At Rolf, Tatyana Lukovetskaya went through a career path from a telephone operator to the head of the company

On weekends, Tatyana Lukovetskaya sometimes “walks” “Gavryusha” - a bright red “hunchbacked Cossack” that came off the Ukrainian assembly line 45 years ago. Oddly enough, the general director of the country's largest automotive trading holding, Rolf, which sells exclusively foreign cars, herself prefers domestic brands. On weekdays, Lukovetskaya travels around Moscow in a Korean luxury car. “As a consumer, I have an absolutely calm attitude towards premium brands; the level of comfort in most cars is now almost the same,” she says.

Lukovetskaya knows what she's talking about. She came to Rolf in 1992 and went through all the steps of the career ladder - from the girl on the phone (service bureau operator) to the head of the company. Now she has 5,300 employees under her command; in 2012, 68,000 foreign cars of 15 automobile brands were sold in 35 Rolf showrooms in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the company’s revenue increased by 21%, to 144.5 billion rubles. Of the 70 largest Russian companies, only three are led by women, and Lukovetskaya is one of them. Forbes estimated her annual income at $1.5 million. How did she manage to succeed in this seemingly exclusively male business?

Girl, car, phone

In 1988, Lukovetskaya graduated from the Moscow Automobile and Road Institute with honors and was assigned to the Research Institute of Automobile Transport. “I prepared my dissertation, had tea with my colleagues, and received my 120 rubles a month,” she recalls. “And one day I suddenly realized that a completely different life outside the window was passing me by.” In February 1992, through friends, she got a job at Rolf as a service operator and sales of spare parts. At her new place of work, it quickly became clear that all the knowledge acquired at the institute would not be useful to her, because the Japanese Mitsubishi that Rolf sold and repaired were cosmically different from the Zils and Ladas that were studied at Soviet automotive universities. “Nobody knew what an injection engine was; the entire structure of modern cars had to be relearned,” recalls the head of Rolf.

I also had to learn communication skills: in the early 1990s, the Mitsubishi brand - especially the Pajero SUVs - was very popular among entrepreneurs in leather jackets with pistols. Not everyone was ready to listen to the young car service employee. “They came, threw the keys on the table and demanded that everything be ready in a couple of hours,” says Lukovetskaya. “I explained that it is better to inspect the car with a mechanic, make an appointment in advance so that he is free, this will take less time and will be more useful.”

She worked in the service area - the most troublesome part of any dealership - for seven years: she took calls, recorded clients, and calculated work orders. At the end of 1998, she headed the service department. “She perfectly organized the work of the service, which during the crisis became the main source of income,” recalls Valery Tarakanov, director of the commercial transport department at Ford Sollers, who headed the Rolf marketing service from 1998 to 2004.

The founder of Rolf, Sergei Petrov, sought to build a company according to the best Western models and already in the 1990s began to attract foreign specialists and consultants. At first they held trainings and seminars, and Lukovetskaya tried not to miss a single one. In 2000, the first foreigner appeared among the top managers - Matt Donnelly became vice president of finance (two years later he was appointed managing director of Rolf). “With Matt’s arrival, the brightest and most capable employees were actively trained, no expense was spared, and Tatyana was among them,” says Tarakanov. According to Lukovetskaya, foreigners broke the belief that a woman cannot be a manager in “such a brutal business.” In 2001, she became the first female head of a dealership in Russia. At one of the conferences, Tarakanov introduced her to his colleagues as Valentina Tereshkova from the auto business. Lukovetskaya jokingly corrected: “I’m more like Strelka or Belka. “I’ll either come back victorious, or I’ll burn in the atmosphere.”

What does the founder and owner of Rolf Petrov think about this? “I never thought about the difference between male and female management in business,” he says. “Perhaps women in business do not suffer from excessive vanity, their self-esteem does not go off scale and does not interfere with self-development and self-criticism.”

Lukovetskaya grew along with the company. In 1993, Rolf began opening car dealerships in Moscow, and later a full-fledged Diamant dealership appeared. If in 1992 the company sold only 109 Mitsubishi cars, then in 1997 it crossed the 2000 mark. In the same year, the company began selling Hyundai cars. In the early 2000s, a consumer boom began, banks willingly provided loans to car buyers, and Rolf became the largest seller of foreign cars.

In ambush

On an autumn night in 2001, the newly appointed director of the Rolf South automobile center, Tatyana Lukovetskaya, sat hidden behind the body of a dismantled foreign car in the repair area. The head of the security service was hiding at the other end of the room. They spent several hours in the dark waiting for the guest. Lukovetskaya recalls how at that time she was thinking about the structure of the auto business: “The dealership center - on the one hand, a boutique, a chic building, music, boys and girls in white shirts, essentially selling a product - sparkling modern cars. On the other hand, there are service shops with a huge number of special tools, stern mechanics moving heavy parts. A bunch of engineers who understand these complex devices. There is a customer service that can translate the client’s bird language that something is rattling somewhere, and understand what really happened, describe it in a flow diagram to the mechanic, place an order for parts so that they are delivered on time. The dealer has three goods - a car, spare parts and the mechanic's working time, and the latter spoils instantly: if the mechanic stops, money is lost. This means that I need to fine-tune the technology so that at least 95% of applications are taken into production instantly.”

Finally, the door opened, and the long-awaited guest slipped into the spare parts, which he planned to take outside the center and sell. One of the employees told Lukovetskaya about the thief. “We caught him red-handed, we wanted to put him in prison, but we couldn’t, we just had to fire him,” Lukovetskaya regrets. “Theft should be severely punished.” This episode characterizes Lukovetskaya well as a leader. Why did she sit in ambush herself? “She always went into every detail, even the smallest matters,” says one of Rolf’s former top managers. A year and a half after Lukovetskaya’s appointment, the management of Mitsubishi Motors declared Rolf South the largest dealership in the world. In 2003, her company sold about 3,600 cars of this brand.

In 2003, Lukovetskaya was offered to head the Rolf Khimki dealership center being built on Leningradskoye Shosse, the largest at that time in Russia. Investments in the project were estimated at $30 million, for 12,600 sq. m, for the first time in the history of Rolf, cars of four brands were to be sold: Mitsubishi, Ford, Mazda and Hyundai. Lukovetskaya personally supervised the construction - execution, meeting deadlines - and even suggested how best to install lifts and place sockets. Rolf Khimki opened on September 15, 2004, and in its second year of operation it sold 15,000 cars, 5,000 more than planned. In 2006, Rolf Khimki became the world's largest dealership selling Mazda cars.

What is the secret of success? “There is such a thing as a sales funnel,” says Lukovetskaya. The company is trying with all its might to suck as many customers as possible into this funnel. The maximum task is to turn every person who calls Rolf into a buyer and client. Managers convince callers and curious visitors to take a test drive, learn about the advantages of the car, look at it from the outside, and then smell the interior, listen to the rumbling of the engine, and feel the comfort. “Each stage is recorded, and we understand where we did a bad job,” says Lukovetskaya. “It’s considered ideal to get 30 customers out of 100 callers, if 25 is good.” Now out of 100 people who call Rolf, 23 become customers and clients of the company.

The warranty for each purchased car is three years or 100,000 km; during this period the car is serviced at Rolf, and the prices for consumables, spare parts and work of craftsmen here are not the lowest. According to Autoreview magazine, in 2012 a standard hour at Rolf cost 1,900 rubles, at Genser - 1,500 rubles, at Block Motors - 1,690 rubles. For nine months of 2013, Rolf’s revenue from service amounted to 11.4 billion rubles, from the sale of spare parts at retail - 1.6 billion rubles, the company serviced more than 200,000 cars.

Transition period

On August 28, 2009, on Neftchinikov Square in the city of Almetyevsk, the Sollers company solemnly handed over 33 Fiat Ducato ambulances assembled at the Sollers-Elabuga plant to the municipalities of Tatarstan. Lukovetskaya was present at the celebration - a year earlier, she left the position of director of operational development and retail management at Rolf for the post of director of the Sollers Trading House. The holiday was a success; the drivers turned on special signals at once with their engines turned off. Here Lukovetskaya’s heart sank: the cars had not yet been run-in, and weak batteries could quickly waste energy on illumination. But everything worked out - all the cars started up and drove away.

“They lured me away with money and interesting tasks,” admits Lukovetskaya. In addition to producing UAZ cars, Sollers began assembling Korean SsangYong SUVs and Fiat Ducato commercial vehicles in Russia; the company planned to build its own retail network of 15 automobile centers.

However, the 2008 crisis put an end to the company’s plans and Lukovetskaya’s ambitions. The Russian automobile market collapsed by 49% in 2009, Sollers sales fell by 54%. At that time the company had only seven of its own car dealerships, the main sales were made through three hundred dealers. Sollers had to stop the development of the network - the company's investments in 2009 decreased to 2.7 billion rubles compared to 8 billion rubles in 2008. But even in these conditions, Sollers increased its share in the commercial vehicle market from 17% to 27%, Ducato vans occupied 24% of the market.

In March 2010, Lukovetskaya left Sollers to develop the retail business of the Modus company, operating in Russian regions. Lukovetskaya worked at Modus for only nine months and, according to the company’s owner Alexey Leshchenko, managed to “prove herself as a leader capable of inspiring and igniting people.”

At the end of 2010, Lukovetskaya received a call from the founder of Rolf, Petrov, with the words: “That’s enough, come home.” According to Petrov, the chairman of the board of directors of Rolf Group of Companies, Igor Salita, convinced him to call Lukovetskaya. The company was not doing well, sales were falling, the debt in 2009 was $1 billion. Lukovetskaya returned to head the retail division of the entire company, because it was this that was supposed to become the locomotive of future growth. “We needed a real leader; the strong will only follow the strong,” says Petrov. Lukovetskaya, according to the owner of “Rolf”, is just one of those: she combines intelligence and amazing performance.

Housework

“For me personally, four years without Lukovetskaya were pure hell,” the director of one of the Rolf auto centers does not hide his emotions. “Endless running in circles: approvals took place for months on every new idea or new sales mechanism, foreigners built a system under which it was impossible to conduct business.” The massive arrival of foreigners in the leadership of Rolf occurred after Petrov left the State Duma in 2007. Nick Hawkins from PricewaterhouseCoopers became managing director, Briton Matt Donnelly took over as president and chief executive officer, Ian King became vice-president of development, and Nicholas Coulson from the Rothschild Group was appointed chairman of the board. During these years, Rolf continued to grow rapidly; from 2002 to 2007, 14 showrooms were opened in Moscow and St. Petersburg. “We could find our own, he, of course, de-
Shevle,” Petrov said in an interview with Forbes in 2008. “But our people simply won’t be able to speak in front of 40 managers of a Japanese corporation, talk about the company in their language and get financing.” Rolf employees note the main feature of foreign top management - distrust; as a result, the company built a rigid management vertical with the transfer of almost all functions to the central office. “The head of the dealership was responsible for the results,
but often could not achieve anything because of the internal bureaucracy,” says one of the company’s employees. “We couldn’t manage marketing costs, and to get a full-time position, we had to go through ten rounds of approvals and justifications.” “Centralization provides some savings, but does not allow enthusiasm to develop,” says Lukovetskaya.

Being cautious in her assessments, she, on the contrary, quickly and firmly set out to break the centralized pyramid. As a result of the reform, dealership centers became the main link and received broad powers: sales of new and used cars, financial services (lending and insurance), and after-sales service. The common areas remained the expert and analytical service, accounting, security service, and lawyers. “But they are in the rear, delivering shells to those on the front line,” Lukovetskaya readily uses terminology suitable for describing military operations.

“Those on the front lines” have more not only freedom, but also responsibility to the client. Rolf was the first in Russia to call customers after visiting a car dealership to find out the level of satisfaction with the services provided. Taking into account this information and checks, coefficients are formed that are taken into account when calculating the bonus part of staff salaries. It was under Lukovetskaya that the remuneration of sales managers began to depend not only on the number of cars sold, but also on whether the entire company fulfilled the plan.

The reform bore fruit: in the first nine months of 2013, 1.56 million new foreign cars were sold in Russia - 4% less than in the same period in 2012, while Rolf sold 20% more than in 2012. Rolf dealerships began to earn additional profit along the entire chain - from sales of a new or used car to loans and insurance, not to mention the cost of additional equipment. How is the result achieved? The seller, being relatively independent in his decisions, can give the client a large discount on a car or service, but in the end he will recoup this money through other services. For example, Rolf earned about 157 million rubles in profit from sales of additional equipment alone (based on the results of nine months of 2013). And the total cumulative margin (Rolf representatives use this term to describe earnings from clients throughout the chain) of the company amounted to 5.5 billion rubles.

Under Lukovetskaya, Rolf is gradually drifting towards the premium segment. The company has been selling Chrysler since 2012, and this year it opened Jaguar Land Rover sales centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In October 2013, the largest Porsche dealership in Russia was opened, worth 600 million rubles, with an area of more than 1,000 square meters. m with a highway for test drives of SUVs and a helipad. What is Lukovetskaya’s forecast for the coming years? “Mergers and acquisitions. These are tough times, and not everyone will survive them,” she says.

Petrov, whose fortune Forbes estimates at $750 million, is a State Duma deputy (A Just Russia), he has moved away from managing Rolf. He left the strategy to the board of directors, but Lukovetskaya manages the company operationally, and he completely trusts her. “A real manager should be free from barriers and strive for only one goal - to make the company number one,” says Petrov. “Tatyana Lukovetskaya has such qualities.”

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