Lead follow-up is how a dealership keeps in touch with people who might buy a car. The idea here is that if the team starts earlier, they can respond faster and set up appointments the same day.
A same-day appointment means the customer comes in the same day they first show interest. It’s a faster turnaround from “interested” to “actually visiting.”
Poll surveys are short questions used to collect feedback. In this case, the dealership asks the sales team how the new schedule is working, then reviews those answers over time.
PTO means paid time off—time you can take away from work and still get paid. When schedules change, companies often try to make sure PTO stays protected so employees don’t lose benefits.
Sometimes salespeople get extra money if they sell certain add-ons or products. That can affect what they focus on during the sale, even if they’re mostly paid salary.
“Finance” means getting a loan to pay for the car instead of paying all at once. The dealership helps set up the loan and the terms depend on your credit.
A “one-price store” means the dealership tells you the price up front. Instead of negotiating a lot, you usually get a clearer, more straightforward deal.
Term
FNI menus
“FNI menus” are the list of extra products the dealership offers when you’re financing. Think of them like optional add-ons you can choose from while completing the paperwork.
“No desk / no tower” means the managers aren’t stuck in a separate office area. They’re out on the floor helping so customers don’t have to wait as long.
“Loan values” are the numbers in your car loan—like how much you’re borrowing and the terms. The finance person makes sure everything is set up correctly for the lender.
Concept
hard credit challenge customers
“Hard credit challenge customers” are people whose credit makes it tougher to get approved for a car loan. The finance team tries to find a path that still gets the customer financed.
“Gross” in dealership talk usually refers to gross profit from vehicle sales (often called “front-end gross”). It’s a key metric for whether a store is financially healthy, because it reflects how much profit is made per deal after discounts and incentives. When someone asks how they’re “holding gross,” they’re really asking how the store maintains profitability without relying on traditional sales pressure.
The GM mentions “three weeks of training with every salesperson,” which implies a structured onboarding process before salespeople work the floor. In dealerships, training can cover product knowledge, objection handling, compliance, and how to run a customer conversation without high-pressure tactics. That kind of process can directly affect customer experience and consistency of deal-making.
A trade appraisal is how the dealer figures out what your current car is worth if you trade it in. That number can change the final price you pay for the new car.
A CRM tool is a computer system the dealership uses to keep track of customers and what’s been discussed. It helps salespeople follow up and not lose track of people.
GAP is an add-on that can help if your car is totaled and you still owe more on the loan than the car is worth. It covers that “gap” so you’re not stuck paying the difference.
Emotional intelligence means paying attention to how someone feels and responding in a helpful way. Here, it’s about making the customer feel comfortable instead of pressured.
“Lift” here means the sales process gets better results. The speaker is saying the empathetic approach helps more than just reading a script or pushing add-ons.
“Cold menu” means walking in and offering add-ons like they’re a checklist, without much relationship or trust. The point is that customers react better when the conversation is more personal.
Topic
20 group
A “20 group” sounds like a set of other dealerships they compare against. Instead of guessing how you’re doing, you look at similar stores and compare results.
Term
per copy
“Per copy” is dealership shorthand for profit or performance “per deal” (often per retail unit/contract). It’s used to compare store performance in dollars on a per-transaction basis.
Term
F&I PBR
“PBR” is a dealership scorecard number that tracks how well the finance/insurance side is doing. Higher usually means the store is making more profit from financing and add-ons per deal.
Decentralizing F&I means moving some F&I responsibilities closer to the sales process rather than keeping everything in a separate “F&I office” or separate step. The goal is often to improve coaching and communication so salespeople can better present finance options and reduce friction.
“F&I” means finance and insurance. It’s the part of the dealership process where someone helps with the paperwork and optional extras like warranties and insurance.
“One point of contact” means you have one main person to talk to. That can make the process feel calmer because you’re not bounced between different people.
“One person” means the customer mostly deals with one main salesperson. It helps avoid the feeling that things change hands and the customer gets pushed around.
Term
point of contingency
They’re talking about the moment the deal moves to the next step. That’s when everyone gets nervous because the customer might meet someone else and the process can feel uncertain.
“Goes to the box” is slang for when the customer gets taken to the office area for the paperwork. That handoff is where the salesperson thinks the customer gets stressed.
“Empower the team” describes shifting authority and decision-making to the sales team rather than relying on a separate gatekeeper role. In dealership operations, this can reduce customer anxiety during transitions and improve accountability.
Succession planning means grooming employees for bigger roles later. Instead of waiting for a manager spot to open, the dealership trains people ahead of time.
Concept
coaching menus
A “coaching menu” is like a checklist of coaching ideas or steps managers can use with salespeople. It helps everyone use the same best practices instead of guessing.
“Bank programs” are special financing deals from the lender. They can change the interest rate or who qualifies, and they’re part of how dealers build a customer’s payment plan.
A rebate is money back on the car. It lowers what you pay, but it usually has rules and deadlines.
Term
FNI director
“FNI” here refers to the finance function leadership role in a dealership—someone responsible for making sure financing and incentive processes are followed correctly. The director’s job is to align sales managers on current programs so deals are built consistently across the store.
They’re talking about training that happens as updates come in, not just once during onboarding. That way, the team can quote deals correctly even when offers change.
Concept
traditional store
A “traditional store” in dealership talk usually means a conventional sales and management setup, often with more hierarchical roles and established processes. The speaker contrasts it with a different “walls your way” system and a no-commission/4-day work week approach.
“Leaders on the bench” means the company is preparing people who can move up quickly when they’re needed. Instead of waiting for the perfect time, they keep backup leaders ready so things don’t stall.
A senior sales manager is a leadership role in a dealership’s sales department, typically responsible for coaching salespeople, managing sales process, and hitting volume/efficiency targets. Compensation for this role is often structured differently than frontline sales roles (for example, salary plus bonuses rather than pure per-sale commission).
F&I means the dealership’s finance and insurance department. “F&I numbers” are the money they make from things like car loans and add-on products, not just the car itself.
This phrase is about having leaders who think like business owners. Instead of only selling cars, they build and coach their teams so the whole operation can grow bigger over time.
To “scale” means to grow the dealership bigger while still keeping things working well. The speaker is saying you can’t do that just by selling more—you need leaders who can build and train teams.
“Acquiring stores” means buying or taking over additional dealership locations. It usually comes with big changes—new people, new rules, and a lot of work to get everything running smoothly again.
A general manager (GM) in a dealership is the top operations leader responsible for performance across sales, service, staffing, and customer experience. The transcript highlights how losing that role for months can create instability and affect both employees and customers.
Dealers usually run two big areas: selling cars and running the service/parts department. “Fixed operations” means the service and parts side—things like writing work orders, scheduling, and getting the right parts.
The service manager runs the repair shop side of the dealership. They help make sure technicians are scheduled, jobs are organized, and repairs are handled correctly.
They’re talking about how busy the shop is. Going from a small number of daily customers to dozens means you need better scheduling and organization so cars don’t pile up.
A service ticket is the paperwork that tells the shop what the customer needs and what work should be done. It’s how the dealership tracks the repair from start to finish.
Parts margins are basically how much money the dealership makes when it sells replacement parts. If you don’t understand them, it’s hard to price repairs correctly and keep the service department profitable.
They’re talking about a non-profit group that connects people in the car industry. The goal is to help members support each other with advice, connections, and shared resources.
Wocan is a non-profit group for people in the auto industry. It’s meant to connect members with peers and resources so they can get support and opportunities.
Girls Auto Clinic is a group that helps women feel more confident in cars and automotive work. The guest brings it up as an example of an all-female automotive space and support network.
They’re saying dealerships do better when they have a diverse team. The goal is to make more customers feel understood and welcome, which can help sales.
They’re saying you shouldn’t only sell one kind of car. If you have different options (like different colors and price levels), more different people will find something they want.
NAMAD is an organization that supports minority participation in car dealerships. Partnering with them is a way to meet other dealers and build community through events.
Automotive retail is basically the dealership business—selling cars and helping customers. The guest is saying they want to broaden how people understand the industry, not just the dealership part.
Concept
vendor groups
Vendor groups are companies that supply services or products to dealerships and car companies. The episode is emphasizing that there are career opportunities beyond just selling cars.
OEM stands for “Original Equipment Manufacturer,” meaning the company that builds the vehicles (and often designs the parts and systems). The speaker contrasts working for an OEM versus working in automotive retail, highlighting different career paths within the same industry ecosystem.
Social media is how dealerships can reach customers online. The guest is saying many dealerships don’t use it well—they either don’t post much, or they just dump car photos without a real marketing plan.
Inventory photos are the pictures a dealership posts of the cars they have for sale. The point here is that just posting photos isn’t enough—you usually need more strategy to attract buyers.
They’re a company that helps car dealerships make and post videos online. The idea is to make it easier for dealers to show up on social media consistently and turn that attention into sales.
A dealer principal is basically the main decision-maker at a car dealership. They’re responsible for how the dealership runs and performs overall.
Concept
automotive industry is going to change dramatically over the next 10 years
She’s saying the car business is going to look very different in the next decade. Dealership leaders will need to adapt their thinking and how they run the store to keep up.
Concept
turnover and restore people
“Turnover and restore people” refers to employee churn and the challenge of rebuilding a stable team in a dealership environment. In practice, it often means hiring, training, and retaining sales and service staff while protecting the store’s culture.
“Core four” means picking the few employees who most affect how the workplace runs. You focus your time and attention on them so the culture improves faster, instead of trying to help everyone equally right away.
It’s the idea that a small group of people can create most of the results. So you spend most of your time helping that smaller group instead of trying to fix everything for everyone at once.
This is training for the people who manage the sales team. The goal is to help them coach sellers and run the process better, not just close deals themselves.
Term
AI
AI (artificial intelligence) is being used in dealerships to automate or assist with tasks like lead handling, quoting, and other workflow steps. The speaker’s point is that AI can make parts of the job easier, but it can’t fully replace human judgment in coaching and relationship-based conversations.
Coaching salespeople refers to structured guidance to improve performance—like refining how they talk to customers, handle objections, and follow process. The segment emphasizes that coaching requires human judgment and communication skills beyond what technology can do.
KPIs are numbers a business uses to judge performance—like how many leads get contacted or how many deals get closed. Managers use them to see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Term
desk a deal
“Desk a deal” means putting together the numbers and paperwork for a car deal—like the price and financing terms. The host is saying managers need more than just the ability to do the paperwork.
If the service department isn’t doing well, it usually means they’re not making enough money or getting cars repaired quickly enough. That can hurt the whole dealership, so managers often change staffing and processes.
If the profit margin gets smaller, the dealership makes less money on each car it sells. When that happens, they have to work harder to keep the business profitable.
Dealers don’t control how many cars the manufacturer sends them. If the dealer can’t keep up with what the manufacturer expects, it can create problems for staffing, inventory, and sales.
“Leaky bucket” is a business metaphor for something that’s draining capacity or revenue—like customers not being retained, leads not converting, or work not being scheduled efficiently. In a dealership context, it often points to a process gap where effort doesn’t turn into completed service work.
Operational capacity is basically how much the shop can get done. If the dealership doesn’t have enough capacity, jobs pile up, customers wait longer, and the business can’t capture all the service opportunities.
Technicians are the mechanics doing the actual work on your car. They rely on the service advisor’s notes and recommendations, then confirm what’s needed and perform the repairs.
They’re talking about planning how much work the shop can realistically get done each day. If you know how many technicians are working and what they can handle, you can set a daily goal that adds up to the monthly number.
Concept
technician hours vs target hours
They’re describing a simple planning rule: if a technician doesn’t put in the expected hours, the shop has to adjust to still meet the daily workload goal. It’s about keeping the team’s output on track.
They’re talking about finding ways to spend less money without hurting the business. The idea is to look at what costs keep happening every month and trim the unnecessary parts.
Overtime means working extra hours and usually getting paid more for those hours. The point here is that overtime can add a lot of cost without people noticing.
Claude is an AI tool that can help you make sense of information quickly. Instead of spending hours entering data into spreadsheets, you can give it the material and get a clearer summary.
Company
GBT
This is another AI assistant people use to help with writing and summarizing. The speaker is basically saying they like one AI tool (Claude) more than the other (ChatGPT/GPT) for certain tasks.
LIVE
I decided I was gonna do everything I could
to be competitive, to break through that.
And that when I did finally get my opportunity,
I was gonna bring in all the people who were told no,
and that you can't make it, and then give them a chance,
and to prove to everyone else
that those stereotypes only exist in your mind.
Today I'm joined by Erica Tiffany,
general manager at Walzer-Hunday Brooklyn Park.
As the automotive market shifts,
many dealers are struggling with high turnover
and antiquated sales processes.
Erica breaks down the radical Walzer model
from the four-day work week
to the elimination of the F&I box,
and why these bold bets are paying off
in both culture and profit.
A big thank you to our sponsors
for making this episode possible.
Podium and Nomad Content Studio.
And now, let's get into the show.
Erica Tiffany on the CDG podcast, Erica, welcome.
Welcome, thank you so much, I'm so excited.
Glad to have you on.
How's life in Minnesota?
Well, it's still cold, and it's April,
so those two don't go together.
I know, especially for you, you're from Georgia, initially.
I'm a Southern Belle, and I should be living
in 75-degree weather right now, not booming cars.
So what brought you off to Minnesota?
I can't imagine it was this opportunity,
or I should say, I assumed you were working there previously.
Is that right, wrong?
No, I actually met Sherry Schultz,
which was kind of the head of HR
and recruiting at a conference.
And I was talking, doing some public speaking,
and she said, hey, we need someone like you
in our organization.
I said, well, where are you?
She said, Minnesota.
I said, never, that's not happening.
I'm not moving to Minnesota.
And for about a year, we talked,
and I flew out here a couple of times with my family,
met Andrew Walzer for breakfast,
and saw what a great organization it was,
and I got sold.
They closed me.
Wow, so look at that.
They got you to move up there for the opportunity.
Okay, so we'll talk about the way you run things
and the way Walzer does things,
because I have to imagine that there's some strong reasons
why you'd make that transition.
One thing I found fascinating about your journey,
when I read upon your history,
is just how you got into the business.
I think we've lost some of this.
You don't see it as often,
just putting yourself out there.
In your case, I did read that.
You literally just walked into a dealership and said,
hey, I want to prove myself, which I love.
People sometimes ask me,
you know, people younger than me,
they're like, hey, what's the best way to do this or that?
And many times, I just say, literally, just walk up.
99% of people won't even do that.
Just walk up somewhere and say, hey,
professionally, respectfully, of course,
but just put yourself out there.
So tell us about that part of your story,
which I think is just an incredible story.
Tell us a little bit about how you got into the business
originally.
Yeah, so I was working at a daycare.
I was a high school dropout.
I had just gotten my GED
and I'm raising a young three-month-old baby.
I'm working at a daycare
because it's literally the only place
I can bring my child to work with me.
I'm making $6 an hour and just trying to make ends meet
and my car breaks down.
And you could have told me
that it was gonna be a $2,000 bill.
It was a $200 bill, either way, I couldn't afford it.
And I go into a Midas repair shop
and I'm working with the guy and he says,
hey, how are you gonna pay the bill?
And I said, I have no idea.
I said, but I do have about 50 parents at the school
that need their car fixed.
If you'll give me an opportunity to refer them to you
and give me some time for a payment plan,
maybe we can make this work.
And he said, yes.
From there, he fixed my car
and a year later he started his own repair shop
and came to me and said, hey, would you like a job?
I didn't know anything about the car business.
I didn't know anything about writing service.
But what I did know is he was a good guy
and he was there to help people
and he was offering me $2 more an hour.
So I went from $6 an hour to $8 an hour
and that's literally how I started writing service.
From there, it was super easy
because I had a story to tell.
My car had broke down before.
So it was great to tell customers
why they needed to get these repairs done.
Small five days at a NAP auto repair shop.
And from there, I kind of fell in love with the car business,
kind of fell in love with helping people.
And two years after writing service,
I walked into that dealership.
It was Cars Cars, a buy here pay here dealership in Georgia
where we had 14.9% interest rate blast
that all over the walls.
Your job is your credit.
And I walked in and said, hey, listen,
I worked at a repair shop.
I want to sell cars.
I'm trying to feed my family, give me a chance.
That was your entrance to service, surprisingly.
You didn't enter the franchise dealership from day one.
And like, how was that experience for you,
over what time period?
Like, just tell us a little bit about the learnings.
You're also a pretty good storyteller.
I can tell already.
I mean, just the way you tell the stories
is pretty compelling.
But just, what was that experience like for you?
So it was interesting.
I mean, it's all male, right?
I'm working at this buy here pay here dealership.
I'm fighting with the guys.
They're out on the lot.
They're telling people I'm off,
that I don't work there, that I'm the receptionist.
And I realized that I was going to have
to hustle a little bit different.
So for me, I stayed by the phones.
When you say they're telling you the receptionist
as in all their salespeople in the dealership
are competing with you.
Oh, for sure.
They're like, she doesn't work here.
She's a receptionist.
I mean, this is Atlanta.
This is Cutthroat.
I cut my teeth in the roughest of rough.
But it gave me hustle.
It gave me, you know, a capacity to be resilient.
And, you know, I was working 12 hour days.
I mean, this was like back when we were open on Sundays.
You know, you worked six or seven days a week.
There was no days off on your first 90 days.
You know, I know we struggle sometimes in the car business.
Now those have been in hit for a while.
And we're like, when I came in the business,
I did it this way.
And then we think that everybody else has it easy.
But for me, it was about learning the craft,
understanding what was important to people.
And I was really good at that.
So when I'd get on the phone,
I'd talk to the customers, find out,
do a good needs assessment,
find out about their credit issues.
And when they'd walk in the door
and someone would say I was off or I didn't work there,
they were like, oh no, I spoke to her
and they'd walk right past.
And I got into the habit of customers coming and asking
for me and finally the GM pulled me to the side
and said, what are you doing?
Like, how do you have all these customers
coming and asking for you?
And I said, listen, I'm great on the phones.
I find doing needs assessment.
I figure out what they're trying to accomplish.
And from there, he moved me to the BDC.
So I went from selling cars to running their BDC.
And I think that's where I got really good at my job.
I had 15 people in our BDC.
I then grew it to 30 people.
So then I was basically feeding the BDC
to all of our locations in Atlanta
and making appointments, getting customers in,
training my people on how to do it.
And that kind of set me up for my next position,
which was with Audi.
So I went from two extremes.
Buy here, pay here, 14% interest to 0%
at an Audi luxury dealership.
And the general manager said,
you don't have any franchise experience.
You've never worked in a new car dealership before.
I said, no, but I have a BDC
where we're sending 100 appointments a day.
He said, I'm sold.
And at the time, the internet director
at the Audi dealership, I may never forget,
his name is Bob, Bob sold, got 400 leads a month
and sold 15 cars.
And he thought he was doing a fantastic job.
He gets 400 leads and he gives us 15 cars a month
out of that.
And I was like, what are we doing?
But it was antiquated back then.
And a lot of dealerships, this is probably around 2012.
They didn't have BDCs yet.
They had an internet guy.
And it was just kind of to the point of where
we're starting to see internet and transparency
and people putting leads in.
So I just jumped right into that,
built another BDC at the dealership, built a service BDC.
And that skill set and experience kind of helped
cultivate and tatterpult my career
because I was a great communicator.
You mentioned growing from one dealer group to the other
and expanding, eventually making your way up
to Minnesota, to Walser.
How did you balance that with your child?
Because you mentioned initially that the reason
you went to the daycare was to be with your child.
And so, and by the way, I'm speaking here as a parent
that the weekends are rough.
The weekends are, when they're under five, six, seven,
the weekends are tiring.
So I'm just in back of my mind, I'm like,
okay, what did you do about that situation?
I will tell you, I have three children now
and all three of my children grew up in the car business.
When I say literally at the dealership,
they would come to me with work.
I'd have to go pick them up from daycare,
bring them back to the office.
It was a struggle.
And I think that's an area that Automotive
hasn't quite solved for.
It's one of the things that I'm super excited about
with Walser because of the four day work week,
allowing to have a structure and flexibility
in your schedule to be able to do something.
The four day work week, okay,
we'll talk about that too, what that means.
Yeah, but all three of my kids transitioned with me.
I'm gonna go on a tangent here,
but I think that in general,
there isn't enough kid-friendly stuff.
You realize this as a parent with young kids, right?
Like find me one restaurant that encourages kids,
like truthfully encourages kids, like you can't, right?
Like if you wanna just go out with the kids
and going out to dinner or going out to even lunch
with kids in general, it's tough,
but like, I guess you could say like McDonald's
with the plate place that they have,
like that's like the extent that you'll find
for something where the kids are literally encouraged
to run around.
Anyways, so that's my business idea.
If anyone wants to make like a normal restaurant,
that's not crazy fancy, but just something basic
where kids can actually run around.
I'll be your first customer.
So I actually have a story for that.
I worked for Ashley Church,
who was the general manager of Volkswagen and Marion.
And when I moved to her dealership
as a sales manager in Illinois,
when I say she pulled out all the stops
to make it kid-friendly.
She did her research, she knew I was a young mom.
I felt like I was being recruited by a football team.
She had a, listen, she had a play closet in my office,
a table and a station where my daughter could do her homework
and come in after pre-K and work,
had a whole toy bin set up for me ahead of time.
And you could just really tell the thoughtfulness
that she put into the recruitment by saying,
I know that your kid is important to you.
We're gonna make sure that you get off on time.
We're gonna make sure that you have birthdays
and holidays off with your kid.
We're gonna make sure that if your kid comes to work,
that we have it.
She even had a cot in the back.
So if she wanted to take a nap,
she'd reel the cot in so that my daughter
could take a nap in my office.
I know this is extreme, but I just say that to say that
when we think about recruiting
and we think about outside the box
and people being the most important asset,
I say it all the time, people are the new currency.
I know there's all this fancy technology and AI
and everybody's kind of afraid of it and scared of it,
but no matter what all that technology is,
they're gotta have the people to run it
and the people to believe in it
and the people who are passionate about it.
So if you don't hire the right people
to take over the technology in these processes, you miss it.
Yeah, I was talking to someone or I saw it on TikTok
and they said, the perfect thing.
They said, you're running through the tape
trying to figure out when you lost the game
and you lost the game in the draft.
And if you don't have the right people on your team,
you're missing the boat.
And to recruit a good talent by knowing what's important
to them and their why makes all the difference in the world.
What's your recruiting style?
You know, throw the resume away.
Like I just, I think that we do ourselves a disservice
when we look at a piece of paper with lines on it
and we go, oh, they jump around,
they moved around too much, oh, they can't stay still.
And we don't have an idea about the person.
For me, I'm like, are you coachable or are you trainable?
There's three things I'm looking for.
Are you reliable?
Do you have a good attitude and you're a performer?
To me, I can coach anything else.
So I have so many stories of people that no one believed in
like a lot tech that I brought in.
And his name is Samson.
He was running service.
He was making $16 an hour for me working two jobs,
trying to support his family.
He's from Liberia.
His second language is English.
He didn't move here till he was eight years old
and he just wanted to help his mom out.
And so he's working in there and he says,
Eric, I want to be a service advisor.
And everybody said, this guy, he's a runner.
Like there's no way you can write service.
But I saw something in him.
And I saw that he had passion and grit
and he was here early and he was picking up the dirty towels
from the technicians and he just had this like pride
in his job.
And I said, that's gonna make a great salesperson.
Six months later, I put him through a little process
where I told him what I needed him to do in the shop
and I would give him a job as a salesperson.
He came in, sold 22 cars his first month.
He's now one of the top three sales guys
in the Walzer organization.
He's been doing it for two years now
and consistently sells 25 cars every single month.
Two years ago, he was moving cars and washing them.
Those are the opportunities you're not gonna find
on a resume.
Cause this kid just looks like someone who's 19 years old
and just got out of high school.
But again, looking for coachable and trainable,
you can't teach hunger.
And when you find somebody who's hungry
and you can find out their why,
you can bring the best out of people.
And I think that to me is how my recruiting style works.
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That's absolutely incredible.
How did you learn that?
Cause everything you just said,
there's some points you made there,
which, you know, I ate a lot of broken glass
until I, you know, did the saying, right?
When you run a company that you're eating broken,
but I went through a lot of stuff till I picked that up.
And I'm curious to know like, where did you learn that, right?
Did you learn it from experience?
Did someone mentor you?
And you learned out like, how did you,
especially about, you know, being coachable
and having to write attitude,
these are fundamentals, which I couldn't agree more, right?
I used to say, you know, I'd meet someone in the office
and even today, if I meet someone, you know, virtually,
but when you're just talking with someone,
like how are they even reacting
and what is their attitude?
I mean, if you're going to, if I'm interviewing you
and you look like, you know, you just came out of bed
and you don't want to be here,
how are you going to speak with a customer?
Or it doesn't, you know what I mean?
Like, these are like very basic.
Like this is, you know, A's and B's.
So I'm curious, what was your way of getting to this point
where you have your training philosophy,
what you look for, like, what was that journey like?
For me, as I started getting to a point
where I was even able to hire,
because what would happen is that I would go to my general manager
or my sales manager and say, I think this person was great
and they'd say, no way.
So I think it was the fact that I would have so many people
that I thought were great candidates,
either people that I knew personally
or that I was trying to recruit into the business.
And I kept getting this rejection
and it didn't make sense to me why.
Why are you saying no?
It was some, you know, some simple reason.
Well, look at their history.
They've only worked at Chick-fil-A.
Are they, you know, just done the didn't.
Who was saying no?
Who was saying no?
My GMs, my sales managers,
this is just me in the business.
So I'm bringing people to the BDC.
Like my BDC, for example, I wanted to bring more men in.
And they were like, why would you bring this guy?
I'm like, so men can't work in the BDC.
Men can't work at the front desk.
Like, I don't understand.
Matter of fact, the fact that I have both
keeps the environment better, right?
Cause I have different personalities,
a diversity of thought in there.
And so I just felt like there was this bias
and stereotype about what a salesperson looks like.
What a BDC rep looks like.
What a front desk person looks like.
Or sounds like.
And so this bias started to get to me.
Like, you guys have a type of what this looks like.
And I definitely didn't look like a sales manager
at F and I manager or general manager.
And I decided I was going to do everything I could
cause I'm really competitive to break through that.
And that when I did finally get my opportunity,
I was going to bring in all the people who were told no
and that you can't make it and then give them a chance
and to prove to everyone else that those stereotypes
only exist in your mind, right?
I feel like you like the challenge as well, right?
Like you like to, you know, it's a great thing, right?
To be able to say like, I took that, you know,
diamond in a rough, I polished it and it worked.
And it's fun.
Like when you're right.
When you're right.
Sometimes you're not right and you eat crow,
but that's part of it.
You learn from that experience too.
Hiring is the hardest thing in the world.
Hiring is the hardest thing in the world.
I think you sometimes learn more from your bad hires
than sometimes from your good hires.
Cause you check yourself and you said, you know what?
I should have let that person go a long time ago.
That I led with my heart and maybe not with logic
that there were signs and red flags and I didn't do great,
you know, with my emotions, maybe getting involved
with all the personal things that come up.
So you learn, it's just, it's part of that,
but you got to take a chance, right?
You got to be able to take a chance
and live with that confidence that if I made a decision,
at least I'm going to stand behind it.
Do you, how much do you use your gut during hiring?
As opposed to like sheer black and white logic here.
So let's talk a little bit about the, just what makes
Walser, Walser, as you briefly mentioned me
before the podcast and a little bit here,
a couple of things that stood out.
I want to hit each one of these.
No salespeople that are commissioned, no F and I people.
Four day work week, probably the only dealership
in the world at a four day work week, maybe I'm wrong,
but I haven't heard that one before.
Let's just like break that down one by one.
Let's start with the four day work week, like why?
So the four day work week started about two years ago.
And the biggest reason is that when we had a five day
schedule, you'd have a early out and you'd have a, you know,
a late in and anybody who got off at three o'clock
basically stopped working at noon, right?
And then the late in, they came in, their appointments
didn't start till three or four o'clock in the evening
and they had a split a deal with someone else
because, hey, that was my off day.
We just felt that there was some issues with scheduling
in the five day work week and said someone came up
with the idea of let's do a four day.
And so they basically work four, 10 or 11 hour shifts
from nine to eight.
And it allowed you to have three days off during the week,
more time with your family, more time for your hobbies,
more time for yourself.
Less split deals because you could be there
from the beginning of the day with the lead you got
in the morning and actually get that customer
to come in that evening and have a same day appointment.
And we ran it at two stores as a pilot
and then ran it across all of the walls or dealerships
and we haven't turned back ever since.
So are the other days bell to bell
or is it still normal or yours?
They're bell to bells.
Okay, so the other days are bell to bell.
And okay, so you ran out as a pilot.
How did you measure success?
So what they were looking is just feedback
from the salespeople.
We do poll surveys here.
And so we do a poll survey probably quarterly
just asking our teammates like,
hey, how do you feel?
How is this working?
Obviously asking the general managers
and the sales managers who the feedback was listened.
I feel refreshed and the schedules are different.
Sometimes it was every other day.
You work Monday, you're off Tuesday,
you work Wednesday, you're off Thursday
and then you work Friday, Saturday.
Sometimes it was two days in a row.
I'm off Monday, Tuesday
and I work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
So getting a three-day weekend with your family,
coming in refreshed and ready to have,
have this kind of excitement and energy ready to go.
Now there are some nuances with it, right?
When you've been gone for two days
and you're just getting back to your portfolio
and your work plan, when a person is off
or a sales manager is off,
it can make it a little bit difficult
because of those four days
or when you're doing your vacation planning.
If it's only four-day work week
and you're taking a vacation,
I mean, you can really use that to your advantage
to have some nice time off
and still kind of protect your PTO.
So there were nuances, I think, that made it a challenge
but we communicated as a general manager group.
We kind of have like a 20 group every month
that we talk about the pros and cons
and work through them.
Bound adjustments, looked at schedules at each store.
Some stores were larger and had, you know,
25 salespeople, some were smaller and had eight or nine.
So there did need to be adjustments
per manufacturer and per dealership
but I think that's what made Walls are so great
is that we went with it and we worked together
and we got through all the concerns
and it turned into something very special.
Now, let's connect this to the non-commissioned salespeople.
When there's many dealerships that do this, have done this,
have tried this, have failed at it, have reverted,
some are still on until today,
what happened to people's salaries
and did those get adjusted
and tell us a little bit about that?
No, salaries were fine.
I mean, the salespeople are still heavy on the salary.
They have bonuses based on some of the products
that they sell for finance.
We're a one-price store, one person, one point of contact
so you're with your salesperson from beginning to end.
They do all the FNI menus.
They talk about all the products with their customers
and it allows the customer
to just have a very unique experience with them.
Our managers, our team leads.
We do not have a desk.
We do not have a tower.
Our sales managers are right there on the floor
with their team.
Think of it like a restaurant
and you have your tables that you're waiting
and the sales managers constantly jumping in between tables,
finding out is everybody okay, touching base,
if a salesperson needs help on a menu
or needs some coaching, they're there.
And we have one finance person who is not in a box,
who's not in an office, who's also on the floor,
who's just making sure the deals get submitted,
the loan values where it needs to be,
that hard credit challenge customers
are getting the help they need.
But what they're not doing is going into some office,
being grinded for 45 minutes to buy stuff that they don't want.
They're actually being able to be transparent
with the customer and the salesperson together
and the sales managers there as a coach and just as backup.
It's something I have never seen in the business
which is why it made it so easy to come to Walter.
It is very non-commential.
So I know my audience very well by now
and what do you think their dealer's listening
right now are thinking?
You're not making any money.
Let's just see what you think.
Boom, bingo.
You're effinized.
That was literally my next question.
I love it.
I love it.
You know, there we go.
I know, there are many comments right now.
So what everyone is thinking right now is how are you holding gross?
Like how do you compare in your 20 group, right?
Where do you stack up?
So first, let me say this.
We do three weeks of training with every salesperson.
These salespeople do not come on the floor
until they've been through this extensive training.
It's something Walter was fantastic about.
So you're going to take these guys off site
and you're going to show them the road to the sell.
You're going to talk about a trade appraisal.
You're going to understand how our CRM tool works.
And then you're going to talk about F&I.
They're going to learn Gap.
They're going to learn all the products that we do.
Now you're saying, yeah, okay, great, Erica.
Three weeks is going to take 10 or 15 years of experience
from a great F&I guy.
But what the difference is this,
I'd rather have a salesperson who may not be that experienced
in all the F&I products,
but can show a menu and lead with empathy
and emotional intelligence
and has an awareness to what their customer feels like
because they've been with them for the last two hours.
And that alone gives us lift
that I don't think that you're going to be able to compare
just bringing someone in the office off a cold menu
or they're already saying, here we go.
Here's this guy who's ready to twist my arm.
It's just a different experience.
And we do do comparisons all the time on our 20 group
where we stack, how my Hyundai store.
How do you stack up?
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you this.
Before we started this,
when we didn't have this intense training about F&I,
we were probably $400, $500 per copy
less than the average Hyundai dealer in town.
What with the F&I training that we put in process
with these F&I managers that are now in the store,
they're not necessarily bringing customers
into a box with them,
but they're in the store coaching the sales people
and the sales managers.
We've seen an incredible lift in our F&I PBR.
And we're just as competitive,
if not better than most of the dealers in our 20 groups.
Wow.
So you were doing a couple hundred below average.
Today, would you say your average above average?
Or average, some stores are above average.
My store probably is about $200 below
the average Hyundai store.
And then why decentralize F&I?
What drove that decision?
Because you don't have to,
like you could still have an F&I manager
that just sits on the floor,
if you want to be more, introduce more transparency
or if there's some cultural driver for that,
that you want to make that happen.
So why change the entire role completely
and empower the team to do that?
One price, one person, one point of contact.
If you've asked any sales person,
what their point of contingency is,
is the moment that customer goes to the box.
Their nerves are there, they're stressed out,
their customers waiting, they're like,
hey, when is my guy going to get in?
They're afraid the finance manager
is going to boot their customer out of the box, right?
Like, you blew my guy out of there.
I mean, there's a lot of pressure and anxiety
that comes from that.
When you empower your sales person,
allow them to have control of their destiny.
But listen, here's what,
these are the products that your customer
has an opportunity to get.
Here's the value of those products.
And here's how that will benefit them in the long run.
You empower the sales person to do something
and you're creating your next manager.
Why wouldn't you want sales people
who can learn these things,
who then in succession planning
puts them in a better position
versus think about our traditional model.
How long do you have to be a sales person
before you're even considered for FNI?
Even if you're considered,
there's maybe one, two, three spots at your dealership
that some guy's been in for 10 or 15 years.
So right away, I have 10 to 12 employees
that are all basically succession planning.
For their next future job, as a sales manager,
for their next future job, as a team lead,
as a general manager, et cetera.
But you still have a floating FNI resource
who's circling in the dealership, right?
He's circling the dealership the entire time.
Game planning, coaching menus,
making sure that everybody's set up,
understanding what bank programs
and why we're going to do this bank with that bank,
and then occasionally meeting the customer.
That was going to be my next question, right?
Updated bank programs, rebates, incentives,
how do we get an alignment across the group
when it comes to that?
That's their job.
The FNI director's job is to make sure
that that happens to each of the sales managers,
but not necessarily with the salesperson.
So the FNI guy's job is to empower the sales managers.
How do I make sure that each one of my sales managers
is educated on the programs,
the current rebates, and what we're writing?
And then there's education that happens in real time,
as well as training that happens with that director as well.
That's incredible.
I want to take a step back.
I wanted to ask you about your training process,
because you told me that, again,
when we were chitchatting before we pressed record,
you were a sales manager for over a decade.
And you recently, I mean, recently,
as of roughly two years ago,
took on the position of general manager.
Can you tell me a little bit about the training you went through?
What was that like?
You mentioned a year of training.
It's tough to find the right GM.
It's even tougher to groom and to train
and to build the right person for an organization.
Your success story,
and I'm curious, what kind of training did you undergo?
So when I met Andrew Walzer, he said,
you want to be a general manager?
I said, yes.
He said, have you ever applied for a role?
I said, absolutely not.
He said, why not?
I said, I'm not ready.
And he said, what makes you think you're not ready?
And I said, I just haven't had any training.
I haven't even been a GSM.
And he said, we're never ready.
He said that.
He said, the fact that you think you're not ready
is why you're ready.
I have people in my office all the time
who think they're ready, but they're not.
He said, it's the humility.
It's the open-mindedness that you're not ready
that actually makes you more prepared.
He said, give me a year.
I'll put you with one of my best general managers.
We'll make sure that you understand the walls your way.
Our systems, what we use.
And we'll get you ready.
And under that is how I got here.
I didn't come straight into a general manager position.
Basically, I was second in command to a GM
that already had a successful Chevrolet store
here in Minnesota.
And I was his right-hand person for a whole year.
I mean, we did everything together.
I learned at the 40 work week.
I learned how to do the team lead.
Again, I came from a traditional store.
So I'm used to the tower.
I'm used to traditional F&I.
All of this was new to me.
And watched the processes, ingrained myself
into the walls your way, understood the culture,
understood the way they did things,
and immersed myself into the reports,
into the statements.
And this stuff was just more than anything
I could have ever imagined was the hands-on,
day-to-day training with someone who knew the job,
who wasn't intimidated by me, who wasn't like,
hey, I'm getting fired and you're taking my job.
I was a peer.
And I was someone who was going to bring
some additional bandwidth to the automotive group.
They didn't know what store I was going to get at the time.
There wasn't even a store available at the time.
But I believe that's what makes a great leader
is that Andrew Walzer has vision.
And for him, he said, I don't know when I'm
going to need another store.
I know that I will have another store.
And I'd rather be ready and over-prepared
with leaders on the bench than be waiting
for the right leaders.
And that was what happened.
And so what was your actual position at the time?
How was your compensation structured?
How did that actually work?
So I was considered a senior sales manager,
which in a traditional store would be very similar
to a general sales manager.
So I managed the managers.
The very first six months, I managed a team
just like a regular sales manager.
They wanted me in the trenches, on the ground, with the team.
Because his biggest thing was, can you grow people?
He didn't say, what were your F&I numbers?
Or how many new cars can you sell?
Or what is your used car?
Can you develop more challenge for the organization?
Exactly.
Can you grow and develop people?
That's what I want to see from you.
Can you grow people?
And that was something I was actually good at.
Maybe not all those stuff.
But I was good at growing people.
So I had my team, then I became the manager of the managers.
And a year and a half later, I was able to get my own store.
It's such an important point, right?
Like they call it the entrepreneur stack.
I heard this from another guy.
But if you don't have in an organization
that many entrepreneurs who are building their own teams
and developing their own people, you will never scale.
And so what you just said, it just makes total sense.
It's like, can you develop people?
All the other stuff is coachable.
It's zeros and ones, right?
You can't develop people.
You can't grow a store, period.
And so it's an incredible, incredible foresight
by the dealer principle and great on you for capitalizing on that.
Okay, so you did that for a year.
When did you take the GMC at the Hyundai store?
August of 2023.
Okay, August of 2023.
So let's just start out with top challenges for you, right?
I think for anyone listening and acquiring stores
and bringing in new GMs, like what were the top three challenges
or how would you describe the biggest challenges that you faced
over the past couple of years?
I came in with a bunch of adrenaline.
Oh my God, I got my own store.
It was an interesting story because the general manager had
had gotten hurt in an accident.
And basically the store had ran for six months
without a general manager.
So there was a lot of turmoil happening in the store.
because I was coming from a very, very, very well run store
with processes and structure and discipline
and a GM who had all that stuff in place.
So I'll say in the beginning it was chaos.
The hardest thing for me was fixed operations.
We don't lean in enough on how underprepared our leadership
is when it comes to learning fixed ops.
So when my service advisor quit and my service manager
was calling out, I didn't know what to do.
Like how do I go in and fix this?
I had 15 years ago ran a small service repair shop
with three bays with five customers a day.
Now I have 65 to 70 appointments every single day.
Technicians that need work, advisors who need training.
And I was sitting here with 90% of my experience in variable.
So that was a learning curve.
And I spent a lot of time and fixed myself
just trying to figure about the lay of the line.
Can I write a service ticket?
Do I understand the parts margins?
I mean, there was this language that I didn't understand.
And I spent a lot of time outside of the dealership
with other general managers, with other groups and conferences
that I would go to and books that I had to read
because for me, knowledge was power.
What has helped you in your career?
For me, what's helped is being able to lean in on resources
outside of the dealership.
I think the dealership is great because you have kind of like minds,
especially with Walzer.
A lot of their general managers grew up
within the Walzer organization.
But for me, the relationships outside of the dealership were great.
I would call general managers, I know what other dealerships back in Atlanta,
bounce those ideas off, talk to them about where I was struggling in
and how I could get these things figured out
and use their knowledge and expertise
because they had been doing it for a lot longer than me.
The books that I were reading were operational,
talking more about leadership styles and understanding my people
and understanding what was important to them.
Because for me, if I could understand the person,
I could figure out the problem a lot better.
We can work through the problem together,
but I need the person in place to be able to handle the process.
And in the beginning, it was about stability.
I couldn't go hire a bunch of new people.
I'm not from Minnesota.
I don't have a network here.
So I need a stability right within the team that I had
to get them to believe that I was the right leader
and that I was going to be able to fix the place.
And then I needed their help more importantly.
You're also founder of, is it a peer group?
It's a non-profit.
It's an automotive network, a non-profit.
Okay, so I want to chat about this actually
before we talk about what your plans and intros are.
Because I think it's between doing everything you're doing,
you have created what it's called Wocan,
which is Woman of Color Automotive Network,
where I really respect this initiative
because I feel like we've sort of done similar things
in different areas where similarly,
I observed that there was a need for peer or just dealers
and peer groups and having shared resources in the industry.
You observed that as well, obviously in a different niche
and you did something about it.
And most people don't do something about it.
And so can you tell us like, how did you think
about creating this automotive network?
Why did you think about doing it?
And doing it of course while also running a dealership?
Like tell us a little bit about that story.
Yeah, so being a woman and a woman of color and automotive,
it's very often that you are the only one.
The idea of not fitting in is something I was very used to,
whether it's in a meeting or it's at a conference.
And when George Floyd murder happened, it was very evident
there was conversations that were happening inside the dealership
that I realized really brought this intensity of emotion
between people having different viewpoints
of a very, very sensitive topic.
And in that moment, I felt like I didn't have anyone to talk to,
like there wasn't a peer person who understood my point of view
and that I was alone.
And I realized that there wasn't anybody at work
who was going to have the same viewpoint and conversation
uniquely like I did.
And the few friends that I did have lived in other states.
So I had my girlfriend, Amanda, who was in Colorado.
She's one of the first women to own a independent car dealership
in the state of Colorado.
And there was a Patrice Banks who runs Girls Auto Clinic
and she is one of the, she found her own service department
where it's an all-female garage where you can get your hair down
and your nails done while you get your car repaired.
I used to drive by it on the way to...
Really? In Philly?
Yeah, upper Darby.
I'm pretty sure it's in Boston on the way to Temple University.
Carrie Wise, who's just done some amazing things
as a chief marketing officer for so many different organizations.
Yeah, she's amazing.
And so these four women that I knew in automotive
that I was decent friends with and we had cross paths,
so to speak, from time to time.
We started having these conversations about like
how different it was for us and that we needed a resource
and there wasn't one.
There was Women in Automotive, which is another organization,
but it only talked about a portion of the struggles that we had.
The idea to create this came from it didn't exist.
And so we decided to start it.
It was right after COVID too.
So there was a lot of Zoom meetings and teams
and it was very easy to create an organization online.
And we used that to kind of catapult our conversations
with other women and said,
listen, if you're a woman of color in automotive, meet with us.
And we started meeting weekly on Zoom meetings and Facebook live
and just kind of got the word out.
And we saw a huge response of women that said,
hey, I'm at my dealership and there's no one like me
and I want to have a conversation
about some of the struggles that I deal with.
And people sometimes minimize that the struggles are different.
I can tell you a story of one of my first years
as a general manager and I walked out to a customer
and they were pissed off.
And they had asked to speak to the person in charge
and asked to speak to the general manager.
And I walk out.
I'm super friendly and I come to shake their hand.
Wouldn't shake my hand and said,
I'm here to speak to the general manager.
And I was like, okay, let me do a little spin
because it is still me, right?
Like there's an idea that I could not be the GM, right?
So what was the outcome of that?
Well, once I said, ma'am, I am the general manager.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
I didn't beat all the blah, blah, blah.
That happens very often, right?
Like the chewing on your tongue.
These incidents where I've been at a winner's circle award
for an OEM where I'm around all of the top 10,
let's say sales managers in the country
and they're all white men and I'm standing out
and someone says, hey, the wives are going to make it
to go do the shopping experience.
We're getting ready to go do the golf.
And I'm like, no, no, I'm with the award winners.
I'm going to be one of the 10.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
I thought those situations have actually happened.
And it is a different experience
because I don't look like what someone
would expect a general manager to look like.
But we're going to change that.
And that's what Woken was about,
is that we're going to create these opportunities
and that you need to have diversity in your dealership.
Nobody would buy all blue cars of the same, right?
Because it makes no sense.
We understand that when you have a diversity
in inventory, different colors, different trends,
high and low and luxury, like all of the diversity
of your vehicles means you bring in customers
from all walks of life, right?
Because the inventory brings them.
Well, the same thing with your employees.
If you have a diverse employee group,
your employee who's from the Hmong community
or who's from Muslim will bring their customers
from their churches and from their soccer practice.
And all of the places that they live
because they have relationships and say,
guess what, this dealership is a great place to work.
I would recommend you buy a car here.
So you discredit sometimes the idea
that diversifying your employee database and group
is just as important as the inventory you have
because we're going to attract people that say,
you know what, this was a great car buying experience.
If I liked you, not I liked you because you're a woman
or I liked you because you're black, I just liked you.
But me being a black woman means I have a different experience
than one of my peers.
And Woken is a place to empower, to get education.
We have scholarships.
We do in-person meetings.
We pay for women to get education,
maybe to go to FNI school.
So all the barriers that maybe come into play
because your general manager looks at you and says,
I don't know if that's a mentee to me.
I don't know if I feel connected to you
where I put you under my shoulder and take you out for a beer
and go out on the golf course and teach you the ropes.
Since we may not have that direct connection,
how can I make sure to find someone
that could give her that, who could see her as a mentee,
who could give her the education and the communication
and late night phone calls when you're having a bad day
and say, it's going to be okay.
I've been there.
That is what Woken does is creating that network.
And we have been so pleased.
We have over a thousand members now from all sectors,
all walks of life.
That I didn't expect.
That's very significant.
Yeah, we do a conference in Miami every year.
We partner with NAMAD,
the National Automotive Minority Dealer Association.
We partner with NAMAD and then we have a luncheon.
We had over a hundred attendees last year.
We had Stacey Abrams as a speaker
who had run for governor in Georgia.
Like we really are putting a place together
where women can come to a conference
and see faces that look like them.
And that matters more than you know.
I can only imagine because to your point,
I've personally felt the power of peer groups
and being with like-minded people.
I'm the last person that needs to be sold
on just the power of that and having that person to call.
I think that's huge.
And I'm curious.
Like what else?
It seems like you've expanded,
you said like very meaningful number of members,
a conference annually.
What's your vision when you think about this
and just the future?
Like what do you want to create out of this beyond that?
Is this, you mentioned it's a not for profit.
So you know, what do you do with more scholarships?
Like how do you want this to evolve in the industry?
Well, for what can our goal,
when you look at the statistics
and how little there is a representation of women
and then minority women in this industry,
we know that there's a problem there.
The black women who own dealerships
in this country right now out of 17,000 dealerships
is seven or eight and that number has to change.
And so the idea is that you'll never have women,
black women or minority women ownership
if you don't start building the database
and start building it from the ground up.
So we have to take those salespeople
and create sales managers,
create those sales managers, create finance managers,
create those finance managers,
create GSMs and general managers
and eventually ownership.
And if you think about a hundred years ago,
there are lots of disparities
why we couldn't own dealerships,
why we didn't have the capital and the land and the education.
So now how do we get past those pain points
and start putting ourselves in a position of power
to have ownership, to be able to be a franchise dealer,
to have your name on the building?
That has to start somewhere
and we can complain about the problem
or we can actually put initiatives in place
to fix the problem.
And that's what Wocan is about.
We want to create the future owners,
the future dealers, the future principals
and then to expand within not just automotive retail
but outside of it, the vendor groups.
And I mean, automotive is so expansive.
You go work for the OEM.
We just want to make sure
that we're putting a place to understand
how great the automotive industry is.
It took a young girl like me at 18 years old
with a GED and no high school education
who was just a single mom trying to take care of my kids
to being able to run a Hyundai dealership
with 70 employees that did 2 million last year.
Like that to me is a testament in and of itself
of the power of an opportunity
of someone just giving you a chance, believing in you
and we want to make sure that more women have those chances.
This episode is brought to you by Nomad Content Studio.
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That's TryNomad.co to book a call
or click the link in the show notes below.
Erika, what's your personal goal?
Like what's your personal aspiration when,
you know, in five years, 10 years,
where do you want to see yourself?
I really like public speaking.
So, you know, in a perfect world, I would love to,
thank you, I would love to have an opportunity
and a platform to coach and share
and take the experience that I've had in automotive
and give that back, how to make it lucrative
and how to make it, you know, I haven't quite figured out.
I've thought about owning my own dealership
and have gone to several classes and organizations
to learn what it takes to be able to be a dealer principal
or to be an owner one day.
But then sometimes I think about the sheer mass
of like responsibility it takes
and I kind of go, oh my gosh, it's a lot.
So, I'm not sure.
I think ownership is still something
that I'm very excited about.
Learning the last couple of years of general manager
has definitely opened my eyes to what it takes
to be a successful, well, I won't say successful yet,
to be a general manager, I'm working on the successful part.
And so now it's just, the world is oyster.
I think the automotive industry is going to change
dramatically over the next 10 years.
And I think that the industry is going to ask for leaders
who are thinking different outside the box
who willing to take a challenge,
who are not going to have these prehistoric ideas
and willing to take the next generation of automotive
to the next level.
And I don't know if the job that I need to do next
has even been created yet.
And to me, that's what's most exciting about it.
Well said.
If there's a GM listening that's just struggling
with turnover and restore people,
like what's one actionable piece of advice that you'd give them?
One thing that someone gave me,
especially when you have a bigger store,
is to focus on, they called it the core four.
And it goes back to the idea of spending 80% of your time
on 20% of your people.
If you try to save everyone, it's probably not going to work.
If you have a culture issue in your store
and you're not sure where to start, pick four people.
And the way you can decide which four peoples
that the dealership was going to get shut down tomorrow
and you could only take four people with you,
who are those four people and why?
And when you identify the people that your dealership
just can't work without,
those are the ones you want to spend your time
with cultivating, bring them in,
understand what the culture issues are
from their point of view.
And then strategically with them,
work together and say, listen,
I want to have you head this department or this initiative
to get the culture back on track
based on the feedback that they're giving you.
And if you do that with those four people
in the four department,
it's going to take your resources
and kind of divide them out a lot better
than you trying to take 60 people
and put your arm around them for 61 on winds
to figure out how to fix it.
So I think you just kind of have to take
it small bits at a time
with the people who matter to you most
and have the most influence and impact
on the dealership's overall turnover.
And those people can do more than you can do by yourself.
What's your biggest operational challenge today?
We spoke about your current performance,
your tenure as a GM,
and of course, cultural impact.
What about operationally?
What's the biggest operational challenge you're facing?
So our big bets with Walzer this year are FNI,
fixed operations, and sales management training.
We've done a great job of making sure our sales people
get the three weeks of training,
but now we have to train our people who train our people.
And as technology is making a lot of the parts
of the job easier, especially with AI,
I think it's important for us to make sure
that we have the emotional intelligence
to recognize things that the computers can't,
especially when it comes to coaching salespeople.
So our managers sometimes didn't get enough training
because they got thrown in the job,
and now they're in a position to lead people
that they have to hold accountable,
have crucial conversations with, manage KPIs,
and we haven't given them the skill set to do that.
Yeah, they can desk a deal and they can do a trade appraisal,
but what about the other skills that technology can't do?
And that to me is one of the biggest initiatives
that I'm working on right now with Walzer
is that we're training our management team.
We've gone as far as creating an entire curriculum
of succession planning for our sales managers
to get to the next level,
and the general managers are taking the course themselves.
We're all coming in on a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,
and we're gonna take these classes
just like our team members will
to make sure that we're putting ourselves
in the best position to grow our future leaders.
At my store, one challenge is fixed operations.
It is still something that I'm working through.
I just hired a new service manager, let one go three weeks ago.
It was a very tough part of parting ways with him,
but I'm now excited that I have someone
who has the vision to take our service department
to the next level.
I know that our service department is underperforming,
that we're not profitable.
The fixed absorption here needs work,
and as the margins between new cars and used cars
continues to shrink, and we're having a struggle
to be able to keep up with the manufacturer's demand
to throw our cars at us,
and we gotta get them out of here faster,
and the new cars are becoming less and less profitable,
and we gotta focus on FNI.
If your service department is not up to speed,
you're going to be in trouble coming up very, very soon.
So as the market fluctuates,
it's called fixed operations for a reason, right?
It's gotta be steady.
It's gotta be the place that you can depend on
to keep your organization running strongly,
and I know that that has to be my focus point
if I want to win.
And well, you've already taken the bold step
of bringing in a new leader.
So what do you think, what is the challenge?
Of course, every problem is a people problem,
but beyond that, what is the challenge?
Are you not bringing in enough people
and not retaining the customer?
Like what are you seeing?
Where's the leaky bucket here?
It's gonna be our operational capacity, right?
This story needs to do 22 to 2,500 hours
to really get to the place we need to be.
Our service advisors need training
until our service advisors
are able to actually sell more work
and be able to get the recommendations
back to the technicians.
Our technicians are never gonna be able
to produce enough hours per day.
So it's a math problem at the end of the day.
Once I know how many technicians I have in place,
I understand how many hours based on their skill set,
then I can easily decide that I need to do 85 hours per day
to be able to get to 2,200 hours at the end of the month
and then have a leader who understands
that production on a daily basis.
On an hourly basis.
But technician comes in and he's working eight hours
and yesterday he did five.
Well, guess what?
He needs to do 11.
Like the idea of understanding production
at that level is quite different.
And we take it for granted a lot of times
that that part of the business can,
the smallest adjustment,
you taking a part and making it $1.50 more
because it's a part that you sell 5,000 of a month.
Like these small little nuances
can do so much to increase your margins,
not to mention expense control, right?
That was something I learned the hard way,
coming into a dealership like this.
I mean, we have a expense
that's close to a million dollars every single month.
And when you think that type of expense,
it kind of makes your stomach hurt
because you go on every single day,
like I have to write a check
for how much to keep this place open.
And then the idea that how can I cut expenses?
We had two security cameras.
I was able to cut it down to one.
We had four printers within like five steps of each other.
And I'm like, why do we have all these printers?
Well, the girls in the office
don't really like walking around the corner.
That printer's gone. It's costing me $5,000 a month.
Like are you kidding me?
Oh my God. Yeah, the least printers are the worst.
What are we doing right now?
So you start looking through your expenses
and you start saying, where can I cut here?
Do I need this?
Overtime is an expense that we forget about a lot.
Like why don't we have so much overtime here?
Are we managing this on a daily basis?
Are the technicians actually clocking out for lunch?
And if not, why?
So some of the simplest fixes
are just by understanding the business
and being able to look at it,
which is why after two or three years,
I have enough data now that's my own data
to look back and say, where did I do really well at?
Where do I need work?
How do I compare it to the other dealerships
in the organization in this area?
And using that and AI,
because this is where I can kind of like,
I like to analyze data.
I hate compiling it.
So for me, AI helps me skip through it
because I can just like dump stuff.
Yeah, I can dump.
There you go.
Because I hate to freaking go and type all the stuff
in a spreadsheet like, uh-uh, give that to somebody else.
But if I could get-
Which AI do you use?
Claude.
I like Claude.
Can't GBT, I like for different things,
like when I want to do personal things.
Claude is great, great.
We use it as well.
Yeah, we actually,
Walter had an AI conference
where they brought all their general managers in
and we spent two days just learning about AI.
Like that's the progressiveness of a dealer
who understands the future
and that this tool is going to use to empower us.
That's very smart.
Not to just take jobs, you know.
So yeah, I use AI to kind of understand the data
and then help me brainstorm as a thought partner
to figure out where my best opportunities are.
Because I love to execute.
I just sometimes struggle with the strategy.
I'm like ADHD and I have all these different thoughts
and they're moving all around.
I need it to like, say, Erica, focus, step one.
And it makes me a better leader for sure.
Beautiful story.
And I'm really, really just popped to continue
following your journey and to see,
I mean, you're only in year two or year three now.
And you're on a great trajectory.
So it's really impressive.
I learned a lot and it's really just excited
to follow your journey.
Erica Tiffany, Walser Hyundai.
Erica, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
This was great.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
And it was a pleasure to be a guest.
Thank you.
Pleasure to have you.
Thank you.
All right.
Hope you enjoyed that episode.
Please give the podcast a rating.
Consider subscribing to the show
and check the show notes for links to what we talked about.
Thanks for tuning in.
I'll see you guys next time.
About this episode
Erikka Tiffani traces her rise from a high school dropout and young mother making $6 an hour to general manager at Walser Hyundai Brooklyn Park, crediting hustle, storytelling, and a willingness to walk in and ask for a chance. She contrasts rough early roles in service, buy-here-pay-here sales, and BDC leadership with Walser’s modern approach: a four-day work week, strong recruiting, and a culture built around people. The conversation also digs into eliminating outdated dealership processes, including the F&I box, and why flexibility can improve both retention and profit.
Today I'm joined by Erikka Tiffani, General Manager at Walser Hyundai Brooklyn Park.
In an industry defined by grind and tradition, Erikka breaks down how Walzer has successfully implemented a 4-day work week and a non-commissioned sales model.
We discuss the transition from traditional F&I "boxes" to a one-point-of-contact system that actually maintains high PVR.
This episode is brought to you by:
1. Podium - the AI platform trusted by one in three dealerships. Podium helps dealers consolidate sales, service, messaging, and voice into one connected system that actually runs the work. If your AI isn’t driving real outcomes, it’s time to take a closer look @ here.
2. Nomad Content Studio - The team behind the dealers you actually see on social media. Nomad works in your dealership to build a brand new pipeline of sales driven by social media content. They’re the same team behind names like George Saliba, Benzs & Bowties, and EV Auto—dealers who’ve built national brands and sold more cars in the process. If you want your dealership to be next, head to @ here and book a call.
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Topics:
02:35 Daycare Worker Who Walked Into A Dealership.
04:50 Why Salesmen Said She Was The Receptionist.
08:20 The GM With A Play Closet In Her Office.
10:55 Why Resumes Lie, Hunger Doesn't.
12:30 The Car Washer Selling 25 Cars A Month.
16:10 The Four-Day Work Week That Works.
18:45 Why Walzer Killed The F&I Box.
23:45 The F&I Gap Nobody Expected.
27:10 Why He Hired Someone "Not Ready."
32:15 The Skill Most GMs Lack.
36:50 When A Customer Refused To Shake Hands.
48:30 Why $5,000 In Printers Had To Go.
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