Consulting renewals are where math goes to hide. The coach points to better meetings. The GM remembers two good months and one bad one. The CFO asks what the store got for the fee, and the room gets quiet. Every one of those conversations could have been settled in advance with 30 days of baseline data and four numbers.
Here is the measurement system we recommend dealers run on any engagement, including ours. Especially ours.
Step 1: Baseline Before You Begin
The month before the engagement starts, lock four numbers in writing. Inventory turn, annualized. Percentage of inventory over 60 days. Front-end gross PVR on used. Lead contact rate. Pull them from the DMS and CRM, not from memory, and agree with the consultant that these four are the scoreboard. A consultant who resists a written baseline is answering your vetting question for you, a point we made bluntly in why managers distrust consultants.
Step 2: Put Dollars on Each Number
The four numbers convert to money without creativity. Turn: a 50-unit lot that goes from 8 turns to 9 sells roughly 50 more cars a year, and at the pre-pandemic-level used gross Haig Partners reported for late 2025, about $1,528 per vehicle for the public groups, that is roughly $76,000 in incremental front gross, before F&I. Aged units: every car that avoids the over-60 bucket skips the markdown, floorplan interest, and depreciation that typically stack to well over a thousand dollars per aged unit. Contact rate: more contacted leads means more appointments at a conversion rate you already know from your own funnel. Write the assumptions down once and reuse them every quarter.
Want your baseline pulled for free?
A Lot Audit captures your turn, aging, gross, and contact-rate baseline in 30 minutes. Use it to measure us, or anyone else.
Step 3: Measure at 90 Days, Honestly
Ninety days is the fair checkpoint: long enough for process changes to reach the numbers, short enough that a stalled engagement cannot hide. Same four numbers, same sources, same math. Then the formula: incremental annualized gross plus avoided aging losses, divided by the total engagement cost. A store paying $1,000 to $2,000 a month needs roughly one incremental deal a month to break even, which is exactly why the aged-unit and contact-rate improvements usually carry the case on their own.
Two honesty rules. Adjust for the market: if every store in your region got a tailwind, your consultant does not get credit for the weather. Cox Automotive's market data makes that check easy. And count the misses: if two of the four numbers moved and two did not, say so, because a coach worth keeping will say it first.
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The 30-Day Leading Indicators
Hard numbers lag. If you want an early read, check the behaviors at 30 days: is the weekly meeting happening with a written game plan, are assigned tasks getting completed, is repricing running on schedule, are the one-on-ones on the calendar? Those process signals predict the 90-day numbers with uncomfortable accuracy, because consulting that sticks is visible in the calendar long before it is visible in the statement.
A consultant who will not agree to a written baseline and a 90-day scoreboard is telling you the ROI answer before the engagement starts.
The Bottom Line
Baseline four numbers, price the moves, check at 90 days, and adjust for the market. The whole system takes an afternoon to set up and ends every renewal debate before it starts. If you want the baseline pulled on your store this week, with no obligation attached to the answer, book a Lot Audit and we will build the scoreboard with you.