There are a lot of retrospectives about 2009 being published in magazines and across the web right now, so I won’t bore you with another one. Suffice it to say, it was a tough year. Things, however, have started to turn a corner. The stock market has risen dramatically since its low in March and more importantly, last month the unemployment rate actually fell slightly. Now I’m not a Pollyanna who is going to tell you everything is fine and there is no more need to worry, but I’m also not Chicken Little. I am realistic, however, and it is time to take a serious look at our businesses and decide where we want to go in the next year and into the future.
After the past year, it’s easy to feel shell-shocked, but we need to move on; we should learn from history, but we can’t let it paralyze us. Now, as the market is taking its first baby steps towards recovery, is the time to grow your market share and seize your share of business as people return to buying cars.
As consumers return to the dealership, many dealers may be tempted to go back to their old ways of doing business; after all, they may think, “if it worked before, it will work now.” It is easy to think this way, but this recession is not like the recessions of the past; it has severely impacted consumer confidence and behavior in ways that are not likely to change simply because the recession has ended. This new consumer mentality, coupled with the new budget and regulatory realities brought on by the recession, mean that dealers are confronting a very different business environment than just a few years ago.
With so much going on in the industry, it is incumbent upon dealers to stay informed and network with eachother to determine how to proceed in the year ahead. The best place to do this is the 2010 NADA Convention & Expo in Orlando Florida. The theme of the convention this year is “Vision for Tomorrow” and there will be five tracks for dealers to attend, depending which parts of their dealerships they need to concentrate on.
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