Editor's note: This feature is part of the "Dealer Training" special section in the June issue of Auto Remarketing and available for Cherokee Media Group Premium subscribers prior to the issue's publications. 

Similar to his early career outside the car business, Brian Pasch wears many hats in his work with auto dealers and the industry at-large. 

As founder of PCG Companies — which includes Brian Pasch Enterprises, PCG Digital, and Localiente — Pasch’s work includes dealer training, consulting, running auto industry conferences, mentoring programs and more. He’s a researcher, author and educator.

“Well, I have a heart for the dealer and I love to teach,” Pasch said of the common thread throughout the various elements of his business. “So, I think the thread is education and teaching.”

And that makes sense, given one of Pasch’s early lines of work as a high-school physics teacher. 

He also wrote software back in the early days of the personal computer, and was a surveyor engineer. Pasch worked for Goldman Sachs, where he gained an understanding of business and data management.  After working in direct marketing and telemarketing, which helped him understand real-time data, Pasch started his own digital marketing agency. 

To generate business, he pitched doctors, lawyers and restaurants, as well as a local car dealership — Circle BMW in Eatontown, N.J. — where he had been purchasing cars for the prior decade. 

Turns out, working with car dealers made the most sense. 

“What I found out from doctors, lawyers and restaurants, some months they would stop advertising. And of course, I was like, ‘Well how am I supposed to feed my family?’ Well, I found out that car dealers advertise every month, in good times and bad times,” Pasch said. “And so, just out of the fact that I wanted a consistent revenue flow, I started doing more (work with) auto dealers and I loved it, because I could bring my data background, my marketing background and my love for people and entrepreneurs. And i think that’s what made me stick.”

And he’s stuck around the car business for close to two decades (and counting).

Car dealers, Pasch says, “are really the heart of local communities; they’re entrepreneurs. So, I love them, I’m an entrepreneur myself. I want to protect their franchise business model and I want to help them succeed. All of those weird, kind of paths through all these different jobs have brought me into where I am today and I couldn’t be happier.”

‘Show-me’ style of teaching

In terms of educating dealers, Pasch leans on providing data, flexibility of learning styles and what he calls a “show-me” approach.

“Dealers are ‘show-me’ type of folks,” Pasch said. “I’ve always loved to show, not just to say, ‘Hey, this is what you should be doing,’ but actually show them what it looks like.” 

For instance, instead of just telling the dealer it is important to inspect their Facebook ads, demonstrate how to do it. 

One way the company does this is through books. In fact, Pasch is working on a workbook to be released this summer that aims to help dealers through the transition from Google’s Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.

“But we also believe that we need to be completely detailed in our training so that people who want to learn on their own, (at) their own pace, can do it without having the crutch of always calling in a consultant,” Pasch said. “We’re kind of a ‘show-me’ and then also tell the whole story in writing so people can learn, if that’s their style.”

One style of learning and communication foisted upon the car business over the past two-plus years — and most any business, for that matter — has been video conferencing. 

“And training took on a whole new meaning. The medium of video conferencing or storing video training in a library became commonplace because no one could travel,” Pasch said.

“Now we had been doing video training for years, so we were prepared. But what we decided to do is shift into a new online training methodology, which is our called our Manager Mentoring Programs,” he said. “We’ll do a live meeting once a week for eight or nine weeks, record those sessions, give the people in those classes some homework discussions and then it becomes, in a sense, a library of topics and material. We keep that online for them for six months.”

The company has found that dealership managers often “have too many distractions,” too much going on, to take the classes at their own pace, Pasch said. So, a hybrid approach has worked.

“What we found is the middle ground to a live meeting is having a weekly live schedule and then online resources. That’s worked well,” Pasch said.  

“And then when dealers realized that even though we provide a lot of hands-on information on how to improve, they just may need an extra set of hands to help them push through change, like creating a seamless retail experience — or maybe it’s their digital retailing mindset inside the dealership,” he said. “In that case, we can send members of our team out to the dealership for in-store training, or we recommend people all the time that we have no financial association with, they’re just great people who do a great job in certain areas of the automotive business.”

Often, the type of material can impact whether live or library training works better. Pasch gives the aforementioned shift from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4. 

“This is a big change for dealers, and we’re going to do a series of live training starting this summer, probably every three months, live, because there’s just way too many questions when a dealer’s going into their own analytics,” Pasch said, later adding: “If it’s a new technique of selling or a slightly new process within their existing CRM, I think remote training works great.”

One aspect of Pasch’s training that he says is unique is that on the agency side of the business, they decided several years ago to not participate in automaker programs. 

“And part of that was, because once you’re in an OEM program, and your livelihood depends on OEM-approved spends, then you really can’t speak your mind anymore. Because if that specific OEM is doing something that you believe is harmful to dealers, you can speak about it, because, well, your hands are a little tied,” he said. 

“So, most of the big players in the marketing world can’t really publicly educate, can’t publicly challenge decisions. And so, we’ve made it kind of part of our culture, even though we’ve lost revenue from it, is to side with the dealer, be an intermediary to move automotive education and retail forward, but be able to speak truth without fear of repercussion,” Pasch said. “And so, our themes of our conferences, we tell it like it is, we bring the data, we act like scientists, not politicians or preachers. And we just let the data speak for itself to move the industry forward.”

Lessons learned from business

One of the key takeaways Pasch has from growing the business over the years has been that working with large dealer groups requires scale to meet their needs. 

“We’ve had to decide where our sweet spots are,” Pasch said. “And supporting a 300-store dealer group, we’re not large enough. Our sweet spot is probably people that are 25-and-under stores … you have to know your market and what you can support.”

It is also important to be able to determine “when to partner and when to innovate” when it comes to solutions for your business, Pasch said. 

“There are some solutions that are amazing — there’s no reason to re-create the wheel or to white-label. Just give the people credit, be part of the solution,” he said. 

“There’s other times you have to innovate. You have to build something yourself. I think that’s very important, because so many times people feel they have to build everything. And they just waste time and money.”

The third takeaway for Pasch has been maintaining stability within your company.

“Auto dealers hate when their account managers change. They have a relationship for two years. They understand their marketing and then boom, sorry, you have a new account manager. Well, for some of the bigger agencies, account managers are changing six months, nine months, 12 months. That is such kryptonite to dealers,” he said.

Pasch said there are account managers that have been with his company more than a decade.

“Stability, knowing your market and knowing when to build versus buy are three things that allowed us to have an amazing voice in the industry, provide great service and believe it not, hold conferences where our competitors come, because there’s room for everyone. if you have a poverty mindset, everyone’s your enemy,” he said. “If you have an abundance mindset, you can welcome everyone to the table and let the dealers choose who’s best for them.”

For more with Pasch, see the below Auto Remarketing Podcast episode from April.