The General Manager Who Could Not Find His Own Parts Department

Here is a question worth sitting with. When you walk into your own business, does everyone know who you are? Graeme from Eden Motor Group once acquired a large Ford dealership and asked the general manager to take him on a tour. The GM opened a broom cupboard looking for the stairs to his own parts department. He had never been down there. When Graeme finally got into the parts office, the young woman behind the desk asked which one of you is the new guy. She had never spoken to the GM in her life. That is not an operations problem. That is a culture problem. And Graeme has spent a career learning to spot exactly that kind of failure within minutes of walking through a door.

What's covered:

• Why will cannot be bred and how to spot it fast in a candidate or a first conversation 
• The physical and social signals that tell you someone is genuinely people-orientated 
• What a healthy business feels like when you walk it and what a broken one reveals 
• Why having a hierarchy is not the same as behaving hierarchically 
• How corporate pride became the motivator that drove Eden's recovery from a bruising 2023 
• Why the best leaders ask their teams questions instead of performing certainty 
• The specific advice Graeme would give to anyone taking their first management role 
• Why IMI accreditation is starting to move the needle in front-line recruitment decisions

Graeme is the principal and sole shareholder of Eden Motor Group in the North East of England, a franchise business spanning volume and premium brands. He chairs the IMI and spent years on the board of Ben, the automotive industry charity. Before crossing into the motor trade, he built his thinking about people at Marks and Spencer, and you can hear it in every answer he gives.

If you run a dealership, lead a team, or are about to take your first management role, Graeme's thinking on will over skill, recovery culture, and what great leadership actually looks like is worth the full hour.

About Symco Training:

Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.

To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk