TORRANCE, Calif. -- A total of 748 dealers, finance managers and affiliated professionals met in Las Vegas last week to discuss compliance, ethics and income in the finance department. The show afforded attendees the rare opportunity to spend a few days learning about all the issues, solutions, products and services tied to this important profit center.
Several attendees said the ethics certification opportunities were a highlight of the F&I Conference. The Association of Finance and Insurance Professionals administered its ethics certification test on the first day of the show, and 53 people passed the exam. The Institute for Ethical Behavior also granted 78 people with its ethics certification.
AFIP certification students were mailed a self-study textbook prior to the conference to prepare for the exam. Dave Robertson, AFIP´s executive director, led a detailed review session for students right before they took the test. Esther Ruiz, finance manager at Santa Paula Chevrolet (Calif.), said the AFIP course review session was very informative and that she learned many new things.
GMAC held a pre-conference seminar for its dealers on Monday and Tuesday. The training was broken into four sessions. The first session, "Neuro-Linguistics Sales Programming," discussed the different ways in which customers process information, such as listening, seeing and touching, and how to give a sales presentation in a way that ensures that you´ve covered these bases to get your message across.
The other sessions looked at cash conversion, service contracts and the credit approval process from GMAC´s perspective.
"We dealt with a lot of things that were really practical," said J. Dale Wilson, business manager at Capital Cadillac in Smyrna, Ga. "One of the things I was interested in was seeing how the buyers perceived the deals coming in as well as how GMAC´s system really works. They gave us a formula and format to see how they structure deals and help get things bought."
Louis Carrio, GMAC´s director of educational services, said the topics covered were the ones most requested by F&I managers in the past. "Everyone knows service contracts are the lifeblood of F&I and everybody´s concerned with credit -- getting deals approved," he said.
Service contracts and credit approvals were also the subjects of panel discussions during the conference. In the panel session "An F&I Manager´s Credit Wish List," three finance managers and one finance director offered some recommendations for lenders. Lenders could offer more training and education and be more consistent in their funding decisions, they said.
Over a dozen other sessions addressed subjects such as improving CSI, reducing litigation risk, aftermarket opportunities and compliance safeguards. Supplemental material from these sessions will be downloadable from F&I´s Web site this month.
Keynote speakers Dick Colliver, executive vice president of Honda, and Charley Smith of NADA kicked off Wednesday´s and Thursday´s events, respectively. Jeff McGrath, prosecutor in the Gunderson Chevrolet case in California, gave the midday Wednesday keynote presentation in which he showed footage of the shady deals at Gunderson and how the authorities brought down the dealership.
Look for more in-depth coverage of the F&I Conference and Expo in F&I Magazine´s January 2005 issue.
