Most dealer associations wait for a problem before a dealer picks up the phone. Ohio's approach is the opposite: build the relationship before there's ever a fire to put out. Zach Doran, president of the Ohio Auto Dealers Association, joined Auto Collabs to share how that philosophy actually plays out, and it breaks down into three moves worth stealing.

The instinct in most relationships, association-to-dealer or dealership-to-customer, is to wait until something breaks. That guarantees the relationship starts on the worst possible terms: someone failed, and now they're expected to fix it.

OADA flips that by creating reasons to engage long before anyone's hair is on fire. Bringing younger dealers to Washington, D.C. to see the issues firsthand, hosting a wake-surfing day, building an entire concert around charity, none of it solves an urgent problem. All of it builds trust that pays off the moment a real problem eventually shows up.

Find one moment in your customer or member relationship that currently only happens during a crisis, and build a version of it that happens before the crisis. A service reminder becomes a service appreciation event. A legislative ask becomes a legislative preview.

OADA's dealers were already doing real charitable work, blood drives, Pinewood Derbies, youth donations, technician training. None of it was being seen by the people who could benefit most from seeing it: elected officials and other dealers.

The fix was a quarterly publication aggregating all of it, sent directly to every dealer and every elected official in the state, with each story doubling as a tagged social post. What started as OADA staff manually hunting down stories has flipped entirely, dealers now submit their own work, largely because nobody wants to be the one dealership left out of an issue their competitors are in.

Audit what your own team or dealership is already doing that nobody outside the building knows about. The content isn't the hard part. Somebody just has to collect it and put it in front of the right eyes.

A concert, a magazine, and a legislative trip only work if they feel worth showing up for. Doran's read on what made the event land wasn't the production value, it was making sure the actual point, supporting the charities and making dealers look good doing it, came through with enough energy that people felt it, not just attended it.

Before your next community or member event, ask whether the energy in the room will actually match the importance of why you're there. If the answer's no, that's worth fixing before the next line item on the checklist.

🎙️ Listen to today's Auto Collabs episode for the complete discussion.