How Nissan North Erased a $750K Used Car Gross Loss With VINCUE

Nissan North is a two-building Nissan dealership on US-23 in Columbus, Ohio, run for 43 years and now led by Executive Vice Presidents Eric Walters and Tyler Baird. They do about half of all Nissan business in Columbus against four other dealers, rank among the top 10 certified pre-owned dealers in the country, and have won Nissan’s Award of Excellence 10 years running. Their edge is a deeply tenured team and a used car and fixed-ops operation they refuse to let coast.

For nearly 20 years, Nissan North ran on the same used car tool. As the market got faster, they stopped trusting the data. A vehicle graded a “gold seven” one week showed up a “bronze three” the next. When the numbers move but the car doesn’t, you can’t make a confident call, and Eric and Tyler knew they were operating below their own bar.

The bigger problem was the model underneath it. They had leaned new-car dependent and let the used car silo and the service drive drift. Trade-ins were down as Nissan loyalty softened, so they bought the difference at auction, often as the last hand up on a car every other dealer already had. That is not a profitable strategy. The math proved it: they lost $750,000 in used car front-end gross in a single year. Fifty cars a day rolled through their own service drive while they sent someone to a screen to overpay for inventory they didn’t need.

Switching to VINCUE gave them clean, independent data they could act on, and a single system to run acquisition through instead of a stack of disconnected tools. The turnaround ran on three moves.

They rebuilt acquisition around the service drive. Using Buy Center Pro and the platform’s AI outreach, every service appointment now gets an offer on their current car before they arrive, automatically and every day, with a salesperson stepping in once the conversation is live. Third-party acquisition got the same discipline. Auction buying became the exception, not the habit.

They changed the language. The team retired the word “trade-in” for “current car,” gamified it for 60 days, and made it culture. Customers already have a number from the Carvanas of the world, so Nissan North stopped asking to “look at your car” and started leading with an offer.

And they got specific on price. The old tool’s static markup mindset kept them out of the sub-$20K cars every dealer wants, so they wholesaled the few they got. VINCUE’s appraisal detail let them buy those cars with confidence and retail them as-is, the right way, opening the exact segment they’d been missing.

For Eric Walters and Tyler Baird, VINCUE wasn’t a tool swap. It was the turning point that finally blended fixed ops and variable ops into one profit engine and made the store less dependent on new-car volume to pay the bills. Service drive acquisition went from zero to north of 20 cars in a single month, on the way to a 50-a-month target, and VINCUE now touches an estimated 75–80% of their business. A used car operation they admit they’d been running “wrong for so long” is now the reason the numbers hold every month.

Discover how VINCUE can help you achieve results like these at your dealership by scheduling a demo to see our platform in action.