COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – There is a lot of stress and a lot of noise around the RV industry these days.
With Artificial Intelligence changing the world of information and marketing just when many dealers are getting the whole internet thing figured out and the economy making it more difficult for dealers to turn the kinds of profits they need, smaller dealers are feeling the pressure.
The Route 66 RV Network Rally at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs, Colo., which ended Wednesday, helped put a better face on the national picture with a reminder that as part of the larger group, members aren’t facing all of the challenges on their own.
Co-Founder Rob Merrill played off of a quote from keynote speaker Dan Chuparkoff, who said as more noise and more disinformation hits the digital world, there will be so much clutter that it will drive people back to the human experience to try to sort out what’s true.
“We feel like that, for our group, that plays to our advantage,” Merrill told RVBusiness. “Because we work pretty hard to be that trustworthy resource to RV consumers and for the RV supply chain.”
During a wide-ranging interview, Merrill, Co-Founder Steve Francis and Co-Directors Cooper Merrill and Connor Francis talked about inequities in how smaller dealers are treated, initiatives and programs the network provides to help its dealer members succeed and about the tremendous success of some network programs.
Rob Merrill said two of the network’s biggest goals are to help members make more money and to spend less money.
One of those new efforts is through a company called Gravie, which offers an integrated health care strategy for groups of small businesses who band together to increase their buying power and benefit their employees.
Route 66 similarly offers training resources for smaller dealers.
“Most recently, we’ve really been focusing on initiatives that help dealers and explicit initiatives that we offer to help them improve their actual operation,” Cooper Merrill said. “That includes training resources that we just don’t feel exist right now for independent dealers. We’re excited about helping dealers improve in their processes and enhance customer experiences while also doing what we always had done, just trying to find them the best deals using their buying power.”
Rob Merrill said it is important for the network to be involved in programs such as those because in the current economic situation, people are hungry for incremental improvement.
“Sometimes not only do tough times make tough people, but sometimes it requires tough times,” he said. “There are still some significant inequities in the industry that you have to be careful talking about. We know we’re not even at the same table as some of the bigger dealers.”
Steve Francis even went so far as to say the inequities are something that will have to be addressed by the industry or there won’t be any independent RV dealers left.
He said the toughest one to swallow and most difficult to talk about is large dealers paying significantly less for new inventory than smaller dealers because of buying power.
“We’re basically subsidizing the big box dealers,” he said. “The margin compression that has resulted in over two years, three years of that is running RV dealers out of business. It’s not sustainable. The industry is going to have to deal with that, and that’s an uncomfortable thing to talk about.”
But for the Route 66 Network, banding together to increase buying power is only part of the competitive boost dealers can receive.
A number of programs and initiatives have proven extremely successful for dealers over the past several years.
Among those is an offering from RVSurance that provides warranty administration solutions for dealerships.
Dealers with warranty disagreements with manufacturers over how many hours a job should take, for example, can turn to RVSurance.
“A dealer can outsource their warranty and processes and have RVSurance warranty take care of those,” Cooper Francis said. “It is not anti OEM. It is rather pro claim and pro customer. Taking care of the claim the right way and using data to substantiate that a certain job requires so many hours is hugely powerful. When you compared to one dealer’s data set against the whole network’s data set you can see the full picture.”
F&I is another difficult task for many dealerships that Route 66 has seen success with.
“We issued a report card on an F&I training initiative that we launched two years ago and participating dealers experienced an average of 73% increase in F&I revenue,” Rob Merrill said. “That’s in today’s market. You know, if the average dealer can increase their revenue a half-million bucks that’s newsworthy.”
Other successful efforts on the part of the network include Digital Ride’s efforts to improve digital communications from dealers as well as a VIN decoding system that helps dealers and manufacturers verify Vehicle Identification Numbers for units as they come into a dealership.
The VIN system has been adopted by 23 manufacturers and has seen 40,000 inquiries through IDS alone. It has had a 97% success rate in VIN confirmation.
Rob Merrill said if there’s a message for dealers at this year’s rally, it would be encouragement.
“We want to remind manufacturers we’re not going anywhere and let dealers know we are going to be there for them,” he said.
