Guides

Starting a 20-group: a practical guide

Starting a 20-group is less complicated than most dealers assume and more work than the people selling you one will admit. The hard parts are not technical. They are choosing the right members, agreeing on definitions before anyone is emotionally invested, and building the habits that make the third meeting as good as the first.

This is a practical guide, written by people who have sat in these rooms as members.

First: who is allowed to be in the room

Members must not compete with each other. This is the first constraint, it is not negotiable, and it is not primarily about comfort.

A group of non-competing dealers comparing operating performance is a well-established and legitimate business practice. A group of direct competitors doing the same thing in the same room is a different situation entirely, and one that can attract attention nobody in the room wants. Keep it simple: no two members drawing from the same market.

The practical consequence is that your group will be geographically spread. That is a feature. The store four provinces away will tell you the truth, will share the process that produced their number, and has no reason to hold anything back.

The other rule that follows from it: nothing about pricing, pay plans, wage rates, customer terms or territory is ever discussed. Not in the room, not over dinner. Operating performance only. Put that reminder at the top of every agenda and read it out loud at the start of every meeting.

Getting to ten to fifteen stores

Groups below about ten stores struggle, because one member's unusual month distorts the composite and because the room runs out of perspectives. Groups much above twenty struggle for the opposite reason: not everyone gets airtime, and members stop preparing when they know they will not be called on.

Ten to fifteen is the range most working groups settle into.

Building it:

Start with three or four dealers who already trust each other. Every group that survives has a core that existed before the group did. Do not start by advertising.

Have each of them name two. Two rounds of that reaches fifteen candidates, and every candidate arrives with somebody vouching for them.

Screen for one thing above all others: willingness to show real numbers. Skill varies and that is fine, that is what the group is for. A member who manages their statement before every meeting poisons the composite for everybody, and they are very hard to remove once seated.

Agree the commitment out loud before anybody joins. Attendance at all meetings, statement in by the deadline every month, and prepared work when assigned. A member who cannot commit to those three should not join, and it is much kinder to establish that now.

Agree the statement and the supplement before month one

This is the step groups skip, and it is the one that costs them a year.

Agree the statement format. Everybody submits the same monthly financial statement, in the same format, with the same mapping. If two members classify the same expense differently, the composite compares two different things and nobody knows.

Agree the supplement. The manufacturer statement does not carry everything a group wants to compare. Technician count, bay count, advisor count, loaner fleet size, and a handful of other operating counts usually have to be collected separately, in a small monthly supplement. Decide what is on it before the first month rather than adding fields later, because a field added in month seven has no history behind it.

Agree the deadline and the consequence. A composite that waits on one late member is a composite that is always late. Most groups settle on a fixed calendar day and a clear consequence: late statements are not in the book that month.

Agree who owns the definitions. When a question comes up about how a line is mapped, somebody has to decide. Usually the chair, sometimes the moderator. It must be somebody.

Setting the calendar

Three meetings a year is the standard rhythm and it works: enough time between meetings for commitments to be delivered, not so much that momentum is lost.

Set all three dates twelve months ahead, at the first meeting, and never move them. Dealers plan their year around fixed dates and cannot plan around dates that move.

Rotate the host. The hosting store handles the room and the logistics, and the group sees a different market each time, which is a genuine benefit and not just fairness.

Rotating the chair, and the honest workload

The chair sets the agenda, keeps the meeting moving, protects the member being examined from a pile-on, and records the commitments. It is real work, concentrated in the week before each meeting.

Here is the arithmetic that usually settles the discussion: in a group of ten to fifteen stores meeting three times a year, chairing and hosting comes around roughly once every three to five years. Most dealers, once they see that, stop worrying about the burden.

Two other roles worth naming early. Somebody has to chase the statements each month, which is usually a controller or an office manager rather than a dealer. And somebody has to be the person who says "that is off topic" when the conversation drifts toward the subjects that are off the table.

Ground rules worth writing down

Short list, agreed at the first meeting, printed on every agenda:

Six lines and a room that behaves.

What it costs to run

Be honest with prospective members about the cost structure so nobody is surprised. A group carries four kinds of cost:

Travel and time. Flights, hotel and two days per member per meeting. This is the largest number by some distance, and it is unavoidable in any group that meets in person.

The room and the food. Paid by the hosting store or split by the group, depending on how you decide to handle it.

The book and the portal. The system that turns the statements into a composite. Apex20 is $199 per store per month, all-in, plus applicable taxes, which covers the monthly book, the group comparison, the store briefing, the meeting tools and goal tracking.

Moderation, if you want it. A group that wants three professionally moderated meetings a year can add that at $250 per store per month, which is $449 all-in, plus applicable taxes, and includes everything except the meeting room and the food. A group that wants to run itself does not pay it.

Decide as a group how the shared costs are split before you have any, not after.

The first meeting

Keep the first one short and structural. Agree the ground rules, agree the statement and the supplement, set the twelve-month calendar, elect the chair, and do one real composite review even if only two months of data exist. Resist the temptation to solve everything on day one. The group is a habit you are building, and habits are built by the meeting happening again.

Where Apex20 fits

Apex20 was built for exactly this situation: a group of dealers who want the arithmetic done properly without handing the group itself over to somebody else. You upload the statement you already produce, the book builds from it, and every line shows the group average, your rank, and your Apex20 target with a badge saying where the target came from. Agendas draft themselves from the group's own numbers, and commitments carry from one meeting to the next.

One honest limit: the statement parser reads the CDJR dealership statement today, so that is the franchise we can onboard right now.

If you are putting a group together and want to talk it through with a dealer instead of a salesperson, call the line.