Technology Boosts Profits

One of the great things about writing this column is that you get to ponder a lot of different things, and this month really opens the door on that whole pondering thing. Technology. Technology, technology, technology. When I was kid, lying in my backyard, gazing up at the stars, I remember my sister saying, “You know, they say it will be someone our age that will someday walk on the Moon—technology is moving that fast.”

Well, they got there before I got to astronaut school and while I was doing a little government work, dressed in a wonderful khaki green uniform, during the engagement known as Vietnam. The point is this, technology was moving very fast then and today the forward advances of technology are almost beyond comprehension—I say almost, there is stuff going on I still don’t get, don’t want, don’t need and yet it is everywhere. A cell phone

is now a computer that lets you make calls, a twitter isn’t the sound a bird makes, and Facebook sure isn’t a book about faces.

For those of us in business, this mind-numbing avalanche of tools, gadgets, virtual offices, Internet and Internet gizmos may seem like it really doesn’t have anything to do with slogging it out in the day-to-day trenches of capitalism. Wrong, now more than ever, all that science fiction like stuff that permeates our lives has got to be understood, managed and harnessed for the good of our businesses. The use of posting your business on the Web and the huge audience it reaches is one of those foundational things you need to understand. You and I might not surf the web, but your customer, my customer, they do. People walk into our offices all the time and say, “I looked you up on the Web.” They’re looking you up, too.

Understanding how the Internet works, understanding how people use it when looking for things, like cars, is one of those things we just need to learn to understand and manage. You don’t need to be proficient in computer-eze, but you need to know you need to hire, lease, find someone that can work with you and explain, in plain English, what you need to know and how you need to set up your presence on the Internet.

And, those are the easiest examples I can give you – the more complex ones, the ability to use a debit card to make payments, loaded up on a cell phone; checking service and waits times at the customer service center, again on a cell phone; the ability to watch inventory at multiple auction sites and communicate with your buyers at those sites in real time; the ability to track units, not just with a traditional GPS, but with some newer stuff, that gives you location within three yards; the ability to track customer’s spending habits, almost daily; real time tracking of parts; daily updates on every unit you’ve sold, showing mileage, location, and the ability to map where the unit has been driven for the entire day.

A lot of this you could care less about. However, here is the reality of the world we do business in today. It’s all about information. Information becomes a powerful tool. It’s powerful because when it comes to what we chose to carry as inventory, where we chose to advertise and why we would chose the advertising and warranty programs we want to be involved in it makes us more responsive to our customers, more efficient and more profitable.

For older codgers like myself, who missed walking on the moon, this is a pretty incredible time to be alive. While technology can be annoying, mostly because we don’t, well those of us who might be a bit older, don’t absorb it as quickly as those who are a bit younger do – it still is wonderful stuff. When you see grandmothers using iPhones and using them in all their glory, you know it has become a technological world. So, embrace it, use it, become friends with it, and begin to change your business with it in very real and very positive ways.