Over the past four or five years, we’ve had a lot of conversations with dealers like you about how you approach improving and growing your business.
Your commitment to continuing to get better at everything you do is inspiring to us. Especially when we consider all that you’re juggling.
Most dealers are running four or five different kinds of businesses under one roof, each of which has its own unique set of factors that need to be considered and managed to be successful. Add into that the challenges that come with seasonality, economic ups and downs, workforce shortages, the unpredictability of Mother Nature … the list goes on and on.
You are not only making the best of all of the uncertainty of running a business, but we can feel your passion for serving your customers, caring for your team and contributing to your community. You want to be among the best of the best in this industry. We can’t help but respect you and want to help.
As MRAA has worked to serve the marine retail community, our goal has been to offer tools, education and resources that can be quickly and easily put to work in the dealership.
The wake-up call for me has been the realization that, despite the best of intentions, most training and education out there doesn’t go far enough to make a real difference for dealers and their employees. And most dealers don’t have a training or human resources department that can pick up where the trainers and educators leave off.
So, the MRAA team has been working hard to ensure the educational tools, resources and content we provide ARE actionable, CAN be adopted by most dealers and WILL help them improve their performance.
The pinnacle of this effort is coming to life in what we introduced yesterday as Continuous Certification. Certified Dealers don’t just have the desire to improve and grow … they’ve made a commitment to laying down a foundation, a stable platform that they can build a better future on. Certification leads them through the development of this foundation.
Once they’ve built that foundation, it means that regardless of how big their business is, how many locations they have or how many people they employ, when they take on a new training initiative, they’re different from the average dealer. They have the processes in place to quickly and effectively adopt new strategies, and respond to changes in their prospects and customers, and in technology.
That’s why we’ve made the investment in developing a training curriculum just for Certified Dealers … One that we can be confident they can use to improve and grow. We’ve partnered with some of the best educators out there, those that are truly committed to our industry and have a track record for making a real difference. People like Sam Dantzler of Garage Composites, Theresa Syer of Syer Hospitality, John Spence of John Spence Inc. and David Spader of Spader Business Management.
We’re also working with Jim Million of Professional Research Group, Inc., an expert in designing dealer education that produces measurable results and a leading trainer and educator in his own right. In fact, if you’ve entered MRAATraining.com to take our Pilot Course on Buyer Motivation: The Key to Building Value, you’ve already had a chance to witness Jim in action as the course instructor.
All of us are really excited to see what we’re producing together pay off in spades for Certified Dealers, their employees and their customers.
At the end of the day, our mission with Dealer Certification, or any MRAA educational program, isn’t just to provide as much value as possible. That’s not enough. You trust us to help you and your team get better at what you do, to make a real difference in your businesses and in this industry, not just once, but on an ongoing basis. That’s what Continuous Certification – and everything we do at MRAA – is all about. And in order to keep up with you and your quest for continuous improvement, we have to keep raising our game too.
