Dealership Summit
This week The Dealership Minds Summit sponsored by Farm Equipment Dealership magazine and Lessiter Media was held in Iowa City. It is an annual event that focuses on promoting and advancing the agriculture industry. My friend Wayne Brozek was invited to do a presentation on service department efficiency and asked me if I would be interested in presenting one of the classes. I told him it would be an honor.
The opening events were on Tuesday and our presentations were on Wednesday. I discussed it with Wayne, and we agreed it would work best to fly into the Quad City airport on Tuesday around noon. The venue for the event was about an hour from the airport, so that would give me enough time to get a rental car and make it to the event by 2:30 to hear Wayne give his keynote speech.
My flight arrived at the Quad City airport at 12:15 and I was feeling pretty good about grabbing my rental car from Budget and getting to the hotel with plenty of time to make it to Wayne’s keynote speech. I walked up to the Budget car rental counter and the agent apologized but told me they currently did not have any cars available. The discussions I had with the agents about this is worthy of another story in itself. The short version is I finally got a car at 2:30 and headed to the hotel.
I missed Wayne’s keynote speech but arrived in time to hear the last dealership panel group. It was great to walk around the different conference rooms and talk with the sponsors. It reminded me of the many equipment dealer association conventions I have attended over the last few years. At dinner they had a presentation for the dealership of the year. It was interesting to listen to the dealers at our table talk about some of the challenges they face.
After dinner, Wayne had us all get together to go over our presentations for the next day. We all agreed how we wanted to present our messages and recommendations for the dealerships. Wayne told us our presentations were right after lunch, so we knew it had to be an upbeat message presented with strength and energy.
The next day when it was time to start my presentation, I went over some of the topics we were going to discuss. I started by asking questions to the group and that opened up a discussion on several of my topics. By the end of the presentation, I felt I had built a good connection with most of the group. For the most part, I felt pretty good how the majority of it went, but also thought about different ways I could have made it better.
I think this is a good example of life in general. You should give yourself credit for the things you do well, but always look for ways you can improve and do things better. I want to thank everyone who made this event possible for me to attend and hope I can do more of these types of events in the future. Thanks for reading.
Next week: Back to basketball
P.S. I didn’t have a captive audience, and no one left, so I’ve got that going for me.