Three motor dealers – South Africa’s best in small, medium and large categories – were recognised for their global best practice performances at the Sewells Group Businessman of the Year (BotY) banquet in Gautenglast night (Thursday 7th June 2012).
They are:
Large category: Johan Coetzee Land Rover East Rand
Medium category: Schalk Fourie NTT Toyota Mokopane
Small category: Bertus van Vuuren New Vaal Motors Bethlehem
Fifteen finalists (five from each category) received special certificates prior to the final announcement at the industry banquet, an event sponsored by WesBank and supported by the National Automobile Dealers’ Association since its inception in 1998. A special ‘Most Improved Performance Group’ award was won by Jaen van Aardt of Datnis Nissan King William’s Town.
Tania Barlow, managing director of Sewells Group South Africa, said the ‘BotY’ awards had become symbolic of the ultimate in excellence in automotive retailing.
‘Our finalists – especially the winners – have shown their ability in providing exemplary service to their motoring customers in every aspect of their businesses. They continually prove that to succeed in a highly competitive environment and against the background of a testing economy, one has to be able to meet and exceed the highest expectations of everyone’s motoring needs.
‘These fine businessmen do that continually and reach outstanding levels of delivery across the five traditional departments (new cars, used cars, workshops and F&I – financial services). Each year these finalists and the companies they run show proof that that can equal and even better the best in the world.’
She said an innovation in the BotY last year was to introduce a stratified selection procedure to nominate dealers from each of three categories – large, medium and small.
‘We’ve continued that practice this year to give equal and fair opportunity to dealers of all sizes throughoutSouth Africa.’
CAPTION: The winners’ group at last night’s Sewells Businessman of the Year banquet included (from left) John Templeton, of Sewells; Derik Scorer, Chairman of NADA; Brian Riley, MD of WesBank; Jaen van Aardt, of Datnis Nissan King William’s Town (Most Improved PG dealer); Tania Barlow, MD of Sewells Group SA; Johan Coetzee, Land Rover East Rand, winner large dealer category; and Schalk Fourie, NTT Toyota Mokopane, winner medium dealer category.
Background: A measurement of excellence
The Businessman of the Year is a measurement of excellence in performance using the key industry benchmarks produced by Sewells Group South Africa.
Most franchised dealers in South Africaparticipate in the benchmarking process. Dealership financials and a large range of key statistics are uploaded using the Sewells Online System (eSOS) which then allows dealers to immediately view their own individual results. Sewells can then view collective industry benchmarks which are determined by sequencing the values generated for the key performance indicators (KPI) and then picking the result at the 70th percentile for revenue items and 30th for expense items.
Introduced last year for the first time, Sewells now utilises a stratified selection procedure to nominate the Sewells Businessman of the Year contenders from each of three different categories (large, medium and small). This is to give equal and fair opportunity to dealers of all sizes.
The categorisation is determined by taking the total turnover for all qualifying dealers (those who have subscribed and reported consistently for 12 months) and dividing the result by three. These dealers are then ranked by turnover. The progressive addition of dealers’ turnover in the ranked sequence, commencing with the largest, until the total equalled the first one third strata, represents the large dealers. The progressive summing of dealers after this point, until the second one third strata, represents medium dealers and the remaining dealers make up the small category.
The balanced scorecard measures all contributing dealers’ performances against the Sewells Group industry benchmarks to determine the top 10 dealers in each category. Each of those 30 dealers receives a special certificate giving recognition to their ‘Best Practice Performance’ for the year. The top five of each group then became the finalists attending the banquet – where the leading performer in each becomes the Sewells Businessman of the Year for 2011.
The actual turnover levels of the three categories for the 2011 evaluation was: Large dealers – over R180m; medium dealers – R180 to R114m; and small dealers – R113m to R41m.
