Dealership Going to the Dogs

It’s a dog’s life at Green Chevrolet-Chrysler in East Moline, IL, starting with Jill Green’s white Bichon Frises.

They are a constant presence at her dealership, often sleeping on her desk, trotting around the showroom and even appearing in television commercials.

“Customers love to see the dogs in here,” Green says. “They get a lot of attention. We are very dog-friendly. People are welcome to bring their dogs when they come in to buy a car or get it serviced.”

The woman behind this canine approach comes from an automotive family. Her father, Ray Green, headed the National Automobile Dealers Assn. in 1990. Her relatives own dealerships throughout Illinois and elsewhere.

Brother Jeff Green runs Green Chevrolet and Green Finish Line Ford in Peoria, IL. Brother Todd Green owns Green Nissan, Green Lincoln-Mazda (No.74 on the WardsAuto Dealer 500), Green Hyundai, Green Toyota, Green VW-Scion-Audi, and Green Dodge-Mitsubishi-Kia-Subaru (No.455 on the WardsAuto Dealer 500) in Springfield, IL.

Todd and Ray, age 84, operate Green Chevrolet-Buick-GMC in Jacksonville, IL.

Jill Green owns the Chevrolet-Chrysler store and Green Buick-GMC across the Mississippi River in Davenport, IA. Nephews Chad Dresing and Eric Dresing, recently acquired minority shares in both dealerships.

Green Family Hyundai will open in Moline, IL in October.

Jill Green began selling cars at Hal Watkins Chevrolet in Oxnard, CA. She spent a short time as a General Motors district sales manager before opening Jill Green Chevrolet-Buick near Peoria in 1981.

She joined the former Warren Chevrolet in East Moline with a management contract in 1991 and bought out then-owner Byron Warren in 1994. Warren had added the Chrysler franchise in the early 1980s.

“It was a good deal,” she says. “It was worth it.”

Over the years, she has invested several millions of dollars in a complete remodeling, which includes a 13-acre (5.2-ha) car lot, 10,000 sq.-ft. (929 sq.-m) of service space, and a new body shop. The store ranks No.377 on the 2012 WardsAuto Dealer 500 with total revenue of $60.7 million.

Green’s earlier investment was a factor in her decision not to participate in Chevrolet’s Essential Brand Elements facility upgrade program. Some dealers and NADA have criticized it for trying to create lookalike dealerships across the U.S.  

“We just did this huge remodel,” Green says of her Chevrolet store. “(Chevrolet says) you can’t have any tinted or reflective glass, and I just put in $400,000 of green tinted, reflective glass.

“(Chevrolet) says you can’t have your writers in the center of the service lane, and I just tripled my service lanes so the writers could be in the center. You can’t have any sales desks up against the windows, and I have my salespeople and my managers up against the glass so they can see the lot.”

In her opinion, “My showroom is much prettier and the outside elevation of the building is much more attractive than what the EBE program (calls for).”

Forgoing the corporate brand identity apparently has not hurt sales. The Quad Cities market (Davenport and Bettendorf, IA and Moline/East Moline and Rock Island, IL), with a population of about 380,000, has four Chevrolet dealers.

“One too many,” Jill Green says, but she sells, on average, 85 new Chevrolets and 15 new Chryslers each month. Sales this year are considerably higher than in 2011.

The store sells between 150 and 170 used vehicles a month. Green says she began to focus on pre-owned units as a significant source of revenue in 1993, but her efforts sputtered at first.

“I went through three used-car managers who didn’t know the market,” she says. “You needed someone who was at the auctions every single week. Then I found John Bachovchin, who had his own wholesale lot.

“I talked him into working for me about 18 years ago and he’s still doing our used-car buying. He’s fabulous. We don’t have a bunch of water in our used cars and we don’t have a bunch of wholesale losses.”

Green says Bachovchin would attend auctions in Omaha on Monday, Kansas City on Tuesday, St, Louis on Wednesday, Indianapolis on Thursday and Chicago on Friday.

“It’s not unusual to have 1,000-1,200 used cars in stock in January between the Chevrolet-Chrysler and Buick-GMC stores,” she says. “The key is when to buy, where to buy, how to buy and when to sell, where to sell, how to sell. As long as the market doesn’t change, we don’t mind having 150 Impalas.”

Green Chevrolet-Chrysler spends about $20,000 per month on Web-based advertising, money well spent, says Erin Dresing, the store’s Internet marketing manager. “We’re big in AutoTrader, Cars.com and KBB.com.”

Each store has a website, and there is a group site “so customers can search the inventory at any of our Quad Cities stores,” Dresing says. The company also maintains www.greenchevy.net, a factory-required website that lists current Chevrolet incentives.

“I would confidently say that 80% of our customers have seen us online before they ever set foot in the dealership,” says Dresing. “If you’re not on line these days, you’re not visible.

“We’re looking at text marketing that sends messages to prospects’ phones. There are no old dogs around here thinking there’s only one way to sell a car.”

Many dealers have given up on newspaper advertising in favor of TV spots and an aggressive presence on the Web, but Jill Green still finds value in the printed page. “We’re in both newspapers, full-page, full-color every single day,” she says.

Keely Byars, director of advertising for the Quad-City Times, says her paper offers a frequency program to help its best customers increase sales in tough economic times.

“The package is focused on full-page ads and they receive discounts based on how many days a week they run,” Byars says. “We have a very strong reach in our market with our daily newspaper, website, mobile, email databases, Facebook and other ways to drive audience.”

The Times currently runs between 10 and 25 full-page auto ads each day.

Green says the area’s economy has been relatively stable, thanks to employers such as Alcoa, John Deere and the Rock Island Arsenal. As a result, credit also is available.

“We have four or five local credit unions here that have been in business for a long time,” she says. “IH Mississippi Valley, Deere Employees, RIA. The majority of our financing goes through these credit unions.”

Auto dealers often feel at odds with credit unions. Two-tier pricing – one for “regular” customers and a preferential rate for those who also happened to be members of the credit union – often led dealers to ask, “Just whose customer is this?”

Some dealers also have accused some credit unions of raiding their customers by cutting dealers out as middlemen of indirect lending. Dealers say it is especially grating when credit unions do that with a customer referral.

But a credit union officer says his lending institution is going for a win-win.

“We want it to be a win for us, a win for the dealer, and a win for the buyer,” says Matt McCombs, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the 40,000-member DHCU Community Credit Union in the Quad-Cities.

He says loan pricing is done in such a way to be fair to credit union members, yet allowing dealers and his credit union to “come out of it making enough money to run our businesses successfully.”

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