Seven Rules for Dealership Planning Season

Most stores run a planning session in November. Most of them come out of it with a budget and a list of about thirty things, and by the third week of February the list is gone and the budget is the only document anyone still opens. These rules are about the gap between those two: what each manager is actually going to finish, and how you'll know in March whether they did.

1. Put the long-range goals on the wall before anyone opens their mouth

Two or three of them. Absorption to 68%. Headcount flat while units grow 12%. Whatever this store is actually chasing over the next three years.

If they're not up there in marker before the brainstorm starts, the room ranks by whatever's been annoying people that month. Annoying and important overlap less than you'd think.

2. Make the owner say the link out loud, in one sentence

Someone proposes a goal. Before it goes on the list, the person who'd own it says which long-range goal it moves. One sentence, out loud, in front of everybody.

"Hire and fully onboard one tech by March 31, that's two more bays running, that's absorption." Good. It's on the list.

"Improve the service experience." That's not a goal, that's a mood. It might be the most important thing in the building and it still doesn't belong on this list, because nobody can tell you on March 31 whether it happened.

3. Announce the cap before you rank, not after

Three per manager. Two if it's a short quarter or they're covering a second department.

Say the number before anyone starts ranking. People rank honestly when they already know the list gets cut at three. Announce it afterwards and you're not running a ranking exercise, you're asking nine people to agree on which of their own ideas to kill, and that goes about how you'd expect.

4. One name per goal

Not "service." Not "Dave and Priya." One name.

The owner doesn't have to do the work. They're the person who has a bad week when it slips. Goals owned by a department have nobody in that chair, which is why they're the ones sitting at 40% in March while everything else got done.

5. Write the finish line so two people would score it the same

"Improve warranty claim accuracy" can't be scored. Two managers will look at the same quarter and genuinely disagree about whether it happened.

"Rejection rate under 5% for three straight months, measured at the March close" can be scored by anyone who can pull the report.

Write it the second way, in the room, before people leave. It's about four minutes a goal.

6. The twenty-odd items that didn't make the cut get owners and dates the same day

This is the rule that gets skipped, and skipping it is why the cap stops working in year two.

The shuttle schedule still needs fixing. Obsolescence still needs a decision. If the twenty-seven things that didn't make the cut just evaporate when the meeting ends, your managers learn that planning season is where good ideas go to die, and next November they'll walk in with three safe ones and nothing worth arguing about.

Owner and date on everything before the room clears. Most of it is a week of work, not a quarter.

7. Book the weekly check before anyone stands up

Five minutes. Every goal, on track or off track. No discussion unless something's off, and when it is, it comes out of the check and into its own conversation.

Book it during the session. Not "we'll sort out a cadence" — day, time, recurring invite, done, while everyone's still sitting there. The first slip usually shows up around week three, and five minutes a week is what catches it.

The version of this that actually happens

A fixed-ops manager walks out of the November meeting owning nine things. Capacity, dispatch, warranty cleanup, CSI, the shuttle, tooling, the apprentice program, the parts-to-service handoff, a training schedule.

He's good at his job, so he takes all nine seriously and moves each of them a little. Mid-February: partial progress on seven, nothing finished. He can talk for ten minutes about how the quarter went and none of it is excuses.

Run the same nine through the rules above. Absorption is the long-range goal, so three survive rule 2 — capacity, dispatch, warranty cleanup. Each gets his name, a finish line, a date. The other six get owners and dates as regular work.

Three things finish. Nothing about him changed.

Before you run this year's session

• Long-range goals go on the wall before the brainstorm, or the room ranks by irritation.
• One sentence, said out loud by the owner, linking the goal to one of them. No sentence, no slot.
• Three per manager, and the number gets announced before ranking, not after.
• One name per goal, and a finish line two people would score identically in March.
• Everything that didn't make the cut leaves the room with an owner and a date.

None of this makes the session longer than the one you were already going to run.

A fair amount of what survives the cut turns out to be people work. Hire a tech by March 31. Get training completions up. Get onboarding actually finishing inside the ninety days. That part is what HR4 does, across 1,000+ rooftops in Canada and the US.

FAQS

Q1. How many goals should a dealership manager take on per quarter?

Three. Two if it is a short quarter or they are covering a second department. Say the cap out loud before the room starts ranking, because people rank honestly when they already know the list gets cut at three rather than after they have argued for nine.

Q2. How do you tell a real planning goal from a task?

Have the person who would own it say, in one sentence, which long-range goal it moves. Hiring a tech by March 31 to run two more bays and move absorption works. Improving the service experience does not, because nobody can score it on March 31.

Q3. What makes a dealership planning session fall apart by February?

Usually three things: goals written so vaguely that two managers would score them differently, goals owned by a department instead of a person, and no weekly check booked before everyone left the room. The first slip normally shows up around week three.

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