Steve Probst

Steve Probst, President of Nickelsen Partners, has worked in the auto industry for most of the past 20 years, consulting on topics ranging from vehicle marketing to service satisfaction improvement for clients including Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Hyundai, Isuzu, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Saab, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Volvo Cars. In addition, as follow-on to a consulting engagement, Mr. Probst served for a year as interim head of the service-parts operations group for one of the two global diesel locomotive manufacturers.

In his work, Mr. Probst has led teams that have:

• Achieved tens of millions of dollars of margin improvement through pricing strategy development and implementation (with no measurable reduction in unit sales, dealer satisfaction, or customer satisfaction)
• Enabled a group of car dealers to substantially raise their CSI and SSI scores by using a “20-group” approach to identify problem areas, identify fixes, and build commitment to making the necessary changes inside each dealership
• Redesigned the vehicle pricing strategy and process for a major car company, in part by bringing key team members out into the field to help them understand how the vehicle selling process works; the client saw its market share increase by two points during the two years of that engagement and its dealer profitability and satisfaction increase, a significant contrast with the trends before that work.
• Earned the highest participant evaluations in the client company’s history for a management training program that over two years reached over half of the company’s 2,000 managers (including the top executive team and key union leaders)

 Before joining Nickelsen Partners, Mr. Probst was President of Business Catalyst, LLC and a founding Partner at CFGW and its later spin-off, Carlisle & Company. Mr. Probst graduated early from M.I.T. with a BS in Civil Engineering. He also holds a Masters degree in Management (with Distinction) from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

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