People Dependent vs. Process Driven

A process is a game plan that pieces together a series of daily activities performed by your team working together to attain a shared vision and accomplish individual, team and dealership goals.

Why is it that some dealerships have special finance departments that consistently thrive while others just can’t seem to get the hang of it? Most likely, it’s because one has a special finance department that is driven by process and the other has a department dependent on people. I’m not saying that having good people isn’t a plus, but I’ll take a handful of green peas and a proven process over a bunch of car dogs shooting from the hip any day of the week!

The best sports teams don’t win because they have the best player at every position. Usually, when you listen to a winning team talk about why they win, you’ll hear words and phrases like “game plan” and “preparation.”

Professional football teams wouldn’t show up on game day without a playbook, and they certainly wouldn’t show up without practicing the plays in that playbook. So, why would a dealership expect to operate a consistent special finance department without a playbook?

The best athletes in the world don’t just step onto the field and execute their game plan on game day; they practice and train constantly to prepare for the game. Should your special finance team be any different? In the world of special finance, your process is your playbook, and your team should be trained on it so they’re prepared when it’s time to execute, just like a professional football team.

An effective process must be prepared, communicated, trained, then implemented and monitored daily to ensure success. Dealerships which have a detailed special finance process are much more likely to be consistently profitable than those that do not because:

1. Processes don’t have bad habits.

2. You can train your process to anyone.

3. People have emotions and processes do not.

4. When people leave, your process stays.

5. People change; process doesn’t.

Much like the playbook of a winning sports team, the process within your dealership gives each team member their individual job to perform in sync with all other team members’ responsibilities. If each team member performs his job perfectly, the entire team wins as a whole. Any time one person fails to do their job correctly, the entire team fails as a whole.