Peer Benchmarking Review Groups
Steve Howard, Group Facilitator
Steve has more than 25 years of progressive hands-on experience, knowledge and leadership in the automotive sales, service and collision repair industry. He has experience growing these businesses from initial concept, to handling all phases of operations, including overseeing all profit centers, training, sales, marketing and controlling variable and fixed expenses.
Steve has spent the last 6 years as an independent consulting and acquisitions officer to automobile dealers from coast to coast, providing in-depth analysis of financial statements to identify areas of improvement in sales and performance across all automotive sales and body shop divisions. He also provides consulting services to assist dealers and automotive groups with mergers, acquisitions, valuations and sales of dealerships.
Among his previous businesses, Steve has owned multiple new car franchises in Northern Kentucky and one of the largest collision repair facilities in Dallas, Texas, repairing some of the finest and most exclusive automobiles on the market.
Steve owes a great deal of his success in the automotive industry to his dedication and involvement in several 20 groups and peer-to-peer mentoring groups. Steve used these groups to benchmark his dealerships financial performance against similar non-competitive dealers to share and refine best practices. He also credits his success in his ability to provide intelligent and comprehensive business ideas with specifics about how to best implement them.
By implementing the valuable information shared within these mentoring groups on various subjects such as marketing, customer satisfaction and retention methods, service and body shop cycle times, pay plans to meet cost ratio guidelines and used vehicle days to market as well as refining a predetermined day turn on used vehicles, Steve was able to turn around a newly acquired unsuccessful Chevrolet franchise, into a multiple year award winning "GM Mark of Excellent" dealership within one year. General Motors Corporation confers this prestigious award to their finest dealers who have committed themselves to unsurpassed performance in customer satisfaction and profitability in all departments.