Everybody wants to know what the best dealerships are doing differently.

So I went straight to someone who sees them every day.

In this episode, I sat down with Joel Dalbo, one of NADA's longtime Dealer 20 Group moderators. He spends his days in rooms with some of the highest-performing dealer principals and leadership teams in the country, so I wanted to know...

What are they talking about right now?

What challenges keep coming up?

And what separates the stores that consistently outperform everyone else?

What surprised me most was how often the conversation came back to the basics.

Hiring the right people.

Developing leaders.

Executing the plan.

Not trying to fix five things at once.

We also talked about AI, and Joel shared something I thought was really interesting. The dealers who are winning aren't waiting around to see what happens. They're experimenting, learning from each other, and figuring out how AI fits into their business before someone else figures it out for them.

If you're leading a dealership, managing a team, or just trying to build a stronger operation, this conversation is full of practical ideas you can actually use.

We cover:

The biggest leadership mistakes Joel sees over and over.
Why execution beats great ideas every time.
How top-performing dealers hire, coach, and keep great people.
What Dealer 20 Groups are saying about AI today.
The dealership metrics Joel thinks deserve a lot more attention.

One thing Joel said really stuck with me...

There aren't any magic shortcuts.

The dealerships that keep winning are usually the ones that never stop getting better.

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