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| The Rallye Group: Driving Forward |
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| Written by Meghan Flynn | ||
| Saturday, 31 January 2009 23:00 | ||
Peter Terian co-founded The Rallye Group in 1958 as a Maserati service and repair garage in Sea Cliff, Long Island. Since then, The Rallye Group, now headquartered in Roslyn, New York, has steadily grown to become a full-service retail chain for luxury vehicles, with five franchises: Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Lexus, Acura, and as of 2007, Smart.  The record Rallye is most proud of is earning the “Elite of Lexus” award more consecutive years than any dealership in New York. Juliana Terian Gilbert, chairman, proudly reported that this particular award underlines the primacy of customer service to Rallye, adding that most of the company’s business comes from repeat customers.“Maintaining our position in the market requires the same level of hard work and dedication that brought this company from humble beginnings,” said Gilbert. “We keep talking about how far Rallye has come, especially last year, our fiftieth anniversary, to give the employees a sense of continuity, of belonging to something larger than themselves.” Rallye continues to adapt. Last year, the company opened a state-of-the-art dealership dedicated to BMW sales and service. Previously, Rallye BMW shared six acres with the company’s Mercedes-Benz facility, but that dual location was too small. Today, Rallye BMW is a 92,000 square-foot facility equipped with a gourmet bistro, 60 service bays, a multi-level parking garage, complimentary Wi-Fi workstations, a BMW lifestyle boutique, children’s playroom, and more factory trained BMW technicians than any BMW dealer in New York. Gilbert had the Mercedes-Benz showroom modified to accommodate Rallye’s newest franchise, Smart, which has been very well received in the community. The new brand fits in well with Gilbert’s emphasis on green technology, which was central to the new BMW facility, and she believes strongly that it will be a wise move for the company. Forward to basics Gilbert took over Rallye in 2002 when Peter Terian, her then-husband, passed away. When she stepped into her new role, the company already had a sterling reputation, but it needed to be modernized. “When I came on board, we didn’t have a HR department with documented protocols or an accounting system that the rest of the company could access,” she explained. Establishing an HR department was her first order of business. Gilbert wanted to provide one location where new hires could be trained, employees could find answers to their questions, and the company could roll out new programs. Through the new department, Rallye helps its employees excel both in and out of the workplace, with programs like complimentary Weight-Watchers consultations and on-site ESL (English as a Second Language) courses, which are conducted in partnership with the local community college. Next, Gilbert invested in getting all of Rallye’s unwritten protocols and processes down on paper to ensure that these would be available across departments and to new hires. She explained that, traditionally, an employee’s training in Rallye’s methods was handled by seasoned employees on the floor. Today, in addition to practical training, employees are able to take a step back at the end of the day and see the bigger picture. As of 2003, all of Rallye’s important business techniques and day-to-day protocols have been documented and are periodically reviewed, and Gilbert is especially thankful her team has had those processes to rely on during difficult times. “We invested a lot in developing these recipes, and now we can use them and build on them to cope with whatever new challenges the day brings. Before, we largely tended to cook from memory, which was fine back then, but now we’re able to use these formulas to tighten up our processes across the board,” Gilbert said. This process led Gilbert to recognize that Rallye needed to update its accounting software and make it accessible to management at all levels, making sales reporting and budget management much simpler. In doing so, Rallye was able to simplify daily operations. “The former management team, in the 1990s, stored all their figures and data in their heads, and they didn’t use computers to do business,” said Gilbert. “My team and I recognized that one of the things we needed to do was to use the technology we already had to make our business run more smoothly for everyone. At the same time, the newer employees were pushing for a more modern system, so we were able to harness that fresh view and reshape the tools we already had. We’re keeping faith with the fundamentals of our business while moving forward with new technology.” Working for employees The new HR department has been especially helpful in establishing a unified corporate culture at Rallye, and the documentation of company protocols has been invaluable in solidifying the company’s tradition of cross training and promoting from within. Gilbert explained that it can be challenging to recruit highly qualified candidates for the Rallye team from other fields. Instead of spending its energy there, Rallye focuses on finding good people to start in entry-level positions and then dedicates energy and resources to train them. Rallye is also continuing to move forward in equal opportunity employment. Gilbert said that when she started dating Peter Terian 20 years ago, she was proud to say that she’d met even one woman on his sales team. “That was unheard-of back then, and while the automotive industry has taken great strides in attracting talented female workers, it is still a very male-dominated field,” she said. Gilbert is proud to lead the country’s largest female-owned auto dealership and knows first hand that women can excel at any level of the industry. “We’re lucky to have talented women at all levels of our organization,” Gilbert noted. “We understand that all our employees, male or female, have lives and priorities outside of Rallye, and we do the best we can to accommodate the needs of them all.” |