THANK YOU, JOSHUA SOARES MTADA Past NextGen Board Member Please tell us about your time serving on the board. The board and the association do a great job representing all dealers of all sizes — from the biggest groups to the dealer who has one store. And I know how much MTADA means to dealers from my time serving on the board. I was surprised to see the number of small-town dealers who found the time to serve — there is a sense of obligation among members to give back and ensure the association is strong and keeps moving ahead. There are a lot of years of combined experience on the board. You have everything from first-generation to fifth-generation dealers. There are smart businessmen and good car guys who understand how to get things done. The board’s ability to push back at the state level and on factories is impressive. The message they send is consistent: “We want to be good partners, but this is how we’re going to be good partners,” and “The dealer network is the best thing for consumers at the end of the day.” They ride that line exceptionally well, and I learned a lot from this experience. The other thing I gained from serving on the board was making some great contacts — people to reach out to whenever I need help. As competitive as we are with each other to grab market share, you can still call and ask for help when you need advice on a particular area. At the end of the day, there’s enough market share to go around. What is your biggest career accomplishment? My biggest career accomplishment so far has been in our service departments. For a long, long time, our service departments were not profitable. It was just kind of a side gig that we ran. When you sell a car, you get a service customer, a finance customer, a lending customer and a parts customer. And the business that’s in service is so much more lucrative than a lot of the old dealers from the prior generation Joshua Soares is the executive manager at Billings Auto Group. He recently finished a one-year term as the NextGen board member as well. We had a chance to sit down with Joshua to talk about his experience on the board and learn more about him. We would like to thank him for his time. The following are excerpts from our conversation. 14 MONTANA AUTO DEALER
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