Much like the idea championed by Sir Dave Brailsford of Team GB Cyclists, where his notion of marginal gains, helped transform an average team into an outstanding team achieving groundbreaking success on track, the same principle can be applied to your car preparation centre.

Brailsford joined British Cycling in 1997 on the back of lottery funding and took over as performance director in 2003. He revolutionised the sport with his attention to detail, notably with his focus on the context of ‘marginal gains’, which brought Team GB 30 Olympic medals between 2004 and 2012 and a further 11 in Rio with a continuation of these principles. 

Brailsford’s philosophy of ‘marginal gains’ came from the idea that if you break down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. 

And so, if your car dealership was to apply the ‘The Brailsford Principle’ and break down the entire car preparation process into individual elements to identify ways in which each and every one of them could be improved by just a few percent, then you would be looking at quite a significant bump in the efficiency and the performance of your back end operations. 

It’s needless to say that inefficiencies in prep time increase days in stock, delay advertising, and ultimately lower profitability because as we know the moment stock is purchased it starts to cost. 

Common efficiency hurdles across car prep: 

• We often see a lack of simple automation within the preparation process which creates inconsistencies in data entry and makes it harder to instantly identify bottlenecks responsible for creating them. 

• Many car dealers still struggle to keep track of their vehicle’s progress as it goes through the preparation process in real-time, making it impossible to set up performance metrics.

• Data entry is often handled by a single staff member, manually, which is subject to human error and most importantly delays in communication as information tends to be logged in and updated in one collective batch. 

How best to apply the ‘Brailsford Principle’

One of the best tools that we can recommend you use to achieve marginal gains across your car preparation process is our Car Prep Accelerator.

You could, as previously mentioned, break down the preparation process into individual elements and look for ways to improve each of them. However, you could also focus on identifying the single hurdle that affects your entire car prep operation. 

For example, superseding manual data entry with a quick scan and push-button functionality, where each staff member is responsible for logging their work progress on an individual car would enable you, the manager, to gain a live birds-eye view of your entire operation, identify performance hot spots, and of course, streamline the communication between the different vehicle preparation stages. 

Whether you know or would like to find out what your biggest car prep hurdle is, our colleague Sue can help and show you how to effectively drive marginal gains and make you the champion that keeps on winning.

Call or email Sue directly via:
Telephone: (+44) 1234 241 548
Email: s.fox@buzz2get.com