Wake up, Buy Here, Pay Here people. It's a beautiful day. Go grab yourself another cup of joe and say hello to Jim and Michelle Rhodes on the Buy Here, Pay Here morning show. Take it away, you two. Hello, everybody. Good morning. Greetings from the dining room table. We're in Oklahoma with family and so set up at the table to do our podcasting thing. Happy Wednesday. Got a big subject of trust again today. And I put in the comments today that, you know, I've made a decision. I didn't share with you this part, but I made a decision to stop talking about trust. You see that? Yeah, I did. Once the used car industry is no longer viewed as untrustworthy. Right. And there's an interesting... Yeah, we'll get into the topic. First announcements. We have, and I'm going to go ahead and add this to the stage, the webinar coming up next Thursday about retaining and motivating talented team members. That is a 7.30 Eastern Standard Time. And if you would like to come... We have a coupon code for 75% off the ticket price. If you just use the coupon code morning show, morning show, morning show. Yeah, absolutely. And then we have a V8 group meeting group one. That's Thursday night. That one's that group's full. We do have another meeting on Tuesday night of next week. If you're interested in a V8 group, then let us know that on next Tuesday is going to be, our group that's mid-sized dealers, 100 to 500 accounts. And so if you have an interest in that, reach out. We still have time to get you in a March meeting. It's interesting that anything over 100 accounts is considered mid-sized. So that's usually when you've been do at it for a year or two I'd like to see a scatter graph but I do think most dealers in the country have 500 accounts or less you know yeah yeah that's why we've got two groups of mid-size so um yeah if that's something that appeals to you let us know we still have I think one spot in the large group uh that's uh groups of 500 accounts plus yeah And so we've still got time. That meeting is at the last week of the month. And just one last thing is, uh, the Neo summit is happening the day before the day that the buy hair period summit starts in the evening. And that will be on April 23rd. 23rd, I think. 23rd, 23rd. Yeah, that's Tuesday the 23rd, I believe. And so we will be there. And we have a lot of our clients that use that product. And so we're going to be there to learn a little bit more about it because a lot has happened since we started using it with our clients. So we're looking forward to doing that. We missed one update. A week from today is the tip of the hat to Rick Reeves. We've got several dealers. I've got dealers there from that are planning to attend from South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Idaho, we've got several dealers that are going to step in and say, say their words about Rick Reeves and the contributions to the buyer. Yeah. So the topic today we've talked about before, and it's, It's interesting because we're here visiting Jim's mom and dad in Guymon, Oklahoma. Western Oklahoma. Yeah. Panhandle, no man's land. Used to be called no man's land. I think it still is. It still is. And just a small town. It's a very different place to live in the city. And I was having a conversation with Jim's mom. And the topic... came for her without any leading around to trust. There's an epidemic in this country of mistrust, of lack of trust. And when you think about who is typically the highest, the ones that rise to the top of people that are mistrusted in our society, Used car dealers are probably one of the top. Another one is pharmaceuticals. And so after having this conversation, I had something come along my feet. And I'm going to share a clip with you of an interview that Mark Cuban did with someone that's in the pharmaceutical industry. arena. He has his own podcast and they talk about this topic just briefly. So I want to play that for you and then share some other things that, uh, There's an industry that's opaque. It's ripe for disruption. So we went for it. And the fact that it's opaque is what created the opportunity to do CostPlusDrugs.com because what differentiates us is that we publish our costs. We publish our markup of 15%. We publish exactly what the price is going to be. And by limiting our markup to 15%, we're typically a whole lot cheaper than anybody else. And on top of that, the biggest component that's missing is trust. Hopefully you trust your doctor, but people typically don't trust anyone else in the healthcare supply chain. You know, you don't know what the economics are going to be for you or your employer or your family, whatever it may be when it comes to insurance. And so by creating CostPlusDrugs.com, you know, and introducing that transparency, we're revolutionizing an industry. Yeah, really fantastic. And so, you know, with the Cost Plus model, it's very interesting because in different industries, that can be a really good thing or a bad thing. I think a good example of Cost Plus being a bad thing would probably be like in the industrial complex. And not that I'm very familiar, but my understanding is that In government contracting, when they get to do cost plus, that just gives the opportunity for the people to just really up their costs, right? Yeah, if you're just cost plus and you just, you know, make a mess, you know, add all the mishigas to your cost, then, you know, a markup on a non-transparent number can be anything. You know, you can set it to anything. And so, you know, we truly are transparent in our cost. And if you were to talk to our suppliers, you'd see that's our cost. And I think that's the difference. And again, the key element really are, you know, we buy drugs and we sell drugs at a base, but our real product is trust. You know, we want to show you all of our economics so that... OK, so that when I was listening to that, I was like, so and it kind of it talked about a few different things that have been really central to what we are, what we are are talking about in White Hat way. Transparency was one of them. And, you know, the ability to be able to add things and fees and things like that to a cost of something. is one of the reasons why people don't trust the pharmaceutical industry. And we struggle with that same type of thing in our industry. And there's a lot of non-transparency that happens. And I'm not at all suggesting that we bought this car for X and this, but that we be as transparent as we possibly can. And the second thing is that he recognizes in a industry that is not trusted, in an industry that is not trusted, what you need to sell is trust. Because once you are able to get that recipe put together so that people can trust that this is what this is and be as transparent as you possibly can, Um, that, that, that is, that really is the product. And, and we've talked to quite a bit about trust is really the thing that people that, that we, that is lacking in, in our industry. Yeah. And I think for me, I mean, as Michelle touched on it, like we're not suggesting that we have to be transparent and public about our costs in the vehicle. In fact, I had a really interesting conversation and I haven't finished it. We're still having the email. a thread with somebody in our industry who was asking me if something that was in the thread was what was consistent with the white hat way. And I think what it, what it triggered for me is this idea that we, you know, with, with white hat way, we're not suggesting that dealers don't need to have a markup and they need to earn plenty of profit to justify their risk. And, and, you know, obviously there are ways to give back and a lot of things that we, you know, advocate for in the white hat way. Now, In the subject of trust, I think one of the things that Michelle and I look forward to continuing to do, and the reason I'm saying look for us to continue to talk about it, is it's one thing to say dealers would do well to be transparent and earn trust. It's another thing to show them how to do that. So I think for me, the challenge is, and I accept it, I accept the challenge to bring others to the microphones, to bring other material to our audience to help them understand how to go about doing it. In the description for the broadcast today, I wrote about you know, asking dealers and business owners too, is like, if you could buy trust, if there was some salesman came to your door and was offering- You'd have to trust the salesman though. But if they had trust in a bottle, which I've talked about this before, and that's basically what you heard Mark Cuban say there is, they're really, even though they're in the pharmaceutical business, in reality, their product is trust. So I'm just challenging dealers for today to think about what that looks like. And so the way that I posed it was if, if Jim and Michelle or anybody else could come to you and offer you trust in a bottle and you could put some shelves up on the wall and these big bottles, and you could just stockpile a lot of trust. First of all, what would that do for your business? Like what, what would that mean for the value of your business? If you held in reserve, a lot of trust. Now, where would you use it? First of all, we have to decide how to acquire it. Nobody's walking in your door offering it to you in a bottle, but how do you acquire it? How do you then leverage that? If you wanna think of it that way, how do you utilize that cumulative trust that you have built up? How do you use that for the benefit of your business and for the sake of your customers? And why does it even matter? I think the key thing here that we've seen, our own polls showed that, I think it was 98% of respondents said that trust in the used car business translates into more sales. Let me share something with you too, that just kind of goes with us. It was a poll and our friend, Anna Maria Beck posted this the other day is from auto remarketing. And it says the percentage of dealerships among 2000, a little over 2000 surveyed was overwhelmingly negative. That 76% say they don't trust dealerships to be honest about pricing. 86% concerned about hidden fees when buying or leasing a vehicle. 84% percent believing price transparency is lacking in most car dealerships. So, I mean, two big things right there scream out transparency. And it's about transparency. It's about cost. And that's the main crux of why there's a lack of trust. So how do we be able to elicit trust with our customers by being more transparent about the things that make sense to be transparent about? Yeah. And the things that we've talked about in the past, you know, will continue to be true. One of the ways we earn trust is we're consistent. We're consistent in what we say and what we do. And that's before the sale and after the sale. I would like to see those numbers broken down. Like I think most of us can probably guess on how it would break down. If you could look at those numbers by franchise car, used car dealership, and then by your payer, it'd be interesting to see what happens. But obviously for those of us in the buy here, pay here side, we have, very low success rate in terms of the number of customers that make it to the end of the contract. And so it just begs the question, you know, what can we do as an industry? And certainly what will we do as White Hat Way to continue to advance this idea of how to create trust, like how to establish it as a used car operation. And then for us, we'll be working to measure it. to measure and verify the impact of that. I think we all know that when we're trusted as a used car dealer in our marketplace, our ability to create more sales, keep more customers, earn more referrals, all those things are going to compound and enhance our success. So this is part of why we're going to continue to come forward and talk about it. I think that poll from Anna Maria just really reaffirms the part that we know is true. We've all seen it and I don't think it's getting any smaller. It's reality. White Hat Way is working to change that. Even if it's just a little bit, it's just to change that level of trust that people have in this industry. I think the first takeaway for me would be transparency, but, but transparency, how, what that really means for me is disclosure. You know, last Wednesday we had Alison Harrison on to talk about disclosure and advertising, like being truthful, transparent, fully disclosing, you know, the terms that you're offering. And I think that's, that's one step in the right direction. I think another one, which is really important that, that actually we're working on creating the consumer education side of it, because people can't trust what they don't understand. And so as we continue to build education pieces for consumers, and we encourage dealers out there, we've talked about this a bunch of times, that you think about when you sit down to sign paperwork for a major purchase car is usually for our customers, the biggest purchase they will ever make. And so it's going to be the most amount of paperwork, the most amount of fine print, the most amount of all of that one to slow down in the process. And there are, there are softwares and things out there that really help to keep things focused and, you know, making sure that it's the exact same thing each time. But take the opportunity, slow down, explain things, and then post-sale, explain them again. And so you have an opportunity to do a quick video, have some of your team members record a video that you can... It doesn't have to be a new one. Each time you send it out to a new buyer, but... something that explains again a major piece of what it is that's in the contract that we see our customers don't understand or that they're defaulting on because they don't understand and they don't trust it because they don't understand it. And and when when they can see that this is this is what this is and this is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to we're going to be able to work together. We're on the same side of the table. All of that. This is this. We are we are working with you with this with this auto loan. The more you can establish that, the more you can establish that with your current customers. Word will get out to and it will help create a level of trust because, you know, it's it's like do what you say you're going to do. Be transparent about it. And sometimes do more than you say you're going to do. I don't know of a better way to earn respect and trust of the folks that are doing business with it. Because it's one thing to get the customer to agree to sign a contract and buy the car on day one. The question really becomes, at day two three and four like after they purchased the car where's their level of satisfaction their remorse with the purchase their their are we asking are we asking afterwards are we doing the call afterwards to say hey how are things going is there you know any any issue or whatever and you hear an awful lot it's like once they leave the dealership I'm done. And, and I, and it's, it's none of it is, none of it is my concern. It's just make your payment, make your payment, make your payment. And that, that, that what I see wrapped into that is we have a 40, a 50, a 60% repo rate. And it's like, how can we help fix that? And, you know, we see frequently some, when Jim was coaching, with, um, some of the, the, the past, um, Rick Reeves and stuff and, and, and his own coaching. And when he was in his own dealership, you, what was the percentage that you were like, this is our target for repo rate? Well, I always am super careful about how I express that. So on a full basis, we'd be targeting 20% repo rate. Okay. And so, you know, we see dealers there that we're working with and they, They felt like I've got a great repo rate and it's astronomical. And so you imagine though, it just in your finances, if you could shift that by 2%, 3%, 5%, what difference that would make in your business? And part of that is education, trust. It's that people trust if they're having a problem or having a situation that they can come to you to talk about it, to see, you know, to figure out how to get past this. They don't trust that the industry, that a lot of the dealers in our industry are going to want to be able to... to counsel them or help them or whatever. And so that's why they're in the process of going through repo and they're already out talking to one of your competitors and getting a new car before that one is repoed. It's something that we see frequently. One of the things that I look forward to proving out in the coming months and years here is this idea that for example, I asked the question, when would you go to the shelf and pull down a bottle of trust if you could pour it out and, you know, earn trust or utilize trust? I think among the places in our buyer payer industry where we do that is in those places where a customer has had a setback, mechanical problem, right? They're, you know, six months in and they're facing a mechanical problem. Well, just imagine we know that Anecdotally, it's easy for me to say that our success rate is much higher with that customer when they trust us, when we have established some level of trust, which is on us. It's up to us to create that level of trust. Now, when we have that relationship equity, as we talked about, and we've established that level of trust, then it's easy to see that our ability to navigate that mechanical problem other setbacks our ability to get past those things is so much higher and so this is the part that it's intangible folks it's not it's kind of like we call it squiggly lines you're not going to find hard measurements on this, on your P and L and your balance sheet. There's no line item called trust, but you also can as, as you develop this with your consumers, it's like I said, that 2%, that whatever, and, and the numbers will start changing and, and you'll have a better success with, with collections and all of those things. But I like what you said is like that, that it, the, the work is on us. The work is not on them. We can't say, well, you bought a car for us. Trust us. It's like, no, the work is on us and building trust is, is something that you start with your community and it takes time. This is the long game. We can do things that are short-term and start to just make those trust deposits with our customers and with our community. And over time, those trust deposits will add up and it will start to change how, as long as we are walking our talk and we are doing what we say we're gonna do and we're being transparent, And we're we're we're depositing those trust deposits in our trust bank. And this is a conversation we have. Yeah. And then when then when you need to make a withdrawal, when there's a problem, when there's a situation, you have more to draw upon. And that's really what I mean by these trust deposits or these reserves. To me, it's kind of helpful to visualize it as though it's reserved, as though we held it in tanks or these big bottles. And we can go draw on those reserves when we need them. So this is why you're going to see us continue to talk about this. We're going to continue to measure it. We've got some really... um important near-term ways to go we've got some folks out there that are following some of the suggestions that we've offered and are seeing success really incredible results now now the the opportunity to go in and measure how much of that can be attributed to this dealer earning trust at the time of the sale and then obviously on an ongoing basis we'll go track those customers throughout and see where their level of trust is with the dealer right and so this is part of what you're going to see us do um at white hat way and why we know it's important to be able to help dealers learn how to create it and I would just say you know the other thing that when I talk about transparency I just say when we disclose fully whether the customer's buying some add-on products or whatever it is the whole um you know truth and lending box and disclosures when we present that stuff thoroughly and the customer does fully understand it um and then they sign then our ability to you know keep that customer happy just goes up dramatically and so again it's it's on, it's on us to do that. It's on us in a way to go measure and verify, you know, these things that we're talking about. And we just know, I think everybody listening knows that of course, when we start the relationship from a place of trust, which I'll tell you, that's one of the things I expect we will talk about a week from today when Rick Reeves, when we do our Rick Reeves tip of the hat, because that is something that was taught to us back then. It is something that I think is, is, is, is not talked about enough in our industry now. And so these are the things that I think you can expect to hear us talk about is how to, how to create that, how to maintain it, how to, you know, really a level of trust that allows us to reach the end of the contract, you know, to really, and, and earn repeat and referral business. So this is really where it's at in our business. And so there's, there's, it's up to all of us to, to work together to figure out how to it's great and maintain that. Absolutely. I just want to do another plug for the book that we're reading, which is How to Never Lose Another Customer. And there are elements in there where they speak about trust as well. And so if you're all looking for a good read to spring, that's a great book so far. We've really, really enjoyed it. And I want to just do one more, again, a plug for our webinar. And it's, you know, there's a level of trust that we can create within our team as well. And, you know, the big thing is people don't quit jobs. They quit bad managers, toxic and culture, limited growth, lack of support, overwork, poor compensation, no recognition. Those are trust things, too. And so if if we, you know, we have a lot of opportunity in our businesses, whether it be with our customer, our community, our team to develop trust and to fill their trust bank. And when you have that kind of relationship, whether it be with your community or your customer or your team, They don't leave as readily. They don't leave. And so when I see team members or dealers that are having a real big problem with keeping people, it's like, okay, let's go back. It's almost like ABCs. It's one, two, threes, ABCs, primary stuff. That trust is such an important element in all of those relationships. And you think about where... where that fits even just in your personal relationships as well um and so it's it's again the impetus is on us it's it's our responsibility the weight is on us to help develop trust because they're coming in not trusting. And if we approach them with, I don't trust you, you don't trust me, then you're not going to have the success that you want to have. And here's probably a way to wrap it up. I think if I were to put myself in the shoes of being a dealer again, and I was for seven years, many years ago, but if I were to think about this and ask myself, let me just be a dealer and like look in the mirror and say, if my employees do not trust me, if my customer does not trust me, it's because I did not earn it. So again, I did not earn it. And so that's something that, you know, it's, it's, it's up to us to recognize that, that, that, that falls on us and that we, it's up to us to make those deposits in order to, you know, achieve that level of trust. And trust deposits are in form of transparency, in education, in following through what you say, you're going to do actions. And so, you know, if we can start to really do that and make that part of what our, our core foundational principles are transparency and, um, and, uh, Yes. Transparency, trust, communication, honesty, those kind of things that that that will help us build the trust that we're looking for. So the action items, transparency, say what you do, what you're going to do, what you say you're going to do. Understand that it's your responsibility to develop trust, not theirs. And part of the reason that Michelle and I preach about these things is because we believe that you're going to see more and better business. absolutely absolutely all right up there well thank you so much on friday we've got uh some important stuff to talk about uh friday I've got uh subjects planned out we'll get those announced soon but uh just one last reminder we've got spots including the um the large groups are just uh freaked out if you have one I think there's some And again, the webinar next week on Thursday about retaining talented team members and what kind of people. We've got a dealer, we've got one of their team members, and another business owner that's had a lot of success in it. So don't forget that the coupon code is MorningStone. Have a great day, everybody. We really appreciate you joining us. And we will talk to you on Friday.
