AutoNation (AN)

Managing Employee Productivity and Compensation: We continue to enhance standardized compensation guidelines and common element pay plans at our stores. These guidelines and pay plans take into account our sales volume, customer satisfaction, gross margin objectives, vehicle brand, and the size of the store. Our goals are to improve employee productivity, to reward and retain high-performing employees, and to ensure appropriate variability of our compensation expense.

Using Information Technology: We are leveraging information technology to enhance our customer relationships and increase productivity. We use a web-based customer relationship management tool across all of our stores. We believe this tool enables us to promote and sell our vehicles and other products more effectively by allowing us to better understand our customer traffic flows and better manage our showroom sales processes and customer relationships. We have developed a company-wide customer database that contains information on our stores’ existing and potential customers. We believe our customer database enables us to implement more effectively our vehicle sales and service marketing programs. We expect our customer database and other tools to empower us to implement our customer relationship strategy more effectively and improve our productivity.

Training Employees: One of our key initiatives to improve our productivity is our customized comprehensive training program for key store employees. We believe that having well-trained personnel is an essential requirement for implementing standardized operating practices and policies across all of our stores. Our training program educates our key store employees about their respective job roles and responsibilities and our standardized processes in all of our areas of operation, including sales, finance and insurance, and parts and service. Our training program also emphasizes the importance of conducting our operations, including our finance and insurance sales operations, in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and our policies and ethical standards. As part of our training program, we conduct specialized training for certain of our store employees in areas such as finance and insurance, fixed operations, and sales. We also require all of our employees, from our senior management to our technicians, to participate in our Business Ethics Program, which includes web-based interactive training programs, live training workshops, written manuals, and videos on specific topics. We also run the AutoNation General Manager University to prepare our future general manager prospects to become well-rounded successful leaders of our stores. We expect our comprehensive training program to improve our productivity by ensuring that all of our employees consistently execute our business strategy and manage our daily operations in accordance with our common processes and policies, applicable laws and regulations, and our high standards of business ethics.