Dealer principal Jonathan Dawson runs Cherokee Mitsubishi in Canton, Georgia, about 40 miles north of Atlanta. His pay plan does something most consultants in the industry have never seen: salespeople who flag a suspicious customer and help the store reject the deal still get paid.
The Numbers
$125 base commission, still paid even when the deal gets rejected
3 to 5 questionable deals rejected per month at Cherokee Mitsubishi alone
$10.4 billion in industry-wide auto finance fraud risk in 2025
+13% year-over-year increase, +79% since 2015
I'm not going to penalize you for being honest or catching something that could have hurt the store.
Why This Pay Plan Structure Is So Rare
Pay-plan consultants Scott Woodward and Kevin Cohan both told Automotive News they'd never encountered another plan built this way. The industry standard runs the opposite direction: penalties and commission clawbacks after a lender chargeback, not rewards for stopping the deal before it happens.
Ben's read on the show nailed the underlying problem with the standard approach: it's the same failure pattern as preventative healthcare. Nobody pays for the illness that didn't happen. Dealerships rarely reward the deal that got stopped, only punish the one that got through.
We never do it, we always do medicine post the symptoms and the illness, not pre. It's the same thing here. It's harder to eat healthier, but that's what this pay plan is actually doing.
What Makes This Genuinely Unusual
Kyle's framing on the show cut to the real point: this only works if a dealer principal is willing to say, out loud, that a lost commission today is worth more than the chargeback that might never come, and mean it enough to bake it into the pay structure itself.
Someone willing to say "I know we're going to take a loss, we're not going to make a deal, and I'm still going to make sure my employees are paid fairly" — that's antithetical to what you'd expect from a sales-driven organization. I love it.
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A pay plan says what a dealership actually values, whether or not anyone reads the fine print.
Cherokee Mitsubishi hasn't had a fraud-related chargeback since building this structure, though Dawson is careful to note that's not the same as proof it works. What it does prove is simpler: a salesperson who trusts they won't be punished for honesty is a salesperson who'll actually raise their hand next time something looks wrong.
