3 essential recon team roles every dealership needs

Get three roles right and your recon process runs itself: the used car manager, the recon manager, and the inventory manager. Every dealership has people doing versions of these jobs, whether or not the titles match. How well those three stay on the same page determines whether cars hit the frontline in five days or twelve.

That’s the case Joshua Call and Bobby Wilcox made on the latest episode of All Things Recon, the monthly podcast from Rapid Recon and Velocity. Ask a technician how long recon takes and you’ll hear two days. Ask someone who actually tracks the process, and the honest number is closer to 10 to 12 days. That gap is where the money leaks out.

Why these roles matter more than your process does

Most dealerships doing 80 to 120 cars a month are looking at potentially millions of dollars a year tied up in how fast cars move through recon. Shave a few days off the average and that cash comes back to you through lower holding costs and fewer depreciation hits. But a documented process, a software tool, a spreadsheet, none of it moves the needle if the people running it aren’t talking to each other.

“It’s not because somebody sucks,” Wilcox said. “How many times have we turned on a store and shaved five days off their recon time? We didn’t have a tool. We didn’t know.” The fix, more often than the hosts expected, was as simple as getting people in a room to ask: what’s our process, actually?

The three roles that carry recon

1. Used car manager: sets the intention

The used car manager’s job is smaller in volume than it looks and bigger in impact. Call named two things that matter most: start the car on day zero by pushing it into the process with a real trade walk, and approve work in a timely fashion once it’s in the shop. Everything else is bottleneck management.

When recon isn’t working at a store, the hosts said the diagnosis is almost always the same: no input from the used car manager means apathy, plain and simple. Nobody downstream can care about speed-to-sale more than the person buying the cars.

2. Recon manager: the pivot point

This is the internal writer or adviser who sits between the used car department and fixed ops, and it’s the role most dealerships underinvest in. At lower volume, an adviser might handle it part time. Once you’re running a real volume of used cars, having someone dedicated to recon full time stops being optional.

The recon manager becomes the nexus for every question about where a car is and what it needs next. Tie part of their pay plan to a real metric, cars done in five days or less, for example, and you’ll see behavior change. Give them an assistant once the role grows, and the whole operation gets easier to run.

3. Inventory manager: keeps the lot honest

While the used car manager and recon manager are tied to a desk, the inventory manager’s job is to float. They’re on the lot, checking that cars staged for detail are actually staged for detail, that keys are tracked, that the trade walk gets set up in the morning.

Small gaps here cause outsized damage. A car that sits forgotten for a day looks, in your reporting, like a step that took days longer than it did. The inventory manager is also the one who ends up fielding “where’s this car” calls from sales all day, at least until the whole team can see vehicle status without asking.

Communication is the actual product

The stores that perform best aren’t necessarily running fancier tools. They’re getting together once a week, often just 15 minutes on a Friday or Wednesday morning, to get everyone on the same page. Skip that habit for a quarter and things drift fast, even with software in place.

That’s also why the used car manager, recon manager, and inventory manager benefit from being able to see the same information without chasing each other down. Rapid Recon Pro’s real-time tracking gives every step of a vehicle’s status instant visibility, so a salesperson can hover over a VIN in the CRM and see that a car is in detail instead of pulling the inventory manager off the lot to ask. Less time spent answering “where’s the car” is more time spent moving it.

Build the culture on top of the process

Call and Wilcox closed on what they called the third golden rule of recon, after measuring your process with a tool and building a dedicated team around it: build a culture around it. That culture doesn’t come from a slogan. It comes from a process solid enough that people can rely on each other, department to department, without hoping today’s the day everything lines up.