Every dealer knows the Saturday crunch.
Customers are ready to buy, salespeople are ready to deliver, and suddenly the F&I office becomes the slowest part of the dealership.
Here's what we've got for you: two dealer groups with very different F&I models discovered the same thing. The biggest threat to profitability may not be product penetration or staffing. It may be the bottleneck dealerships have built into the buying process.
The Most Expensive Wait in the Dealership
When deals pile up, everyone feels it.
Customers wait. Salespeople stop selling. F&I managers get rushed. CSI suffers.
For years, dealers have treated this as a normal part of the business.
Joe St. John, Corporate Finance Director at Oakes Auto Group, argues that many stores are solving the wrong problem.
The issue isn't always staffing.
It's capacity.
More F&I Managers Isn't Always the Answer
Most dealerships experience the same pattern: slow periods followed by sudden waves of deliveries.
Adding another F&I manager can help during the rush, but often leaves capacity sitting idle the rest of the week.
Instead, Oakes began asking a different question:
What if F&I didn't have to happen in one office?
Turning a Bottleneck Into an Opportunity
Oakes uses remote F&I presentations to help customers complete deals wherever they're most comfortable while allowing stores to share F&I resources across rooftops.
When one store gets slammed and another has available staff, managers can support deals remotely.
The result?
Shorter customer wait times
Better use of existing staff
More consistent deal flow
Strong product penetration
Higher customer satisfaction
According to St. John, remote turns often perform as well as traditional in-store presentations.
That's a big shift for an industry that has long believed F&I success depends on getting customers into an office.
Walser Found the Same Answer From a Different Direction
Walser Automotive Group eliminated the traditional F&I office years ago through a single-point-of-contact model.
Customers work with one person throughout the buying process while dedicated finance leaders provide support behind the scenes.
The approach helped drive a roughly 35% increase in F&I PVR over the past 18 months.
Different model. Same lesson.
The less friction dealers create, the easier it becomes to deliver a better customer experience without sacrificing profitability.
Questions Worth Asking
If your F&I process feels strained, start here:
How long are customers waiting on busy days?
What happens to product penetration during peak traffic?
Are deliveries being delayed by capacity constraints?
Could remote presentations reduce wait times?
Are you solving a staffing problem or a workflow problem?
The Future of F&I Isn't an Office
The most interesting takeaway from this conversation wasn't technology.
It was perspective.
The dealers finding success aren't redesigning a room. They're redesigning a process.
As customer expectations continue to change, the stores that remove friction from the buying journey may discover that one of their biggest profit opportunities was hiding in the bottleneck all along.
