Danny Zaslavsky

How to outperform the market on every vehicle with intelligent acquisition, disposition, merchandising, and retailing.

Changing the way you think can be hard business, especially when your experience, your instincts, and your intuition is based on generational knowledge of the car business. But like it or not, our industry and our customers are evolving, modernizing, and have higher expectations than ever. If we don’t change the way we think and the decisions we make, the next generation of the industry may leave behind even the most experienced operators and veteran dealerships.

Danny Zaslavsky took over as General Manager of his family’s independent dealership in 2016 and quickly realized that he couldn’t rely on the same buying, merchandising, and marketing strategies that his father had used to build the business. Acquisition costs, reconditioning, syndication costs, and marketing costs were all outpacing front-end gross and just dropping prices wasn’t enough to significantly impact turn. Danny decided to think differently and committed to finding a way to not just compete in the market – but outperform it by increasing the real and perceived value of every piece of inventory.

Through this journey, Danny sat in every seat and did every job across the dealership. He realigned his people and quickly found and fixed process inefficiencies. When it came to the data and systems that managed the critical functions of buying and selling inventory he realized that having separate systems and databases was an enormous obstacle. This led Danny to completely transform the way he managed inventory, turning to a unified approach and a solution that combined acquisition, merchandising, retailing, and performance into a single system.

Armed with unified data and tools, Danny now has a complete view of the Vehicle Lifecycle where he can prioritize data and insights over intuition – and create strategies that are based on real-time conditions, not luck. This shift was not easy, but the net effective result of transforming his business has delivered more intelligent acquisition decisions, higher value merchandising, and more consistent retailing and exit planning for every vehicle – all generating higher gross and turn.