Meeting new challenges — and still growing

Abigail Kampmann was a successful lawyer in her native Texas, helping people prepare their estates and avoid excessive tax bills. But she wanted more of a challenge, she said, so she started working at her father's dealership group, The Performance Cos.

She's had plenty of challenges.

She joined a Porsche store during the Great Recession, when it posted its first loss ever.

Now Kampmann is CEO of Principle Auto, a group she founded with COO Mark Smith, and she's drawing on what she learned during that crisis to help her through the current one.

Kampmann, 53, spoke with Jeremy Carroll of Automotive News TV about how she's managing through the pandemic, restarting digital sales and continuing to grow the business. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Did your stores have to close during the crisis?

A: We did not. We're in three states now — Texas, Tennessee and Mississippi. We've sold cars online. We turned that on very quickly. Still dealing with all those little ruffles, because not every state that we do business — you can't be 100 percent online. But we're working through that. And I have a feeling that the world is going to change a little bit and the states might change their rules before year-end and be able to have that happen.

How have sales been through the crisis?

March was tough. April was tough. May is much better. I won't say we're back to normal at all. I don't think we'll see normal for a long time.

I think this year, with what's going on in unemployment and what the government's done on that, I think you're going to see a lot of different fallout between now and October.

I don't think you can say, "Hey, it's back" just because you had one good month. Especially with the manufacturers and what the inventory is going to look like in new [vehicles]. But they've been supporting us. We really changed a lot to where we're doing a lot more pickup and delivery.

We have really changed our game. We've actually improved a lot. I would say this has opened our eyes to a lot of processes that maybe we didn't need before.

Did you have to furlough staff?

At one store, we furloughed some folks and we brought them back with the help of the (Small Business Administration) — we brought them immediately back. I don't even think they were gone two weeks.

What were you doing with digital retailing before COVID-19, and how has it changed?

A couple of years ago, we actually had been [doing] full, live digital retailing and found that very few customers were actually finishing anything in digital retailing. We didn't have a customer that actually bought a car in a year on digital retailing. So we turned that off to save that expense. [This year,] we turned it back on and we have quite a few customers.

Is digital retailing going to change the way you do business going forward?

I do believe that digital retailing is going to be here and is going to stay from now on. But I don't think that you're going to have this mass exodus.

I think for a lot of customers, they will like to go that route, so they can get most of the shopping and negotiation done before they come in. But I think they really enjoy getting to see the car and have the experience of picking up their car and the excitement of that. We always put a big bow on their car, and we make a big deal about the delivery. And so I think they're going to continue with that joy that brings them.

How have your automotive partners handled this crisis?

What they can do, I think they've done a good job. They've given programs to help our customers, whether it's 0 percent financing or 120 days with deferred payments.

From a manufacturing perspective, I would say that they have been supportive of us. They have reached out. We have weekly calls with them. From a communication standpoint, it is nice to know what's coming. Letting us know what's coming, I think it's the most important thing right now. Communication between us, our associates and our partners is super important.

Has the crisis slowed your growth plans? Right now we have physically seven dealerships, eight franchises, and we're going to be adding probably another three franchises in the next six months. And we're excited about it.

We have very good relationships with our manufacturers. And so we're excited about the opportunities. We have been partners with our manufacturers for a long time and we each — Mark and I — have a lot of relationships. And we deliver on what we promise. If we say we're going to do something, we will build it for you and we will take care of our customers together. So those opportunities still continue to come.

At the National Automobile Dealers Association event, you said you were switching your dealership management system provider. Is that still ongoing?

It is. So with our DMS, we were in between moving our stores over. So we have four stores that have moved and we've been actually working really hard to understand our new reporting structures and the different things under that new DMS we have. And then we actually delayed the move for the other ones during this process just because we wanted people on-site. So our first group is coming in July, and they're going to be on-site. They have confirmed. So we're excited about that. And we'll have that all done by September.

What have you learned from the crisis?

During this time, it has enabled us to focus down on what's important. We have already discovered that we're going to be able to change some positions and responsibilities going forward to be a more efficient and effective company. We love the fact that we're pivoting more on digital than we have before.

Our other big change has been in accounting. We have centralized accounting, making our processes much more efficient. And so this time has given us some time for my IT team and my accounting team to really look at how we can improve this process.

With our partners, we've been able to do that to where we're getting things for the customers done faster. So I think it'll make us a better and stronger company.