August 26, 2022

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has revised the “Standards for Safeguarding Customer Information” (Safeguards Rule) under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). The Safeguards Rule is intended to strengthen data security to help protect your customers’ financial data.

Hiring women to work at your dealership is a good idea, but listening to them once hired is also important. You want to create a collaborative and supportive work environment. Talk to them about the demands on their time, personal and professional.

Catalytic converter thefts present a growing problem for dealers and their customers. In 2021, the National Crime Bureau estimated that more than 52,000 catalytic converters were reported as stolen, compared with 1,300 in 2018. That’s 40 times as many converters, and it doesn’t include the number of catalytic converters thefts that went unreported.

Vehicles powered by electricity aren’t a new thing. Some experts have said the first ones were developed as early as 1828-1832. A British inventor named Robert Anderson displayed another prototype in 1835 at an industry conference. In the late 1880s, a chemist named William Morrison fitted a carriage with a battery. The carriage could carry 12 people and travel about 20 mph.

The newsLINK Group recently chatted with Craig Bickmore, the executive director of NCDU, about a class he developed and teaches for dealership staff members called Thought Performance Training. Craig has worked with the association for almost 35 years and has been a director for the last 26 years. He earned an MBA from Utah State University and a bachelor’s degree from Southern Utah State College (now called Southern Utah University) in Cedar City, where he grew up.

The pandemic is the current measuring stick used to determine the U.S. labor shortage. Experts have classified the pandemic’s impact as the biggest employment catastrophe since the Great Depression. More than 30 million people were unemployed at the pandemic’s height, and more than 120,000 businesses closed temporarily. That statistic was followed in 2021 by a surge of 3.8 million new jobs, but the surge in jobs wasn’t enough to compensate for the number of lost employees. Approximately 60% of the jobs that disappeared during COVID came back, but the remaining 40% did not.

The New Car Dealers of Utah Association created Good Wheels to assist with the charitable giving of our generous dealerships.

Today’s business environment may be the first to include five different generations working side by side toward shared organizational goals. Many of our Utah dealers have some expertise in this, as many dealerships are family businesses. But for the first time in history, workplace generations have moved into the rank and file of employees, and as a result new challenges are emerging.