Technology can help you:
Everyone is reducing staff and biting the bullet. How can your managers and people continue to do it all with a much smaller staff? What if you lack the special finance expert you think you need to run this business?
The kind of tool you need is one that can function as “special finance in a box.” Technology can do the work of a seasoned special finance manager, just much faster. You need a tool that can calculate the potential profitability of your entire inventory and the LTV’s on every vehicle in your inventory. Let’s face it, lenders aren’t just looking at the credit situation of the customer but at the underlying collateral as well! Knowing where you stand in each and every piece of inventory can help you get more deals approved. You can’t do all of that in your head.
You also need a tool that also calculates accurately the front end gross and the back end as well so you maximize every opportunity you get.
You need a tool that can make it easy for any of your managers to handle the subprime deal – with simple, intuitive process so the brain damage is eliminated! Now more than ever, it is crucial to capture the opportunities your store gets. Get a tool that does multiple iterations and eliminates the hassle and imprecision of calculating deals in your head – things like roll back, payoff, down payment, variable changes, etc. This will save you time and money.
Technology can make subprime easy. Contact me if you would like to hear about our new product, DeskIt™. We designed it with all the issues you face in mind. “It does the work, you make the money!” Subprime should be easy with solid fundamentals and technology working for you. You need every advantage you can get in this market!
Check out www.deskit.com for a quick look!
Over time people do find new jobs. When the economy is doing well, that’s not an issue, we have a constant rise of one industry offsetting the decline of another. So there’s a matter of timing.
Second, geography matters. For most Americans, their biggest asset is their house. When an industry goes under that is both large and involves large units, then communities take a hit and it’s not just the job that goes, but also wealth. Furthermore, given the way in which we finance local government, the community takes a huge hit with schools and everything else. That accentuates the loss of value. And it also means new companies will be very slow to move in. People have to move where the jobs are (absolutely unclear at the moment that such a place exists!), and they’ve lost the resources to do so.
Third, some skills are portable, some are not, and you need the job market to make that link. Much of the value of an organization comes from the ability of its members to function together. Destroy the team and you destroy that value. If GM goes under, then over time Toyota will add a few more plants. But it won’t happen fast enough or in the same geographic area or probably with the same hiring criteria (while age discrimination isn’t legal, how many 55-year-old ex-Detroiters will they end up hiring.)
Again, if this was a single worker, such things wouldn’t matter. Indeed, with luck someone might land a new job in the same community before unemployment insurance runs out — though the job match is likely to be worse, meaning a cut in productivity for the employer [or a worker who is underemployed] and a cut in pay for the worker. But if it’s 160,000 at the same time, then there aren’t going to be any jobs to land in the same community — and the things that tend to cause 160,000 jobs to be lost at the same time probably mean that everyone else is shedding workers, too, across the country. The former is a microeconomic story (as is your friend’s), the latter a macroeconomic one. Unfortunately we’re having to deal with the macroeconomic one right now. And the human cost of massive unemployment, of perfectly capable individuals unable to find jobs, is huge. To lose a job is traumatic, to lose income is traumatic, and it affects family and community and not just the individual. Such unemployment — regional and structural — tends not to end quickly in good times; it can last for years in bad times. And the jobs that are found tend to be bad matches — as in the case of your friend, an experienced manager with all the skills that entails reduced to grunt work. (In contrast, in good times the average spell of unemployment is fairly short — and includes lots of people who quit their jobs because they expect to find something that is a better match. Not many people quitting at the moment.)