By Jeff Martin
As Seen in Used Car Dealer Magazine | September 2026
Every fall, most dealers across the country sit down to build next year’s financial goals. They pencil out advertising spend, reconsider floor plan costs, argue over CRM subscriptions, and debate whether that reconditioning line item can be trimmed. Here at NIADA, we’re kicking off that same budgeting process right now — and it’s a good moment to say something plainly: the best return on investment in your dealership isn’t parked out front. It’s standing on your lot in a polo shirt, answering the phone in your service department, or reconciling deals in your back office.
Your people are the greatest investment you can make. Not because that’s a nice sentiment for a LinkedIn post, but because in the used car business, where trust is the whole product, your team is the brand. Customers don’t remember your inventory mix. They remember how they were treated by the salesperson who didn’t pressure them, the finance manager who explained their options straight forward, or the service advisor who called back when they said they would.
I was in a conversation recently about leadership, and the thing that stuck with me is this: good leadership is more culture than process. You can write every policy manual in the world, but a manual doesn’t make someone show up early, tell a customer the truth about a trade-in, or assist a teammate having a rough week. Culture does that. And culture starts with something simple: empowerment. Specifically, it starts with people feeling heard.
Think about your own dealership. When a salesperson raises a concern about a process, or a technician flags a problem with how parts get ordered, do they feel like that input goes somewhere? Or do they feel like they’re supposed to nod along and get back to work? Once people genuinely feel heard in your culture, you stop having to sell them on where the dealership is headed. Alignment isn’t something you negotiate — it’s something that happens naturally when people trust that their voice matters.
That trust runs both ways, and this is the part leaders sometimes forget. Leaders owe their teams three things: accountability, confidence, and empathy. And leaders should expect those same three things back. Accountability means following through on what you said you’d do — as a GM, as an owner, as a manager on the floor. Confidence means giving people real authority to do their jobs instead of hovering over every decision. Empathy means remembering that the person detailing cars in July heat or working the phones during a slow month is a human being first, not a line item.
Everything else in a dealership follows from that foundation. Retention follows from it — you don’t have to fight so hard to keep good people if they know they’re valued. Customer experience follows from it — an employee who feels respected treats customers with the same respect. Even your bottom line follows from it, because turnover is expensive, training is expensive, and a demoralized sales floor shows up in your numbers before it ever shows up in an exit interview.
As you contemplate your financials for 2027, I’d encourage every dealer reading this to ask a harder question than “what can we cut?” Ask “what are we investing in our people?” That might mean better training, more competitive pay plans, clearer paths for advancement, or simply carving out time to actually listen to the people who run your dealership every day. None of that shows up as flashy as a new inventory acquisition tool. But it’s the investment that compounds the longest.
Take care of your people. The rest of the business tends to take care of itself.
