Travis Hawk | About | Automotive CFO & Dealership Consultant

Most dealership CFOs are excellent accountants. They close the books, produce the statements, manage the audit, and report to ownership what already happened.

I do all of that. But I have never been satisfied stopping there.

Throughout my career I have approached the CFO role as a strategic business partner — not just a financial reporter. That means renegotiating contracts ownership assumed were fixed. Finding reinsurance structures that generate revenue for a decade after the engagement ends. Structuring fleet service partnerships that fill underutilized bays with new revenue. Designing health benefit programs that cut employee premiums in half while making the plans richer and eliminating the chronic 15% annual increases that drain dealer group payroll every renewal cycle.

It means sitting in 20 Group sessions and understanding not just what the composite says but what it is not showing. Running internal 20 Group-style financial review sessions across all departments for five consecutive years at one of Oklahoma's largest dealer groups — without sending a single manager to an outside consulting group to get it done.

And it means applying AI to the operational and financial data that has always existed inside dealerships but that almost nobody has been reading correctly — to find profit gaps before they compound, identify where problems actually start instead of where they surface, and validate whether the people being put in leadership positions will perform the way their resumes claim.

I collaborated directly with NADA to build a comprehensive dealership accounting training program for a 26-entity, international accounting operation. Multiple dealers have told me over the years that I know more than most NADA Academy instructors and could teach the class myself.

I am not the CFO who tells you what happened last month.

I am the CFO who tells you what is happening right now, where it started, and what to do about it before it shows up on the statement.

I have spent the past several months teaching myself how AI works — not the surface-level version, but the deeper application. Pattern recognition. Data synthesis. Operational intelligence.

I started by asking a simple question: what happens when you stop looking at individual data points and start looking at what the data is collectively saying?

So I built a test. I gathered CSI scores, Google reviews, Glassdoor feedback, Yelp reviews, and multi-year customer and employee sentiment from multiple platforms. Before anything entered the analysis, all personally identifiable information was fully redacted — no names, no individuals, no firm-specific identifiers. What remained was pure operational signal.

Then I let AI read it.

Not to find complaints. To find patterns.

Here is what the data keeps revealing:

The department getting blamed is rarely where the problem started. Employee frustration appears in public feedback months before it shows up in CSI scores. F&I charge-back patterns tell a story about deal structure that the gross profit report never shows. The accounting office nobody questions is often the source of the lender friction nobody can explain.

The data already knew. The organization just was not asking it the right questions.

I am now applying the same thinking to fixed operations data — ROs, parts tickets, labor efficiency, comeback rates — and to F&I portfolio analysis — bank trends, reserve patterns, charge-backs by credit tier, product penetration by finance source. Looking for where gross is leaking and why.

I am also developing an executive hiring validation methodology — using publicly available data to determine whether a GM or department head candidate actually performed the way their resume says they did. Did scores improve while they were there? Did problems follow them from one organization to the next? The data tells that story too.

This is not about replacing people with technology. It is about giving the right people better information faster — so decisions get made on facts instead of feelings, politics, and whoever argued loudest in the last managers meeting.

The dealer groups that learn to use this capability first will have a significant competitive advantage. I intend to bring that capability to every organization I work with.