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Training without emptying the showroom

Sep 30, 2026 Gerhard Lourens, Future Skills Development, FSD, training model

Training without emptying the showroom

By Gerhard Lourens | Future Skills Development

Can taking training to the dealership save time, reduce cost and improve results?

For years, the automotive industry has accepted a familiar training model: Select employees, remove them from the dealership, send them to a central venue and trust they return with new knowledge that translates into better performance.

But perhaps we should ask a different question. What does training really cost when we include everything around it?

The invoice for the course is only one part of the expense. Add flights or fuel, accommodation, meals, mileage, vehicle use and travel time. Then add the cost that is far harder to see: productive hours lost while salespeople, managers or support staff are away from customers.

If ten employees attend a two-day programme in another city, the business may lose much more than twenty person-days. Depending on travel arrangements, those two training days can effectively become three days away from the dealership. Suddenly a two-day intervention has removed as many as thirty productive person-days from the operation. Even where no direct sale is lost, the dealership still absorbs the opportunity cost of fewer people available to prospect, follow up leads, handle enquiries and manage customers.

That does not mean centralised training is outdated. OEM academies and dedicated centres remain essential for product launches, technical training, brand standards, compliance and programmes where specialised facilities are required.

But does every sale, customer-care, leadership or performance program or course, need to happen there?

Taking the trainer to the dealership changes the economics. Travel and accommodation costs are reduced or removed. Employees remain closer to the sales floor. Training can be scheduled around operational realities, and the facilitator can work with the dealership’s actual processes, CRM practices, objections, customer scenarios and performance challenges.

It can also make development more accessible to smaller dealers. A dealership with six or eight employees may struggle to justify sending a team to a central venue. But if neighbouring dealerships combine learners, the facilitator travels once while the participating businesses share the investment. The result can be a professionally facilitated programme without every delegate carrying a separate travel bill.

There is another advantage: relevance. A generic training room can teach principles. A dealership allows those principles to be applied directly to the environment where performance must improve. The conversation moves from “this is how it should work” to “this is how we are currently doing it, and this is what needs to change.”

The same model can support follow-up coaching. Instead of training becoming a once-off event, the facilitator can return, review implementation, measure progress and reinforce skills. That gives management a better opportunity to see whether training is changing behaviour rather than merely generating attendance certificates.

The question is therefore not simply: “What does training cost?”

Perhaps the more useful question is: “What does it cost us to send people away to be trained?”

In an industry under constant pressure to improve productivity, control expenses and develop people, the future of training may not always require employees to travel to the trainer.

Sometimes the smarter option is to take the training to the people.

For further information, please contact

Gerhard Lourens on 0832140642

Or email gerhard.lourens@futureskills.org.za