How This Fixed Ops Director Stopped Chasing Wholesale and Started Winning Online
“It brings the incremental business, without the local wholesale brain damage that goes with it.”
Not every Fixed Ops Director walks into a dealership that needs fixing. Nicholas Burch walked into Lincoln of Bloomington and found something that needed saving.
To put it lightly, the place was running on fumes. Four technicians, barely enough advisors to cover the counter, and a parts department that wasn’t generating anywhere near enough revenue to justify the overhead of a major metro location. This wasn’t a simple take-what’s-already-working-and-improve-it type of job. It was a complete overhaul.
“It was a fairly broken store when I came in. My job was to grow it. And we definitely have.”
Fast-forward five years and the business has quadrupled. Sitting underneath it all is an online parts operation adding up to $30,000 to the bottom line every single month through three revenue streams. One that most Fixed Ops Directors don’t even know exists.
Here’s the full story.
Some battles aren’t worth fighting
In the Twin Cities, the wholesale market is owned by big Ford dealers. They’ve got deeper pockets, bigger discounts, and go after body and mechanical wholesale like it’s going out of fashion. Nicholas took one look at that and decided his time was better spent elsewhere.
“Trying to compete in those markets just isn’t feasible for a store my size. Whereas online, it’s very easy to scale.”
Wholesale costs you margin. As well as that, it pulls your counter staff’s attention away from your most important revenue stream — the service drive — to serve someone you’re already discounting for.
“I would rather have my parts team concentrating on my shop — because obviously that’s a good chunk of my parts department’s revenue — versus concentrating on somebody I’m selling to at a discounted rate.”
Now, orders come in off-peak and get processed without anybody breaking stride, and the service drive stays fed. “It brings the incremental business that doesn’t have the local wholesale brain damage that goes with it.”
This alone makes it worth doing
Before we get to the part that’s going to surprise you, the straightforward win deserves a mention first.
Thanks to the eCommerce store, the dealership is bringing in an additional $10,000-$15,000 in gross every single month at Lincoln of Bloomington. That’s consistent, repeatable revenue that wasn’t there before Nicholas walked through the door back in 2019. There’s no wholesale discounts eating into the margin, no chasing invoices 30 days after the sale, no parts coming back 120 days later creating obsolescence headaches. You get paid at the time of the sale, the service drive stays undisturbed, and it’s all managed by the existing team.
For a store that was barely keeping the lights on six years ago, that’s a pretty decent plot twist. But it’s not even the best part.
Here’s the part nobody sees coming
Ford runs a rewards program that pays dealers a percentage back on their total monthly spend. Hit the highest tier and you get a 1% bump across everything. Miss it and that money’s gone. Some months, the service drive alone isn’t quite enough to clear the threshold for Lincoln of Bloomington.
Enter: eCommerce + RevolutionParts.
“Selling parts online helps keep us in the highest reward tier. If I just relied on my shop, some months I would miss, just based on my total spend and my loyalty percentage.”
That tier difference is worth a 1% bump across the entire monthly spend. On a good month, that’s another $10,000–$15,000 landing on the bottom line from the same operation that’s already generating parts gross and shipping profit.
“Not only do you get the front-side gross, but you also get the back-side money from Ford.” Most people selling parts online know about one of those revenue streams. Nicholas is collecting all three.
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Nicholas didn’t hire his way into this
You might be thinking there’s a big cost to setting up and running an eCommerce store like this one. There isn’t. Nicholas started with just one existing part-time team member managing the online side.
As the business grew, he expanded the dealership’s hours and brought in a full-time employee to support this move. That same employee also handles the online operation when needed.
“It’s definitely a much lower cost investment than getting into mechanical or body wholesale.”
Better inventory + better absorption
If you’re always looking to move the absorption needle without blowing the cost structure — and let’s be real, who isn’t — selling online is one of the most affordable ways to do it, and the ROI speaks for itself.
When Nicholas joined Lincoln of Bloomington, the parts department was carrying $41,000 in aging and obsolete stock out of a roughly $500,000 inventory. In an industry where an obsolescence rate of around 3% is considered exceptional, selling online has helped him move consistently in the right direction. Those parts now reach a national audience instead of waiting for the right local customer to walk in, and the mix of what he stocks has changed with it, online trends bring in parts that would never normally land on his shelves.
“It definitely changes the way my inventory looks. It brings in a different set of parts that I might not normally sell.”
And because online parts growth adds revenue without adding proportional cost, the absorption number moves in the right direction almost automatically.
“Any growth you bring to the bottom line is going to obviously help your fixed absorption. It doesn’t add a whole lot of cost.”
Six months to dial it in. Worth every one of them.
Six months. That’s how long it took Nicholas to dial everything in. A big part of that was getting crystal clear on policies and sticking to them.
“You have to be very clear on the site about what your policies are. It’s a more black and white kind of selling than in your local market.”
His customer service approach is simple. Respond fast, push customers to supply a VIN, double check the fitment, and if the part doesn’t fit after you’ve verified it, take it back at no cost. That’s the differentiator from RockAuto, and it’s what turns a one-time buyer into a repeat customer.
Once the process was dialled in, he turned his attention to growth. “The RevolutionParts Marketing Agency definitely helps put you in front of those customers,” he said, “and sits alongside dealership social media, email and out-of-state campaigns”.
What’s next?
For 2026, the goal is a 20% gross gain. He’s tightening the process and building toward a number he’s confident he can hit. Because for Nicholas, standing still was never really an option.
“If I’m not growing, I’m failing.”
