No customers yet. No phones going. Nobody has had a deal blow up on them yet. Just the lot, and whoever showed up early.
At one store I worked at, we spent those minutes going over yesterday's numbers.
At another, we spent them praying. For each other. For the families who were about to walk that lot. For the ones already driving home in something we sold them. For the building, the inventory, the whole day in front of us.
Same product. Same market. Completely different air by ten in the morning.
I am not running that first store down. Stores like it can do very well and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the second kind is what I am building for. Because when you start the day with God, a customer stops being a unit. She is somebody's mother. He is a man trying to get to work and back. They pulled onto your lot and, out of everywhere they could have gone, they picked you. That is not traffic. That is trust.
A book of business is just a record of the people entrusted to you. Losing track of them is not a slow month. It is a failure to keep what you were given.
That is what this is for. Not a system to squeeze more out of people. A system so nobody who trusted you slips through the cracks. So you remember her name two years later. So you call him back when you said you would. So the way you treat somebody in month forty is the same way you treated them the day they signed.
Nearly ten years in, I have had every bad month this business can hand you. Everything you are about to read, I lived first. Nobody ever gave me a system, so I built one out of notebooks and sticky notes, and the year I finally got it right was the year this business stopped starting over on me.
You do not have to believe what I believe to use this. You are welcome here either way and I will treat you the same. But you ought to know what it was built on, because it shaped every decision inside it.