How to set realistic recon goal times (and hit them)

The industry benchmark for recon is five days from intake to frontline-ready: one day in inspection, one day in repair, minutes (not hours) for approvals, and one day in detail. That’s the standard Rapid Recon co-hosts Bobby Wilcox and Joshua Call laid out on the latest All Things Recon (ATR) podcast, and most of the dealerships missing it aren’t losing time in the shop. They’re losing it everywhere else.

The two rules that matter more than any workflow step

Wilcox opened with what he calls his two golden rules, repeated so often on the podcast that Call joked he could recite them from memory:

• Start on day zero. No delay getting the car into your process. If you’re taking cars on trade, that means a trade walk every morning, RO’s written up, and units queued for the shop right away, not sitting on the lot while everyone waits for someone to get to them.
• Approve work in a timely fashion. Minutes, not hours. Wilcox was direct about what happens when approvals lag: technicians who don’t hear back on an estimate move to the next inspection, and the car you were rushing now sits two or three cars deep behind other work.

Neither rule costs a dollar to implement. They’re about intent and culture, not tooling, which is why Wilcox calls them a measure of “recon behavior” before anything else.

The 5-day benchmark, stage by stage

Once a car is moving, here’s the breakdown the ATR team uses as the industry gold standard:

• Car into the shop: within 12 hours of intake, by midday the next day at the latest
• Inspection: no more than 24 hours
• Approvals: minutes to under an hour, not hours or days
• Repair: no more than 24 hours
• Detail: no more than 24 hours, with photos alone at 12 hours or less

Add it up and you get roughly 4.5 days to retail-ready. Call noted the industry used to lean on the old 72-hour turn popularized by Dell Pollock, but that number has crept up as digitally frontline-ready expectations grow. Getting a car “standing tall,” fully stickered and photographed, in three days often means the pictures and description don’t match the condition. Rapid Recon’s own onboarding process, which the team calls a “drive to five,” walks every new dealership through this exact breakdown two weeks after launch.

Why approval delays do more damage than any other bottleneck

The most concrete example on the episode was about approvals, and it’s worth sitting with. Wilcox described a dealership averaging a 0.4-day approval time in Rapid Recon Pro, which sounds fine until you translate it: 10 to 11 hours to approve a single estimate.

Here’s what that actually triggers. A technician stops waiting and moves to the next car. By the time approval finally comes through, that tech is two or three vehicles deep and has to circle back. If the delay pushes past the parts department’s cutoff time, the order slips to the next day, or the part isn’t in stock and now you’re waiting two to three additional days for it to arrive. A slow approval doesn’t just cost the approval window. It inflates parts hold and repair time on top of it.

Wilcox’s point: almost every dealership with an inflated overall recon number traces back to slow approvals somewhere upstream, not a slow shop.

Your business model changes the math

Both hosts were clear that five days is a benchmark, not a rule that applies identically to every rooftop. A Lexus or BMW store with a steady flow of clean lease turn-ins is going to run faster than average almost by default. A buy-here-pay-here lot working older, higher-mileage inventory is going to need more repair time, and that’s a legitimate deviation, not an excuse. The distinction Wilcox drew: understanding why your numbers look the way they do is different from using your inventory or facilities as cover for not tracking the process at all.

Detail is the most overlooked lever

Detail gets blamed for slow recon more than any other department, but the ATR hosts pushed back on treating it as a black box. The benchmark is 24 hours. When it creeps to a day and a half or two days, Wilcox’s advice on dealer calls is to look at two things first: do you have enough people, and are the people you have actually incentivized to move fast. Hourly pay plans don’t reward speed. Flat-rate detail, where a detailer earns a 60- or 70-hour paycheck for 40 hours of efficient work, does. So do bonuses tied to production quality and volume.

The same logic applies to technician staffing. As a rule of thumb, a shop doing 30 to 40 used cars a month needs one or two dedicated used-car technicians; at 100 cars a month, that’s three or four. And the productivity bar for staying on that team should be 110 to 120 percent, not just showing up.

Use red, yellow, and green as a starting point, not a verdict

If you’re running Rapid Recon Pro or Recon Velocity, you already know the color-coded status system that flags units falling behind. Call made a point of reframing what a red unit should mean to a manager. Treat it as a starting point for a real question, not a signal to hammer the number into shape until it looks right. Why is this stage taking longer than the goal? What’s actually happening in that step of the process?

That only works, though, if your team feels individually accountable for the units sitting in their step, whether that’s a technician’s inspection queue or a service advisor’s approval workflow. Real-time tracking and total transparency across every stage are what make that accountability possible in the first place. When each person can see exactly how their part of the process affects the next, the whole operation gets easier to diagnose and easier to fix.

Setting your own goal times starts with knowing where the industry benchmark sits and then figuring out, with real data, where your dealership actually stands against it.