Why Dealerships Comply and How to Choose a Compliance Path

Reasons dealerships must comply

Hi, my name is Terry Dortch. I'm with Automotive Risk Management Partners. I'm here today to talk to you about compliance and why you comply with the different rules that we have out there. So really, why do you comply? There's a handful of reasons why.

First one, government regulators. So there's state, federal regulators that could come in, find you, audit you, create havoc. FTC, CFPB, state AGs. That's your first reason, right? Because you're worried that you're going to get fined. You don't want to give back any money that you've been spent the last however many years making. There's no sense giving it back to the government agencies. So you want to make sure you're compliant so that you can protect yourself against that civil liability. Some aspects of these rules allow for civil liability. You want to make sure you protect yourself against any civil aspect of it.

And I'm going to suggest too that there's a third reason that you want to do this, and that third reason is because I think that anytime you adopt processes and procedures that help you treat the customer better, conform with the federal regs that are out there, that your entire operation's going to be smoother. Everything's going to function better, and you're going to have a sales process that is more beneficial to not only you but the consumer. So there's multiple reasons why you're going to comply.

Options for achieving compliance

Now, how do you comply with these rules is really a big question. There's several different ways we could do that, right? You could self-insure. You could basically just say, hey, you know what, I'm not going to worry about it. I could care less if they find me. They find me, I'll take care of it. Just ignore it. There's a lot of dealers that do that. I get it, I understand that, right?

You could internalize it. You could create your own team. You could create a team that comes in, does your auditing. You'd have to go out and find some online courses that you could create and put into a format that your employees could go through. And there's different platforms out there. You could even buy, if you wanted to, that have many of these courses in them. You may have to buy two or three different platforms, but you could put it together. You could put together an internal program that would make you compliant. Couple of things: it's not going to be cheap, and do you really want the fox guarding the henhouse? I mean, seriously, because that's what you would have anytime you internalize it. The camaraderie, the way that a dealership works, they're never going to, nobody's ever going to really nail down any problems in the dealership with any strong convictions because they all hang out together, they're all part of the same team, so they really don't want to point fingers.

Choosing a compliance company

The other part is you could hire a compliance company like us. Now again, that leaves you with multiple choices, because there's, we're not the only compliance company out there, obviously there are several of them, and each one kind of has their own little niche, I guess. You have, you know, there's some guys out there that are smaller, more independent, do their thing, and they have a handful of stores that they work with, they're really tight with those stores and they do a pretty nice job. They do an audit process, maybe they're not as intense as we might be. There's other companies too that are more hands off, they're more remote, they want to turn on a couple switches, give you a little software platform that you can function from, provide you with some courses, and they let you go. Then there's a company like us, we're going to come in and hold your hand through the entire process. So we're the kind of a compliance company, we're a true consulting company, where we're going to come in and work with your management team, little more involvement. We're going to be a lot more involved in setting you up to where, again, we can wage that affirmative defense to the civil governmental aspect of the possibility of being fined, sued, whatever.

My point in all this is that you have a lot of options, a lot of opportunities, and a lot of ways to address these issues. You need to find out what's best for you. I'm going to tell you right now, if you're going to hire a compliance company, you need to call us. We are literally the best, can tell you right now, are none, there's nobody out there better than us, nobody, nobody has the same knowledge that we do. We've been doing this a long time. So if you're going to hire a compliance company, you need to call us. If you're going to internalize it, God bless you, good luck, have fun. You'll be able to put a team together. I've known some dealers that do it successfully, and I've known a lot of them that don't. And I don't have, you know, that's something that you have to make a business decision on, and you may choose to not do anything, which is fine also, because I understand it. I know that there's a business decision to be made here. All I'm telling you is when you make that decision, if you need to use a compliance company, call us, because we're really there to work with you hand in hand. If you have any questions or anything, information's on the screen, give us a call. Thanks.