Putting MDCE to work

Ask a dozen people about where to hold a trade show, and you’ll get a dozen answers.

But whether you return with a tan, a handful of poker chips or a Disney trinket, what ultimately determines whether the show was worth your while are the results you achieve in your business due to what you learned and the contacts you made.

The 2010 Marine Dealer Conference & Expo, which took place in Orlando, Nov. 14-17, may have looked like a success from the outside: It featured a larger exhibit floor, an increase in educational seminars and many more participants. But the ultimate test of the show – which was co-produced by Boating Industry magazine and the Marine Retailers Association of America – occurs when attendees return to their dealerships.

So, as dealers provided rave reviews of their event experiences, Boating Industry’s editorial team dug deeper, interviewing three dealer principal attendees. Here is what we learned.

Planning for success

When Tom Mack began planning for MDCE 2010, South Shore Marine’s return on investment was a key focus.

During the conference, the company’s team of four attendees spread out, getting back together during breaks to download what they had learned from each session.

Upon returning from the event, the group met to collect all the notes they had taken and break the ideas into sales and service categories so that they could be introduced during each department’s meeting. This included ideas generated during the company’s 20 Group meeting, held in conjunction with MDCE, and the conference itself. A few weeks later, the entire team met for three to four hours regarding these ideas.

The outcome? A list of more than 50 initiatives, big and small, for the dealership to pursue in the year ahead.

One initiative that is already underway is a new approach to collectible efficiency they picked up from speaker Jim Bronstien of the American Boat Builders & Repairers Association. The dealership downloaded Bronstien’s PowerPoint presentation from their MDCE flash drives, printed it out and distributed it to all of its service leaders for implementation.

But even more significant is what South Shore learned from speaker and marine dealer consultant Valerie Ziebron of Yamaha University. After being impressed by her presentation, Tom Mack and service accounting/parts employee David Mack approached Ziebron to share a challenge they were facing.

South Shore had spent the past six months searching for a service director, a position they were having trouble defining. Like many owners, Mack had been acting as a part-time service director himself, in addition to several other roles. He had realized it was time to hire a full-time employee for the job, but the dealership was struggling to find someone who had technical knowledge of its five service departments.

Ziebron offered her services, and South Shore eagerly accepted, setting up a conference call in the weeks following MDCE to come to a solution.

“I had this idea in my head that the service director had to have experience in all the different departments,” says Mack. “She helped us define that the person we were looking for was very different than the person we imagined it to be.”

Rather than having technical expertise, South Shore’s service director needed to be well-organized, capable of running their own business, highly attuned to CSI and profitability with strengths in areas like holding people accountable, planning, HR and training, Ziebron suggested. Right away, the South Shore Marine leadership team identified the ideal candidate within their current staff: salesman Karl Sooy.

However, by far the biggest accomplishment the dealership has realized as a result of MDCE is the adoption of a new integrated dealership management software system.

One of South Shore Marine’s top goals for the conference was to research software vendors with the idea of making a new system live in 2011. After visiting with all of the software vendors at MDCE, Mack set an appointment with ADP’s regional rep.

Since then, South Shore has signed a contract with ADP and expects to have a new system live this spring.

Leading by example

When the team of seven Prince William Marine Sales employees got on the plane to travel to Orlando for the 2010 Marine Dealer Conference & Expo, CEO Carlton Phillips knew that the company would be named the No. 1 Dealer in North America, as determined by Boating Industry magazine’s Top 100 Dealers Program, at the end of the trip.

You’d think, then, that the team would be ready to celebrate or, at the very least, distracted during the conference. But, instead, they went right to work. They attended every single seminar and spent several hours on the expo floor.

In fact, they were so impressed by a demonstration given by Certol International that they purchased the bottom-cleaning product at the show and began using it at their facility upon their return home.

The day after arriving back at the dealership, they met to discuss what they had learned in Orlando and how they could put it to work. From the list of initiatives, a spreadsheet was built that details each initiative’s level of importance, start dates and who is responsible for putting it into place.

“We’re the No. 1 dealer in the country, and we still have 24 items we picked up on that we can do better,” says Phillips. The value represented by those items translates to at least a 30-fold return on the company’s investment in the event, he adds.

A much needed catalyst

A few weeks after returning from MDCE 2010, Doug Giuliana and his partner Jack Wasson sat down to educate each other on what they had learned at the event.

The result was a list of 30 items, big and small, for their winter project to-do list. By the end of December, several had already been checked off.

While their company, Advantage Yacht Sales, had already tested the waters with one YouTube video before the conference, they created two others in the month following the event, one of which demonstrated how the company used a Travelift to pull a 50-foot sailboat off the truck and into the yard.

In addition, Advantage Yacht Sales has improved its Google Places Page and launched a mini-campaign to get customers to post reviews of their business online.

“We’ve made it part of the post-sales follow-up process,” Giuliana explains. “One step is to ask each customer for an online review on sites like Yelp, Google and Insider Pages.”

As of December, the company had already received two such reviews.

In response to one best practice discussed in Orlando, Advantage Yacht Sales has created a boat service report card, which is essentially a checklist of potential repair items for techs to search for in order to generate more service work.

The dealership has also created cards that are handed out when they sell a boat, offering discounts on parts, storage and service.

But the most significant accomplishment the dealership has realized since the conference is a new relationship with ARI. Giuliana and Wasson met with the MDCE exhibitor for the first time during the conference and since have signed a contract with them to have a new website built that will integrate with various forms of social media and video players. In addition, through this relationship, Advantage Yacht Sales will be able to access mobile versions of ARI’s lead management software, allowing them to pick up and respond to e-mail leads from the road.

“If we only do a quarter of the things we put on our list, it will have been worth sending a couple of people down there,” says Guiliana. “We get so focused on the day-to-day stuff. An event like MDCE forces you to look up and consider ideas from the outside. It provides a catalyst to get things done now that maybe we knew we needed to get done eventually.”