Credit Crunch, Credit Crunch, Credit Crunch!  Over the last 2 weeks our dealer financing partners have been in many conversations with us here at AutoRevo.  Here are a few of the key changes auto financers have made that hit close to home for our dealers:

Capital One Auto Finance
1. Discontinuing motorcycle loan and auto lease buyout loan products, and suspending person-to-person (private party) auto loan product indefinitely. Exiting these products will allow CapOne to focus on core products of auto loans for new and used cars from dealers and auto loan refinancing.

2. Continue to offer new and used car loan products through all franchised car dealers, but will no longer accept Blank Checks from non-franchised car dealers.

3. Only be financing vehicles with a model year of 2001 or newer.

* * These have a high impact on independent dealers since discontinuing the person-to-person and Blank Check products.  Many independents have lived on this financing for years.

HSBC
This was an absolute pull of the ejection lever on the part of HSBC Auto.

Effective March 17, 2008 HSBC Auto Finance will no longer be offering financing for new or used vehicle purchases. In the past, we had financed new and used car purchases with our TurboCheck® product, which is being discontinued immediately. However, HSBC will still continue to operate as one of the largest car loan refinance lenders in the US. We are finding that in today’s economy, consumers are looking to lower their car payments and have changed our marketing strategy accordingly.

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This is a great milestone for AutoRevo.  We have been fortunate enough to establish the AutoRevo Foundation.  Our focus will be benefiting children in many ways but primarily giving back of our time, resources, and capital needed for children’s charities to succeed.

We have a website in the works, logo, and more, but here is the overview of the foundation:

Foundation Overview
The vision of the AutoRevo Foundation is to offer our resources of employees, customers, and relationships to benefit children and support the world in extreme needs.  We are committed to harnessing the power of people surrounding AutoRevo to improve the lives of those children around us in need.

Our concentration is on employees and those surrounding AutoRevo to give freely of their time and life experiences to lend helping hands to children in need.  We also give of our financial resources to designated charities to foster growth, awareness, and outreach.

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Every organization has the big “what if” ideas.  At AutoRevo, not a day goes by without a “what if” thought from many people in the organization.  We are constantly trying new ideas for our auto dealers and internal processes.  Some stick but others don’t.  What is our approach?  What if, delegation, what is, and investigation!

Leaders always have big ideas, but can you delegate?  We are all do-it-yourselfers at our core, but that doesn’t scale very well.  Delegation means to empower or entrust.  Some of us are control freaks to varying degrees, but what we have to realize is that many people inside and outside your organization are equal in form and different in function.  Let them function….delegate appropriate initiatives to capable individuals (employees, vendors, partners, etc).  Delegation is not complex.  It might be hard for us to do, but it is not complex.

When you delegate it becomes “what is” or something tangible.  Something tangible can be investigated, measured, critiqued, and adjusted.  Delegation is how we move from what if to what is.  Then you have something that is what it is.  If delegation never occurs you can never get to what is, I don’t care how many crackberries you have.

Here is the rub right here: Investigation.  Most of us don’t like investigation.  Why?  It can create conflict, but delegation without investigation is merely relegation (say that sentence again).  Sure, we can delegate this task, this initiative, this project, but can you investigate?  Follow-up, ask questions, get data back, analyze, what would we do different, etc.

Here is a recap of the process:

1. What If (vision)
2. Delegation (empower)
3. What Is (it is what it is, now you have something tangible)
4. Investigation

Your customers will only see about 10% of the inner workings of your dealership, but that other 90% is what it takes to display that 10%.  If you can’t march through this process then all you have is potential and potential simply means you haven’t done anything yet!  Start practicing this 4 step process today and see where it will take you.

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