Tully Williams
At the Niello Company, customer retention drives everything across the group’s 10 luxury dealerships in California. And for fixed-ops director Tully Williams, it starts with one number: 70.
More specifically, ensuring 70% of customers return within 14 months of their last service visit.
Big picture: "We are truly in the repeat and referral business," Williams told Daily Dealer Live hosts Sam D'Arc and Uli De’Martino. "If we are not driving repeat and referral business in the service drive, our dealerships will fail… 40s is a fail. 50s is a fail, 60s is okay, but really the magic number is 70%+.”
Why it matters: Customer acquisition costs keep rising. But repeat customers provide predictable revenue, generate referrals, and create quality trade-ins that fuel used vehicle operations.
The problem: Most dealers don't even know their real retention numbers because they rely on manufacturer data instead of tracking it themselves.
As a result, Williams has abandoned nearly every traditional fixed operations metric. No more effective labor rates. No more hours per repair order.
“These are things from the dinosaur age,” he said.
Instead, everyone from service managers to technicians gets paid for the same thing: hours forecasted.
By the numbers: Williams has hit his 70% retention target across Niello's dealerships while maintaining $182 per hour in gross profit, and running shops at 140-145% capacity use.
Zooming out: He's trying to end transactional thinking and give every service interaction a repeatable blueprint to generate loyalty.
And that means flipping traditional profit-thinking.
The Niello Company sacrifices short-term profits for long-term retention through four key strategies that attract customers to the bay and build relationships:
Tires: Year-round "buy three, get one free" promotions that lose money but get customers in the bay for video inspections and trust-building.
Batteries: Sell replacements instead of jump-starting cars. Every interaction builds relationship equity rather than quick band-aid fixes.
Brakes: 70-80% same-day replacement target for red-flagged issues.
Maintenance: Keep routine services in-house instead of losing customers to quick-lube shops.
And the payoff extends beyond service.
Williams claims his retention-focused service department sells more cars than traditional sales teams by “tenfold.”
The logic is simple—satisfied service customers trust their advisors, who become advocates when it's time to buy their next vehicle.
"The service advisor is our best lead generator to buy their next car because they trust their service advisor if we do a good job," Williams explained.
Bottom line: The Niello Company has built a system that manufactures loyalty—one honest recommendation, one video inspection, one retained customer at a time.
"If you're not striving for 70, then you have to sit there and look in the mirror and say, ‘really, what am I doing?’" said Williams.
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