By now I imagine most of you have seen and read Driving the Road Ahead: A View into the Future of Canadian Automobile Retailing, the research paper published this past spring by the Canadian Automobile Dealers Association (CADA).
This comprehensive document provides an important look into the forces and factors shaping the automotive retail industry, and describes a possible future landscape for car dealers. It’s an important piece, and one that the paper’s author Chuck Seguin did a great job putting together.
So here we are, a few months later, and while most car dealers in Canada will have read it (if you haven’t, you should. Contact CADA or myself and we’ll get it to you), the question on my mind is what are you doing about it?
Is your copy dog-eared, with yellow sticky notes marking specific pages, and lots of handwritten notations crammed along the margins, as you translate the strategic insights of the paper into a tactical roadmap for your store?
Or is it sitting on a shelf, with pristine pages and an uncracked spine, much like the owner’s manuals that lie in the glove compartment of junkers at a wrecking yard that look as new as the day the car was sold because they have never been read?
Adapting the strategic insights to a dealership business model will vary by brand, location, ambitions of the dealer principal, and local opportunity.
Hopefully it’s the former.
But either way, the team at Canadian auto dealer is going to help you turn that document into a powerful tool for informing (and possibly transforming) your business.
As Chuck would be the first to tell you, the paper lives at the proverbial 30,000 foot level. For you to apply the thinking in the paper to your business, we need to bring it down to the ground. And as the lead of this column reminds us, the devil is in the details.
Adapting the strategic insights to a dealership business model will vary by brand, location, ambitions of the dealer principal, and local opportunity. So while the paper is an important document, there is much still to be done, and we think we can be of some assistance.
Over the next many months and issues of the magazine, our editorial team will pick up specific themes in the paper and explore them in tactical detail. Working with dealers and vendors across the country, and hand-in-hand with CADA, we will report on and explore examples of how different businesses are applying the thinking, and succeeding in innovating and evolving their businesses.
That innovation might include diversification, such as that undertaken by Perry Itzcovitch and his brother, who have gone from operating a large group of dealerships to a smaller group of dealerships alongside a thriving and growing commercial real estate business. That is just one example. There are countless others.
And we are excited to report on them, and to link them back to the strategic framework of the CADA paper. In this way, we hope to turn Chuck’s initial work into a national conversation — one that highlights the work dealers across the country are doing to not just succeed in tomorrow’s retail landscape, but to put their own fingerprints on it.
Look for much more to come. There’s a future to be built. We have a roadmap. Now let’s find some great spots to visit along the way.
