When I was operating dealerships in Northeast Oklahoma, there was a little hamburger joint that had some of the best hamburgers and fried squash I had ever eaten. At the expense of my girlish figure, I would attempt to eat at this burger joint about once a week. The odd thing about that burger business is that some days it would just be closed for no apparent reason. Sometimes, it would stay closed for a week or two at a time before opening back up.

We had one of the employees as our customer, and one day, I asked her what the deal was with the restaurant being closed at such odd intervals. She informed me that the owner was elderly and when he was sick or had medical procedures that he would just shut the restaurant down because he had never taught anyone else how to run the day-to-day operations. It struck me that this gentleman appeared to have built a great business with a great product, but in reality, he didn’t have a business, he had a job with more headache and risks.

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with the car business.

Well, since you asked…I recently had the opportunity to attend the NIADA convention in Las Vegas and had the pleasure of meeting a lot of independent car dealers and talking with them about the 20 Group peer collaboration concept. Many of the dealers had no idea what a 20 Group was and were very excited to potentially join a group and learn from others going through the same challenges. Everything was great until I told them we meet three times a year for a day and a half. I heard the same objection over and over again and it went something like this: “It’s all I could do to get away to this conference. I’m scared to death about what’s going on while I’m gone. There’s no way I could commit to three days, three times a year to attend meetings away from my dealership.”

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