Ok, now I am curious. What exactly is your business?
Fixing what’s broken in car dealerships.
Anything from Advertising (we work as an advertising agency for a few dealerships) to training.
This is now officially a hijack but I think I can since it is my own thread.
I did something like that but in a franchise. I went to the stores to make sure they were squeezing all they could from the brand name and maximizing their advertising money and looking clean and professional and pretty and all that.
It was all Internal Affairs, though. I was an employee of the franchiser who visited stores who had no option but receive me. How do you approach a dealer? Or do you work only with a particular brand and you are an employee of that brand? (if it is not too much to ask, of course)
We work with whoever we can convince to give us money. 
We don’t work with any brands, although right now we’ve got a product that’s more directly geared towards used cars that we’ve been pushing pretty heavily. It’s dirt cheap, considering the return (it’s 400 a month, and returns over a hundred used car leads… for a small dealership). It doesn’t make us much money, but it’s a great foot-in-the-door for more business later.
Approaching dealers isn’t difficult. Most dealers will give you time if they thing you’ve got a product that might make them money. At the moment, I’m in the process of getting into some 20 group meetings (those are meetings that Dealers go to, to share ideas about how to save money, make more money, etc), and I’ve got a list of some thousand dealers who I call on a regular basis.
It is an excellent time to buy a second hand Toyota, just not from a Toyota Dealer.
There is never, ever a good time to buy anything at all, including free air, from a Toyota Dealer.
I’ll second that. Back when the entire world was sure the next Pinto they saw was going to explode into flames, I got a really sweet condition low-mileage two-door Pinto for basically nothing ($250) from a lady who was certain hers was going nuclear as we signed the papers. The fix for the filling nozzle/tank had been proposed but the actual recall was pending and she just wanted that car gone NOW. I would have felt guilty but I was in college, broke, married, and I managed to live with it.
(After the free fix of the tank, I got 6 years and 78000 miles out of it and then sold it to someone who parted it out.)
Its already starting , we supply brake and hinges mainly to chrysler and Gm ,with a little ford. Our production schedule just went up alot.
Declan
You’re nineteen right? And you’re not working for a car dealership now. So how many can it have been that you have worked for your entire life?
I’ve been in and around dealerships my entire life.
I took my first steps in an Olds dealership in Pitsburg (where I promptly fell over and hit my head, hard, on the tile floor – no jokes, please), as well as a number of other milestones.
My father has been a General Manager my entire life, and from a young age I’ve learned everything about the auto industry short of how to build them. By the time I could speak fluently, I knew every step of the sales process (a slight hyperbole, but not by much). I know more about dealerships than 10+ year vets, by pure luck of the draw. I could walk into a dealership, and do, and sell them products to make their sales process better.
Part of my current job is training salesmen on how to sell cars, the process, and how to overcome objections.
Without revealing too much about myself, I happened to have been born to one of the most skilled individuals in the automotive (retail) industry. And that’s not conceited “look up to my father,” type of talk, that’s genuine awe at the ability to close, desk and finance deals which simply seem so far out into left field that it’d be impossible for anyone else to get done.
And don’t mistake the fact that I don’t work 9-to-9 in a dealership, day to day, with the fact that I don’t work in car dealerships. I still do sales,
I’m not the best, by any means. But I know a lot more than a layman, and more than most “car guys.” I feel entirely comfortable donning the title of expert, when it comes to this particular subject.