Why Can't I Get My People To Do What I Ask? (The Real Answer Has Nothing To Do With Your Team)

Direct Answer

The reason your salespeople, BDC agents, or used car managers aren't doing what you asked is almost never about them. It's because you never set a clear expectation in the first place. As 52-year industry veteran Ed French puts it: "No one can meet a secret expectation." If your team doesn't know exactly what you want, why you want it, how to do it, and what's in it for them, you're paying full salary for guesswork, and the dealership down the street is eating your lunch.

What Is a "Secret Expectation" in a Car Dealership?

A secret expectation is anything a manager wants from an employee that has not been spelled out in writing, in conversation, or in a documented process. It's the appraisal turn time you assume your used car manager should hit but never said out loud. It's the price-to-market number you expect on every unit but never put on a board. It's the leads-per-vehicle ratio you grade your team on but never communicated as a target. If it lives only in your head, it's a secret. And nobody hits a target they can't see.

This is the entire reason underperformance shows up in stores that have plenty of talent. The talent is guessing.

How Do You Actually Set a Clear Expectation?

Ed broke it down on the podcast into four parts, and it's worth printing on a notecard and taping to your desk:

1. What do you want? Be specific. "Sell more cars" isn't a target. "Hit 14 days average days to sale on the front 30 bucket" is.
2. Why do you want it? People follow conviction, not directives. Connect the number to the outcome, whether that's gross, turn, customer experience, or comp.
3. How are you going to get it done? This is the process piece most managers skip. If you can't describe the path, your people will invent one (and you won't like it).
4. What's in it for the employee? Spiff, comp, advancement, recognition, education. If the only person who benefits from the goal is the dealer, the team will never own it.

Miss any one of those four and you don't have an expectation. You have a wish.

Why Are Today's Dealership Leaders Choosing Comfort Over Clarity?

Because clarity is hard, and comfort is easy. That's the whole story. Ed put it this way on the show: "I chose clarity over comfort. I'd rather have clarity than comfort. Today's leaders index more toward being comfortable than being clear."

The COVID gravy years made this worse. From 2020 through 2024, you could sell anything at any price to anyone. Managers got promoted off the floor without ever learning to read a financial statement, build a desk, or hold an accountability conversation. Ed called them "battlefield promotions" — "We fired Jimmy, okay, you're up." Now those same managers are running stores in a 2017-style market where margins are tight and shopper counts are inverted, and they're discovering that hope isn't a strategy.

The participation-trophy era trained an entire generation to expect comfort. As a leader, your job is to reset that expectation inside your four walls.

How Do You Analyze What You Lost Instead of What You Sold?

This is the single biggest mindset shift in the entire conversation, and it's the one I flagged on the pod as the line to circle and asterisk: what you don't know is what's killing you.

Every dealership has a scorecard for wins. It's called the financial statement. You get twelve a year. What no dealership tracks formally is what got lost — the deals that walked, the leads that died, the trades you missed, the units that aged out of their gross window. Ed's framing:

"If we sold 150 cars, that meant we probably could have done 275 if everything went perfect. So how much am I willing to accept as a percentage of chasing perfection and catching excellent? If 150 was good, excellent would have been about 210. That means we left 60 deals on the table. Of those 60, how many were self-inflicted?"

That's the question. The self-inflicted losses are where your gross lives. A practical way to start: every Monday, before you talk about what sold last week, spend the first 20 minutes of your sales meeting on what didn't. Walk the dead-lead report. Walk the unsold showroom log. Walk the aged units in the 60-plus bucket. The wins take care of themselves. The losses are the lesson.

If you want a structured way to audit those self-inflicted losses across your inventory, our aged-inventory cleanup playbook is built exactly for that.

What Is a "Business Model" in a Dealership Context?

A business model is the specific, repeatable way your store makes money, not the franchise on the pylon. Ed was direct on this: "I'll ask a dealer, what's your business model? They go, 'Well, we're a Nissan.' No, dude. That's a franchise. That's not a business model."

A real business model answers questions like: Are you a finance-first store? A used-car-volume store? A high-gross-low-volume rural operation? A subprime-heavy metro store? A service-absorption-driven group? Until you can answer that in one sentence, you can't hire correctly, you can't train correctly, you can't pay-plan correctly, and you can't coach correctly, because you don't know what you're coaching toward.

The same store, in the same market, with the same inventory will perform completely differently under two different business models. Define yours.

What Is a BHAG and Why Should Used Car Managers Care?

A BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal, is a target so large it forces you to rebuild your operation to hit it. Ed shared the story on the pod: in the early 1980s, his mentor walked into a Pontiac-Datsun store selling 40 cars a month in a town of 50,000 people and announced they would sell 300. Four years later, they sold 303 and closed the dealership for three days to take the entire team to Vegas to celebrate.

The point isn't 300 cars. The point is that the BHAG forced a different conversation every single day. Instead of "How was last month?" the question became "What if?" What if we changed our marketing? What if we restructured the pay plan? What if we built a different acquisition channel? What if we hired three more producers? The BHAG creates the gravitational pull that "do better next month" never will.

Most used car managers are chasing the dealer down the street. Stop. The dealer down the street probably isn't great, and you don't want to be them anyway. Chase the BHAG instead.

What Do High Performers Need From a Leader?

Three things, and Ed nailed them clean. Every rock star on your roster — the 30-car salesperson, the closer who never misses a turn, the BDC manager who runs an 80 percent contact rate — needs to know:

1. Their work matters. Not in a corporate-platitude way. In a specific, observable, "you did this and here's what it produced" way.
2. They're being developed. What's the next skill, the next role, the next level? If a top producer can't see the next rung, they'll find a ladder at another store.
3. You have their back. When the customer escalates, when the deal goes sideways, when payroll is questioned, they need to know you're in the foxhole with them.

If a high performer stops feeling those three things, doubt creeps in. And doubt is the single thing that runs your best people to the competition. As Ed said, "You can't run a dealership on doubt."

What Is "Windshield Time" and Why Does It Work?

Windshield time is a coaching technique where a leader pulls a manager or top performer into the car for an unannounced drive — no agenda, no destination. You might end up at Sonic for a milkshake, you might end up driving a back road for 20 minutes. The point isn't the drive. The point is the conversation, and the visibility.

Ed used windshield time intentionally for two reasons. First, it created a one-on-one space with no phones, no distractions, no audience — the only time most managers will actually hear feedback. Second, and this is the underrated piece: the rest of the store sees the two of you leave together. That's a signal. It says, "These two are tight. Whatever they're talking about, it matters." It builds the high performer's stature inside the building without you having to say a word.

The windshield-time conversation lives on those same three things: your work matters, here's how we get better, I have your back. That's it. Not a write-up. Not a lecture. A conversation in a moving car.

The Bottom Line

After 52 years in this business, Ed French's message lands harder than ever in today's market: there is no money in being comfortable. There is money in winning, and there is money in being clear. Most dealership underperformance isn't a people problem or a market problem. It's a clarity problem. Set the expectation. Show the scoreboard. Define the business model. Chase the BHAG, not the dealer down the street. Analyze what you lost, not just what you sold. Build your high performers up with the three things they need, and use windshield time to coach without humiliating. The dealers who do this are pulling away in 2026. The ones who don't are blaming their comp plan.

Ready to bring this kind of clarity into your store? Book a demo with a Lotpop coach and we'll walk through your bucket health, your aged inventory, and the leadership gaps inside your used car operation in 30 minutes.