Introducing Empire Auto Consulting.

Every company has a story behind why it exists. Ours starts on the sales floor, not in a boardroom.

Empire Auto Consulting was founded by DeVaughn Walsh, with Ta-Keem Franklin as a founding partner. Between the two of us, we've spent years on the retail side of the automotive business, working at dealerships of every size, from low volume single point stores to high volume operations moving hundreds of units a month.

That range of experience matters because it's where we noticed something most people in this industry overlook. The stores that consistently stood out to customers weren't the ones spending the most on advertising. They were the ones that made the customer feel like a relationship, not a transaction.

The Idea Behind Empire.

Customer experience was always the real differentiator. It was the thing that separated dealerships in the eyes of the people who mattered most, the customers themselves. But almost nobody was treating it as a growth strategy. It was treated as a nice to have, not the engine of the business.

We founded Empire Auto Consulting to change that. Not by replacing what dealerships already do well, but by combining real world retail experience with modern strategy to help dealers grow their numbers while strengthening the relationships they already have with previous buyers.

That's the mindset we built the company around. Not chasing one big month and hoping it repeats. A repeatable process that reduces the stress of hitting a target because the strategy behind it is already proven.

Proof It Works.

Before Empire existed as a company, this process was already being run inside a real dealership, one that was already the #1 Honda store in the state. We didn't create that ranking. What we did was widen the gap between that store and everyone else by a much larger margin, every single month, for the duration of that run.

Numbers like that don't happen by accident, and they don't happen without the people on the floor buying into the process. That's why this post wouldn't be complete without recognizing someone specific.

A Special Shout-Out.

Scott Proctor was the General Sales Manager during this run, and DeVaughn and Ta-Keem were his salespeople at the time. Scott saw the impact of this process firsthand, not from a report handed to him, but from being on the floor and watching it happen in real time, week after week.

He was one of the first to acknowledge just how much of a difference this approach made to the dealership's performance, and hearing that from the person who was running the floor every day means a lot. It's one thing to believe in a process yourself. It's another thing entirely to have your GSM watch the results happen and say so.

That acknowledgment is part of why we felt confident enough to build Empire Auto Consulting into what it is today, a company built to bring that same process to other dealerships.

This is just the beginning of what we'll be sharing here, case studies, insights on where dealerships are leaving units on the table, and what's actually working in automotive retail right now. If you want to see what this process could look like for your store, we'd love to talk.