Why so many dealers are having record results

In the last 2 months, many dealers have reported to me record used car months in both volume and profitability.  Often these dealers are attributing their success to the principles of Velocity Management.  While I’m eager and grateful to accept some credit for their success, I think that there is more to it than just the implementation of the Velocity Principles of Management. Why now, and why so suddenly are all of these success stories pouring in?  

Yesterday a pitcher named Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers had what would have been a perfect game taken away from him by an errant call of the home plate empire.  If that pitcher’s perfect game had stood, it would have been the third perfect game in this year’s young baseball season.  In most seasons of the past, there is no more than 1 perfectly pitched game in the entire year.  So, why suddenly already 2 or 3 this year?

I suspect that clues to these phenoms can be found in the anthropologist study of the African Gazelle.  When chased by prey, the African Gazelle runs much faster than is necessary to outpace its pray.  This has caused anthropologists to wonder why the gazelle runs faster than it needs to to escape the pending danger.  Anthropologists have concluded that in fact gazelle’s are not running from lions, their usual prey, but rather from ghosts.  The ghosts are saber tooth tigers and other prehistoric beasts that once roamed the African planes. 

In baseball, use of steroids has been a boom for batters.  Over the past decade, the skill of pitchers has escalated to meet the challenge of the performance enhanced batters.  Now that the use of steroids is in decline, the elevated performance of the pitchers has caused the phenom of more perfect games. 

In the case of the recent record performance of so many dealers, I suspect that they too are performing to meet the challenges of the recent economic past.  Maximum attention to expense control combined with strong commitments to Velocity Principles have created record results.  The lesson that I draw from this experience is that success is derived from applying the good old-fashioned commitment to expense control and the new principles of Velocity Management.  We should all stay lean and mean and committed to the principles of Velocity Management through both good and bad times.

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