When is Too Much Too Much? Don’t take compliance to excess
by : Gil Van Over


I was dining with another gvo3 associate the other night at a nice seafood restaurant in Laguna Beach overlooking the ocean. Being Midwestern flatlanders, I’m sure we looked like gawking tourists with all the beautiful sights.

However, an example of the Real Housewives of the OC, with all its excesses, will remain seared in my feeble mind well into my 90s. It was relatively early in the evening. The sun was just settling into the ocean as another day morphed into night. The thin crowd reflective of a mid-week work week.

A woman was chatting with a man at another table. At first, her voice was a murmur and I couldn’t tell what she was saying. Then her volume increased as did my recognition that she spoke with a speech impediment.

Curious, I glanced her way. To my horror, the speech impediment was self-induced. She had so much botox in her lips that she had rendered them inoperable. She couldn’t hold her lips in any stable condition, wobbling all over the place. In addition to her slurred speech, she constantly dabbed the saliva from the corner of her mouth.

In an attempt to improve her looks she went so far beyond desirable that she rendered herself ugly. And her lips inoperable. She had done too much!

Dealers can do too much as well. Compliance is a great process and culture to have in place. The alternative is intolerable. But compliance taken too far can be damaging to your core business – selling cars.

Examples
One dealership over-botoxed its safeguards program. As a reminder, a dealership must have a safeguards program in place to prevent the theft of its customers’ personal, non-public information by identity thieves.

This dealership had an F&I office in a separate building from its accounting office, where the deals were stored. The process put into place required that the F&I manager shred the credit bureau report before sending the deal to accounting so that the credit bureau report could not be stolen by the courier.

The F&I manager at this primarily sub-prime dealership ended up running duplicate reports when he had to rehash deals so that he had the credit report in hand.

Training the courier (a company employee) in the safeguards program and using sealed courier bags solved the problem and drastically reduced credit bureau expenses.

Another dealer decided to limit the F&I products sold in his dealership because of all the lawsuits against anything other than credit life, gap and service contracts. His theory was, “if I don’t sell it, I can’t be sued for it.” I am surprised he still sells used cars after all the odometer and prior damage lawsuits on the court dockets.

After installing compliance tools such as proper selling word tracks for each product and a web-based menu, the dealer has expanded his product selection. Not surprisingly, his PVR has increased substantially.

Review
Take a look at the compliance initiatives you have in place. Have you gone too far, have you added too much botox in your attempt to protect your dealership and your bank account? Hopefully you have put a compliance program in place that will provide you the protection you seek while also allowing you to sell cars and make money.

Gil Van Over is the president of gvo3 & Associates, a nationally recognized dealer compliance consulting firm. He assists dealers with F&I and sales compliance.