Are you ready for February? That is probably the biggest question for January.

You should have finished or be finishing your end-of-the-month and end-of-the-year reports. I hope back in November you completed evaluations of your personnel and processes. If not, taking some time to look closely at how each person on your team performed in 2014 is a great exercise before you are deep into the 2015 tax season.

Doing a quick evaluation of your personnel helps now by allowing you to have a candid conversation with each person in your organization about what you expect and what they project will happen during the year. You should, at a minimum, write down the expectations you and the associate “agree” to so there is a record to compare with actual production later in the year.

Static Pool Sales Analysis

One trick I learned years ago has to do with sales tracking each month. We would pull a static sales report for any given month over each of the last three years (such as January 2012, 2013, 2014) . On a calendar white board (you can buy them ready to use or we used pinstripe to make ours) I would list the daily sales activity from the last three years for each calendar day.

You will be surprised how consistent each day and each week are year-over-year (as long as your operation hasn’t had a major operational change). Using that information, you can project when you will be busiest and what each person on your team should be producing each week.

For example, if January 5 through 10 during the last three years your operation has produced approximately 20 sales, you should expect that as a minimum again this year.

If you have four salespeople, in order for each of them to produce their “share” of that production you expect five sales each. Of course you will probably have someone that sells 10, and the others will split the remaining 10, but that is the nature of the business.

In the operation where I first experienced this, if a sales associate did not meet his or her respective share of production, warnings and possible termination could occur quickly.

In my last two dealerships everyone that understood what was going on would be very interested in the consistency of the daily numbers. Posting those numbers always proved to be a great motivator for associates that had access to the board.

Conversely, the associates and managers could be more realistic about sales trends and expectations. If we didn’t sell many vehicles year in and year out during the same week, there was no reason to add the stress of “make more sales or else” in an obviously slower period.

We could spend some of that time analyzing why it was consistently slower and try to work to overcome those issues instead of blindly demanding a sales increase — like trying to squeeze blood from a rock — and we would use slow trending periods to plan time off .

This strategy helped attitudes and allowed sales incentives or motivations to work better when the data showed sales volume should be there.

Looking at Losses, Too

While I had those static pool reports in hand, I would analyze the losses from those time periods. Those figures should also be consistent (again, as long as processes and policies are the same).

You should have a figure for losses you expect and see consistently.

I hope your repossession number is below 30 percent. If there is a spike or a decline in that number, go back and take a look at what was different. It could be underwriting changes, personnel differences, inventory, economic or a host of other forces that caused the variances.

Take a close look at your previous years’ tax season business. When did your loans from those periods see the heaviest loss numbers? Is there something you can control that would mitigate those losses?

All of this is about you as the manager or owner taking some time to setup your operation for better success — inspect what you expect. If you spend some time researching what has happened you will learn a lot about why it happened, and some decisions can be made to alter the repeat of the outcome.

Realistic Expectations

I have met many managers that would blindly say, “We must sell 10 percent more than last month” without taking into consideration that March isn’t going to be good as February or September generally doesn’t eclipse August.

If that same manager would say “over the last three years we have sold ‘X’ number of cars each year for this month, let’s improve that 10 percent this year,” now there is a realistic goal for success, and everyone can quantify how it can be achieved and get behind the effort.

Get the team working together to achieve realistic goals that each team member can recognize as achievable, and you will have a better work environment that is producing. If you just expect increasing sales or grosses month over month without quantifying what represents improvement or a clear path to get there, the battle is over before it began.

Coach your team to win. Don’t just whip them to go faster. It’s a new year, and it could be time for a new attitude or new way of looking at your business.

Gene Daughtry is an experienced trainer and consultant specializing in BHPH/LHPH dealership operations. Daughtry now is director of BHPH operations for PLS Financial and has begun a multistate project of building new BHPH dealerships in several states. He has 17 years of BHPH experience. If you would like a “how to manual” on starting up and operating a BHPH dealership check out www.dealers411.net and get a copy of his book, BHPH 101 Plus. You can reach Daughtry at gene@dealers411.net or (479) 970-4049.