A Better Way To Do Business, the Mandal Way “You always have to be changing. You always have to be reinventing yourself. You always have to be coming up with new processes and better ways to do things.” — Bo Mandal, President and CEO of Mandal Automotive Group. April 19, 2015, was a day that Bo Mandal will never forget. It was his mom’s birthday, which made the date easy to remember, and Bo had decided not to go into the office and spend time at home. He wanted to work in the yard and do some spring cleaning. As Bo pulled weeds and pruned the rose bushes, he had the dealership and how things were working running through his mind. “I remember that I kept thinking to myself, ‘There just has to be a better way to do this business. There must be a more hospitable way. I want our customers to feel like they are walking into an Apple store, but not just an Apple store, almost like an Apple store meets a Ruth’s Chris Steak House,’” Bo recalled. That very day, Bo came up with a plan. He wanted his dealership to have a fun, vibrant feeling combined with great hospitality and excellent service. The next morning, Bo went to work, pulled his team together and said, “Let me tell you what we’re going to do … We’re not going to have salespeople; we’re going to have product specialists. We’re not going to have managers anymore; we’ll have leadership teams, and those leadership teams will help those product specialists.” Bo continued, “We’ll take customers’ orders and service them by teaching them about the products. And if they want to buy a car, we will deliver them a car.” The plan started out with language changes, and procedure changes quickly followed. “Everybody looked at me like I was crazy at the time. I felt like I was herding cats,” Bo mused. “It was a nightmare. All the traditional-minded employees quit.” That was hard for Bo as he values his employees. The core set of employees who chose to stay got on board with the plan. The next few months were filled with uncertainty and changes. Although there was no map to follow and the team was in unnavigated territory, the idea of where Bo wanted to take the company shone bright. He meticulously added procedures and continued to make changes, all while keeping detailed notes in a big black book. Bo likens this experience to “building the airplane while we were on it.” At the eight-month mark, things had not come together as well as Bo would have liked. “I was missing a few pieces. I didn’t know what they were, and I was trying to figure it out, which was frustrating,” Bo stated. “I remember saying to my vice president, Daniel Ruggiero, ‘Let’s just say to hell with it and go back to the old way of doing things.’ Which is not in my DNA to be like that.” That moment of weakness was met with a strong “We are not stopping now! We are going to see this through,” from Daniel. Fourteen months and many changes later, the store hit an all-time record high volume of 250 units. Everything had come together and was working better than anyone could have imagined. The black book on Bo’s desk became the training manual. “I literally have two black books, big architectural books that sit on my desk to this day. We wrote the process of this whole thing from start to finish on how to make our dealership hospitality-centric,” Bo said proudly. 8
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