Embark on a transformative journey with car dealership virtuoso Brian Kramer, as we peel back the layers of innovation within the auto sales industry. Brian's rise from detailing cars to revolutionizing dealership systems illustrates the potent combination of technology and human ingenuity. With legacy platforms like CDK and Reynolds & Reynolds at his fingertips, he's steered a paperless revolution, proving that deep-rooted knowledge can be the catalyst for creative and efficient workspaces.
Dive into the core of business adaptability and witness how organization, humility, and data trump gut instincts every time. We unravel the strategies that have reshaped car sales, from Grant Cardone's wisdom to the nuanced art of negotiation where AI meets "Never Split the Difference." Our conversation with Brian underscores the necessity of precise communication and bespoke training for a thriving operation, regardless of the industry. The anecdotes shared are more than just stories; they're blueprints for success, emphasizing the profound impact of predictive analytics in decision-making processes.
The dynamics of car dealerships are as intricate as they are fascinating, and in this episode, we spotlight the traits of the industry's top performers. We address the alignment of leadership with the unique profiles of team members, the revelations brought on by operational changes, and the paramount importance of accountability. Whether it's reshaping compensation structures or prioritizing people over technology, Brian's insights are a testament to how prioritizing thoughtful processes can manifest extraordinary business outcomes. Join us to unlock the secrets to transforming your dealership—or any business—into a well-oiled machine.
Embark on a transformative journey with car dealership virtuoso Brian Kramer, as we peel back the layers of innovation within the auto sales industry. Brian's rise from detailing cars to revolutionizing dealership systems illustrates the potent combination of technology and human ingenuity. With legacy platforms like CDK and Reynolds & Reynolds at his fingertips, he's steered a paperless revolution, proving that deep-rooted knowledge can be the catalyst for creative and efficient workspaces.
Dive into the core of business adaptability and witness how organization, humility, and data trump gut instincts every time. We unravel the strategies that have reshaped car sales, from Grant Cardone's wisdom to the nuanced art of negotiation where AI meets "Never Split the Difference." Our conversation with Brian underscores the necessity of precise communication and bespoke training for a thriving operation, regardless of the industry. The anecdotes shared are more than just stories; they're blueprints for success, emphasizing the profound impact of predictive analytics in decision-making processes.
The dynamics of car dealerships are as intricate as they are fascinating, and in this episode, we spotlight the traits of the industry's top performers. We address the alignment of leadership with the unique profiles of team members, the revelations brought on by operational changes, and the paramount importance of accountability. Whether it's reshaping compensation structures or prioritizing people over technology, Brian's insights are a testament to how prioritizing thoughtful processes can manifest extraordinary business outcomes. Join us to unlock the secrets to transforming your dealership—or any business—into a well-oiled machine.
Dealer Tech Tuesdays is brought to you by VTechDealerIT, guaranteeing your dealership premier reliability, stability and customer support. Transform your Tuesdays into a powerhouse of growth. Contact us at wwwVTechDealerITcom. Brian Kramer. Thanks for having me, john, appreciate it. Dude, I've been wanting to do this podcast for a long time. Man, you're one of the smartest dudes in the car business. I think one of the most innovative. I've been wanting to have this conversation because I think you and I think in a similar fashion as far as data, as far as process, as far as I think ecosystem is really the right word or like in systems.
Speaker 2:So I would agree, and I think that the way to actually move more smoothly and be able to freestyle more in dealerships is actually you have to have systems in place to be able to free you up, to be able to do those sites the things that everybody wants to do. Yeah, the fun stuff.
Speaker 1:So I usually start with everybody about how do they get into the car business. So how was that journey for?
Speaker 2:you. Well, I started off as a detailer washing cars at an Oldsmobile dealership and then transitioned into selling cars there and couldn't handle that level of freedom when I first got in there. So I got let go. You know, probably six months in, after having a few good months, you know, I got comfortable and I went over to an infinity store where I lucked out and they said if you want the job, you get to sell that customer out there. It was a fresh up. It was either me do it or don't.
Speaker 2:Luckily I did. And then, you know, got, everybody else got, all the leadership got fired. So nobody knew how to use a computer. So I ended up in F&I because everybody was terrified of it. They're like hey, do you know how to use one of these things? It's not because I knew how to sell F&I products, it's because I knew how to use a computer, because I had a Commodore 64 dating myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you naturally had an ability of you know just engaging with customers and then knowing technology. I think that's a lethal, lethal combination of the car business, especially in the last you know 30 years.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, and in my age I'm Gen X, but at the bottom end of it almost a millennial there was a there's like a an age advantage that I had because everybody I worked with was 20 years older than me. So whenever auto by tell came out and internet leads and anything like that, trying to map things out, and actually ironically, when we went paperless at Jermaine Toyota, whatever, 25 years later, the interesting thing is is that the reason I was able to do that is because I knew all the hard prompts and the, the cheat codes, if you will, in CDK, in Reynolds and Reynolds, uh, in order to to bypass all the things. That is just tribal knowledge that even the support team didn't know how to do yeah from way back when because you had to do it all the manual overrides yeah
Speaker 1:yeah, that institutional knowledge gives people like just you know, um, you know, one of the things that we see as IT guys, you know like IT systems guys, is like you start collecting people that know how to do weird things in CDK or Reynolds or you know the I call them like the elves behind the, you know like the behind the system that are making the levers happen and you, those guys know how to do that stuff. So that institutional knowledge of doing it it's like you know, new CDK reps that have been around for 10 years have no idea they don't even know that you can actually do that like that, that that world exists because it's so layered and there's so much depth to the system. So it's really interesting that just by being around, having that institutional knowledge, it just happenstance created a perfect storm where you could create a paperless process in a very innovative way.
Speaker 2:And a lot of luck, just timing of how things unfolded. There was one point where I was trying to, because there's always all these fields and you're like, well, it says it should do that, and then everybody had support because, yeah, I don't know why that field is there. Dealer cash and incentives is one of them. If you go into CDK, into the G screen and hit 9-6, it's for incentives, rebates. You can automate that for commission. So almost every dealership I've ever worked at it's manual in every single deal and I and I saw it at automation had been automated.
Speaker 2:But nobody knew how it happened. And they go, we can't share, you know, automations data. And I said, can you just tell me how to do it? No, we don't see how it can be done. And then, lo and behold, somebody was coming in from CDK checking on my controller, he. And then, lo and behold, somebody was coming in from CDK checking on my controller. He goes, hey, is there anything I can help you out with? And I'm in the conference room and I said, yeah, if you can help me fix this puzzle piece. I've been trying to figure this out for like years. And he goes oh, and he had a couple of codes that opened up a Super Mario Brothers type window, you know like going underground.
Speaker 1:A parallel dimension, yeah.
Speaker 2:And he goes. Yeah, uh, I go. I've opened up I don't know how many different tickets and how do you know how to do that he goes, unless you were here at the beginning? You wouldn't, because I'm retiring next week, so I'm probably the last person that knows that. Wow, so when other dealers can't go 100 paperless, those are the reasons why is either they don't have access to those fields or they don't know that one person with the enterprise knowledge and they've all retired and then it wasn't documented anywhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a real problem. You know, I was in the military right. I worked on B-52 bombers. There were 58 and 60 models. So you're like, can we talk to the engineer that designed these? Like he's been dead for 25 years. You know, like nobody knows these very, you know very detailed questions.
Speaker 1:There's a there's a guy that we deal with, dave davis, that you probably heard the name of it yeah, the name of the in the business and he's a guy that comes in and just makes everything smoother. I don't know what he does. He has super cdk access and he just makes the puzzles move and think he's like, just add, dave, and these buy cells will go 10 times, you know, 10 times better. It's, it's wild. That's an episode in itself. Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly, exactly so. Um, you know, I know that, um, you know, I know that you've been extraordinarily innovative in in your journey of of coming in and being in the car business. Where does that come from? I mean, is it, is it a desire of, of curiosity, because it seems like that's where it originates from, but also the implementation, and just like this perfect storm of having a high performer that that puts all these pieces together. Well, how's that process for you?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a good question. I'm obsessed with eliminating redundancy and the same things that happen over and over and over again. So, like back in, oh, two or three, everybody was saying that market scan or M pencil, the old touchscreen lease calculator, that you could push that into the DMS, push that into the DMS. So kept on tinkering with that and I think most people aren't willing to stay up till midnight. You know toying around with that, but I know that if you add a little bit of friction at the beginning and you and you do figure that out, that it, it the throughput and the velocity that's where the speed comes from is all those little paper cuts when you need to. You know one of the first things that I learned when I was selling, you know, 12 to 15 cars a month at an infinity store.
Speaker 2:My, uh, my GSM said hey, you got to get organized. And I go, I am organized, he goes. No, you need to start with the end in mind. Start your month out, how many cars you want to sell. You want to sell 20, you should have 20 deal jackets with every document you need and assume that everyone's going to have a trade.
Speaker 2:You need the two key rings, the things to stock in the trades, the not for sale, the not for sale stickers, every single thing that everybody runs around scrambling like chickens with their head cut off. It should be like Kaizen Everything is within arm's reach, you don't have to think about it, you just do do and you know. Just like a standard operating procedure. Yeah, but for for everything but the innovation. I used to scoff at a lot of things, actually, and I used to hey, I gotta stay focused, I'm not worrying about that noise or that noise, and you guys can go down that rabbit hole, I'm not doing it. And then there was. It was in 2011. Uh, grant cardone and I've known each other for a long time from that Oldsmobile store.
Speaker 1:Okay, training Out of the trunk.
Speaker 2:Exactly yeah, door to door, and way back when, when nobody would listen to him, he was trying to talk about buying cars off the service drive, which now we've come full circle. Yeah exactly, but in 2011, he stopped by and saw me at Lexus Clearwater and had him come in and talk to the dealership. Nobody knew who he was or ever heard of him.
Speaker 2:And he said you know, I think I'm going to, I'm going to get big on social media and in an 11, I'm like looking at it, like, uh, I don't know, like I guess, when I looked at TikTok two years ago, right, and I'm like that's for little kids, what are you gonna do on social media? He goes I'm going to build a real estate empire. And I'm like, granted, you know you, you look, talk about some crazy stuff. And this point he was like retired, Like he had sold his training company.
Speaker 2:Uh, he was, you know, a couple of years older than I am now and he, he goes. Yeah, he goes. I'm going to, I'm going to crowdsource this real estate thing. I'm. It's going to be a multi-billion dollar deal. You should come on with me and I'm like no, no, I'm on a track here. I'm with AutoNation, I'm going to be a market president. I appreciate it, but I'm sitting there thinking to myself that's some of the craziest stuff I've ever heard him say and he says some crazy stuff.
Speaker 2:And I look at him now and he walked me through exactly how he was going to do it and that's exactly what his playbook was and he's done it to a T so that FOMO of me watching him. I'm not going to dismiss anybody's crazy ideas ever again. That makes sense. That's an important lesson, right, Right. Yeah. And there's innovation that I see everywhere now that I didn't see prior to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's a skill in itself being able to and this sounds super harsh but your ability to kill your babies, right, it's like you have this baby of an idea and it's yours. It's like I have this idea and then you learn some new information. It's like, damn, was I wrong? You know, it's like having just the humility to be able to go through that is an important process and I think that, you know, like one of the things that I admire, like you know, your conversation with David Long. Right, it's like that, this two-year conversation, it's just like such a cool, you know, sparring methodology of finding the, you know, because it's making the industry better. Right, this great spar is making this industry better.
Speaker 1:And I've seen, you know, patrick do it with Jonathan Dawson and I've seen, like these guys just kind of go at it and it's like, okay, great, it's great to witness the sharpening of this tool, but one has to, you know, when one idea prevails, somebody has to, you know, kill their idea, right, and kill their baby and do that with humility and take that information and be like, okay, I'm going to change my process and the best operators in the world do that. Right, they really have this I don't know if it's humility is not the right word but like right-sizing their ego to be able to assume new information or accept new information.
Speaker 2:And I think they're curious. Yeah, and you know like I've changed my stance, as I'm no, I still actually I don't think I know now and I haven't released this yet. We'll have the full data coming out shortly. But obviously you know, I work for cars commerce and we have dealer inspire websites, which is 6,000 dealer websites. Yeah. They're converting over. Like you know, I'm down here in South Florida meeting with Southeast Toyota yesterday and we were talking a lot about smart path and should you have multiple CTAs, multiple trade widgets.
Speaker 2:What does that do? What's the client journey look like? Is they balanced from one to the other? But here's one of the stats that we found is we're looking at some of the biggest dealership websites in the country. If they're only providing a range and I'm not trying to this is I'm saying you should start with a range actually, because that's what gets them to go into the funnel and you actually get more people to enter the funnel. But if you don't provide a exact value at the end of the journey as an option not to say that every customer is going to want to do it If you don't, it's over 80% bounce rate. Jeez Of form completion.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, that's. I mean that data is going to tell you that what that looks like, I mean there's, is there, you know. So we talked about Temple Grattan a long time ago, right, you know, temple Grattan for those that don't know was a woman. That was. That is autistic, that is into, I think don't quote me on this but husband, animal husbandry, agriculture type situation, but animal husbandry agriculture-type situation.
Speaker 1:And she this analogy is just so harsh. But she designed systems to take cattle into the slaughterhouse and what she did was designed a way that the animal couldn't see the horror that they were about to experience, but drastically reduced the anxiety of the animal and you know animals getting injured and doing the process. And I'm like we have to design all systems to make sure that that engagement is as right size as possible, right and really understand what that engagement is and understand the mapping of it, because Because once we do that, we can do exactly what you're talking about. It's like why is this step in the process right here, losing 80% of its effective rate and then what is an acceptable effective rate, and not trying to defend?
Speaker 2:why what you're doing is okay, because that's what I see a lot of people doing is well, let me tell you why that's different with my XYZ situation or my XYZ franchise and this XYZ market, and I now go all over the country and I know that it's agnostic.
Speaker 2:Now there's certain markets where trucks will sell better and four-wheel drives and some geo stuff, but the things that are consistent. And I was just talking about this yesterday and they said what are some of the interesting things that you see? Well, down here where we're at in South Florida, honda doesn't outsell Toyota. No, yeah, yeah, it's not even right it's not even yeah, but up in the Northeast it's not like that. Yeah, and people think that it's weird when Toyota outsells Honda up there yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's fascinating for me as the way it is Right and it's really because of the dealers that have been there for so long that have built this infrastructure. But the consistency no matter which one has leadership is people, process, pay plans and accountability. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And those ingredients in any successful franchise. You know you go up to Tampa, to Hyundai of Newport Richie the number one, you know 600 to 700 new cars a month. They have those pieces in place and every single store that I visit like that, oh okay, I see why they're successful. And then they have a process and I don't agree with all of them. But the one thing that I will say is that they all and this is one part where I do agree with David Long it doesn't so much matter what the process is, as long as you relentlessly execute it. That's more important?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's money balling your dealership, right? It's like if you're hitting singles and doubles all day and you build your infrastructure around hitting singles and doubles, not the home runs and I have a gut feeling about this guy or this gal, right, it's just not the. It doesn't seem like the right way to manage an organization. And it's like how can you maximize your effective rate over a long period of time? And that's, you know, kind of so for the audience, you and I are on a call basically every morning, monday through Saturday, talking about the car business right On Clubhouse. It's called all things car biz and you know we're kind of everybody sharpening their knives right before going into work and we have this conversation on a regular basis. It's like is it the chicken or the egg? And is it processes, is it people, is it the thing, is it all the above? You know, it's just an interesting way of looking at it. What insights have you seen?
Speaker 2:I mean, besides knowing that people, processes, are the main driver of effective operations across the country, what's the one it factor that you see across all the board, the one thing that they all have in common, I would say the one thing that they all have in common is it's never enough, and when you try to tell them they're doing a good job, they're sensitive to no, no, no, we're not, we're missing this and this and this, whereas the ones that are in the middle of the pack will tell you how great this is or great that is, and the top, top performers won't let you compliment them or compliment their managers in front of them, or you can tell they're very awkward receiving a compliment or somebody telling them that they're doing a good job, and they really. I think they're all proud of their teams, all of them but they're not proud of how much more opportunity there is that they haven't yet accomplished and the difference between those stores and, let's say, everybody else, and this has been like a PhD for me working at Cars.
Speaker 2:Commerce being able to go around and walk into all these top-performing stores and just see how the sausage is made, and as I go in there, the ones that are not let's say the elite that are in the middle of the pack do a good job. Those I would classify it like this they get lucky every once in a while. It's like playing blackjack Every once in a while you know they're getting a bad run. Maybe I should stop keeping all these aged cars and I should start doing something else or change my strategy.
Speaker 1:And then all of a sudden they sell one and they make $4,000. And now they got confirmation. Bias is killer.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, See I told you yeah, and they're not playing the odds Like you're talking about, with money ball, the singles and the doubles, they're like. You know, I told you I could hit it out of the park, yep, and I'm not changing my process now. It worked. And that's the deception deception you know in their brains of the ones that don't get to elite yeah, yeah, there was a.
Speaker 1:There's a famous story about tommy gibbs talking to it to a you know general manager was like, oh, you know, this seven series bmw was sitting on the lot of 45 days and doing stuff. He's like, oh, why, why haven't you sent it the cars they auctioned? It's like, well, you know the market and all that stuff, and you know he kind of goes all through all the places for that he can't replace it again, that he can't buy new cars.
Speaker 1:Again, there's feeling, this market, I know, there's all this stuff, and then he's like, well, it boils down to it's not the right color, like, well, was it the right color when you bought it? So you know that gut feeling, is that just confirmation bias? And I think that you know one thing that I see that super operators all have in common is that they've gone through trials and tribulations, which is a really interesting thing. Man. One X factors like trials and tribulations, but I think the trials and tribulations give you an ability to work on yourself that not a lot of people have.
Speaker 2:I've gone on that journey with Tommy Really, and he ran me through the ringer Wow, deservedly so. Dale Pollack was there Right when Viotto was just coming on. Velocity had just been released and we brought Tommy in as a consultant with Dale and I had this Mercedes store in Columbus, ohio, where Daniel Govair worked. Yep, we only had like 35 or 40 spaces and I had all these beautiful Porsches and Range Rovers and just the best inventory, right. What I thought and Dale's like you know he's for everybody listening that doesn't know is he's blind, right. So he goes yeah, you got all the wrong inventory out there. I'm like, how would you know? You can't see it. And he goes that's, it helps me that I can't see it because you're emotionally attached to it. And he goes pull up StockWave and search by market day supply and I hadn't really heard that term yet at that point. This is like in 06, 07. And he goes okay, so sort it by lowest day supply and you're just going to start sourcing those. And I'm like, oh, pontiac Aztec, yeah, buy it.
Speaker 2:I'm like, if you saw this, I know you can't see them, but if you saw this, you wouldn't buy it and he goes and Steve Germain's, like, hit the button and it was one after another. It was Plymouth Voyager, it was a Dodge Stealth, it was all these either models. It was right before the recession, but it was models that were going extinct. Plymouth Horizon, g8. Yeah, just yes. All that yeah. And there was no supply out there because nobody was buying them, but there was actually a demand for them. So we get this truckload of, you know, misfit toys and they all sold in two weeks. Jeez.
Speaker 2:We were on a you know conference call or whatever. And he goes okay, well, do the same thing and just buy them again. I'm like, well, even at broken clocks, write twice a day, but I don't want to take this chance again. Guess what was still there my Rovers, porsches, all the exotic stuff that was good looking, but the math didn't line up. So that was a real wake-up call to me.
Speaker 1:So does that start that journey on data, or has had that data journey been been there before?
Speaker 2:so david long's mentor, his coach john melishenko um I was. He took me over to open up the open point lexus store. We opened it up three days before september 11th, so it was great timing. Oh geez like opened up that mercedes store right before the great recession the same month, golly man, so you get to be really innovative Hard times give you a lot of the mother of innovation right.
Speaker 2:That's right, but it's necessity. But John didn't. He came from Toyota Motor North America national sales manager. He didn't come from retail up which I thought was a real weird thing at the time, but he's what. He's the one that opened up my eyes to data and looking at it through that lens, because it was foreign to me up until that point.
Speaker 1:Do you think that that comes from that continuous improvement kind of model? Is like getting that feedback, looking at data, doing that feedback loop? Is that Kaizen, that kaizen culture, that that toyota has?
Speaker 2:yes, and we went deep into that in terms of parking and all all these you know inefficiencies or whatever. But the and I went through the lexus benchmarks for excellence program, which is instilled a lot of that in me. That's like the most intense one that they have. Yeah, that that goes deep, deep, sewell park place, jm, lexus. Yeah, the best of the best are in that thing and they all learn from each other and share all the benchmarks. But I think that John had to manage by data because he'd never sold a car, so he didn't know what he didn't know, so he had to figure out. It's like somebody playing a game, but they're playing it in a different way, but they're still winning. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'd never seen it playing that played that way. You know it's more like what the public's do and it was very fascinating where he he would show me how to through the metrics. You know I would look at it from tribal knowledge and be able to see what are they not doing or what's the salesperson not toing, or, you know, you sense it like almost like a clutch in a manual transmission. You can't describe it, but you'd know it that they're about to lose the deal of the body language intuitively. But he managed it at scale through data and he would point out things that I didn't see with the data and then really like laying those two over top of each other, created like a superpower.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, that when I first got into the car business I didn't believe anybody Like it was a dealer in Miami. You know why is the showroom empty? It's like it's raining. Nobody buys cars when it's raining. You know he's like why is the showroom empty? It's sunny, everybody's at the beach and it's like dude, this is bullshit. You know what I mean. Like you're lying to me and I get it If you wanted a weather report.
Speaker 1:You'd, yeah, exactly, if I wanted a weather. Yeah, exactly. So I just like I was like, you know, we spent $80,000, $90,000. This is 10 years, 11, 12 years ago. Like spend $90,000 on mailers and it's like, don't spend any, like kill all of it. Sold the same amount of cars. Sold 35 cars Same thing, okay, aren't working, obviously. So it's like, just I think, with momentum and experience, there's things that are really good, that happen, that you can have, you know, a finance manager that can do, you know, seven, six, six, seven pound deals in the back end, that you're like man, this guy's a magician in some capacity. But that same magic for management by running by gut isn't a skill set or a tool, like a tool set that you need to be able to look at things coldly through data and start talking about a system rather than a gut feeling.
Speaker 2:And even layering in people in that, you know, we started using predictive analytics and predictive learning index with like agility. So not just we used pi oh predictive index, but okay, on on every person, and I was part of like a big, massive study of that at auto nation as to what does a 20 car person look like? It's like these three profiles what's a top nice. What's somebody a top performer, fni person? What's a middle performer? What's a bottom? What's a poor?
Speaker 2:Uh, overall, you know 85 plus of the time which profiles don't do well. And then here's why they don't do well, unless you know, with these profiles you surround them with a billing clerk to be able to do their paperwork, but you could connect the dots on the people or you would create a team, which is what you know we did at a lot of the stores that I worked at, where you'd find one manager that's very skilled at accountability, guarding the process, and then you have another person that's more relationship-driven, better at connecting with others, meeting that need and then lining up. You don't put a highly altruistic person on a manager's team that's devoid of emotion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like a formula for conflict, or yeah, yeah, and that's really that money ball aspect of like. Looking at it, it's like how do you add the right ingredients to be able to do this and do this successfully? And do this successfully every single time.
Speaker 2:And then one other element that has to happen, which is how, even though we had that paperless process down, it really took six months before it took off, and it's because I did the equivalent of trading Pena, you know to the Tigers Okay, okay, okay. And Jared Killway and I took our CDK printers out and I drove over them with my FJ Cruiser and just took a video of it and shared it with everybody and said, hey, just so you know we went paperless, took a video of it and shared it with everybody.
Speaker 1:Just so you know, we went paperless yeah exactly, there's no turning back printing the boats, those Oki printers. So you know kind of talking about the new thing, about this journey mapping. You know talking to a dealer and they were like, hey, man, we made some changes on the phone system and they were going into this black hole, infinite loop of you know despair and we were tracking we're tracking 300,000 more dollars this month than we were last month. I mean that big of a swing because of a change on a phone system going to the wrong place I had eight deadlines at a chevrolet store.
Speaker 2:I took over on clearwater once, oh first. I did it first week because I've been to that party before. But yeah, yeah, I don't know how long that had been going on, but if it's been going on for six months a year, it's nauseating yeah, it had been gone.
Speaker 1:Thankfully, it got on for like 45 days before they found it and you know there's lulls that are happening in the car business, right. It just happened in january, february. Then they found it and they're like what? We're tracking a lot. So it was like you know, are we back to 2019 numbers in 2024? It's like that whole COVID. You know everything that's happening right. So it's marred by a lot of stuff and also confirmation bias. It's like the party's going to stop. Did it stop now? Did it stop because of the phone system? Did it stop because it's the market? How much of it is that?
Speaker 2:Are they resulting and finding a result and then justifying it in reverse to get to that result? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:I mean most cases, people, rather than just accepting something for it is what it is and let's fix it, it's like oh, it wasn't me, you know what I mean. So everybody's kind of guarding their territory and covering their asses to be able to make sure that they're not the one that is like hey, epidemic, yeah, in every business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so you know, I was kind of thinking about and this is that customer mapping idea right is that? How do you get? And the kind of thing that we're talking about this morning is like, how do you get fresh eyes on a problem system systematically? Right, because if you're in the dealership you can't really get fresh eyes and you don't want to let anybody know where your you know holes are. It's like so how was it as a, as a body, right? Do you audit those trails and have a technologist that understands the ecosystem of doing that and say, okay, you know somebody on the other side call into the phone. Did you answer Okay, go to the you know, go everywhere and validate these systems every six months to make sure that the things that you're designing are actually getting translated and implemented in the right way and you understand your data flow and your data map or ingress, egress of your systems and really not find those black holes, because you know you could have had that same loop during COVID and you're like we're doing great and you lost $2 million of business because there was a black hole of that for a year and everything's about retention right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest hot button with every OEM. What's your loyalty index? What's your retention percentage? But I think it's hard to sharpen the blade when you're in the middle of sawing.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And there has to be. If you don't get the people thing right, like we were talking about earlier, and you don't have role clarity, who's responsible for this. To be able to be clear as to who can be freed up to figure out those problems strategically, because if everybody's just reacting, doing the same things and there's no role clarity, so we're all responsible if we win or we lose. And you can't say to each person did you win the day? And at the end of the day, like service drive acquisitions is a great example, we would always sit there and say yeah, what's our process?
Speaker 2:Well, we've got Jimmy that goes back there, you know, a couple days a week and it's going to work the drive. But we didn't measure it. We didn't have lead measures, scoreboard lag measures, no accountability.
Speaker 2:So it just had to be a progression that ended up, you know, looking like, at the end of the day, from one person to 12 people, and they were responsible and they knew every single day that they had to turn it in to the acquisition sales manager. This is how many appraisals I did. This is how many people I contacted. This is how many appointments I have for tomorrow, because there's failure points within CRMs for acquiring vehicles. They all don't have ideal workflows unless you get a separate CRM for that.
Speaker 2:failure points within CRMs, that for acquiring vehicles, that there's not they'd all don't have ideal workflows unless you get a separate like CRM for that. So we need to hold these RO. These are the cars we acquired. We need to hold these ROs open so we can close it out in the customer's name to make sure we get credit for retention because that work, and make sure that the service advisor gets paid on it. But that cadence of accountability and knowing if they missed the number, they could see it on a scoreboard so they couldn't just say well if service acquisition was doing their job, we would have hit the
Speaker 2:number, because then you have to have lateral accountability that that acquisition manager can see. Okay, so on internet, what was our closing percentage? Did we close at 15%? Did we get enough contact made? Did we get enough appointments set, shown who's responsible for those things? And when you have that level of clarity and everybody knows that they don't have to do somebody else's job because they're going to do theirs and you just have to do yours, that's how you get people freed up to be able to map all that stuff out. And if you go through the mapping, I would start it like this use this as a reference point in a car dealership.
Speaker 2:And you can have. You know, obviously you want to listen to phone calls and I always did more so because I wanted to hear stuff like that. Or getting routed to the wrong hunt group, or somebody picked up their phone, unplugged it and walked over to a different part of the dealership and now they're on a service hunt group that. But they're getting the inbound service calls and keep hitting. Do not disturb.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't know why this thing keeps ringing or just insanity nails on a chalkboard and stuff like that to me.
Speaker 2:But if you take an average sales process, when you come into the showroom, customer comes in, meet and greet, sit down, do a needs analysis, figure out what they're trying to you know, get selection. You know, appraise their car, take a demo drive, come back. Hopefully by then you've had an early manager intro. That's all scripted out. It should be choreography. Then you're going to present the first pencil and then everything else happens after that. The next question is what does that look like online? How far can the customer get? Can they get a menu? Can they upload their documents? Can they upload the drive securely? Which?
Speaker 1:is a huge issue. Yeah, it's a huge issue.
Speaker 2:Can they work payments? Can they modify it like on a Tesla website or in a smart path environment, can they appraise their car and if they want more than a range, so you don't have the 80% bounce rate, can they keep going and get an exact value, like they can on Carvon or CarMax, which is where they bounce to according to the pixels we're looking at. So they get an exact value, just not from that dealer. Oh, okay, he's like, okay, no big deal, I'm going to now. I'm going to find out what it's really worth. That's why CarMax acquired quarter million cars last quarter from consumers. Wow. So credit app Is it easily integrated? Is it iframed in? One other thing is, if you you know, I ran into this problem with credit apps Sales people don't want to use it. It's another step. It's redundant. Well, obviously I didn't want redundant.
Speaker 2:I want to remove roadblocks so that they the path of least resistance is the way I want it done, the way the customer wants it done yeah, exactly so we would fill that out, but then they had to print it and then they had to load it all back into the crm jeez, because it wasn't mapped in the back side, which took me days yeah in the back of route one and dealer track to map. All this equals this, equals this. And it's's different in dealer tracking route one than it is in the desking tool. It's different in the desking tool than it is in the hard codes of the DMS.
Speaker 1:And God forbid, they call it something different, correct?
Speaker 2:So you have to have a Rosetta stone like a Rubik's cube If this equals this like a, like a six digit combination. Yeah, exactly this equals this, this, this, that it's got the perfect. But, if you don't make it that easy and I know that not everybody's equipped to do that, but you need to find somebody who is to be able to map that all the way through. When you do that, you don't have to ask your salespeople to follow the process. They'll do it because it's easier.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah, that's going back to Temple Grand, right, it's like there's no other, because that is like you have designed the road to a way of removing those excuses, removing those hurdles, removing that barrier, not seeing the slaughterhouse in front of it, and it's the path of least resistance. You make your path the path of least resistance.
Speaker 2:And empower them to pull payoffs throughout one so they don't have to wait on a call for five, ten minutes. And just all those little empower them to appraise cars, and I know that's a really controversial thing. It'll be very commonplace in the next year or so. Ai keeps on coming in. I think that's something else. Process mapping is not going to be a nice to have. It's going to be a requirement because you have to train these AI tools, of course and everybody's got some AI something, but the only ones I see winning. A lot of people don't know what to do with them.
Speaker 2:I think there's going to be like an e-com BDC manager. Who's going to be an AI manager, either to marketing or to operations. Yeah, that makes sense, and you have to train it the way your store wants to do business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, I mean. So I recently created a. You know what a GPT is, right. So ChatGPT came up with a new thing called Workspaces and the Workspaces. You can create your own Workspaces so you could put, like Kramer GPT and then you could teach it all the things that you know and you can configure it in a way that it's like this is the way Brian Kramer does things, and then you can train it to be able to do that and it's stupidly easy. It's. I mean, it's very easy, and I did one, for you're familiar with Chris Voss right Never Split the Difference.
Speaker 1:I'm a ridiculous fan of his. I read his book, I think, seven times in a row and so I have the principles of his you know, negotiation tactics seared into my brain and I taught a GPT how to be a BDC negotiator, like a BDC assistant, where you say use all the techniques from Never Split the Difference. How am I supposed to do that? Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. How am I supposed to do that? No, ended questions, right, tactical empathy and literally you ask it a question Like, literally a lead comes in. It's like I want a vehicle for my family and you put in. You don't get yes, no, ever. You get a full tactical empathy engagement with a customer that's going to build rapport as fast as possible, build trust and have them come into the dealership right or ready prep to have this relationship. And I'm like this has to be in everything. You have to teach people how to be better people so they can engage in this capacity right and you have to give them clarity.
Speaker 2:Now, the other thing, too, is that you get an unbiased, objective analysis as to whether it works or it doesn't work, because then you can measure the result of it and you don't have somebody saying well, my customers are a little bit different. The GPT doesn't say that, it doesn't say here in South Florida it's a little bit different than it is up in Seattle. Yeah, exactly, and you don't get all that feedback. You just okay, that worked, I can change it or not change it, but you don't have the biases and the heuristics and that are attached to most scenarios.
Speaker 1:And every time it's going to do the same thing. So you know if it works or it doesn't, because every you know the thing there's I've talked about this a couple times but there's something called the curse of knowledge. It's like when I say something to you, brian, there's a 30% transmittal of information. Right, like I'm transmitting only 30% of the information because I have my assumptions, I have my life experiences, I have all the stuff that I've done and you have yours. So the real. There's a gap between how much I assume you know and how much I'm actually transmitting. That's. That's like a 40% gap between that. And imagine teaching that in processes you have to go so far into the process, so deep into the into the training, to be able to make sure somebody does it repeatedly over time and that process sticks if everybody listening to this doesn't take anything else away, I would tell them that that's a trained muscle that I've had to develop over decades yeah and I fight it every single day.
Speaker 2:I fight it on all these clubhouse calls yeah, because I know what I think. But I still have to remain objective, because david long might have a point I'm still waiting for him to quantify it but when I walk into stores I look at Brian Benstock's process. I wouldn't do it that way, but it works amazingly well for him. Who am I to question it? Because everybody is completely bought into that and you're not going to convince any of them of any other way, from the top all the way down, and they believe that's the only way and that's the best way. And that's the most important thing, I think, is the buy-in yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1:I think we're talking kung fu versus karate, you know, versus jujitsu, you know. I mean, like, if you're mastering your thing, you're going to beat up 90 95 of the population, right? I feel like you're a master at your thing. Whether you do Kung Fu, jiu Jitsu or or karate, you're going to be good at self-defense, right? Like. These arguments are so interesting because we're talking about, like, micro percentages of differences between you. Know, maybe Brian Benstock does things completely different than Patrick, but they're both winning. So who gives a shit?
Speaker 2:you know. But the one thing they're consistent about is they're both about the customer, exactly, and they work that experience backwards, and not everybody does that. There's a lot of like in my world. Here's the decision tree. It's customers first, yep, and we had this. I went over it during every onboarding to let everybody know what's more important, right? So first it's customers, then it's dealership associates Everybody's. Oh well, no, if you take Richard Branson says, if you take care of your employees, no, if there's a problem that comes up, and it's between your time and their time, it's the customer. After the dealership associates, then it's our dealership partners OEM. In our case it was World Omni Southeast Toyota JM&A In our case it was World Omni, southeast, toyota, jm&a.
Speaker 2:After that it was all the other partners, which would be like, in my case, carscom, and a lot of people take offense to that Then it would be the wheel repair team, the bumper repair, and then after that the community and so on. But when I would lay that out and I would tell it to vendors and a lot of people would get ruffled feathers. But I needed to make it clear that if a customer was in the used car office and they're waiting to get numbers from the used car manager and the person that was doing the bumpers came in and wants to get approvals and talk about glass chips and all that other stuff, they needed to understand that the customer is the priority. And if a dealership associate came in, they wanted to request PTO and that sales manager is working a deal for the customer. It needed to be easy, which it always was, and had to be constantly reminded. That's why it was posted everywhere, yeah, so that we could reference it.
Speaker 2:Hey, why did you, you know? And then it comes back to the Disney stuff safety, courtesy, show efficiency. If you're walking across the showroom and you've got a customer waiting on you and you're trying to be efficient to be able to, you know, get numbers and go email it to somebody and you don't acknowledge the customer. You just violated that because you're trying to be more efficient than you are courteous. Oh, wow, so that the last couple of years I worked in retail, that's probably what I spent. Those two things probably 80, and plus the process map, and that was probably 90 of the my time. Do you think?
Speaker 1:that the success doesn't necessarily that most of the the largest percentage of success comes from just setting that north of of of things, right, yeah, like a patrick store.
Speaker 2:there's levels and it's very clear at every position. What do I need to do to get to the next level? What does that look like? And there's a, there's levels and it's very clear at every position. What do I need to do to get to the next level? What does that look like? And there's a, there's visualization right on the wall and they talk about it, but that North star should permeate and percolate through everything that you do Like.
Speaker 2:In our case, it was simple, fast and easy and we hung our hat on that, but then it became more than just our advertising tagline. I had a lot of people that would come in and this is an interesting thing, probably for a lot of vendors. I had a lot of vendors that would come in and they'd say, hey, I can do bi-monthly payments or I can do something else. That was going to add some level of complexity and I had to sit there and say, okay, I could make an extra $300 a car and there's always that opportunity, right or $500 a car and everybody's like, well, if you do this and you just get 30% and the next thing you know you're talking a million bucks a year or more.
Speaker 2:And I take a lot of pride in the fact that we said no to a lot of those. Yeah, that makes sense, because I tell them I said we're simple, fast and easy. I'm doing everything I can to remove one little click. When they want to appraise the car, how do they not have to put in their first, last name and email address? How do I already know them if they're on my website? How do I? If they enter my digital retail tool and they put in their cell phone number, I should already know all their information. They shouldn't have to type it in all these redundant times. And if they put it in the credit app, it should go throughout in the CRM and populate everywhere else. We shouldn't keep asking them and then, when they come in for service their first service we shouldn't act like they're a complete stranger when they bought six cars and we have to hey, can you give me your? Okay, what's your current address? Well, it's the same as before.
Speaker 2:Can you just give it to me again, because they're not rolling their appointments, they're just starting a new DMS lead and there's 27 different clients that haven't been merged, that are all being followed up with in different ways and the data hasn't been cleansed and everything that goes. It's not just one thing, it's all those little things that make it simple, fast and easy. And in order to say, in order to fix those things, you have to say no to some good ideas so you can just focus on a few great ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's what really talks about operational saturation. You know, it's like if you there's a million good ideas out there and you could do one way, you could do things another, but having that core, battle cry, or that core, you know that, that spirit, the core right, that simple, fast and easy, you say, is it simple, fast and easy? No, we're not doing it. And it just it's like your baseline operating system gets loaded with. Does it meet this requirement? No, and then you can just be like, hey, it doesn't meet the requirement, man, and we all agree on this thing.
Speaker 2:So if it, if it does that, we do it If it doesn't make it a way to make it simple, fast and easy, table it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it's like this is going to eliminate 20% of your process, like, oh well, it's simple, fast and easy, right? So that's like um, so how? I mean, this is a this is going to be maybe a controversial question. Good, so I think that the incentives are set up incorrectly. Pay incentives are set up incorrectly.
Speaker 2:The salespeople compensation or the service.
Speaker 1:I think in general, because if you're 10-10, you're not incentivized in creating long-term winning strategies. It seems like. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like simple pay plans. Create, I think, unaligned incentives. It's like if your incentive is to save as much money, not train your staff. Create long-term processes for the long-term sustainability of the organization, and every month the chalkboard gets erased and you're starting from zero. It's a almost cannibalistic way of of running an organization.
Speaker 2:And I'm numb to it Cause I don't know another way of life Like now. I get paid the same that you know every month, regardless of how much I travel, how much if I work twice as many hours, it's just a. It's a flat amount, right yeah, it's like most people and normal people yeah and I. I've only been in that survival mode for the majority of my life and I actually personally prefer it, but I have to be objective because it's not the most effective.
Speaker 2:Patrick abe, that's a great example yeah and he has a tiered flat system and it worked out for him during COVID because his percentage of gross wasn't like everybody else's and he didn't have to pay out these gigantic commissions. But his people also didn't get used to making an unrealistic amount of money. Yeah. And now he's not dealing with all these people saying I don't know how. To you know, my cost of living changed and I've got all these bills and his model was elastic and now everybody wants to work for him because he's paying more than these minimum commissions that are going out and he was able to be very resilient through all that and painted, and I and I give him a lot of credit.
Speaker 2:You know, at Jermaine wheel and they still do today we hammered do not, uh, buy too much house, do not buy too much car, make sure you're investing it. We were really hardcore about, you know, make sure you're maxing out your 401K for everybody that was making all this money. But Patrick's leadership is phenomenal in terms of him painting the vision. Here's why we do this and here's why it's going to pay off for you in the end, and this is why this is a better long-term strategy and if you do this, you can set your own schedule and there's more to it than just the actual pay.
Speaker 2:He paints the vision of the intangibles that don't necessarily cost him money. But if you, if you hit a certain performance level, you just set your own schedule and tell tell them at the beginning of the month which we had some similar germane you need to submit it. It needs to be this many Saturdays You've got to work this many days, but just submit to us when you're going to be here so we can give it to the receptionist, so that she knows you can't just come and go as you please, so at least we can keep track of when you're here.
Speaker 2:When you're not here, at least to tell your customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's such a good way of looking at it. But, like, I just think that you know, out of the momentum of the industry is so powerful that you can have a lot of loss and a lot of noise and still be effective. Right, I can't argue with a guy that's, you know, jetting around the country and be like look, I mean, it's worked for me. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It's like oh, it's my biggest struggle right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I bet. I bet it's like to really look at those people that want to go from you know 94% effective rate to 97%. You know those like horsepower, right, the higher you go in horsepower, the harder it is to get to you know a higher speed, right? So, like, how do you paint that picture? For? And dealers are in different phases of their of their, I guess, journey, right, their journey in this business, right? There's people that are like I'm, you know, 34 and I'm taking over this dealership and I'm going to be a dealer principal and I became a, you know, managing partner and I'm that's one story. And then somebody's at you know the end of their career. It was like listen, man, I want the thing, the thing humming, don't I want the thing humming, don't mess with it.
Speaker 2:Or you have a 34-year-old salesperson that is making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. They've mastered their craft. They don't want to have all that accountability pressure, which there's a lot of. They don't thrive on it, they hate it, and there's many cases like that, but they also feel like they have this obligation. That man, this person's an F&I Maybe I should be an f and I and not everybody's built for that and the ones, especially the ones that have a family.
Speaker 2:You know, being in sales and selling 20 to 25 cars a month is, in my mind, the best gig in a dealership. You get left alone, you don't ever nobody just comes in and just randomly, you know, gets blamed for not hitting their number. That's selling 20 plus cars a month. Yeah, yeah, and they require the least amount of advertising. Typically, you know, on average they're, you know, higher maintenance. But I'd rather have higher maintenance people, not unethical, immoral people. But yeah, they're going to require more and they need more empowerment and more enablement and more, you know, wider swim lanes, I guess yeah bumpers on the bumper bowling thing, but I think that the more you enable those people and quit holding them back.
Speaker 2:What I see, the worst thing in the world is and I've experienced it when they're managing people like that because of the bottom 20% that they won't hold accountable, and then they get boxed in with. They have to wait to get their car appraised, they have to wait to get a payoff, they wait and wait and they can't be productive and that's when they start thinking about leaving. In terms of the percentage versus a flat, I do think it's flawed and I've gone round and round on this. It just wasn't the hill that I wanted to die on. I've seen a lot of people that are very successful doing it the way Patrick's doing it. Yeah, you know, brian Benstuck at his Acura store is taking deals single point of contact, from start to finish, you know, from greet to F and I Shoot to nuts yeah.
Speaker 2:And when you don't in that model and they're actually more profitable now, I would imagine. And F&I Well, I didn't think so and he was okay going backwards just because there's a comp savings. But what he's? Been able to do at that Acura store is he's able to pay his salespeople more but still pay out less. And they are paying on a. You know, if you sell a service contract like CarMax, you know this much. But they still have an opportunity to make a lot of money, but just in a different way. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean the, the, just the. The head side is a probably a lot lower because there's not the bloat of having those, you know, those managers and FNI, you know, taking all that, that, those percentages, that makes that makes a lot of sense. So what's the? What are? I know there's a big challenge slash opportunity with used cars coming in people that got in tough situations during COVID. What's something exciting about the car business that you're looking forward to in the next 12?
Speaker 2:months. Well, I see kind of like the resurgence of 2005 to 2009 with BDCs. Okay, when everybody would get so frustrated, like you know. I know we need to follow up and the CRMs just came out and we need to use a CRM instead of the three, five, five index cards that I used to use and that's not the best system, but we don't know. The salespeople can't make fun of me personally, I think you just hold salespeople accountable and have them do a cradle to grave and have a service BDC.
Speaker 2:But that's my two cents for what it's worth, because then you can actually pay the sales people more because you have more, a bigger pool to work from. But the same thing that happened in the late middle, late 2000s is happening now with acquisitions. So there's two different uh schools of thought or departments, I guess developing that I'm seeing where they're actually putting resources the most successful stores. I'm working with a lot of them that are acquiring 100, 150 plus, and I'm talking a lot of them uh cars a month off the service drive. But also a lot of stores that are, you know, based on their ro count, another incremental 25 or you know, 35 cars a month, which in in a store that writes less than a thousand ro's a month, is a major difference.
Speaker 2:You're're not paying out $1,000 in auction fees. Transport and then post-sale inspections are $1,500. So you're at $1,500 to $2,000 in fees, now that you're saving on a car that's got a low market day supply versus an auction car that's a high market day supply. So there's so many benefits. It's right there. You're scanning it hopefully with an OBD thing, but I think that the dealerships that I see that are the most successful are finally putting a manager on that. Do you really need three managers behind the sales tower? No, you need one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if everybody comes up with their stuff, all ready to go, you don't banter back and forth and you know, wear them out because they didn't spend 10 minutes getting a payoff, because you wouldn't give them access to route one and all the other redundancies and just make it clear and and say, okay, this is how many cars you need to acquire and this is all you're going to do, and I'm going to pay you for 300 bucks, for 400 bucks, and not try to just pay them 75 bucks a car, because that's what we did back in the 2000s. Yeah, and we haven't changed the pay plan since. Charge that to the stock number, think outside the box and start getting. He would think the last people to do it would be the big publics, but they're the ones that I'm working with that are, again, very creative and most of their pay plans are carved and etched in granite. But they're getting, thinking outside the box and doing things like this.
Speaker 2:They're doing tiered acquisition program. Some of them are counting acquisitions as units towards their pay plan. Oh, wow, and so it's not just how many cars do you sell, how many cars do you sell Plus how many cars do you acquire? That's what your unit bonus is based on. That makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you incentivize the steps, not necessarily the outcome.
Speaker 2:Correct and really, if you want to acquire cars, you should pay people more than what a mini is to acquire cars. Because what happens is in most dealerships at first that we're working with I'll look at the pay plan and they're getting paid more to sell than they are to acquire. So what do they do as soon as they greet the customer? You know, hey, what if I paid you more than your car's worth, would you consider selling it to me? I don't know how much would you give me for it. I don't know what do you want to replace it with? That's the wrong thing to say. Yeah, because their pay plans driving that behavior? Yeah, and that's the root cause of it. But either a buy center, vehicle buying center or service drive, or having the combination of the two, like beaver does um.
Speaker 2:That's what the most successful stores are doing and that's okay. What's eliminating their? Their need to? You know, rely on auctions, but it's also. It makes them so much healthier. There's a symbiotic relationship between the service department and that acquisition team and the acquisition team can work regular hours. You don't have to work past five o'clock. If you're meeting the minimum requirements, you can actually take Sundays off. You don't have to be there and you can hire a different type of person, different caliber of person, and it really opens up the labor pool type of person different caliber of person and it really opens up the labor pool.
Speaker 1:That's, that's really smart. Yeah, that's that's. That's super smart. So what do you think of? You know, I've always had this idea. It's like if you have the car on the lift, you might as well do an appraisal on it. You know what I mean. Just make it part of the. A technician can do an appraisal. Look at the vehicle, take pictures of everything, do the thing, get the number put to put it all in and you know you appraise the vehicle right there, you put in your system and then you have the latest appraisal of that vehicle is maybe two weeks old, or three weeks old, or a month old, or six months old, or whatever that looks like since the last time I was in service so we've got a lot of peter bullware.
Speaker 2:Toyota up in tallahassee does that and they get a tremendous amount of incremental business sometimes 30 a month off of because they appraise 90% of their cars in the way that you just described. They got the valets doing it, which is what Toyota Hollywood around the corner is going to be doing here momentarily, but one of the reasons I was here is to talk to them, talking to Southeast Toyota. We're building an integration right now and this is something that's very exciting, and what AI is going to also allow this to unlock. I won't get too deep in the weeds on this, but Hunter alignment racks and UVI inspection systems Makes sense Already when it goes through. If you think about what like on our scorecard, where are dealers struggling? It's to get their when they start having 50, 60, 70, you know, these big stores, salespeople, the praising cars.
Speaker 2:You know how do you get past 60% tread depth percentage, because they're going so fast, how many? How do you get past 80% OBD scans? And you know 80% photos. Well, if you go through a hunter alignment rack or you go through UVI, you've got a hundred percent photos now, a hundred percent tread depth with cupped or uneven tread wear. Um, you've got what photos? You just need to do an OBD and mileage because it's doing everything. Actually, it's got the photos.
Speaker 1:You're automating everything and then you put that into data analytics and you do. You know 2 million a year and you're really starting to tighten up your, your data set to say, hey, this is exactly what this is. And you can even say you could probably figure out, like, do some predictive analytics and say this is an aggressive driver, this is, you know this person, babies the car and then companies are already doing that, yeah, without the consumers knowing in many cases of course, yeah, and you take that data from the you know the obd2 readers like the safe driving.
Speaker 1:You know crap that they're trying to. You can really have a really good perspective of what the dealer is. And then you combine online behavior, purchasing power of what, like you're predicting, the future at this point You're predicting the future.
Speaker 2:Well, over-the-air updates are a thing. It's just a matter of unlocking, getting the consumer to be able to opt in to doing it. We're working with a few Oems right now and in the mapping to to figure that out, not just to do it in the service drive, but remotely at home. If we can diagnose their, their whole vehicle, with dtc codes, yeah, we can also pull down their mileage, because that's a that's a yeah, nothing, it's in there and eventually we'll be able to pull subscription products and that's all in the connected car IoT in order to things, data.
Speaker 2:So the goal by the end of this year is to figure out how to be able to pull mileage and DTC so we don't even have to plug it in. Eventually, wow, and as soon as they go through that UVI, which that dealership around the corner does 10,000 a month. Uvis yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow, because there's Every single vehicle that goes through UVI. Yeah, there's only one way in. That's powerful man.
Speaker 2:They got four of those units that's powerful, that are huge, yeah, so, as they've got that type of volume, now you think about what can AI unlock and you know their. Their goal is to sell three or 400 cars a month. Out of that by acquiring, you know, a little bit more than that, yeah, that makes sense. That to me is the future between that type of service drive integration combined with, you know, like on carscom. Right now we've got my garage, which some other you know CarMax, Carvana have these things where you can go in.
Speaker 2:The difference with ours is you can pull your payoff and figure out what you owe versus what it's worth at will. I think that's the next form of lead gen, instead of people, you know, aggregating all over the place. And that's how. You know, I've got a Lexus GX550 in order.
Speaker 2:You know, I've got a lexus gx 550 in on order and I got to figure out when's the best time to get rid of this bronco that I'm driving. Yeah, um, after I handled the diminished value from getting rear-ended, but but it I don't know what I what, what the what I owe on it. I have an idea what it's worth. Yeah, I could, I don't know right, so because it's not as easy to get your payoff. So that's what we're unlocking is being able to give dealers that ability on the service drive Like, not a guesstimated algorithm, like with the real payoff. Yeah, hold down from an API from the lender, jeez, combined with a guaranteed value off the license plate. So the car drives through. Obviously, hunter or UVI sees the license plate In a millisecond. We're pinging the dvd, the dmv, getting the vin. So we already got the vin. We've got everything but the dtc scan and the mileage before they open the door. That's today that's powerful.
Speaker 1:I mean that's an uplift. What do you think that's an uplift on a dealership on average?
Speaker 2:Well, it depends on. That's a great question, because now it comes down to the execution bringing it to life.
Speaker 1:So let's say execution is at 80%, what do you think an uplift in an organization, gross-wise, is that 10% Is that 20?.
Speaker 2:It would be 3% plus of how many ROs they write. So, like at 10,000 ROs. That's 300 cars a month, of the most desirable used cars Month in, month out. I mean that slingshots them to another stratosphere.
Speaker 2:But for a store that has 1,000 ROs a month, which is probably an average store 1,000 to 2,000, at 3% you're getting an incremental 30 cars a month. So if you take a store like that, it's probably selling 30 to 40 used cars a month. You can pretty much double their business using this efficiency. But the execution piece is a whole other episode of. Are you going to have the process? Are you going to measure the scoreboard? Are you going to hold people accountable? Have those daily grind conversations like they do with internet leads?
Speaker 2:Hey, did you contact this with all those metrics that 35, 60, 60 with? You know, as long as it's confirmed that everybody drills, they're going to have to do that with service drive acquisition and there's a lot of dealers I can think of a dozen right now that are acquiring 100 cars or more a month by doing that. So it's it's a mixture. It's actually less technology than it is. Process and, yeah, execution most people want to just focus on the tech and think that it's going to take care of itself yeah, the weapons don't make the warrior type of situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, wow, man, that's, that's powerful. So, brian, how do people get a hold of you? You know, I know you're on Clubhouse every morning in the group, but how? If somebody had a question or wanted to get in contact with you, what would that look like Brian Kramer on YouTube.
Speaker 2:The same my handle is Brian Kramer, nice.
Speaker 1:Twitter X is.
Speaker 2:Kramer, brian, and Instagram is.
Speaker 1:Kramer, brian, nice, nice. Thanks, man. This has been awesome and hopefully we can do this again soon. Absolutely, I appreciate you letting me on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, man.