Small Dealer Conference

Principal, branch manager, service manager, or fire chief—all are in the people business. Each has customers, clients, constituents, employees, and friends. You are the trusted face, the one with the solutions, and the one who can be relied on to work on their behalf. You absolutely must have a good product. But beyond the quality of your product, it really is about people and relationships.

In this keynote, Hanover Park Fire Department Chief Craig Haigh will discuss two critical points for organizational success:
1. Your greatest strength in serving your customers comes through the quality of the people you employ. Learn about the importance of hiring, training, staff development, succession planning, and taking care of team members.
2. Customers want to know and be known. Yes, customers are buying a product or service, but what keeps them coming back is the relationships they build with the team. Learn how to grow, develop, and foster these relationships to ensure ongoing success.

Whether delivering a product or answering a 911 call, the people you impact and the lives you touch are what really matter. Attend this keynote and learn how you can employ these principles in your own dealership.

What’s really negotiable in a dealership agreement, even when the salesperson says it’s not? This session will address negotiating termination rights, buyback obligations, dealership laws and other commonly overlooked, but critical, dealership agreement provisions.

The success of the people leading the rental operations of the business depends on a strong strategy. Do they have a strategy? Do they know what the rest of the industry is doing? In this session, we’re not talking anecdotes, we’re revealing hard research on common practices currently utilized by dealers in their rental strategies, business models, and operation and their correlation to rental profitability.

This session addresses the findings of AED’s first rental study. It is a broad review of strategic choices for rental and business model elections for both rent-to-sell and rent-to-rent models that can be made. The emphasis of this session is on the common practices of operating a rental line of business and includes key operating roles, inbound and outbound processes, and management of utilization.

From this session, attendees can expect to gather information that will enable them to benchmark their rental business to common practices revealed through the array of one-on-one dealer interviews that were conducted during this research so rental leaders can gain the confidence they need to know how the rest of the industry is navigating the growing world of rental.

Sponsored by HBS Systems

The pandemic has created a sea change for everyone. Business has been recovering and companies are focused on staying positive and profitable. What’s next? Smart companies that will survive and thrive post-pandemic must be thinking about business-critical objectives including customer and employee retention, customer service delivery and visibility in a competitive market. To avoid the creepy crud of complacency, every business needs to sharpen its future by focusing its energies on securing the future.

In this informational and engaging keynote, Todd Cohen will offer for your consideration mission-critical imperatives that will help shape and determine the future of the business, longevity and profitability.

Sponsored by Krank

Fact: 90% of a business owner’s financial assets are tied up in their businesses. However, owners rarely have an accurate, objective understanding of the value of their business. Understanding what drives, or kills, value in your business is critical. This session will help you understand where you can accelerate value and what to avoid so you can avoid killing value.

You will leave the presentation with:

• An understanding of what drives value, from a buyer or investor’s perspective
• Details about the value killers to avoid
• Why transition-ready businesses are more valuable

This presentation will provide MacKay & Company’s latest update on the economy – and more specifically the construction-related economy—but primarily focus on a review of their latest update from their DataMac CE aftermarket study. This study is based on surveys completed by hundreds of construction equipment users, profiling the parts aftermarket demand including total demand, point of service, point of final sale, outlook and several other factors.

Sponsored by Perceptive Processing