Record June. So why was your month rubbish?

54 482 new vehicles moved in June. Up 15.3% on last June. The best June this industry has had in 19 years.

So how was yours?

Because if you sat through the best June in nearly two decades and your floor was quiet, I've got bad news, and thats the whole point of this post. The market is not your problem. The market did its bit. The market showed up, brought its friends, and bought a record number of cars from somebody.

Just not from you.

"The market is tough" is the oldest excuse in the trade

I have heard it in every dealership I have ever walked into. Good month, bad month, doesn't matter. There is always a reason floating around the sales office. Petrol price. Interest rates. Load shedding. The election. The rugby. January. December. The month with the public holidays. The month without the public holidays.

And look, sometimes it's true. Sometimes the market genuinely is rough and everyone eats it together.

June was not that month.

June was the month where the tide came in and lifted every boat in the harbour. Passenger cars up 18%. Bakkies up 8%. Buyers walking around with pre-approved finance, actually spending. If your boat stayed on the sand while that was happening, the tide isn't the thing thats broken.

The buyers came. They just went somewhere else.

This is the part that stings, so I'll say it plainly.

Those 54 482 people didn't materialise out of thin air on the day they signed. Weeks before, they were sitting on a couch with a phone, googling the car they wanted. A big chunk of them googled it in your town. Some of them landed on your website. Some of them filled in your form. Some of them WhatsApped you.

And then they bought from a dealer down the road.

Not because that dealer had a better car. Half the time it's literally the same car, same colour, same price, same OEM. They bought there because that dealer got back to them in four minutes and you got back to them on Thursday. Or because that dealer's site loaded before the buyer got bored, and yours was still spinning. Or because the buyer never found your stock at all, because your listings are a mess and your website was built in 2019 by a guy who has since emigrated.

Record months are brutally honest like that. They strip out the excuse. When demand is scarce, everybody can blame the economy and go home. When demand is everywhere and you still miss, it's you.

The audit nobody wants to do

Take twenty minutes this week. Do it properly, dont delegate it, and don't get defensive.

One. Send yourself an enquiry through your own website, from your own phone, at 7pm on a Saturday like a real buyer would. Time how long it takes for a human being to respond. Not an auto-reply. A human. If it's more than an hour, there's your June.

Two. Open your website on mobile data, not on the dealership wifi. Count the seconds. Buyers are doing this in a queue at Checkers with two bars of signal and zero patience.

Three. Search for the exact car you're trying to move, the way a buyer would type it, and see if you come up at all. If your own stock is invisible on the internet, you're not selling cars, you're storing them.

None of that costs money. All of it will tell you something you'd rather not know.

Next month won't save you either

Here's the hill I'll die on. A good market hides a bad process, and a great market hides it beautifully. Every dealer who had a stormer in June and doesn't know exactly why is going to have a terrible month at some point and won't know why then either.

Fix the boring stuff. Answer faster. Make the site quick. Make the stock findable. Then when the tide goes out, and it always does, you're the one still moving metal while everybody else is at the braai explaining that the market is tough.

It really was a cracking June.

Shame if you missed it.