09/17/2026
🚨 THE COST OF IGNORING YOUR SERVICE LANE JUST WENT UP.
According to Cox Automotive, used-vehicle listing investments reached their highest level since 2022 in August, with the average listing investment reaching approximately $27,239, up 7% year over year, while inventory continues to tighten.
That raises a question I believe every dealership needs to be asking:
How many vehicles drove through your service department last month that you would have gladly bought, and nobody ever asked?
Think about what you already have.
The client is already there. The vehicle is already there. You have the service history, you have their information, and in most cases you even have their last opportunity recap sitting right in your system.
Yet the vehicle gets serviced, the client gets their keys back, and another potential piece of inventory drives off the property.
Then we spend money trying to find inventory somewhere else.
That’s a LEAK.
I’m not suggesting every service client needs to be sold a car. That’s the fastest way to turn a great opportunity into a bad client experience.
I’m talking about having a professional, measurable process for identifying the right vehicles, starting the right conversations, making legitimate offers to buy and discovering which clients actually have a reason to make a change.
If your dealership writes 1,000 repair orders a month, I’d want to know exactly how many of those vehicles you would have wanted to acquire, how many owners were actually approached, how many conversations turned into appointments and how many vehicles were ultimately acquired or replaced.
Because even a small leak multiplied across 1,000 repair orders every month becomes a very big opportunity over the course of a year.
That’s one of the reasons we built SERVICE-TO-SALES™ into our LEAKS™ assessment.
You already know what your service department produces.
The question is, do you know what it’s losing?
Message me “LEAKS.”
Let’s put a number on it.
