February 18, 2025
Running an independent car dealership can be a very profitable and rewarding experience. It can be a fast-moving business landscape, and there are constantly new opportunities to seize and make the most of. With those benefits come a range of risks, however, and it’s important to take those risks seriously.
One of your top priorities will be to keep your staff safe. This will involve taking a multifaceted approach, and many of the solutions you might choose to invest in will have benefits beyond safety. From investing in physical security infrastructure to training your employees, here are a few ideas to keep in mind.
Running a car dealership means storing and taking care of a large number of expensive and vulnerable assets. One of the most important things to do to keep your staff safe as a dealership owner is to protect those assets, and make it less likely that criminals will try to take or damage them.
Essentially, this means investing in a number of security solutions to keep your premises safe. From building a secure perimeter to installing security cameras and complex alarm systems, all of these investments will help to keep both your assets and staff safe.
For a security or safety-oriented solution to be effective, it needs to be easy to use. If your staff need to spend a substantial amount of time and energy each day on repetitive, boring security tasks, it substantially increases the chances that they’ll slip up and make a mistake.
Whether that’s some kind of automated safety shutter system, or an electronic key storage solution from a designer like KEYper Systems, ease of use should be at the top of your list of priorities when choosing an option.
An important area in which staff safety can be compromised is in the opening and closing of your dealership. To minimise potential issues, you need to have some kind of clear opening and closing protocol, and make sure that all necessary employees are trained on that protocol. Again, you want to make these protocols as simple as possible to follow, so that your staff can follow them no matter how tired or distracted they are.
Lastly, in most situations, your staff will be the most important factor in keeping themselves safe, but for that, they need to be trained properly. This means providing instruction on a wide range of topics, from how to conduct test drives safely to how to deal with aggressive customers.
This training should be structured and regularly updated, to ensure that staff don’t grow complacent. Make sure that the training is actually useful and engaging, and not just another corporate responsibility that employees come to dread.
Keeping your staff safe ultimately means that you need to look at the main risks that they’re facing. Based on those specific risks, you can choose a set of safety procedures that is capable of mitigating those threats in the most effective way possible.
