In November of 2007, I took over as GM at a large but struggling Toyota dealership, Tysons Toyota, right on the cusp of the Great Financial Crisis. Like most troubled stores I'd inherited, it had been running increasingly misguided strategies; throwing tenuous gross at the wall in hopes of it sticking, only to watch most of it slide back down in the form of chargebacks, repurchases, and write-offs; all while the real decay in discipline, process, and accountability went unaddressed beneath the surface.
The cleanup was immediate and damaging. We took 56 "bad spots" off the road in the first week. One family was so furious they used their 2007 Corolla as a bouncy house; jumping on the hood, trunk, and roof in protest before we took it back. By December, we had rolled back over 300 RDR cards that had been burned to prop up the dealership's ranking.
That reckoning created a predictable storm. Manufacturers, banks, consumer protection groups, the sales team, F&I, accounting, and the owner; each one had a good reason to be angry, whether it was about the practices that had gotten us here or the collateral damage of cleaning them up.
I had been down this road before. I knew the job was to calmly explain the necessity of disruption to each group as they came wanting to roll my head.
So it was no surprise when the regional head of Toyota Financial Services demanded a meeting, made clear it would be contentious, and threatened to go over my head to the owner if she didn't get what she wanted.
Then I got my first surprise.
I expected a dressing down over losses and bad contracting. Instead, the meeting was about TFS market share; why their captive lending wasn't capturing enough of our loan volume. She didn't want to punish us. She wanted more business from us.
We had legitimate reasons for our numbers. But her aggressive framing had already done its damage. By the time I hung up the phone I had decided exactly what I was going to do; rehearse our reasons until they were immovable, walk in ready to defend every one of them, and call my owner Jim Koons afterward to warn him the storm was coming. She had told me it was going to be a bad meeting. I was ready to prove her right.
When I called Mr. Koons to forewarn him, he said three words that stopped me cold.
"Pick another day."
I said, "I don't understand."
"If that's the day they want to have a bad meeting, tell them to pick the day they're ready to have a good one."
He wasn't speaking in metaphor. He meant for me to call her back and say exactly that.
For a moment, I was annoyed. I thought it was silly. Then it clicked.
When we walk into a meeting expecting confrontation, we carry our anger and defensiveness in with us; and when that negative energy meets the negative energy on the other side of the table, there is very little chance of a great outcome. We guarantee exactly the outcome we were dreading. The "good day" Mr. Koons was talking about wasn't on a calendar. It was a mindset. A choice to approach even the most uncomfortable conversation with openness and a genuine willingness to hear the other side — because our own version of the story is rarely as unassailable as we think. His wisdom was brilliant in its clarity.
I called my counterpart at TFS, requested the date change, and shared what Mr. Koons had told me and why it mattered.
She laughed. But then something shifted. The defensiveness drained out of the conversation. We talked; really talked; for the first time. By the end of the call we had already found more common ground than either of us expected, and we hadn't even had the meeting yet.
We left that meeting with genuine trust, a shared understanding of each other's challenges, and a commitment to make our goals mutual.
That relationship with her and TFS became a friendship and a cornerstone of a decade of success at that store. That friendship and partnership are both still going strong today.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do before a difficult meeting is simply pick the good date; and decide to bring a better attitude along with it.
