By Giorgio AndonianPublished On: May 27, 2025

MTD’s 2025 Tire Dealer Survival Guide is Here

Stay tuned to www.moderntiredealer.com for excerpts from MTD’s 2025 Tire Dealer Survival Guide.

In this year’s edition of MTD’s Tire Dealer Survival Guide, mergers and acquisition expert Cole Strandberg, also a managing director with FOCUS Investment Banking’s automotive aftermarket team, explains why the ability to scale is vital for dealers who want to expand through acquisitions.

You’ve heard of artificial intelligence. How can you, as an independent tire dealer, effectively harness this developing technology to improve your systems and processes? Dennis McCarron, a partner at Cardinal Brokers, provides some thought-provoking ideas.

Is everyone on your team aligned and rowing in the right direction? If not, you may have a quiet quitter somewhere within your organization. Mike Townsend, retail tire sales coach and owner of Townsend Strategies, teaches you how to identify and rehabilitate quiet quitters before they do more damage to your business.

Customer retention is an evergreen concern for many dealers. J. Mark Jackson, a founding partner of Guidon LLC, a leadership and resilience training/consulting organization, details the three levels of customer commitment and how you can convince clients to stick with you.

And Randy O’Connor, owner of D2D Development Group (Dealer to Dealer Development Group), discusses how to understand the purchase path of today’s customer by identifying — and locking in — segments, touchpoints, time frames and more.

Previously published on MTD.

Giorgio Andonian is a Managing Director at FOCUS Investment Banking, where he specializes in mergers, acquisitions, recapitalizations, and capital raises for middle-market businesses across the automotive aftermarket industry. He brings over 15 years of operational experience from the tire and service sector. He began his career at his family's business, Discount Tire Centers of Southern California, where he held positions spanning finance, business analysis, operations, inventory management, and purchasing. He later served as vice president of a regional tire chain in Southern California, overseeing all aspects of operations and successfully preparing the business for an exit to a private equity platform. Since joining FOCUS in 2019, Andonian has become a recognized voice in the automotive aftermarket, providing insights on industry trends, M&A activity, and market dynamics from OEM manufacturers through distributors, jobbers, and retail operators to the end consumer. His unique combination of hands-on operational expertise and investment banking acumen allows him to analyze the entire value chain and understand how changes at one level ripple throughout the industry. Andonian holds an MBA with an emphasis in finance from Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration with emphases in finance and supply chain management from the University of San Diego. He holds Series 79, Series 82, and Series 63 licenses.