Incoming NADA Chairman’s Vacations Include Visits to Car Dealership

Most family vacations involve a trip to the mountains, the shore, or Grandma’s. But whenever Wes Lutz was on holiday, there was always a side trip to check out the local car dealerships.

“Whenever we were on vacation I’d tell my wife, I’m going to look at dealerships today,” recalls Lutz, owner and president of Extreme Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram in Jackson, MI, and the incoming 2018 chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Ass. “I just wanted to see what people are doing.”

What he saw troubled him. 

“I had been in business for 20 years and I’d go into these stores and it was pretty intimidating – and I’m a dealer! It was uncomfortable for me,” he says. That experience got Lutz thinking about how to improve the car-buying process at his own dealership.

“I asked my crew how we could be less intimidating and more inviting,” he says. “We needed to have a place that is so nice that you could send your wife or mother alone and you know they would be treated properly. We started looking at what people liked and didn’t like in the buying process.

“You go in and you talk to a salesman, then they have to talk to a sales manager, then if he can’t put a deal together, you talk to the general sales manager, and when you think you’re all done you go into the F&I office.

“We just started thinking why does it take four people to buy a car? Why don’t we empower the salesperson to make that decision?”

Today, every salesperson at Extreme Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram is the customer’s single point of contact. “If you know a car that you want, and you walk into our store, you’re in and out in 30 minutes – financed, insured, cleaned, gassed, and ready to go,” Lutz says.

Lutz opened his first dealership, Wolverine Dodge, in Jackson in 1976, only months after he graduated from the University of Michigan. He also owned a Chevrolet store in Brooklyn, MI, and a Hyundai franchise in Jackson.  

“My father was in the marine business, so I was always used to being around big-ticket items like Sea Ray boats,” he says. “I talked my father into going into the car business with me. We were partners for nine years and I bought his half of the business when I was 30.”

Extreme Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram has 60 employees and 2017 sales of just over $60 million. “Being a Ram-Jeep dealer in the Midwest where we have little import business is just extraordinary,” Lutz says.

Lutz will assume his new role at the NADA annual convention in Las Vegas this weekend. He is currently NADA vice chairman and served on the group’s board from 2001 to 2004.

Lutz says it took extra effort to find employees who can handle a deal from start to finish, but now he knows where to look.

“I found that the best recruits are current managers who were frustrated with having to baby sit all day long,” he says. “I’d talk to people who had been good F&I or sales managers, and they tell me all they do is put deals together for salespeople who can’t do it themselves. I’d say, how’d you like to be an independent businessman and run your own business inside a business?

“It’s very appealing to these men and women because they’ve had enough of people who don’t show up at work and don’t make phone calls. They know how to structure deals and work on their own. I pay them on the total gross on a deal, front and back end, including part of the sales manager’s and F&I salaries. They’re a good fit for us.”

It has helped Lutz avoid a chronic problem across auto-retailing: low employee retention rates. “I just don’t have any turnover,” he says.

Lutz assumes the NADA helm as autonomous vehicle and mobility technologies are leading the industry down roads unheard of only several years ago. But he sees the future as a new opportunity for the group’s 16,500 franchised dealers in the U.S.

“The franchise system is the most adaptive selling process ever devised,” he says. “When the Internet came around in the 1990s, that was going to be the demise of the dealer. “Today we use the Internet to help serve our customers. And remember when the OEM’s were going to buy dealerships and be competitors? That didn’t work out.”

And it’s on to the next dire prediction for dealers, he says. “So now they say people aren’t going to want to own cars anymore. Things like Uber and ride sharing are going to continue because they’re certainly convenient, but I just don’t see people giving up personal transportation. Vehicle ownership is on the rise and somebody’s going to have to service those consumers, do their financing and their trade-ins.

“And if we do have autonomous vehicles that are roaming the streets waiting for someone to call them, there are going to be more miles driven. There are going to be huge service opportunities. It’s going to be an exciting time to be involved in the leadership at NADA because I get to figure that stuff out. I want to be part of that solution.”