Pub. 1 2021 Issue 2

22 live to work. Some people do live to work, but we don’t, although I do like to have extra jobs going on the side. With COVID, we also shut down on Saturdays except by appointment. The service department is only open Monday through Friday, and sales used to be open 9-4 on Saturdays. We will probably have to go back to being open on Saturdays eventually. Q: Many dealerships put a lot of emphasis on service. What are Rehbein Ford employees currently doing to strengthen the community? A: We are involved in everything. If there’s a school or church function or a service guy who is into baseball, we support what we can. Plains, Montana, is a great place to raise a family because it is such a small community. I was born in Minnesota, but I moved here with my parents when I was in sixth grade, and this is where I grew up. After I got married, I came back again and chose to raise my family here. My parents are in town, and my younger brother is, too. Q: Your website has a big emphasis on trucks and preowned vehicles. How much of that is due to the Ford product line, and how much is due to the customer base? A: The product line and the customer base work together hand in hand. We do have a strong customer base, but Ford also has a very good lineup of the products our customers buy. We match our customers with the right products. Q: Your website also has a menu item to bring up autos that are less than $15,000, but June 23, 2021, nothing was listed. How is the used car market right now? A: A used truck that used to sell for $15,000 will now sell for $23,000. There’s a huge buyer’s market, especially that price range, and high demand drives the price high. You can’t find used inventory unless you CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 spend more money. We’re waiting to see what happens, but we are also looking at auctions and searching in more places. We are still selling new trucks, but the new car inventory is also very limited. We have 4-5 to sell. Q: Do you have expansion plans? A: When we built the dealership, it was big enough. If anything, it is too big now for a little town, so the footprint is fine. We are very comfortable getting most of our income from the service shop. For us, expansion consists of buying the techs better equipment. That’s how we expand. Not too many dealership owners are driving their own trucks. We have a car hauler and can deliver all our own cars, but we mostly just haul our own stuff. The car hauler helps us when we drive back and forth to the auctions. We are pretty rural, and waiting for a truck would be hard. (Eric owns the dealership that is the nearest to mine, and he’s still 50 miles away over the hill.) A semi is better to drive because I can take what we want to sell and bring back what we bought. Our system works well for us.