See how Howard Brothers Drives Success using Ideal for their Six Dealership Locations!

Jeff Howard, Owner – Doraville, GA.

Owning multiple dealerships can be very difficult but with 6 dealerships across America, Howard Brothers seem to have it in the bag.

We sat down with Jeff Howard where he shared his experience managing a dealership with six locations in total. Howard brothers has been around since the 1920’s and Jeff recalls watching the dealerships progression since he was a kid. Along with his brother, Jeff has helped manage their day-to-day operations.

Hear all about their journey up to this point and what they did to create sustainable success across multiple locations here:

What were some of the challenges your dealership faced before introducing Ideal?

Jeff: A lot of the challenges before Ideal. When I was really young, we literally just wrote orders on paper and had carbon copies, running the credit cards through the black carbon copy paper.

What is your favorite feature within Ideal?

Jeff: We’ve had Ideal now for about seven years and we love it. It’s fully integrated all six of our locations. We can see exactly what’s going on everywhere. We use everything on the inventory side on a daily basis. All six of our stores are intertwined and we’re constantly moving inventory around, especially in times, like right now in the post-COVID era, when inventory is tight and it’s hard to get particular items. We’re constantly moving inventory. Ideal is key in order for us to track it and know exactly where it is and where it came from and where it’s going and to ensure that we’re not losing any inventory as well.

We track commissions through all the sales summary reports and we use the Labor Efficient Agency report with all our service folks. We’re constantly using all the various reports.

Can you tell us about your experience with our training team?

Jeff: The training process for Ideal’s been great. We use the training module quite a bit. We get in there and kind of tear it up and try to figure out what we did and fix it first before we go into our real side of ideal. But training’s been good. The team at Ideal’s been very great if you ever have a question and reach out to them.

It has absolutely allowed us to track all our inventory and have more peace of mind that things are truly occurring and being able to see past invoices and truly track all the data.