Vision Management Group

Please join us in welcoming Curt Trepanier to Vision Management Group!

Curt joins our team as our newest Fixed Operations Specialist, bringing years of hands-on dealership experience and a passion for helping dealerships improve performance. Throughout his career, he's built his expertise from the ground up, developing a strong belief in communication, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Curt's addition reflects our continued investment in helping dealerships build stronger service departments through practical coaching, proven processes, and dedicated support.

Swipe to meet our growing Fixed Operations team. Together, Jerry Wagner, Bob Suko, and Curt Trepanier are committed to helping dealerships strengthen operations, develop their people, and drive lasting results.

Welcome to the team, Curt! We're excited to have you on board

Adding a new process before fixing the last one is how good stores stay stuck.

We see it after nearly every 20 Group cycle.

A GM comes back with three new ideas:

• A revised follow-up cadence
• A different morning meeting structure
• A fresh F&I approach

And layers them on top of what the team was already struggling to run.

Six weeks later, none of it has taken hold. The manager is frustrated, and the team is half-doing several things at once.

All because no one stayed on any of them long enough for the team to stop thinking about it and start doing it by habit.

Before we add anything to a store, we ask one question first:

Which of your current processes is actually running the way you designed it?

Not whether it exists. Whether it's being done, by the right people, every time, with someone accountable for checking. In our experience, the answer is usually fewer than the GM expects.

The stores that build durable results pick fewer things to work on. They stay on those things through the uncomfortable stretch where it feels like it's not working yet. Then they add the next one.

What's on your plate right now that deserves that kind of focus before anything else gets added?

CDK released their 2026 State of F&I study last week.

The finding that stayed with us:

F&I is now the most trusted step in the car-buying process. And wait times and paperwork are still the top complaints.

That gap makes sense once you see where the friction actually lives.

Customers trust the F&I manager. They don't always trust what happens around the manager. For example:

A 45-minute wait with no one explaining why it's taking this long.

Or contracts that need a signature every other page with no walkthrough of what changed.

Or a product presentation that starts before the customer has had ten seconds to process what they just agreed to at the sales desk.

The trust is there. The process around it is what burns it.

In the stores we work with, the ones with consistently clean F&I CSI scores tend to handle one thing differently from the rest: the handoff framing. Before the customer walks into the F&I office, the sales manager says something specific.

"You've got about 20 minutes in there. They're going to walk you through a couple of things and then you're done."

That expectation alone changes how customers experience the wait. Pre-disclosure of products at the sales desk helps too, but only when it happens there, not in the F&I office doorway.

If your F&I CSI is inconsistent month to month, where does the handoff break down? Comment or DM and I'll share what we typically find first.

The best conversations we have as a team don't happen in the office.

They happen here:

Not because dinner is more important than the work, but because it's where you find out who you're actually working with.

Someone mentions a store visit that didn't go as planned. Someone else says what they wish they'd handled differently. Things that wouldn't come up in a Monday morning call.

We're in our clients' stores five days a week. That's the nature of the job. But the team doing that work still needs a table of its own, away from the floor.

We tell our dealers all the time: culture is what the room feels like when no one's performing.

That one applies to us too.

This Tuesday, we sat down for our quarterly Tactical.

Ryan Giles, our Head Overdrive Coach, ran it.

We went through our annual goals, checked where we actually stood, and built clear next steps for the gaps we found.

That meant honest conversations. Some disagreement. Our coaches pushing back on each other's read of where things stood.

And finding common ground before anyone left the room.

That's the same experience we work to build inside the Overdrive System for our dealer partners: leadership teams that communicate without dancing around it, stay aligned on where they're going, and leave each meeting clear on what happens next.

We can't ask a GM and their leadership team to do something in a room that we're not willing to do ourselves.

Does your leadership team have a meeting rhythm that actually moves things forward? Drop a comment or DM us.

Nearly 1 in 4 new-car buyers signed an 84-month loan in Q2 2026.

Here's what we're seeing in the stores we work with:

Customers stretching to a payment they can handle today, on a vehicle they'll owe more on than it's worth by month 18. When they come back to trade in, they can't. Repeat business, service retention, referral cycle. It all stalls.

The F&I office didn't create this problem. But it's the one place that can interrupt it before the deal signs.

The most useful thing we've seen a manager do: pull last month's 84-month contracts and ask one question:

Did this customer understand what their equity position would look like in 18 months, or did we just find a payment that worked?

In our experience, the answer is usually the latter. Not because the team doesn't know the math. Because no one built the habit of walking through it at the desk.

The answer isn't to turn the business away. It's making sure the customer understands what they're agreeing to before they figure it out on their own two years later.
What's your current 84-month percentage? Drop it in the comments.

Source: Cox Automotive, Q2 2026.