How Dana Allen-Khmous runs the South Region
Two years into running South Region dealer accounts, Allen-Khmous reads her progress in operational terms. In April, over a dozen contacts wrote her name into 5-star reviews.
Walking a dealership lot, an Area Operations Manager has a few minutes with a service writer between calls and maybe less with a used car manager between appraisals. Dana Allen-Khmous treats those windows as the job. She asks specific questions, tracks the answers, and follows up before the next visit.
That approach has built her two years of standing accounts across the South Region territory for All-Pro Auto Reconditioning, where reconditioning quality and time-to-line decide whether a unit goes front-line ready this week or sits on the lot another seven days. In April, over a dozen of her dealer contacts wrote 5-star Google reviews naming her directly. She does not treat that as luck.
“We strive to be the best. Everyone is willing to help and share ideas, but it is all because of our leadership.”
Dana Allen-Khmous
Her territory covers a mix of franchise and independent dealership accounts across the South Region, where unit volume, used vehicle aging, and turnaround windows shift week to week. The Area Operations Manager role at APAR is the field-level account owner — the person used car managers and fixed ops directors call when a reconditioning question hits the lot. Close enough to the service drive to know what the reps are seeing, close enough to the body shop to know what the techs can deliver. Two years in, Allen-Khmous reads her own progress in operational terms.
“I'm much better at managing my time and prioritizing what matters most. I've learned how to stay organized and not get overwhelmed when things get busy. And I know what I am looking at in the paint world.”
Dana Allen-Khmous
Reading paint correctly — surface condition, prep, color match — separates the Area Operations Manager who can flag an issue on the walk-around from one who escalates every call back to a tech. The reps notice. So do the dealer contacts writing the reviews.
Each of those 5-star Google reviews came from someone who sat down after the work was done and wrote about a specific experience. That feedback is the cleanest read APAR has on how dealer accounts feel about the relationship between the recon vendor and the dealership floor, and the names that surface in those reviews tell the South Region team where the relationships are working.
Off the clock, Allen-Khmous runs her household with the same operating model.
“A CEO once told me, if you can run a home, you can run a successful business.”
Dana Allen-Khmous
She plans the trips and events for the people in her life, takes on projects around the house, and on weekends she climbs rocks in the Ozarks. She picked it up because she wanted to learn something new. The next thing to learn was rock climbing, so she went and learned.
