Where do we go from here?
There’s a lot of change in the air and dealers are thinking their way through it As we sit here in the first quarter of 2023, having lived through two tough years of uncertainty, what can we expect in the …
Category: Aspects of ownership: Chuck Seguin
Getting out of the backfield
I can’t help but look at our current business situation and describe it with a sports metaphor. At the time of writing, it’s Super Bowl weekend in a few days, the NHL all-star game has just finished and the NBA …
Heightened anxiety
Uncertain OEM marketing trends, coupled with the economic forecast, have many dealers feeling uneasy about the future Each fall, as the summer winds down; sunlight hours get shorter and shorter, kids head back to school, and everyone seems to get …
Where are all the workers? Blame demographics
I recently have had many discussions surrounding the fact that there seem to be more jobs than workers to fill them. Virtually every dealer I speak with is looking for people and can’t find them. Many years ago, there was …
Many moving parts and pieces
With so much going on, from supply chain disruptions to decision-making from beyond our border, employee priority shifts and more, 2022 will be an important year to keep a watchful eye on global developments. With the end of the year …
Dealerships and customer experience
What pandemic-learned experience tells us about our customers and future business. The past 18 months have been a true learning experience. As the world pivoted towards digital transformation, auto retailing had no option but to follow. Up until then, traditional …
Which changes will stick around?
Doing things the good old way might not work anymore. By the time you read this article, some 18 months will have passed since the dominance of the pandemic took over our personal and business lives in March 2020. Rolling …
The only certainty is uncertainty
For auto dealers, that may not necessarily be a bad thing. The past 16 months have been filled with stops, starts, restarts, more stops and more restarts. By the time this article comes to print, in the next few months …
Succession: the ins and outs
Succession planning can be complicated and it involves many moving parts, but whatever you can do in advance, do it now. All throughout history, ownership and management succession have continued to play an integral role in ground-level operations at automobile …
Hot, hot, hot!
The automotive retail buy-sell market is ripe for the picking and selling of dealerships. In normal times, “hot, hot, hot” would refer to trips to the sun-bleached islands, walking barefoot along the sandy surf and sipping your favourite cocktail. The …
Digitization is the engine propelling our evolution
We are no longer selling. Instead, the consumer is buying and digitization is the engine we need to boost auto retail to the next level. 2020 turned out to be a year of accelerated digitization, created by the need to …
Flexibility is the word for 2021
Looking ahead, it’s going to be a year of shifting sand and changing tides. But dealers are used to that. After a dreadful 2020, Canadian automobile dealers are looking for better days ahead. Our business, as we knew it, shifted …
