After more than 90 years serving customers in small-town Nova Scotia, a dealership group that’s eager to grow has enlisted help from outside the auto industry to engineer its aggressive expansion plans.
Bruce Automotive Group has developed a growth strategy with a goal of expanding to 30 dealerships from the current eight within 10 years. The plan was crafted by Bruce executives working with Georges Haddad, a Montreal-based facilitator of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS).
The model focuses on business performance and makes no claim of expertise in automotive retailing, said Jen-Philippe “JP” Martel, executive vice-president at Bruce Automotive Group. “We wanted to have someone who knows more about running a business rather than running a dealership,” said Martel, who came to Bruce from the hospitality industry. “We want to grow extensively in the next few years, and we wanted someone from the outside” to shape the plan. “We also didn’t want to lose that family feel, that culture we’ve worked so hard to build up.”