Jonathan Kienle's team once sent a salesperson to chase down a customer's canceled check, and he crashed the loaner car doing it, and Kienle says that single moment is exactly why he stopped trusting cash, checks, and credit cards to handle his dealership's biggest transactions. He walks through how switching the default down payment method saved his group $168,000 in fees so far this year, with $300,000 in sight by year's end, and argues that most dealers are needlessly eating card fees and fraud risk on payments that don't have to carry either. Jonathan Kienle is the Director of Operations at Walters Automotive Group and Kienle Motorsports in Riverside, California, where he oversees five stores spanning Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Audi. A third-generation dealer, he started at the family store at 14 cleaning the parts department, worked nearly every job in the building, and spent two years cold-calling at a Ford store before his father would let him back in. Joining him is Truett Dwyer, Co-Founder and CEO of Clerq, the payments company he credits with turning down payment collection from a source of risk into a documented driver of profit. Kienle speaks candidly about the moment that convinced him legacy payment methods weren't worth the risk anymore, how he trained his finance team to make the new method the default instead of the fallback, and what surprised him most once the savings started compounding.
He explains:
◼ Why a canceled check and a wrecked loaner car became the turning point for how his dealerships take down payments
◼ How switching the default payment method saved $168,000 in fees this year, with $300,000 in sight by year's end
◼ Why credit card limits and debit declines cost dealers deals on their busiest sales days, and what he uses instead
◼ How Truett Dwyer built a payment guarantee that shifts fraud and chargeback risk away from the dealer entirely
◼ Why the order of preferred payment methods flipped from cash, check, credit card to cash, Clerq, check, credit card
This episode of Industry Spotlight is brought to you by Clerq.
Topics:
02:40 Dad Made Him Start At Ford First.
06:50 Canceled Checks Left Dealers Chasing Customers.
07:10 Credit Card Fees Destroy Margins.
08:00 Salesman Crashed Car Chasing A Check.
09:55 Clerk Is Venmo For Dealerships.
11:00 Debit Cards Have Daily Spend Limits.
12:40 Dealer Didn't Believe Solution Existed.
14:30 Clerk Guarantees Every Transaction.
16:30 Checks Expose Customer Bank Info.
18:35 $168K Saved In Credit Card Fees.
23:45 Dealers Need Fast Payouts.
28:20 Focus Drove Way More Savings.
Clerq – Clerq's instant bank payment solution modernizes down payments, deposits and other large transactions - helping leading dealerships drive more sales, cut costs and reduce risk. Visit https://www.clerq.io/contact-us to learn more.
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