Welcome to another edition of the Car Dealership Guy Podcast Recap—a rundown of key lessons from top operators, founders, and execs shaping the future of auto retail.
Today’s guest is Erikka Tiffani, General Manager at Walser Hyundai Brooklyn Park.
In an industry defined by grind and tradition, Erikka breaks down how Walzer has successfully implemented a 4-day work week and a non-commissioned sales model.
Hiring on potential beats hiring on history
Erikka argues that resumes filter out some of the best candidates before a conversation ever starts.
"Are you coachable? Are you trainable? There's three things I'm looking for. Are you reliable? Do you have a good attitude? And you're a performer. To me, I can coach anything else."
One of her hires was a lot tech making $16/hour who now consistently sells 25 cars a month and is one of the top three salespeople in the organization.
The four-day work week solves problems the five-day schedule created
Split deals and dead-zone shifts were costing the team real money.
"It allowed you to have three days off during the week, more time with your family, more time for your hobbies, more time for yourself, less split deals because you could be there from the beginning of the day with a lead you got in the morning and actually get that customer to come in that evening and have a same-day appointment."
They piloted it at two stores before rolling it across the group, and two years in, nobody's asking to go back.
Eliminating the F&I box changes the entire customer dynamic
With the traditional model, the customer walks into a separate office expecting to get sold on products they don't want, and the salesperson sits outside hoping the finance manager doesn't blow up their deal.
"When you empower your salesperson, allow them to have control of their destiny—these are the products that your customer has an opportunity to get. Here's the value of those products and here's how that will benefit them in the long run. You empower the salesperson to do something and you're creating your next manager."
They were running $400-$500 below average on per-copy, and with the F&I coaching they've put in place, some stores are now landing above average, though Erikka notes her own store is still running about $200 below the Hyundai average.
Recruiting with empathy is one of the most underrated retention tools
A GM Erikka worked under (Ashley Church of Volkswagen Marion) researched what she needed as a working mom and had a fully equipped office with a toy bin, homework station, and a cot waiting before her first day.
"When we think about recruiting and we think about outside the box and people being the most important asset, I say it all the time, people are the new currency...if you don't hire the right people to take over the technology and these processes, you miss it."
Knowing a candidate's "why" is what separates a hire from a long-term keeper.
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Diversity in your employee base works the same way as diversity in your inventory
Erikka draws a direct line between inventory diversity and employee diversity, and argues most stores never stop to think about what a homogenous team is costing them in market reach.
"If you have a diverse employee group, your employee who's from the Muslim community will bring their customers from their churches and from their soccer practice and all of the places that they live because they have relationships and say, 'Guess what? This dealership is a great place to work. I would recommend you buy a car here.'"
A team that all looks the same tends to sell to a customer base that all looks the same, and most stores never stop to think about what that's costing them.
Humility about readiness is what actually makes a good GM candidate
When Erikka told Andrew Walser she wasn't ready for the GM role, his answer reframed everything.
"He said the fact that you think you're not ready is why you're ready. I have people in my office all the time who think they're ready, but they're not. He said, 'It's the humility. It's the open-mindedness that you're not ready that actually makes you more prepared.'"
She spent a full year working alongside an experienced GM before getting her own store, and she's pretty clear that's why things went as well as they did.
Fixed operations is the part of the business most variable ops leaders don't understand
Fifteen years running BDCs and sales teams left real gaps when the service advisers quit and the service manager started calling out.
"Fixed operations is still something that I'm working through...I spent a lot of time in fixed myself just trying to figure out the lay of the land. Can I write a service ticket? Do I understand the parts margins? I mean, there was just language that I didn't understand."
With new-car margins shrinking, a service department that's not producing enough hours will hurt a lot more than most GMs expect.
Turning around a broken store starts with stabilizing four people, not sixty
Walking into a store that had run without a GM for six months, with turnover and disgruntled staff in every direction, the instinct to fix everything at once was overwhelming.
"If you have a culture issue in your store and you're not sure where to start, pick four people. And the way you can decide which four people is that if the dealership was going to get shutdown tomorrow and you could only take four people with you, who are those four people and why?"
Get those four on the same page, and they'll move the rest of the store faster than you can on your own.
The industry's next leadership gap is in training the people who train others
Most managers got promoted because they could close a deal, not because anyone taught them how to lead.
"Our managers sometimes didn't get enough training because they got thrown in the job and now they're in a position to lead people that they have to hold accountable, have crucial conversations with, manage KPIs, and we haven't given them the skill set to do that."
To fix this, Walser built out a full management curriculum, with the GMs sitting in the same classes as their teams.
Building a pipeline of minority women in automotive requires starting at the bottom, not the top
Out of 17,000 dealerships in the U.S., Erikka said only seven or eight are owned by Black women, and that number won't move without a deliberate ground-up effort.
"You'll never have women, Black women or minority women ownership if you don't start building the database and start building it from the ground up. So we have to take those salespeople and create sales managers. Create those sales managers, create finance managers. Create those finance managers, create GSMs and general managers and eventually ownership."
Her nonprofit, WCAN (Women of Color Automotive Network), now has over 1,000 members, hosts an annual conference, and funds F&I school through scholarships.
