You Will Be Satisfied

You Will Be Satisfied - Book Review, by Bob Tasca (Author)

From the Publisher Bob Tasca is the world's most effective practitioner of customer service, and his accomplishments are staggering. His tiny Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Rhode Island is consistently among the world's best in sales volume, prompting competitors to visit in droves to observe "the genius" in action. Tasca has at times achieved the unheard-of feat of capturing 24 percent of his metro market (meaning that one in every four car buyers "drives Tasca"), and he regularly sees 65 percent of his customers return, tripling the loyalty ratio of his competitors. His service department is considered the world's most efficient - sometimes described by awestruck observers as resembling six Indy 500 pit crews working in concert - and his guesses about which inventory is likely to sell seem touched with clairvoyance. Now, for the first time, Tasca explains in fascinating detail how to win customer loyalty, revealing the secrets that compel his customers to "buy Tasca" year after year - literally until death (or debt) forces them to part. He presents a whole new model for thinking about compensating co-workers and several new models for measuring whether customers are getting what they truly want. Equally applicable for a software company middle manager, bookstore owner, or appliance retailer (indeed, anyone in a relationship business), Tasca's pithy insights and bulleted lessons will, if assiduously applied, quickly result in sales dominance.

Foreword

The many years of my auto industry involvement, I've heard legend after legend about the individual car dealers who've left their mark on the local market they've served. Some imprints were positive, some negative; but each legend was based in some individual's style or mode of operation. The majority of the nation's car dealers no longer possesses the stuff of legendary appeal. The dealers are becoming nameless corporate business suits. The illustrious car dealers, like the heroes of the Old West, are fast dying out as the world around them changes dramatically and forever. In the 1950s, when Bob Tasca started running a car dealership, he joined nearly fifty thousand entrepreneurs in the United States doing the same thing. Since then, while the industry's unit sales volume has approximately doubled--from 7.5 million to 15 million new vehicles sold annually--the number of entrepreneurs has declined to less than fifteen thousand.

As the entrepreneurial car dealer ranks thin, I try to meet and spend time with as many of those disappearing legends as I can, to learn what makes them tick. Bob Tasca was one of those fabled industry entrepreneurs whom I never seemed to encounter in my many travels, until one day about ten years ago after our company was retained by the Ford Motor Company to conduct a series of focus groups composed of a cross section of its dealership body. Ford wanted to get some in-depth feedback on how its dealers felt about its new policies (which had been instituted to make the auto giant more sensitive to its end customers, the car buyers, and to its intermediaries, the dealerships). In one of those focus groups, there he was, seemingly bigger than life. Sometimes you really have to work hard in a focus group to get participant responses; you really have to dig. In this session, Bob simply took over and spent the next three hours telling all of us what "the Bible according to Bob" said about customer care. It was really quite a stunning performance. As focus-group research, it was a blowout, but as an educational experience it was superb.

As I read Bob's book today, I can't help thinking back to that initial meeting, which Bob totally dominated. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single car dealer practitioner who eats, sleeps, and breathes his business philosophy as convincingly as Bob Tasca. His personal beliefs have been the key to his success--to what he has accomplished in the past forty years at his Ford and Lincoln-Mercury dealerships in southern New England, perhaps one of the toughest auto markets in the United States.

I couldn't agree more with Bob's views on running a business, as I heard them ten years ago and as I read them now--especially a business as difficult as automotive retailing. He's made a lot of money and kept his customers happy--and that's really saying something in the auto business. I'm certain there are other fields where he could have done even better.

In You Will Be Satisfied, Bob outlines his principles for success in an anecdotal and entertaining manner, with a serious message communicated behind the enjoyable stories. The book is an important primer for young or old who want to be successful business people in a tougher and tougher competitive environment.

When Bob gives his reasons for writing the book, he lets us in on such secrets as: "Knowing my business principles is, in a sense, the easier part of the problem; practicing what I preach is the tougher part." He goes on to say, "Once you've got the business agenda right, then it's all execution." He explains that success has to come from within you--not from getting lucky out there. Once you set your agenda, it's how you treat your employees and, in turn, how your employees treat your customers that determine your success. If you can satisfy the customer, then success and money follow--not the other way around.

--J. D. Power III President J.D. Power and Associates December 1995