When it comes to dealerships with multiple locations, it’s easy to think of them as duplicates of the same experience, inventory, and customers. Gerry Groia, who has been in Parts & Service at RIVA Motorsports & Marine since 2003, explains that is not always the case, and certainly not for RIVA.
“Each store has completely different inventory and customer base,” he emphasized.
RIVA Motorsports has four different locations in South Florida. The Key Largo store is a full-line multi-brand dealership selling mainly watercraft, boats, and outboards, as well as motorcycles and golf carts. The Miami store sells a large number of side-by-side ATVs and motorcycles, while the Space Coast store in Titusville is big on everything off-road. Lastly, the Deerfield Beach store is known worldwide for its Riva Racing parts and accessories.
This creates a broad inventory of parts to manage, and because the stores are so different, there is not a lot of overlapping of processes. What’s needed is an easy parts management solution with integrations that can be shared by the four stores, along with templates that can be customized to each store’s unique needs.
Leaning into Lightspeed
Gerry also shared that he has been working with Lightspeed his entire career, and it actually helped him to get a long-term leadership position at RIVA.
“I was initially hired by the owner because I knew the system, and eventually became his right-hand man.”
RIVA is committed to Lightspeed as a tool to help them streamline their efforts between stores, even if things are the same at each location. “We rely on Lightspeed 100 percent of the time,” Gerry said. “Everything is done through Lightspeed: accounting, financing, sales… absolutely everything.”
Streamlining store operations
Since Gerry manages parts and inventory at three of the stores—all of them except the main location—he has found great success with Lightspeed, which offers a cloud-based solution loaded with OEM integrations. The customizability of reports also means that basic templates can be flexed to accommodate variances in the operation of each location. These can then be made into templates to meet each business’s needs and then saved with personalized naming conventions for fast recall.
Specific to the Key Largo store, which does a great deal of service business, the Lightspeed mobile app (along with iPads) has helped maximize their revenue and efficiency.
“When I’m doing inventory maintenance, I can just navigate through three stores like nothing. It saves me tons of time.”
He shared that each store carries or is responsible for about 5000 different types of parts, so the barcode scanner on the mobile app is a huge help in managing all of it.
Global perspective
Gerry is a native Spanish speaker, and he took some time away in the mid-2010s and spent a couple of years in Spain. He became involved in the industry over there and noticed right away that they didn’t have any DMS systems like Lightspeed.
“While I was in Spain, I contacted around 20 different companies, and none of them had even close to what Lightspeed offers.”
Always automated
When it comes to the OEM integrations and other automated aspects of Lightspeed, Gerry understands that time is money. He simply said, “Everything is automated” when asked about the level to which they’ve invested their daily operations in Lightspeed.
That automation, combined with the ability to manage three stores at once, is what has made Lightspeed such a crucial resource for him and the whole RIVA team.
He describes himself as a “jack of all trades”, but with Lightspeed, he’s been able to master the platform and find success across all their business locations. That success comes from the ability to customize and streamline their operations, giving him confidence and helping him focus on the business as a whole, not the little details.
Learn more about RIVA Motorsports & Marine in our Dealer Spotlight.
