Regulators Hold You Personally Accountable Now. So, What Should You Do?
Regulatory compliance is all about strategy. A good strategy motivates employees, facilitates smoother interactions with customers, and will help your automotive dealership grow faster and better than your competitors.
But it could also keep you from going broke. Over the last few years, we’ve watched the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission not only invest more time, money, and energy into enforcement, but intensify the dollar amount and nature of penalties. These days, regulators are assigning personal liability for non-compliant business decisions, and they’re going after individual dealership principals and owners.
If protecting your and your family’s future is important to you, it’s no longer safe to do what you’ve done for years and simply hope not to get caught. You need a strategy. Your plan of action may look different than others in your industry, but all decent strategies share a few core characteristics.
Formulated by our legal experts, and based on our real-world work with clients, here are our Golden Rules for Developing Your Regulatory Compliance Strategy:
- Be organized
- Develop your policies and procedures
- Put in place monitoring
- Determine your methods for maintaining it all
And, above all, be methodical about everything.
Here’s why strategy matters: You’re less likely to make a mistake when you have a script. And it’s easier to fix a mistake, because you can find the deviation in the process. Best of all, you can hold people accountable.
Of course, there’s more—much more—to strategizing than the 25 words in our Golden Rules above. You may be wondering: “How often should I audit my dealership’s policies and procedures?” Or: “What if I get investigated?”
Good news: our latest downloadable resource addresses these questions and more. In our Regulatory Compliance Strategy Worksheet, you’ll find out how your dealership’s training program and rates of growth and turnover determine your compliance risk, and how to save money and hassle when preparing for possible investigations. When you’re done (the worksheet should only take a couple minutes) give us a call or send us an email and we’ll go over your answers together.
