Steve Nickelsen

Steve Nickelsen, CEO of Nickelsen Partners LLC, has focused on improving dealership net profit for the past 30 years. In his personal consulting to dealers and as leader of other consultants, he has worked with more than 8,000 dealers, general managers, and sales managers to improve their businesses, and he has trained more than 20,000 automotive salespeople. His clients include some of the most profitable automotive organizations in North America, as well as some with among the highest customer satisfaction and retention.

He is a frequent speaker for companies and conventions related to the automotive industry, and he has been the highest-rated speaker at NADA. In addition to working directly with car dealers, he has worked with OEMs and importers to help them improve the sales, profitability, effectiveness, and satisfaction of their dealer bodies.

Examples of his work include:

• For a group of domestic-brand dealerships, helping them rise from average to outstanding sales performance (including making their largest store the #12 Chevrolet store in the U.S. in sales) by coaching the dealer and his management team

• For a dealer with both import and domestic stores, enabling the dealer to achieve greater profitability — and happiness — by helping him define and implement consistent, effective processes for major dealership activities, particularly the vehicle selling process, thereby creating an earned confidence that the operations were stable and under control.

• For a Canadian importer, helping them achieve month-over-month sales growth in an otherwise declining market, by creating and conducting a series of targeted performance workshops.

• For a distributor of Toyota vehicles, helping them grow their market share by more than 15% over two years, through work with the distributor and directly with their dealers.

Steve Probst

Steve Probst, President of Nickelsen Partners, has worked in the auto industry for most of the past 20 years, consulting on topics ranging from vehicle marketing to service satisfaction improvement for clients including Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Hyundai, Isuzu, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Saab, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo Cars. In addition, as follow-on to a consulting engagement, Mr. Probst served for a year as interim head of the service-parts operations group for one of the two global diesel locomotive manufacturers.

In his work, Mr. Probst has led teams that have:

• Achieved tens of millions of dollars of margin improvement through pricing strategy development and implementation (with no measurable reduction in unit sales, dealer satisfaction, or customer satisfaction)

• Enabled a group of car dealers to substantially raise their CSI and SSI scores by using a “20-group” approach to identify problem areas, identify fixes, and build commitment to making the necessary changes inside each dealership

• Redesigned the vehicle pricing strategy and process for a major car company, in part by bringing key team members out into the field to help them understand how the vehicle selling process works; the client saw its market share increase by two points during the two years of that engagement and its dealer profitability and satisfaction increase, a significant contrast with the trends before that work.

• Earned the highest participant evaluations in the client company’s history for a management training program that over two years reached over half of the company’s 2,000 managers (including the top executive team and key union leaders)

Before joining Nickelsen Partners, Mr. Probst was President of Business Catalyst, LLC and a founding Partner at CFGW and its later spin-off, Carlisle & Company. Mr. Probst graduated early from M.I.T. with a BS in Civil Engineering. He also holds a Masters degree in Management (with Distinction) from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.