Sally Schill

I've worked hard to get where I'm at, but I've also had some really incredible, influential people who have helped guide me along the way. I think the biggest thing is just not being afraid to fail, not being afraid to make mistakes. I always say your first loss is your best loss, so when you do mess up or make a mistake, just own it and then move forward. I feel like relationships are strengthened when errors and mistakes happen, and the mistakes and errors don't define people, but how you respond to them does. Here's something you probably don't know, but I have one hand. I'm missing my left hand from just a little bit below. Being looked at like I'm weird never really bothered me as an adult, though it bothered me as a kid. My dad, when I was a kid, would always help me figure out how to do things. It was never that I couldn't do something, I just had to figure out a different way to do it. I think that, from the beginning, has set me up for success. It may look hard or be challenging, but you just have to find your way, find your path, find your process. When I look at things, I try and break them down, because the way that everybody else does things doesn't necessarily work for me. Always having to do things differently or take a different approach has been influential as well.

There's a couple of things that have been said to me that I say a lot. One of them is, just because you can doesn't mean you should. I feel like that goes across so many different things. It's like, okay, we can do this, but is this the right thing? Just take a beat. Just because we can doesn't mean you should. Is this the right path? And then I think the other one is, doing the right thing doesn't mean always doing things right. Doing the right thing is sometimes going against what the right way of doing things is, if that makes sense. So sometimes doing the right things means breaking the rules. Doing the right thing is not following the same path. Those are probably a couple that stuck with me the most.

In the beginning, or if you're just starting out, be a sponge. Learn all the different things, try different things, and focus on the things that make you happy and that excite you to do. You may think you know what you want. When I was in college, the two classes that I liked the least were marketing and computer science, and I feel like my first job thrust me into websites and how they worked and functioned, so a lot of computer science-y type stuff combined with marketing. I took the two things that I liked the least in college, combined them, and made a career out of it. I never would have thought that I would do that, but at the end of the day, what you learn in school is not necessarily, in practice, the same thing. Just be open to trying things and following not what you think you should like, but what it actually is in reality. Automotive has, from 20 years ago when I started to today, changed so much. It used to be such a male-dominated industry, and today you see so many different women thriving and being successful, and you see all these leaders that you never had before. It was so rare, historically, to see a general manager who was a female, and now I come across them pretty regularly. Learn from the women around you. Don't be afraid to ask questions, don't be afraid to ask for help, don't be afraid to try something.

Automotive in general is tough because of the way that the industry has changed since COVID, especially the way inventory and the supply chain has affected everything. I think it's changed forever the way that manufacturers even stock and produce cars. It used to be that dealers would have so many cars on the lot, and some cars would sit for a year. I remember one dealer we worked with locally was always trying to find additional lots to have their overflow. Manufacturers don't make that many anymore. During COVID, when supply chain dwindled and factories were shut down for periods of time, it got real scarce on cars. I think what the industry learned was that you don't necessarily have to have that high of units on the ground if you've got the supply chain. One of the dealerships I work with is Longo Toyota, one of the largest in the country. They used to have 1,000 units on the ground at any given time, or more. Now they never have that kind of inventory in stock. Their market day supply has shrunk considerably. They may want to have between 15 and 30 day market day supply, but they're not gonna have a 90 or 180-day market supply on their inventory on the ground anymore. This has changed the way that people advertise. It made people lazy for a while in COVID, and I think dealers are at this spot right now where every phone call was like, do you have the car? They didn't have to do anything to sell it. Now they have to go back to the basics of actually selling the cars and executing, doing follow up again. They don't have the factory incentives that they used to have. It used to be getting 0% for 60 was no big deal pre-2020. It's super rare to see that now. The only place you see that are with EVs. With the onset of EVs, I think the market is still trying to figure out what the right vehicle is. There's something to be said for a gas car that you don't have to stop and charge. Charging is a thing, and there's more of a network there now, but the plugs are still not uniform. I think we're gonna see more of a shift towards plug-in hybrids, where you get kind of the best of both worlds. I don't think hydrogen is gonna take off. The infrastructure for that has been talked about over the years, but I just don't see it happening. I don't see manufacturers putting the emphasis needed to make it take off, so that'll still continue to be niche.

If you take care of your people, they take care of you. When it comes to hiring, I don't look necessarily for a specific skill set or background experience. Me and my East Coast counterpart always say we look for the give-a-shit factor. I can teach you all the things about marketing. Anybody with a little bit of technical sense can figure out how to do a lot of this stuff. It's not rocket science. But I can't teach you how to care about the people you're working with, I can't teach you how to care about your clients, I can't teach you how to take pride in your own work and make sure that you're doing things right. I can't teach you how to want to learn. When we're hiring and looking for somebody, that's really where it starts, finding people who care and have that give-a-shit factor. I believe in taking care of people, and they'll take care of you. We formulate teams that take care of each other. This is marketing, it's advertising. I'm not performing surgery here, we're not saving lives, we're not preventing natural disasters. It's not that serious. We're in a very fast-paced industry, and a lot of times it gets very quick and it seems like a lot, and it can get very intense. But at the end of the day, people have lives and things that happen. People have tragedies and need to take time off. Just keeping that humanity perspective, and encouraging my team to take time off, encouraging my team to take care of themselves, all of those things are important to me.