A personal look back at 20 years of change in Canada’s auto retail industry
Upon discovering that Canadian auto dealer was turning twenty, I felt engaged to recall my own experience with automotive retail in Canada, as much of my career evolved over the same period.
In some respects, our industry can seem slow to change, however when viewed through a two-decade lens, there has been much we have endured, enjoyed, and most of all, have learned from.
When the magazine was founded in 2005, I was a Sales Consultant at a BMW dealership in Saskatoon. Having moved there three years earlier, I was only beginning to get accustomed to the intense seasonality long winters brought to our business.
Hard to imagine back then that my oldest child would eventually become a successful Sales Consultant at a dealership twenty years later. Those tough winters in luxury brand sales taught me to be resourceful and not simply wait for prospects to walk in the door. I needed to create outbound opportunities. To this day, when I am consulting in dealerships, I look for processes that help actively put customers into the sales funnel.
By Canadian auto dealer’s fifth anniversary, I was helping open the first Porsche Centre in Saskatchewan. This was a six-day-a-week endeavour with a very small team.
I’m not sure how we all had the energy back then, but I know our enthusiasm for building a brand like that in a new market really kept us going.
Luckily, I had a mentor along the way, and with his help and guidance, the biggest little Porsche store in the West got off to a great start. I learned many things about running a dealership I would not have learned on my own, which taught me the value of mentorship and transfer of knowledge in automotive retail. Values that I am happy to live in the present day in my faculty role at Georgian College.
By the magazine’s ten-year mark, we had grown the little Porsche store into a profitable and award-winning business, with a fantastic customer following.
Those tough winters in luxury brand sales taught me to be resourceful and not simply wait for prospects to walk in the door. I needed to create outbound opportunities.
Via continued mentorship, training, and experience, I started to feel like a leader. Still, as innovative hybrids were arriving, and expensive EVs were on the horizon for the reluctant Saskatchewan marketplace, I learned that the automotive industry will never let you rest for long on your laurels. Some of the biggest curve balls were yet to come.
Canadian auto dealer would have celebrated its fifteenth birthday in 2020 while wearing a mask, because it was right at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This was a time of great transition for all of us. I went from running a Mazda store in north Edmonton, to consulting for a company that specialized in the then-new concept of automotive digital retailing. This prescient idea was well-timed, as dealers were being pushed quicker than ever towards change, and the basic functions of selling and servicing cars were upended by the pandemic and its new rules.
Later that year, while running a large Mercedes-Benz store in Ontario, the pandemic’s demand for almost-daily change was brought to the forefront. What I learned from operating a dealership during the pandemic was that change is inevitable. those that meet it head on, however, can lead their teams through even the most adverse times and come out the other side with better process and a better business.
Finally, as I am writing this, the 20th anniversary of Canadian auto dealer sees me enjoying a very bird’s eye view of our industry. When working within a dealership, it is often very easy to keep your head down and in the day-to-day operations.
Sometimes you miss the benefit of the wider industry perspective, particularly the advantages that being in Canada brings: great connections, manageable dealer networks, collaborative OEMs, and events where everybody knows your name and is in it with you.
All you have to do is flip through the pages of any issue of this magazine to see people in automotive retail coming together to work on the bigger picture for Canadian dealers. What I have learned through this experience, and the twenty years previous, is the power of giving back to an industry that is easy to love.
