You Don't Actually Know How Your Dealership Is Performing

You think you do. You have your YOY revenue. You have your manufacturer scorecard. You have a feel for how the year is going. Your CFO sends you the financials every month. You know your numbers.

But "knowing your numbers" and "knowing how your dealership is performing" are two different things.

Eye-level view of a financial report with graphs and charts

Here's the test. Right now, without looking anything up: What's a healthy fleet gross margin for a dealership your size in your industry? What's a top-quartile service recovery rate?

What's a reasonable used inventory level relative to your annual operating plan? What's a strong revenue-per-employee number for shops like yours?

If you can't answer those questions with confidence, you don't actually know how your dealership is performing. You know what your dealership did. You don't know whether it was good.

This is the gap that 20 Groups have been closing — for some industries — for nearly 80 years.

The Idea That Started in 1945

In 1945, a small group of Ford dealers in Kansas City got together to do something none of them had done before: open their books to each other. Carefully, selectively, and confidentially. The group called itself the Dealer Analysis Bureau. They hired a Kansas City accounting firm called Central Services to compile a monthly composite of their financials so each dealer could see how he stacked up against the rest of the group.

By 1947, they held their first official 20 Group meeting. Central Services eventually became Nichols, Campbell & Morrow — NCM Associates today — and the 20 Group concept spread out of automotive retail and into more than twenty other industries.

That original DAB group still meets three times a year — currently nineteen Ford dealers from across the US and Canada — eighty years after their first sit-down. What kept that group alive that long isn't nostalgia. It's the math. Members of long-running 20 Groups have stayed in the same group for thirty, forty, even fifty years. People don't pay dues that long for a program that doesn't pay them back.

Why It Works: The Math of Benchmarking

The core insight is simple. A dealer running their business in isolation has exactly one reference point — themselves last year. That isn't a benchmark. That's a memory.

A dealer running their business alongside twenty similar peers has nineteen reference points. They can see where the median sits, where the top quartile sits, and where the spread is widest. More importantly, they can see which dealers are pulling ahead, on which metrics, and ask them how.

That is what data does for a dealership when it is done right. It tells you:

• Where you're already winning, and shouldn't change anything

• Where you're middle of the pack, and have an opportunity to differentiate

• Where you're behind, and need to make a change before the gap costs you

Without comparable peer data, every operating decision is a coin flip dressed up as judgment. With it, your priorities sort themselves. The dealer who knows their fleet margin is six points below the top quartile doesn't have to guess where to focus this year. The number is the conversation.

The Catch: Benchmark Data Is Only Useful If It Fits

Here is where most "benchmarking" goes sideways.

Generic industry averages are nearly useless for an operator. The "average" equipment dealership combines a thousand-employee national chain with a single-location family shop. That average tells you almost nothing about whether you are running your business well. Comparing yourself to it can actively mislead you — show you a green light when you should be looking at a yellow.

What you actually need is benchmark data from a peer set that looks like you. Same product lines. Similar scale. Similar customer mix. Similar geography. Similar capital structure.

That kind of data is rare. In some industries, it doesn't exist at all.

This is the single hardest problem in 20 Group design: getting the right twenty dealerships in the room. Too broad a peer set and the benchmarks become noise. Too narrow and the group can't sustain itself. The 20 Groups that have lasted — the DAB included — have spent decades curating who is in and who isn't, because the integrity of the benchmark is a direct result of who is sitting at the table.

If you're in an industry where peer-aggregated financial data doesn't exist yet, you have two options. Wait for someone else to build it. Or be one of the founding members of the group that does.

The Other Half: A Constantly Changing Economy

Even with the right peer set and clean data, a benchmark from three years ago won't tell you what you need to know today.

The ground is moving. Tariffs change the cost of every machine on your lot. Interest rates change what your buyers can afford. Used equipment values move on supply cycles that didn't exist a decade ago. Manufacturer programs change. Labor costs reset every year. Customer expectations get rewritten by AI now, quarterly.

The dealership that's outperforming the field this year is doing something different from the dealership that won three years ago. The only reliable way to see what they're doing — and how it's working — is to be in the room with them when they're talking about it.

A 20 Group that meets once and never again is a snapshot. A 20 Group that meets two or three times a year, for years on end, is a movie. You see the trends as they emerge, not after they've already cost you money. You see who tried the new financing program first, what worked, what didn't, and you adjust before your year is over instead of after.

Most dealers underestimate this part. They imagine the value of a 20 Group as the data itself. The data is the entry ticket. The real value is the conversation that happens around it — the moment a peer says we tried that, here's why it didn't work and saves you twelve months and six figures of figuring out the same thing yourself.

What I'm Building With Executive Exchange

I run a 20 Group-style program called Executive Exchange, designed specifically for equipment distributors. The first cohort is built for fleet distributors in the golf car channel — a community I've been part of for over twenty-five years, and a peer set that has, until now, never had aggregated financial benchmarks of any kind.

A few things are intentionally different from how most 20 Groups operate.

One facilitator. Always. I personally facilitate every meeting and aggregate every data submission. No associates, no rotating moderators, no third-party analysts. The person reading your numbers in confidence is the same person sitting across the table from you in February. That continuity matters more than most groups acknowledge.

Industry-specific, not industry-adjacent. Most peer groups have to combine adjacent verticals to get to twenty members. Executive Exchange is built around a specific distributor channel from day one. The benchmarks are tight because the peer set is tight.

An operator, not a corporate facilitator. I ran an equipment distributorship for over twenty-five years and scaled it from one location to eight across five states. I'm a CPA with Big Four training, and I've been an active member and moderator in YPO forum for more than a dozen years. I know the numbers, I know the operating context behind the numbers, and I know what it feels like to be the person on the other side of the conversation.

Three pulse points a year, not one. A February kickoff with full financial review and benchmark deep-dive. A virtual mid-season check in June or July. A November year-end and planning meeting. Three touch points across the year, not a single annual meeting that's already three quarters out of date by the time you walk into it.

This model is being built first for one distributor channel. Others are next. The principle scales — but the integrity of the data only scales if every peer set is curated the same way the DAB curates its.

The Question

If you're running a dealership today and you don't have a clean answer to how am I actually performing relative to dealers like me, that gap is costing you money. Probably more than you want to know.

Eighty years of evidence says the dealers who close that gap outperform the ones who don't. The original Ford group figured that out in 1945. Your industry may be a little late to the conversation. That's fixable.

Brandon Bonham is the founder of Brandon Bonham Consulting and the facilitator of Executive Exchange, a private peer forum for equipment distributor executives. He works with dealerships and manufacturers across the golf car, tractor, and construction equipment industries.

Brandon@BrandonBonham.com  · 801-633-2590 · BrandonBonham.com