Business View Magazine | April/May 2022

91 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 4 that we had highway patrol cars on order for state troopers, and maybe a nurse or a doctor needed a car. We got them to let us open all the dealerships on a limited basis where we did curbside delivery and didn’t have any of the customers in the offices. We sold over the internet and delivered to the home, and it worked out fine. Most businesses in town laid everybody off when that hit, but we committed to keeping everyone on payroll to meet their obligations like paying a mortgage and buying groceries.” Although the company has managed to retain its employees through such initiatives, finding new people is a challenge, especially for entry-level positions, which Stanko Sr. says has a lot to do with shifting market dynamics. “We have massive warehouses coming up in the area paying up to $25 per hour, which is hard to compete with when the level of skills we are looking for are similar.” To counter this, the company has adopted an up-skilling approach to reducing employee churn, which it accomplishes through personnel training programs. Stanko Sr. notes, “We conduct training sessions all the time. For example, every month, Chevrolet Motor Division provides product training online for the salespeople, while service technicians fly to California or Arizona to attend a General Motors training school. There’s a lot of training throughout the whole dealership all year round.” Besides selling cars, Champion Chevrolet is one of a handful of dealerships in the area with a full-service body shop. Built in 1996, the company is expanding the body shop by an additional 6,000 square feet at the cost of $1 million. This investment might have come when there are fewer new cars to sell due to global chip shortages, but the company has made significant complementary investments in used- car inventory to bridge this gap. CHAMP ION CHEVROLET