A little corner of neglect could be worth $63,936.(Dealer Dollars)

Powersports Business, September, 2004 by Lawson, Blake

If you are the average, middle-of-the-pack dealership, you are losing $63,936 annually and you don't even know it.

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Good dealers and service managers who focus on repair order parts consistently achieve a ratio of 1 to 1, RO parts sales to RO labor sales. They sell $1 worth of parts on repair orders, for every $1 worth of labor.

However, in analyzing thousands of repair orders over the last year I found that a typical import powersports dealer is running at .82:1, or 82 cents in parts for every $1 of labor. Excluded from my analysis were the Big V Twin dealers who consistently meet or beat the 1 to 1 ratio.

Let's quantify this. The average import dealership does 2,664 customer repair orders each year. The...