Franchised dealers capture roughly 20-25% of maintenance and service business nationally. The other 75-80% is going somewhere else, and Rhett Ricart thinks most dealers aren't treating that gap like the opportunity it actually is.
The Numbers Worth Sitting With
Your commodity dealers like Ford and GM and all the rest, we're only getting 20-25% of our customers. There's 160,000 Pep Boys and Firestones out there, and there's only 17,000 of us. We got to pick up our heels and start going after that business.
📊 The Math
17,000 franchised dealers nationally
160,000+ independent shops (Pep Boys, Firestone, and similar) competing for the same service dollars
20-25% of maintenance and repair business currently captured by franchised dealers
75-80% going to independents instead
Why This Matters More Right Now
Ricart's reasoning ties directly to a point he made earlier in the conversation: dealers can't control what gets built, where it's built, or how tariffs move month to month. Inventory mix and vehicle supply are largely out of their hands. Service is the one part of the business dealers actually control end to end, and by his account, it's the part getting the least aggressive attention relative to its size.
We can't really control the products, how they're built, where they're built, how soon we're going to get them, how much they're going to be. We have no control over that. What we can control is our customers and our service.
What This Means for Your Store
Absorption, the share of fixed costs a service department covers on its own, has always been the metric that determines how much room a dealership has to operate independent of new-vehicle margins. Ricart's read is that this only grows more important through year-end, not less, as tariff uncertainty continues to make new-vehicle inventory harder to plan around with any confidence.
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🎙️ Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion.
The 75-80% isn't a competitor's advantage. It's an open market dealers haven't fully shown up for yet.
Ricart's framing reframes the fixed-ops conversation away from "how do we grow service revenue" and toward something sharper: dealers are already positioned to win this business, factory training, OEM parts, brand trust, and are still losing the majority of it to shops with none of those advantages. That gap doesn't close by accident.
