Business View Magazine
3
car dealers. It’s very important for our members that
we’re here to help them with regulatory compliance.”
In addition to its advocacy role, the FADA provides in-
formation and technical assistance to its members by
way of high-quality, web-accessible programming on
its website. It also offers networking capabilities via
electronic and regional meetings. But, according to
Smith, the Association also responds daily to phone
calls from its far-flung membership: “We operate like
we are their home office. They will call us about regula-
tory or legislative questions, or a legal situation. They
may need an answer to some problem they’re having
in their service bays, or some problem with labor law, a
need for new employees, or a piece of software. Every
time the phone rings, whatever that member’s prob-
lem is, our ability to solve that problem makes us very
important to their operations.”
Smith continues outlining one of FADA’s more recent
functions: “And one of our newer roles is that we con-
stantly analyze their product needs and we try to be-
come a laboratory for new products and service inno-
vations that might be of value to franchise car dealers.
If we see one, we might look at, vet it, and make it
available to our members.”
Smith explains that one of the most common issues
faced by dealers concerns their interactions with their
franchisors – the auto manufacturers. Many people
don’t realize, for example, that new car dealers have
to buy their inventory from the factory; nothing is on
consignment. That means that in addition to the mil-
lions of dollars spent on a dealership’s buildings and
infrastructure, many more millions have to be laid out
for vehicle purchases. So each day, a dealer needs to
figure out how to sell those cars and service the ones
