Strictly speaking from a corporate perspective, the structure and the amount of personnel in the back office (accounting, treasury, finance, analytics, IT) has been and continues to be almost 100% determined by the fact that the company doesn't use an accounting system to account for its business operations. The company's purchases, all other costs, and sales transactions are entered into various and different systems and those transactions affect hundreds of databases. The size of the company's IT group is TREMENDOUSLY over-sized due to the needs that this creates from an ongoing development perspective. This also creates the need for the company to hire 3-4 times as many people in accounting and finance because any work to arrive at the simplest accounting or finance result is done by using SQL code to query the databases and building (typically) unnecessary spreadsheets. Yes, almost all of the staff in the back office at Drivetime knows SQL. Not everybody is an expert, but almost everybody can do enough to get their job done. Additionally, it has created a need for the company to grow a very large department called "analytics" that would otherwise be completely unnecessary. Normally this task is performed by accounting or finance or anybody that can simply get into a system, pull information, and put it into a spreadsheet.
The company has had a very hard time hiring and keeping talented individuals from the Staff to Controller level, which ultimately has stemmed from the difficult systems environment. Most of the manager and below individuals in the back office are not very talented people and therefore are defensive about their positions in the company. This had created dysfunction in terms of the structure of the departments and the ability for people to successfully grow their careers. It is a perpetual cycle.
The company does make a lot of money and its business model works. But, the same upper management that successfully runs the company from that standpoint has absolutely no clue these very apparent facts described above could be easily solved. Most of the upper management are talented and smart individuals that simply don't have a lot of experience in the wholesale world.
