What a used car manager should do every day to speed up recon

A used car manager who wants cars off the line faster has one job that beats all the others: stay in the process every day, not just at drop-off. That means approving work fast, running a real trade walk, and talking to the service department more than once a month. Skip any of those and recon slows down no matter how good the shop is.

That’s the theme Bobby and Josh worked through on this episode of All Things Recon, the follow-up to their episode on the recon manager role. This time the focus shifted to the used car manager and why that person, more than anyone else in the building, has a stake in getting recon right.

The used car manager has the most to gain from recon done well

Bobby opened with a story from a used car summit he’d just spoken at for the Fred Anderson group in Charlotte, in front of about 26 used car directors. He asked the room a simple question: on a scale of 1 to 10, rate your relationship with the service department. Only about a third to half raised their hands at five or better.

His advice wasn’t complicated: go have beers with your service department. Nobody spends more money with service than the used car department, and the used car manager is the one accountable for that spend. If there’s tension between the two sides, the used car manager pays for it in slower cars and higher costs.

Josh put a name to what’s driving that tension: a collision of pay plans. The used car manager wants cars through the shop for as little cost as possible. Service wants to turn as many hours as it reasonably can. Both sides are doing their job; somebody still has to reconcile it, and that starts with the relationship, not a policy.

The daily habits that actually move recon

Asked what a used car manager should do every single day, Bobby and Josh kept coming back to a short list:

• Approve work fast. Bobby called this the single most controllable thing a used car manager can do for recon speed. It costs nothing and it’s within their control every time.
• Explain the why, not just the what. Technicians who understand why speed matters stop treating an impatient used car manager as just another demanding voice. Influence the thinking instead of only pushing for results.
• Know the people who make recon happen. Go shake hands. Learn names. That relationship pays off the first time something needs to move fast.
• Run an intake process every day. More on this below, because it’s the one Bobby and Josh think gets skipped the most.
• Keep recon communication in one place. If you have a tool, use it exclusively. More on that too.

The trade walk is an almost-endangered process, and that’s a problem

Bobby called the daily trade walk “almost an endangered species” at a lot of stores, which is a shame, because it’s one of the most useful habits on the list. A used car manager who walks incoming trades every day, with the internal advisor and ideally a salesperson or two in tow, catches what a car needs before it ever sees a bay. Tires. Paint. A scratch that needs attention. Tag it in the recon tool right there on the lot, and by the time the car clears mechanical, everyone already knows what to do with it. Nobody has to ask twice. Salespeople who sit in on trade walks also know the incoming inventory cold, which beats getting caught flat-footed at the desk.

Three things every recon process needs: a team, a tool, a culture

Bobby framed it as three rules, in order, and said you can’t get to the third without the first two: a dedicated team, a tool to measure the process, and a culture built around using both.

The team piece is where he flagged a gap even among dealerships doing the other things well. Plenty of stores now run dedicated used car technicians instead of mixing recon into the customer-pay queue. Far fewer have a dedicated internal service advisor for those cars, and Bobby argued that’s often the single most important role in the whole process. That advisor usually knows more about where a store’s recon actually breaks down than the used car manager does, which makes a quick check-in between the two of them one of the most efficient meetings a store can hold.

There’s a financial wrinkle underneath all of this worth naming: service closes a repair order and books that revenue immediately, while the used car manager’s cost sits on a car that might not sell for 60 to 90 days. Same dealership, different clock, and that gap is part of what strains the relationship. One fix Bobby and Josh floated: tie a small piece of the internal advisor’s pay to used car gross, or to hitting a recon-time target, say a bonus for keeping a car’s controllable recon time under five days. Small dollars, but it puts both departments on the same side of the incentive.

Watch the aging units, not just the average

A strong average days-in-recon number can hide a handful of units quietly aging out in a non-counting step, sitting in detail or waiting on a close-out that nobody but the service manager cares about. The fix is daily attention to the outliers, not a monthly look at the average alone. That’s exactly what a used car manager checking the tool daily is positioned to catch.

Keep it in one tool

The last piece Bobby and Josh kept returning to: once a store commits to a recon platform, every recon conversation needs to happen inside it, not split across text messages, email, and hallway conversations. When a unit sits red with no explanation, the fix isn’t to shrug, it’s to ask the question in the tool and make documenting the answer the standard. That’s what turns a workflow tool into a real record of what happened to every car and why, which is exactly what a used car manager needs when a customer or a GM asks about a unit’s status.