← Case studies · AI audit · Automotive · 14 days
A car dealer sitting on $362,730 a year, most of it revenue nobody was chasing
waste priced, per year
largest single leak
of busywork, every week
“Would I say that they are being contacted within the first five minutes? I'd say 9 out of 10 are not.”
An automotive dealer that helps people buy a new car, sell their current one and finance the purchase. Two sides to the business: car buying, run by three full-time car buyers, and an in-house finance brokerage run by one broker. Owner-led and pushing to scale, with their own web platform and a CRM sitting on top for the customer journey. Here is the honest bit: the business worked, but it was not yet profitable, and the owner knew it. He wanted a straight answer on where the money was leaking.
Leads came in through the website and referral partners, and staff spent their days chasing them by phone, quoting each deal by hand, then drowning in post-sale admin. Every delivered car meant an invoice made by hand, a purchase order chased by hand, and payment routed by hand between customer, dealer and broker. The owner was still raising invoices himself. On top of that he was buried in AI hype from podcasts and big names, and what he actually wanted was an honest read on what was real and what was noise.
Findings & waste analysis
Automotive dealer with in-house finance · audited May 2026
- Around 60 web leads a month tick yes to finance, and only 1 to 2% ever complete the application$114,000/yr
- Of roughly 30 referral partners, only about 15% send referrals consistently. The rest sit idle$105,000/yr
- Sub-5% web conversion while competitors do better$90,000/yr
- Zero retention or referral outreach to past buyers$18,000/yr
- The finance broker phones 95% of finance leads to fill in their applications by hand$12,249/yr
- The finance broker reads roughly 20 lender guideline documents every month$8,749/yr
figures verbatim, in the client’s own rates · names removed
The audit surfaced 75 findings across four areas of the business, with $362,730 a year of quantified opportunity and 20.4 hours a week recoverable. Most of it was revenue nobody was chasing. Around 60 web leads a month ticked yes to finance, and only 1 to 2% ever completed the application. Of roughly 30 referral partners, only about 15% sent referrals consistently, the rest sat idle. Web conversion sat under 5% while competitors did better. And retention? In the owner's own words, zero.
Free 30 min · one process priced live, like the lines above
How it ran before
- Around 60 web leads a month tick yes to finance, and only 1 to 2% ever complete the application
- Of roughly 30 referral partners, only about 15% send referrals consistently. The rest sit idle
- Sub-5% web conversion while competitors do better
The blueprint we handed over
- puts a voice agent on the front door so every new web enquiry gets a call within 30 to 60 seconds, including the after-hours window nobody was covering, then hands the warm ones to a human.
- takes the post-deposit admin off the sales team: purchase orders auto-confirmed, dealer invoices chased on time, payments routed, invoices generated.
- gives the finance broker an AI matcher that reads the monthly lender documents and returns a ranked shortlist for each deal.
This audit's findings, laid out as the client received them, names removed. The full deliverable maps every process, prices every leak, and ends in a build plan in priority order.
Walk through a full sample audit →Kickoff
Team sessions, every handoff mapped
Every leak priced in their rates
Findings + blueprint, live
“If you're going to ask me, do I have any retention? Zero. And that should be a part of the marketing.”
None of this was visible from the owner’s chair.
Found by mapping the operation person by person, and pricing what came up. Same method, your rates: 3× the fee in findings, or the audit is free.