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F&I Income Development for Dealerships
Who you hire into the F&I office, how you pay them, and how you tell whether any of it is working. The desk produces more of your net than almost anything else in the building, and it is usually the least measured.
Most stores are never given a way to tell a good month from a lucky one
Ask a dealer how the F&I office is doing and the answer is usually per unit gross. It is the right instinct and the wrong number on its own, because it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the person writing the deals.
A strong mix will carry a weak finance manager for a whole quarter. A run of cash buyers will make a good one look ordinary. Judged on the headline number alone, the office gets rewarded for the market and blamed for it in turn, which is how stores lose people who were doing the job properly.
The pay plan usually compounds it, and rarely by design. Plans get written once, then amended as things come up, and after a few years they are paying for behavior nobody would have chosen deliberately. The store ends up paying most for whatever was easiest to measure at the time.
What We Offer
What income development looks at
Four things decide what the office produces, and they have to agree with each other.
The pay plan
What it actually rewards, as opposed to what it was intended to reward. Most plans have at least one clause that is quietly working against the store.
The measurement
Which numbers tell you something, and which move on their own. Penetration by product, by vertical, and by salesperson says far more than a single gross figure.
The hire
What to look for in an F&I hire, and what to stop looking for. The best predictor is rarely the one on the resume.
The bench
What happens when your finance manager leaves, which they eventually will. A store with no second person who can write a deal is one resignation from a bad quarter.
Our Process
How we work with your store
The aim is that you can run this yourself afterwards and see the office clearly without us.
- Pay plans reviewed against what they are actually producing
- Reporting set up so a good month and a lucky month look different
- Hiring criteria built for your store and your mix
- Connected to the training, because a plan and a process that disagree cancel out
- Reviewed against your own history rather than an industry benchmark from another market
Common Questions
Questions dealers ask
Our finance manager is performing. Is there anything here for us?
Usually yes, and it is worth doing while things are going well rather than after they stop. A strong performer on a badly written plan is a retention risk, and a store with no bench behind them is carrying more exposure than the owner tends to think.
Do you rewrite our pay plans?
We review them and show you what they are rewarding. Changing a pay plan is the owner's decision and it has consequences for the people on it, so it is not something to do quickly or on somebody else's say-so.
What should we measure instead of per unit gross?
Per unit gross stays. It just stops being the only thing. Product penetration broken out by vertical and by salesperson, and how those move against your mix, will tell you within a month whether a change worked. The exact set depends on what your system can report.
We are a small store with one F&I person. Does this still apply?
It applies more. A single point store has all of its F&I income riding on one person and typically no plan for the week after they hand in their notice.
See what the desk is really producing
The assessment covers the numbers, the pay plan and the process together, because looking at any one of them alone tends to produce the wrong conclusion.