CARY, N.C. -

Chuck Bonnano is the vice president of dealer development at the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association. Brent Carmichael is the 20 group moderator, consultant and instructor with NCM Associates.

As engaging as both Bonnano and Carmichael are, a Zoom meeting just could not be the conduit for successful 20 group gatherings each dealership training and consulting expert has orchestrated for years.

“We realized right away that I couldn’t do a 20 group virtually for three days,” Bonanno said in an interview with BHPH Report after the NIADA tried to organize sessions for a fraction of that span when lockdowns began at the outset of the pandemic last spring.

During an episode of the Auto Remarketing Podcast recorded before the pandemic reached the one-year mark, Carmichael described why dealers are thirsty to learn through 20 group gatherings that are held in-person like they’ve been for decades.

“The engagement part of it is probably the biggest aspect of it,” Carmichael said. “You can’t do eight hours straight on a Zoom call. It seems like I have over the last nine months having four, five, six or more a day. It just doesn’t seem to work well for my dealer clients.

“That in-person interaction, there are more free flowing ideas when you’re in person as opposed to looking at a screen with maybe 18 little blocks of video up there,” he continued. “You get more in-depth discussions. I guess eight hours doesn’t seem like as much when you’re in a meeting room with a break every two to three hours, time for lunch. The interaction you have on those breaks is huge as well. Everyone is ready for human contact, if that doesn’t sound too corny.”

What’s probably not so funny is what Bonnano is seeing as alternatives to 20 groups, which have costs associated with being a member as well as for travel and accommodations to attend and participate.

“We’re hearing a lot of interest (about the return of in-person meetings), but we’re competing with social media sites that give free advice,” Bonnano said. “All I ever tell them is that it’s priced accordingly. I’ve seen people giving legal advice on a Facebook Group. You don’t know who this person is or whether what they just told you is even legal.

“But it does tell me there’s a lot of hunger for knowledge, instruction and direction. We’re real excited about this year and beyond coming back to it,” he added.

Sharing best practices

Part of the reason for that excitement is how well independent dealerships — in particular buy-here, pay-here operators — have navigated through the pandemic.

“I think what you had in most cases because you have long-time buyers, long-time salespeople, long-time collection teams, they were seasoned, more independent workers so that when they worked from home or remotely or split shifts or any of the other different strategies that were used, they were able to keep moving right along/ They adapted really well,” Bonnano said

“Those dealerships that were already buying cars online and some sort of platform for digital marketing, the staff and the team were already aware of how to do all of that, they didn’t have to invent it like some of my dealers had to on the fly,” he continued.

“What I was so pleased by with very few exceptions — and the PPP loans helped — but they kept their teams together,” Bonnano said. “Very few people bailed. There were a few people with underlying heath issues who were unable to go forward. But like I’ve said. They’re car people. They’re not going to go hide in a bunker for a year. They wanted to work. And even those that went home to work in accounting and some of the marketing people as well as the underwriting and collections people, most of them were thrilled to get back to the office because they really like their team and the culture.

“Most of these smaller dealers, most people are cross-trained so that when you had split shifts or working from home you could do more than just one thing. I think that helped a ton,” he added.

Resilient operators

NIADA spotted indicators of what Bonnano described not long after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic last March.

The NIADA COVID-19 Dealer Impact Survey of 846 independent operators conducted from last May 9-14 — a follow-up to a survey orchestrated by NIADA a month earlier — found 63% of the dealerships that had furloughed or laid off employees a month earlier have started the process of bringing them back.

Overall, NIADA indicated 34% of the independent dealers said they are rehiring staff, 20% said they are not and 47% said the question was not applicable, meaning they had remained at a full-staffing level throughout the COVID-19 pandemic That was the same percentage as the previous survey.

According to the results, 39% of operators who are rehiring said they had experienced no problems in doing so, but 31% acknowledged their employees were hesitant to come back because they were making more through the government’s enhanced unemployment benefits than they had made at their jobs, and 19% said fear of the coronavirus was an issue.

The survey also showed dealerships opening up again, with 44% doing business as usual (compared to 27% in April), 34% open by appointment only and 10% selling online only.

NIADA discovered just 11% of dealer survey participants remain closed temporarily — down from 27% — and 1% reported they have closed permanently.

“The leadership came out,” Bonnano told BHPH Report this spring. “They were very quick to adapt to what was going on. Looking back now a year later, those first few weeks some people were thinking is this the end of the world? And rather quickly we were deemed to be essential businesses and now we have to figure out how to continue to operate.

“Everybody jumped right in there and we learned that we can buy cars online. We’ve been telling dealers for a long time that the digital world of buying is here. We definitely learned that we can collect remotely. I’ve got some companies where their collectors are still at home. They’ve basically been given the option to work from home as long as their productivity stays high and the results are good. And we can sell cars by appointment, sell them remotely, do it digitally. Again, everybody adapted real quickly like that,” he continued.

“As moderators and trainers, we’ve been talking about digital retailing, not digital marketing, for a long time. Car dealers in general sometimes are slow adopters. But being pushed into this, they recognized rather quickly that we can make this work and they did,” Bonnano went on to say.