The New GM's First 90 Days: A Dealership Reputation Plan

As a new GM, your first 90 days go to whatever's loudest: the team, the numbers, the sales floor. Online reputation becomes an afterthought. But reviews don't stop just because you're busy.

Your review page is your dealership's digital front door. Shoppers decide whether to buy from you long before they set foot on the lot, and they read your replies as closely as your ratings. One in three won't buy at all without checking reviews first. Left unmanaged, your reviews make that first impression for you, without you in the room.

The fix isn't budget and it isn't hustle. It's structure. A new GM dealership reputation plan that runs on process, so the results hold whether or not any one person stays late.

What should a new GM do about the dealership's online reputation in the first 90 days?

Follow a 30/60/90 plan: assess in the first 30 days, stabilize in the next 30, and build a durable system in the final 30.

• Days 1–30, assess. Pull a reputation scorecard, read the last 90 days of verbatim reviews, confirm reviews are landing on the correct store and department pages, and check your response rate.

• Days 31–60, stabilize. Respond to every open review, fix routing so feedback lands on the right Google Business Profile, and turn on automated review requests from both sales and service.

• Days 61–90, build. Pick the single most-cited complaint, fix the operational driver behind it, and put a reputation review on the weekly leadership agenda so the system outlives you.

That sequence turns a neglected page into a management instrument in one quarter.

Days 1–30: assess before you touch anything

Don’t respond to a single review until you know where you stand.

Start with a scorecard. You want a baseline against the industry, not gut feel. The gap between where you stand and where you think you stand is often wider than you'd expect. 

In Widewail's Q1 2026 Voice of the Customer Report, built on 1.2M Google reviews from U.S. franchise dealerships, the industry median is 12.3 reviews per month per rooftop. Widewail customers run 44.1. Similarly, industry response rate sits at 83%, while Widewail users run close to 100%.

If your store looks like the median, that's your starting line.

Then read the last 90 days of reviews in the customer's own words. You're hunting for the recurring complaint, not the outlier. While you read, confirm the reviews are actually landing where they should: the correct rooftop, sales versus service, not a duplicate or defunct listing. A neglected store usually has feedback scattered across profiles no one manages.

Days 31–60: stabilize the fundamentals

Now close the two easiest gaps.

First, respond to everything. Moving from an 83% response rate toward 100% is the clearest signal that someone is finally home, and it doesn't take a bigger budget, just the discipline to make it part of someone's daily routine.

Second, fix routing so every future review lands on a profile you control. Then turn on automated review requests from both the sales floor and the service drive. Solicitation is where volume comes from, and volume is the difference between the median and the leaders. A store adding 12 reviews a month is barely getting three a week. The fresh, current record you actually need gets built by asking every buyer and every closed RO, automatically, instead of hoping.

This is the move that pulls your monthly rate off the median and starts compounding.

Widewail Tip: Set requests to trigger automatically off your DMS and service events. A record that depends on a person remembering to ask is a record that stalls the first busy week.

Days 61–90: build a system that doesn't depend on you

Volume is the floor, not the goal.

The reason you read the verbatims in month one was to find the one thing to fix in month three. For most stores, that thing is communication. Across the industry, 44.2% of negative reviews cite communication, the single largest complaint category, ahead of price, wait times, and everything else.

It's rarely a people problem. It's a process gap. No callback on a large RO. Silence between deposit and delivery. No status update while a customer waits.

Pick that most-cited issue and fix the operational driver behind it, not the symptom. Then make it permanent. Put a short reputation review on the weekly leadership meeting: rating trend, response rate, review volume, and the top complaint theme. When those four numbers live on the agenda, the system stops depending on whoever cares most and becomes how the store runs.

That's the difference between a vanity score and a management instrument.

Widewail’s Customer Intelligence solutions organize your feedback around the things customers actually talk about, including staff, wait times, price, and communication, so the weekly read tells you what changed and what to fix first, before your customers do it for you in public.

Start your first 30 days here

The assessment step needs a real baseline, so make it your first action this week. Pull your store's free Widewail Reputation Scorecard to see exactly how your reviews compare against the industry benchmark, and where the opportunity sits, before you change a thing.

It turns day one from a guess into a plan.

For the full dataset behind these benchmarks, see Widewail's Q1 2026 Voice of the Customer Report.