2025 ANNUAL MEETING


WELCOME
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17
- TIMEAGENDA ITEM
- 7:30 am
Breakfast
9:00 am
Welcome
9:15 am
2024 Year in Review
10:15 am
Technology
11:15 am
Traffic Management
12:15 pm
Lunch
1:15 pm
Business Office / Operations
2:15 pm
Marketing
3:15 pm
Break
3:30 pm
Merchandising Your Store
4:00 pm
Guest Speaker |
Will Guidara5:00 pm
Sonic Story
5:15 pm
Wrap Up
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18
- TIMEAGENDA ITEM
- 7:30 am
Breakfast
9:00 am
Welcome
9:15 am
Guest Speaker |
Antonia Hock11:15 am
Pre-Owned
12:00 pm
Lunch
1:00 pm
Guest Speaker |
Jonathan Smoke2:00 pm
New Cars
2:30 pm
Fixed Operations
3:00 pm
VIP Concierge / Amazon
3:30 pm
Break
3:45 pm
Manufacturer Relations / CSI
4:45 pm
Special Presentation
5:15 pm
Wrap Up
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19
- TIMEAGENDA ITEM
- 7:30 am
Breakfast
9:00 am
Welcome
9:15 am
EchoPark
10:00 am
Powersports
10:45 am
People Experience
11:45 am
Wrap Up
12:00 pm
Lunch
WELCOME
Welcome to our 2025 Annual Meeting!
Thank you for your outstanding leadership, teamwork, perseverance, and creativity in 2024 as we overcame unforeseen obstacles, broke records, and developed stronger relationships with our teammates, customers, and manufacturer partners!
Once again, we as a team have been living our Sonic Purpose - to deliver an experience for our guests and our teammates that fulfills dreams, enriches lives and delivers happiness. In fact, our amazing team achieved an historic milestone in 2024 by delivering the highest customer satisfaction scores in Sonic history!
We are known for and take pride in providing exceptional experiences; however, we cannot become complacent! As we strive to achieve new and even more ambitious goals in 2025, we must challenge ourselves to deliver even more world-class experiences for our guests and teammates. It's up to all of us to identify innovative ways to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and offer our guests, teammates, and communities unmatched experiences!
We are excited to have two hospitality industry experts join us this week, providing cutting-edge ideas on how we can deliver memorable moments. Will Guidara, author of the New York Times Bestseller Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect, will join us on Monday, February 17. I hope you enjoyed reading the book, and I look forward to hearing all the ways you will guide your teams to harness a hospitality mindset and deliver exceptional experiences with each interaction.
On Tuesday, February 18, we will welcome Antonia Hock, a world-renowned expert in customer experience who spent six years as the Global Head of The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center and will share ways for us to up our hospitality game. We will also welcome back Jonathan Smoke, Chief Economist at Cox Automotive, who will provide an outlook on our industry in the year ahead.
We have a tremendous opportunity to meet in person for the first time in several years!
We have the best and brightest minds in the auto industry here this week! Let's seize this opportunity to learn from each other - ask questions, share ideas, and get better together! We are setting the stage this week to have another all-time record-breaking year!
Thank you, and let's make it an unforgettable Annual Meeting!

David B. Smith
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Sonic Automotive, Inc., and EchoPark Automotive, Inc.

WILL GUIDARA

ANTONIA HOCK
Antonia is a world-renowned expert in customer and employee experience, leadership, and building experience-based brands. Her career is rooted in delivering customer-centric service models for companies of all sizes, implementing game-changing employee culture, and innovating customer experiences, all with an emphasis on tangible results and lasting impact.
She uses her high-energy, bold, and unapologetic style to help companies succeed through creating a relentless mindset of excellence and innovation. Before launching the firm, Antonia spent six years as the Global Head of The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center. For the two decades prior to The Ritz-Carlton, Antonia held executive positions for demanding
tech giants including Microsoft, HP and Siemens. She has led numerous organizational transformation projects for some of the world’s largest brands. Her multi-industry background in technology, hospitality and consulting has shaped her unique perspective and philosophy around creating exceptional customer experiences and building world-class employee culture. She holds a double bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies/Civilization & Political Science/Economics from Dartmouth College.

JONATHAN SMOKE
Smoke leads Cox Automotive’s economic industry insights team, which tracks the economy, new and used vehicle sales, supply, prices, retail and fleet demand, consumer credit and auto financing, and dealer sentiment to understand the key trends impacting both the wholesale and retail markets for vehicles informed by the proprietary data from all of the
company’s businesses and platforms including Manheim, Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, and Dealertrack.
Smoke is an executive member of the board for the Atlanta Economics Club and is a member of the Conference of Business Economists, Harvard Industrial Economists and the National Association of Business Economists. He has spoken at major industry conferences such as the NADA and NIADA conventions, Automotive News World Congress,
and Used Car Week. His views on the economy and the auto industry are featured regularly in industry and national news outlets such as Automotive News, Auto Remarketing, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Bloomberg, and CNBC.

LISA ROTHSTEIN
Lisa Rothstein is a business storyteller, speaker, facilitator, and cartoonist who has spent over two decades generating stories for the world’s biggest brands (and more recently, cartoons for the world’s best magazine). She has worked as a copywriter and helmed creative teams at famed Madison Avenue ad agencies Y&R, Lowe, and Ogilvy, where she created
the “Wait’ll We Get Our Hanes on You” campaign that reinvented the underwear category and doubled sales year over year.
Lisa also worked in Paris for over a decade on international brand campaigns for IBM and Unilever running in 17 countries. In 2018, she had her first cartoon published in The New Yorker Magazine, achieving a childhood dream.
Over the course of her career, Lisa has led brand storytelling and visual storytelling workshops at Bayer, Merck, Rheem and innovation conferences nationwide.
Now Lisa uses her experience to help transform companies’ messages into engaging visual stories, single panel cartoons and comics that people read, love, remember, and share.
Transportation from the St. Regis Hotel will be provided with buses looping daily from 7 am to 7 pm.
If you have any questions, please contact the front desk.


Help your fellow teammates, like Terra Cua (pictured above with her family), Divisional Administrative and Financial Assistant, who has been able to use SAFE Fund grants to pay for her husband's medical bills, unexpected final costs related to the death of her aunt, and home repairs after devestating floods in Nashville, TN.
When the unexpected happens, you're SAFE.
Visit the Be Connected! group on Workplace to read Terra's story.
Note: All donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c) (3).