A conversation with a dealer in Texas drives home the importance of paying attention to contracts you have with your vendors.

This dealer says she now is instructing her staff to give her all vendor contracts to review. She recently caught a uniform vendor raising prices 8% when the contract clearly stipulates it can only raise prices 3% each year.

On another contract, she found the dealership was being charged $62 a month when the vendor owed it $1,200.

Doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up month after month. So the message here – Pay attention.

Cash for Clunkers is now over after generating nearly 707,000 direct sales, along with countless other sales for customers not eligible for the program.

Now what? Most analysts are afraid September sales will experience a downturn without the popular government financing.

Many of you have stories of crowded showrooms and of customers racing to the dealership in the hours before Cash for Clunkers ended in order to buy a car. The industry hasn’t seen that sort of excitement in years.

Wouldn’t it be nice to continue that momentum the next several months?

I recently saw the fictional movie The Goods: Live Hard Sell Hard (you know, research for work) which details how a traveling sales team puts on a four day event to save a dealership from closing in Temecula, CA. (If you plan to see it, leave the kids at home). There’s one scene that struck me. The last day of the event, a hyped up concert at the dealership fails miserably and results in a riot.

TV news cameras captured the chaos. Unmitigated disaster, right?

Far from it. The scene’s star, Jeremy Piven (playing Don Ready, the movie’s hero) grabs a microphone, jumps in front of the news cameras and invites all of Temecula’s police department and anybody wearing anything resembling police gear to the dealership and promises a hefty incentive (I’m little shaky on the details – left my reporters’ notebook at the office) if they made it to the store by closing time.

Sure enough, it’s a Hollywood ending. The dealership is saved and Piven gets the girl.

In the midst of a wildy ridiculous story, I think there is a lesson to see. I couldn’t help but think Piven was capturing what being a dealer was all about with that stunt.

Instead of complaining how bad things were, he improvised and turned a bad situation into a winner.

Many of you did just that with Cash for clunkers. All sorts of problems and issues, yet you sold 707,000 vehicles.

Some of you want to keep that going. There is a group of 73 dealers who created their own stimulus plan (you can see the details at www.automotivestimulusplan.com) to compensate for some of the drawbacks of the government’s plan. Dealers participating in the program have raved about its success.

How about other areas?

A recent email from dealer marketing firm OneCommand, detailed the story of a California dealer who last year held a Labor Day picnic, bringing in more that 13,000 people. It was a weeklong celebration that generated more than $400,000 in service department work and more than 1,600 repair orders, and who knows how many customer contacts?

The point is, be creative, improvise and take control. If traffic slows, figure out a way to get them back.

Kelley Blue Book released a statement last week that got a lot of play in the media — including Ward’s. KBB is cautioning dealers to watch their used-vehicle inventory closely because the Cash for clunkers incentive program could create a bubble of inventory prices that could deflate suddenly once the program ends.

You can read our story here: Used-Vehicle Prices Continue to Climb.

I’m not sure I agree with KBB’s analysis. There might be a deflation but how severe is the question. Used-car values have been climbing all year, and according to Manheim’s Chief Economist Tom Webb, prices should continue their upward trend the next few months.

Still, it’s probably wise to not get carried away with adding inventory.

Last week, I wrote a column urging the U.S. Senate to continue funding the Cash for Clunkers program. (Read the column here:No Vote on More Cash-for-Clunkers Funding is Declaration of War on Small Business.)

I’ve since received numerous emails from people accusing me of being a socialist. A friend even wrote me saying the headline was “over the top.” Apparently, a lot of folks don’t like buying cars for their neighbors.

Sorry people, I’m holding firm — and am happy the Senate listened to my wisdom while approving another $2 billion for the popular incentive program.

Feel free to weigh in with you opinion on whether I’m a socialist.

Dealers tell me often one of their biggest challenges is trying to find good salespeople. One would think it should be easier today with the flood of salespeople on the hunt for a job because their dealership closed. Dealers might be getting more resumes, but how do they know if the applicant sitting before them can actually sell a car?

Lee Kemp thinks he has the answer with an interactive sales simulation firm he created several years ago. You can read about it here. An executive with a dealer group on the Ward’s Megadealer 100 tells me his managers love it because it’s simple to use and it’s evaluations are spot on. He says they also like the training component the solution provides.

We’ve known Lee for several years back when he was a Ford dealer in Minneapolis. (He was part of Ford’s minority dealer development program. His landlord was also his competitor — Denny Hecker, who’s automotive empire recently collapsed.)

Lee left the business in 2005 to follow his dream of being in the Olympics. He was a national and world champion wrestler in the late ’70s and was all set for the 1980 Olympics when President Carter decided to boycott the games that year.

Lee finally made it as a coach of the U.S. Olympic Freestyle Team in 2008. He now operates two wrestling schools — one in Atlanta and one in Chicago. But he couldn’t shake the car industry. He restarted his company last year with business partner and industry veteran Steve Munyan and hopes to help dealers with their hiring processes.