If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Last year, Asbury Automotive Group was mindful of that rule when it purchased Larry H. Miller Dealerships for $3.2 billion.
Following the acquisition, Asbury left Rick Trinkl — general manager of Larry H. Miller Hyundai Peoria in Arizona — in charge of his fast-growing dealership.
Which comes as no surprise. In 2021, the suburban Phoenix dealership sold a record 2,779 new vehicles, up from 2,005 the previous year. Last year, it also sold 993 used vehicles, up from 874 in 2020.
And now the store has topped Automotive News‘ annual list of the 100 Best Dealerships To Work For.
This is the third-straight year that the dealership has been recognized as the nation’s best large dealership — a category that covers stores with more than 100 employees — and the first time it has been honored as the overall winner.
Trinkl is sticking with the personnel practices that have made his store such a success. Sales associates are on salary — not commission — although they are also rewarded for high customer satisfaction scores and end-of-year sales goals.
Sales associates with one year of seniority also receive a retention bonus of $250 a month. After two years, that bonus rises to $750 a month.
The store’s 32 salespeople operate on 45-hour workweeks with two days off per week. That’s a bit tricky in a seven-day-a-week market such as Phoenix. But Trinkl noted, “The bigger the store, the easier it is to do those things.”
The dealership’s junior management development program also is starting to get results. Participants — generally salespeople younger than 30 — sit in on the store’s biweekly manager sessions, and they also meet one-on-one with Trinkl once a month.
Trinkl already has promoted two of the seven trainees, and one of them — 27-year-old Nick Laffoon — is now a finance manager.
Laffoon joined Larry H. Miller Hyundai Peoria nearly six years ago after crisscrossing Texas as an electrical contractor. “It was a good job for a 19-year-old, but I wanted to do something where I could come home every night. Phoenix is my home, and this is where I wanted to be.”
His close friend — a salesman at the dealership — suggested that Laffoon join him there.
“I hesitated at first,” Laffoon said. “I had never really thought about it. At the dealership, we sometimes joke that none of us had ever gone to our high school guidance counselors and told them that we want to be a car salesman.”
After a slow start, Laffoon discovered that he was good at it. He also discovered that he was ambitious. As a salesman, “I was doing the same thing over and over. I was producing good numbers, but I wanted something more.”
After Trinkl entered him in the dealership’s management training program, Laffoon got a peek inside the dealership’s financial “black box.” The managers showed him data for inventory, advertising, personnel, sales gross — everything that mattered. Laffoon was intrigued.
“You can see where all the money goes,” he said. “You can see how many people you need in certain departments.”
Laffoon is confident he’ll have still more opportunities to move up. “We’re very busy — it’s trial by fire,” he said. “This is just the first steppingstone for my career.”
Despite hot demand among dealerships for service technicians, Trinkl has had zero turnover among his expert technicians during the past two years. But with 30 service bays, the dealership needs a reliable supply of apprentice technicians.
To ensure that supply, the dealership has a representative on the advisory board of the Universal Technical Institute, and it hires interns who attend Western Maricopa Education Center, a technical high school. Trinkl’s son recently graduated from that school, though he’ll work at a different dealership to avoid any nepotism issues.
Two women who recently graduated from the institute are technicians at the Hyundai dealership, including Joanna Ortiz, who decided to become a service technician during the pandemic after her first career choice — the culinary arts — fell through.
“My dad used to work in an auto collision center when I was younger,” she recalled. “I used to go to work with him, and I really enjoyed shop life. Whenever he worked on his cars, I’d hold the light for him. I enjoyed fixing cars and finding out what was wrong.”
In December, the store will start paying off her $12,000 tuition bill in monthly installments, which is expected to take five years. As long as she stays there, her student loan payments are covered.
So how does she like it there? At first, “I was very much intimidated,” Ortiz admitted. “Being a girl surrounded by men, it’s a little scary — especially when you don’t know much. But the dealership was very welcoming. They were very encouraging.”
Thanks to a steady supply of graduates from the two schools, the dealership hasn’t suffered any shortage of technicians.
“We are in a really amazing situation,” Trinkl said. “We’ll sit in a room with other dealer groups, and if they ask, ‘Who needs technicians?’ everybody raises their hand. But I never do. I have all the technicians I need.”
As COVID-19 infections recede, the pandemic has fallen off the front pages.
But Trinkl hasn’t forgotten, and he is trying to COVID-proof his work force. The dealership, for example, has cross-trained employees in every position. “We’d worked on it before, but it wasn’t a top priority prior to COVID,” Trinkl said. “But now we know we can lose people in waves.”
Each department also schedules shifts so that all key workers are not in the building at the same time, to prevent mass infections.
And each service technician now has their own cart to transport parts. Each cart is loaded separately and brought out to the service bay so that the technicians don’t congregate at the parts counter.
“We started that during COVID, but we also found it to be more efficient,” Trinkl said.
Given the dealership’s fast-growing sales — which so far has matched the Phoenix area’s explosive growth — it doesn’t seem likely that Asbury will tinker with Trinkl’s management system.
After purchasing the dealership group last December, Asbury “came in and said we were doing great work,” Trinkl said. “They didn’t want to mess with what we were doing.”