Your pathway to a better 2026
- Anthony MacLean | Boost Auto
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
If 2025 was a tough year for your business, perhaps it is time to look at the way you do your business improvement and planning rounds for 2026. For many dealers this is an exercise about financials, whereas it could be a transformative exercise to engage with key managers and to set bold goals.
A plan in your head is nothing more than an idea, and yet the best business plan is one that is developed with your team. With this in mind, below is a seven-step plan to assist with planning that I have used successfully. It can provide a pathway to a stronger dealership.
A great framework provides you the best chance of creating the right goals and priorities. Many dealers that I've worked with over the last 18 months have been going through reduced margin pains or growing pains. Think big. It is not enough to aim for growth of two or three percent. Many Kiwi dealerships are relatively small, and modest growth is almost a rounding error.
There are some great benchmark KPI's available and published in the public domain for your business; the Deloitte Automotive KPI link is below. As a minimum, you should be significantly closing the gap between where you perform and the benchmarks (if you are underperforming).
Ownership is a critical part of the process. A business plan developed by a dealer principal with no input from his senior team will be a business plan that the DP imposes. Whereas a business plan developed in conjunction with department managers is very much a living, breathing document that the management team has created for their own department and with a focus that aligns with the DP's visions and goals.
It is much more powerful for a department manager to develop his own goals and an action plan with his manager’s permission and full understanding than it is to be handed a set of targets. Realistically every passing of the baton results in diminished focus and outcomes. It is understandable that a technician might not feel fully engaged in the process, yet it is much more powerful if the foreman, workshop controller, or service manager understands not just the goals but the reasons why. These ‘reasons why’ would have been created by the service manager.
Step 1. Where are we now?
What are the 10 or 12 KPI's that are most critical to the business? Or the five or so KPIs for each department, and what does your year-to-date data tell us about that performance? Record these figures.
Step 2. Where do we want to be?
What goals might we set for each department, either based on this year's performance (the KPIs from Step 1) or some blue sky thinking? Include some business-wise goals, such as reducing staff turnover, being a great place to work, and being the preferred choice for customers. If you are a franchised dealer, there are probably some customer satisfaction goals that you need to achieve.
Step 3. How might we get there?
We may have to run through some smaller exercises to ensure that we focus on the right things.
What do we do well? What should we stop doing, what should we start doing, and what do we do poorly? Have a round table with your management team and capture these on Post-its or a whiteboard. You’ll need to refer to these later.
Create a SWOT analysis bearing in mind that strengths and weaknesses are things that you can control; in other words, they are internal, where opportunities and threats are external factors that you cannot control, but you can counter or prepare for. Applying the internal and external lens reduces the chances that all weaknesses become opportunities.
Identify ideas and actions (these can be thoughts, actions, processes, or workflows) that you want to implement in order to help you get to why you want to be. These are components of the of answering the question, ‘how might we get there?’. Focus on the positives, the things you wish to change or improve, and work hard not to get bogged down in the negatives or soul searching about why things don't work quite right. This is an unstructured section to help you identify the ‘how might we fix or improve things. However not all ideas are created equal.
Step 4 Create priorities.
Applying a simple methodology to the ideas that you have created in order to identify the most effective solutions can be really powerful. Create a chart with a centred vertical line intersected with the centered horizontal line. You should have four roughly equal sections. At the top of the vertical line, write ‘Big Difference,’ and at the bottom, ‘Small Difference.’ On the horizontal axis on the right, write ‘Easy to implement,’ and on the left, write ‘Difficult to implement.’ You will use this chart to prioritize your projects and ideas collected in step three.
An idea in the top quadrant that has a big difference and is easy to implement is a quick win. Conversely, ideas or actions that sit in the bottom left quadrant, difficult to implement and small in difference, are by definition a fool's errand in that they take up a lot of time and deliver very little.
Step 5. Assign the tasks.
As a dealer principal, you cannot do it all by yourself, and if you would attempt to do this, you will fail. Your department managers now have skin in the game; they have set their targets, and this means that they own them. Create a table that has the smart objectives, an action point lead, and a sponsor. All goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. It is not enough to say improved car margins. A smart goal would be to increase the new car margin by 10% within three months.
Step 6. Collate and circulate.
Collect all actions, comments, and goals in a brief document. This is your business plan.
Step. 7. Support, coach, and guide.
Your plan is now live. Schedule bi-monthly business development meetings to see how your team are tracking and where your managers need support. It is likely that you have more experience than they have and have worked through many of the challenges that they are facing. Help them, guide them, and give them enough space to make their decisions. After all, your goal is to make them excellent at their job.
Be generous in rewarding managers for incremental shifts in performance that are positive to the business, because without ownership these goals are so much tougher to achieve.
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