Sitting on inventory is a costly and highly inefficient way of running a business. If you’re sitting on Ford Fairmonts, Plymouth Dusters, or a handful of LeBarons I can understand why you can’t turn inventory over. But if you’re a real car dealer that is proactive in moving units as fast as possible, or are intrigued at the thought of monetizing a vehicle before it changes titles, you need to read on.  Aside from Lotlinx to target sitting inventory (literally), there is another emerging solution that makes a dealer $ on "sitting" inventory.

HyreCar is a publicly traded company that has figured out an ingenious way to turn sitting inventory, both new and used, into a revenue stream that runs fast. They took a hard look at the concept of rideshare and came up with a very creative way to insert car dealerships into the money making formula.  It’s really quite simple, instead of letting used or slow moving new inventory sit, why not rent the fully insured assets to local drivers who need a vehicle for Lyft or Uber gigs, but either have no vehicle, or don’t want to put excessive mileage on their current vehicle(s).

Once the rental hits say 2k miles, the dealer pulls it off of the road, labels it a demo (still a new car designation, but at a more buyer-friendly price), and puts the driver into another vehicle. At any point in the process, the rideshare driver can make arrangements to buy the car he or she is using at a discount after putting on the 2,000+ miles. It’s a great way to make money for both the driver and the dealer that could, as a result, develop a customer for life. It’s also a great way for someone who needs money and a car, but has a credit challenge, to make their life better and more productive. The driver can choose the length of their rental from a day, to a week, to a year. The program requires no additional hiring of personnel and can be easily managed by the fleet manager who would be trained to use the HyreCar management software.  

If you are having issues with aging inventory, and it’s tying up your cash flow, I highly suggest you have a conversation with a representative from HyerCar, a truly unique outlier in automotive that brings results that can keep you running in the black.

I'm by no means a Wall Street Wiz. The stock market is booming right now, but it’s never been a viable option for me because I’ve never had any real interest in it. With that said, I did notice something that may actually be somewhat of a hedge against riskier investments no one has ever thought of...or maybe not. I’m not saying it’s a “sure” thing, but it may be a “thing” worth thinking about.

Since I just wrote a blog on the ironic profitability of car dealers located in areas that are struck by floods and natural disasters, I figured I’d do some deeper diving to see how such increases in post-deluge sales affects share prices a quarter after the claims are paid out, and flooded cars have been replaced by new vehicles (since used inventory is depleted by flood damage as well).

What I found was that over the last 365 days, Ford and Chrysler shares were selling at their highest in January and February of this year, a few months after Hurricanes Irma and Harvey. Fiat Chrysler increased over $8 a share while Ford, a notoriously cheap company to invest in, sold for almost $4 more than it does now.  Honda also sold for more than $6 per share in the same time frame.

Toyota, currently trading at or near $119 today, traded at $140 in January earlier this year. If you had thrown $1,000 at Toyota before or during hurricane season, you would have banked 20K. Now, there may be absolutely no correlation between a destructive hurricane season and banking on auto stocks, but the data is at least really, really, compelling.  

GM, which had been doing fairly well in October of 2017 stayed hot through January after dipping a tad in late December. The takeaway here is that GM stock prices stayed stable in that Q1 post disaster period. As of this minute, share prices for GM are down $11 from that January peak. If any of us had put a K down on GM while the winds were blowing and the waters were raging this time last year, we’d have pocketed a 6X ROI 4 months later!  As it stands now, if you held onto that stock until today, you’d be down $400!

With that said, there appears to be a very nasty hurricane off the east coast named Florence trying to float her way into the history books. Will Flo live up to the hype spotlight-starved meteorologists and failing cable networks have been building up (thankfully, they usually don’t)?  Who knows. Will tidal surges and flood waters wreak enough havoc to sink enough vehicles whose owners have comprehensive insurance/flood coverage to make a difference in automotive stock prices in January and February? I for one think it may be worth a c-note or so. Certainly beats the odds of my beloved Browns winning the Super Bowl.

Many of the bigger franchise and Indie dealerships have a hard time attributing where their leads come from. Typically, a single lead may touch a number of different advertising and classified platforms at any given point in the shopping process, including the dealer site itself.  Dealers feel they need to maintain a presence on a variety of increasingly expensive, publicly traded, comp sites to maintain a certain level of visibility in order to hit that lead every step of the way.

Because of this misconception, dealerships are continuously burning ad dollars by over-exposing themselves financially with inefficient advertising and marketing practices. Dealer Analytics provides clarity by elucidating the waste, and helps streamline dealership advertising/marketing processes with top notch analytics...not guess work. 

Simply put, Dealer Analytics is used as a dealership’s insurance policy against wasting advertising and marketing dollars, and ensuring that their website is producing traffic and leads at optimum levels.

Dealer Analytics assigns each client a Google Analytics expert who acts as a “dedicated Account Manager”.  The account manager is tasked with the following practices:

• Monitor and report on the performance of website traffic through Google Analytics
• Generate weekly reports reviewing the performance of each dealer’s website and vendors
• Monthly one-on-one screen shares to go over website/vendor performance
• Alert regarding any issues with traffic, tracking or website performance
• Work with dealership vendors and/or web company to correct issues that are affecting the websites lead generation
• Direct line provided to each dealer’s account manager, no 800 numbers, for quick answers and help
• Free, one-on-one Google Analytics training for anyone at the dealership

Over the course of a single year, Dealer Analytics saves each dealer thousands of dollars in wasted ad budget and inefficient online practices.  The cost to dealers is based on 3 tiers.  The tiers are broken down as such: $99/month, $199/month, and $299/month, with no a 12 month contract.  This also includes unlimited phone calls for the top tier and help from the assigned account manager.

During my conversation with Tracie Costabile, VP of Dealer Analytics, I asked her to give me a couple examples of how they can make a measurable difference in a dealerships online performance.  Here is her response:

“A small Chevrolet dealership in Montana recently enlisted our services to help them determine how to spend their very limited marketing budget.  After analyzing the data in their Google Analytics, we were able to show exactly which vendors were bringing quality, engaged traffic, and which were sending junk clicks that weren’t helping the dealership’s bottom line.  This dealership saved thousands of dollars per month by getting rid of what wasn’t working, including some expensive, big name vendors.  As a bonus, taking that money and putting it into the programs that were producing for them, produced more first generation leads from their website, which in turn boosted their sales.”

“A Ford dealership in Las Vegas was able to benefit from our website monitoring service.  Part of website monitoring is checking on the backlinks the site has.  When the website’s quality scores plummeted, a check into their backlinks revealed that they were being unscrupulously targeted by a competitor who was linking X-rated websites to their main dealership website.  Quality scores are what Google uses to determine where a site will be returned in an organic search.  If the scores go down enough, the dealership disappears from page one of organic searches.  We were able to help the dealership disavow these bad links and restore their quality scores, giving them back their organic, page one placement.”

As a digital marketing veteran of 10 plus years, I’m impressed with Dealer Analytics overall approach to analyzing data and providing actionable advice that makes substantive improvements in performance.  To have an experienced analytics expert provide a monthly audit of your dealership’s digital operation, including digital ad spend, attribution analysis, and website performance for as low as $99, is perhaps the greatest bargain in automotive vendorship history.  These guys are a leading candidate for Automotive Vendor of the Year 2018!