Tire Dealers Association of Canada Convention - Autosphere

Congratulations to OK Tire from
Toyo Tires on this prestigious
recognition!
Engineered
for the real world.
44 Tire News tn October 2008
At TOYO Tires, we design our tires
to handle Canada’s worst driving
conditions. We also know you need tires
that will perform in one particularly
demanding area: the real world. So
whether your customer is taking the kids
to the ball game, or they are on the way
to a meeting TOYO has the perfect tire to
match their driving needs.
Contact a TOYO Regional manager for
details on how you can get involved
in an upcoming TOYO campaign or to
become a TOYO Tire dealer.
Special report rising to the top
quality of the staff and the service. “We have a group of staff
called dealer development managers who work with our stores
to help them become better businesses,” Sims says, “because it’s
not enough to be a good tire and mechanical service provider. You
have to be a good business person as well.”
The organization also strives to understand the consumer, conducting
research on a national level and introducing tools that
help each store better understand what’s happening in their particular
area. “If you don’t understand the consumers, you won’t
know what they’re looking for, and you won’t know what services
to provide,” Sims says.
There’s also a strategy in place that is helping the organization
become as efficient as possible, with a focus on improving supply
chain management. “We need to make sure that when a consumer
is looking for something, we can get it to that store and to that
consumer in a timely fashion,” Sims says.
Independent thinking
An organizational shift of this magnitude is difficult enough when
all the stores are company owned. But when you have an organization
like O.K. Tire where each store is independently owned and
operated, it can be difficult to get all owner/operators to buy into
the new vision.
“The uptake is uneven because they are independent business
people,” Sims says, while pointing out that this can also be an
advantage. “If you look at the winners of the J.D. Power Study
in the last three years, they’ve all been organizations that have a
large degree of independent ownership. You had Fountain Tire two
years ago, last year it was Tirecraft, and this year it’s O.K. Tire.
So when a consumer is dealing with one of our stores, they’re not
dealing with the manager—they’re dealing with the owner. And it
seems that the owner has a more vested interest in making sure
that the customer is satisfied.”
The upgrades the more than 265 O.K. Tire locations have been
asked to accept are major. For starters, the organization is rec-