DENVER – Industry conferences sometimes spawn Facebook pages that promote the events, but it’s unusual for a social-media group to create a conference.
Yet that’s what Facebook’s Ethical F&I Managers did. The 10-year-old group held its inaugural EFI Conference here.
Its agenda aligned with what group members do on Facebook: swap advice on how to sell more aftermarket products and services, stay up to speed on government compliance issues and promote car dealership F&I professionalism. (OK, yes, there’s occasional carping and boasting.)
About 12,000 F&I managers, other dealership staffers, vendors and a few auto journalists belong to the by-invitation Facebook group created by Marv Eleazer, finance director at Langdale Ford in Valdosta, GA.
As is common with first first-time conferences, he and fellow organizers wondered how many people would attend – if anybody.
“We were worried about no one showing up,” says conference director and emcee Tony Dupaquier, director of The Academy, an F&I training company and one of the event’s sponsors.
Eleazer, the EFI conference’s content director, credits Dupaquier with spearheading the event. It drew about 130 attendees, many of them high-energy F&I managers with an entrepreneurial spirit.
Eleazer says organizers weren’t looking to profit financially from the conference.
“Everyone has paid their own way,” he tells Wards, a media sponsor. “No one is making any money on this. It’s strictly going back in for the enrichment of the F&I community.”
The conference “started as just an idea discussed at dinner among F&I people,” says Dupaquier, a Louisiana native who goes by the nickname “Tony D” in part because a lot of people have trouble pronouncing his French-origin last name. (Phonetically it’s “Do-pa-choir.”)
After so much dinner talk about it, Dina Wilson (general manager, compliance officer and finance manager at Timbrook Auto Group in Cumberland, MD) said, “‘Let’s do the (darn) conference!’” Dupaquier recalls.
Trade conferences can be formal affairs. In contrast, this one had moments of informality and jocularity amid the seriousness of the theme of how to succeed in F&I without resorting to questionable practices, such as payment packing and juicing incomes on credit applications.
Such behavior once was fairly common. Today, it can put a dealership in court or in the crosshairs of government regulators.
Dupaquier directs attendees to a conference program page with a code of conduct that, among other things, says “We will always do the right thing, and promise to uphold the highest level of integrity and professionalism in the F&I office.”
Conference presentation titles included “Navigating Disruptive Change With 20/20 Vision,” “Paving the Way to a Better F&I Experience” and “Who Needs a Hot Dog?”
There also was a knowledge-testing contest in a game-show format called “So You Think You Can Do F&I?”
What did the conference organizers hope to accomplish?
“We hope people will be able to take back to their stores what they learned here and build on it,” Eleazer says. “We are looking forward to doing this next year and subsequent years as long as we can get the support. The turnout here shows an obvious need.”
