According to Rural Lifestyle Dealer's 2017 Dealer Business Trends & Outlook Report, about 40% of rural lifestyle dealers expect aftermarket revenues to increase 2-7% in 2017, and nearly 13% expect aftermarket revenues to climb 8% or more. We asked dealers to share what they’re doing to keep aftermarket revenues strong. Here are highlights of the responses and you can read the complete feature here:

• “Specific people for specific jobs makes everything run smoothly.”
• “First, we have culled out the break-even or loss leaders in the service department. Second, the parts department makes sure to keep incoming parts prices as low as possible and to keep as close to our established profit margins. There have been too many instances where the supplier suggests you work on a 10% margin.”
• “Departmentalizing expenses, budgeting, sharing monthly data and reports. The managers are more aware and make more of an effort to make things work properly.”
• “Our biggest issues were related to the bottleneck at the service writer position in the number of transactions that needed to be processed by one person and the follow-up customer interactions. We have backfilled these people with additional counter staff and are retraining them to assist in the initial service transaction."
• “Added air conditioning to our shop. Mechanics working in the heat during the summer are less effective. This increased productivity by 15% year-over-year. We changed all lighting to LED for electricity cost savings as well as to provide better lighting for techs and customers. We added a full-time setup person to complete jobs that mechanics were doing.”
• "Adding younger, more energetic people to our front line to work with customers. Older, more experienced employees tend to be less flexible in their answers to customer problems. Younger employees seem to think out of the box. They seem to show more concern for customer care.”