President’s Award of Excellence—Small Business Division: Toyota Subic
For Toyota Subic, success in the Small Business Division was built on a foundation of dedication, teamwork, and customer focus. Winning the President’s Award of Excellence, Toyota Subic distinguished itself through exceptional sales performance and service quality. As a smaller dealership, it showcased how strategic management and a strong service culture can lead to industry recognition. Competing against other Toyota dealerships, Toyota Subic’s achievement reinforces that no matter the size of the business, a commitment to Toyota’s core values—quality, reliability, and continuous improvement—paves the way for success and long-term customer trust. We spoke with Toyota Subic president Evangeline Mary Tan.
1. Winning the President’s Awards for Excellence is a major achievement. What are the key factors that brought these triumphs to your dealerships?
Key factors that helped us are team work and communication. — Our people is our best asset. Winning dealer of the year is a result of everyone’s hard work and dedication.
2. How does your dealership maintain strong relationships with customers and ensure they remain loyal to Toyota?
Our customers are very important to us. So we make sure all their needs and concerns have been addressed. We rely on constant communication with our team members to exactly know what we need to improve on to satisfy our customers and to provide them the best customer experience possible. By consistently improving our customer satisfaction, our customers tend to be more loyal to Toyota through our customer for life approach aiming to strengthen our programs and services which our customers can avail thru the life of their vehicles.
The best advice I can give is to have a good culture inside your dealership by always going back to the basics and always embody the two pillars of Toyota: respect for people and kaizen.
3. Being part of the Toyota network, how do you leverage best practices from other dealerships to improve operations?
We are fortunate to have seven dealerships in our group, so we’re able to consistently share best practices with each other, analyze and adapt to different market conditions, and implement different processes that fit perfectly in our respective dealerships. On top of that, Toyota Motor Philippines sees to it that dealers are always equipped with best practices in all departments to perform at their best all the time.
4. Toyota is known for its customer-first philosophy. How do you and your team embody this principle in daily operations?
In the JBT Group, we have this slogan, “Driven to serve you better.” With this slogan embedded in all our Team Members’ minds and hearts, they are always determined and motivated to continuously improve and be the best Team Members that they can be. In return, dealer operations operates smoothly and harmoniously while aiming to always provide the best customer experience possible.
5. What advice would you give to other Toyota dealers looking to achieve and maintain your same level of excellence?
The best advice I can give is to have a good culture inside your dealership by always going back to the basics and always embody the two pillars of Toyota: respect for people and kaizen. By focusing on these two advice, you are always making sure your employees are satisfied, motivated, and passionate in their respective positions. You will also be prepared for what the year will give because in our industry, every year is different. So you should always do kaizen so you can adapt to different market conditions year on year.
