The end of every month at Sam Pack's Five Star Chevrolet in Carrollton, Texas, is marked by the "tick, tick, tick" of a spinning prize wheel. And, if the top-performing employee is lucky, General Manager Alan Brown will announce the biggest amount: "Five hundred dollars!"
The game is the center of the staff's regular "pep rallies," celebrations that have revived the store's camaraderie and competition. On the last Friday of every month, the staff gathers to recognize the top employees in each department, review the previous month's performance and hear the targets for the next month.
Brown began the pep rallies in January 2020 as a core part of his strategy to turn around a store that was losing money and known in the Dallas suburb as an undesirable place to work. The store, which sells about 2,000 new and used vehicles a year, has since grown 840 percent in true net profit and now has "very little turnover," he said.