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. Well, good morning, everybody. I'm right up in the camera. you are I mean you know yeah good morning everyone I could have gone to so many places it's with that you're right up in the camera and it's like right cameras right up your nose cameras yeah and I I was like I could I could go I could go funny but I decided yeah I gotta practice my timing show that you got a filter Yeah, come on. Now you can do it. Well, yes, and it's funner to just say the things. I was telling Jim this morning that as I was getting ready, it occurred to me that most men... have a have a ten year old boy living inside of them I thought you said eleven eleven ten or eleven okay eleven year old boy living inside of them that has like the silly jokes and the silly sense of humor it has nothing to do with how mature the individual is because it's like I've known my dad just never showed that unless he was around the guys and so the guys are like this is the real dad but around mom mom just wouldn't she just was like grow up all the time I encourage it so I get it all the time you know it's just like I'll jim's like I shouldn't say it it's like oh gosh I know you're going to and then he'll say his thing that he was thinking and I find it enduring this is yeah endearing I think endearing sorry um no it's cool I think um the The six foot two, you know, two hundred plus guy in me, I just refuse to grow up. You know, I don't know who's going to tell me I got to grow up. So, you know. I'm not going to do it. Well, and I know that since we started this, I was like, bring it. Because Jim makes me laugh every day. But when we're talking about buy here, pay here, usually there's very little humor that is woven into the conversation. And I just, you know, he's freaking hilarious. And people get to know him. I teed up a little holiday reminder. Oh, you did? Yeah, I got it on the screen here. So this is a reminder for those of you not seeing the screen. At the holiday season, this is a time to jingle all the way. Because nobody likes a half-assed jingler. Right? Nobody likes that. So jingle all the way, people. So, you know, that's not my joke. I heard that years ago. So funny. Yeah. so funny well we have also just to kind of throw it up here we have the snow cam yeah um I I guess it did snow once when we were out of town in gaiman but by the time I got back it was melted so this is our official first snowfall and um it's fun to wake up to um the white but it's also you know I was laying in bed and I thought I wonder if it snowed and then you could hear the the plows going by I was like it snowed because regardless of how much snow you have on the ground Usually cars you can't hear, but the snow plows, you can hear those buggers. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can hear them, and it's like it echoes all the way through the neighborhood. They're on it. They really are. They really are. And we complain all the time. that we don't like winter. The first year that we were here, I think in the first month, we shoveled about five feet of snow. So we're just starting and we're trying to find the loveliness in it. Jim turned on the heaters outside. And so we had coffee out on the back patio and enjoyed the snowfall. And, you know, we're like, we're trying to, we're not going to half-ass jingle. We're going to jingle all the way when it comes to. All the way to the end with the jingling. Yeah, there will be no stopping short. Okay. So any other, like, are there any announcements? Yeah, just quickly, I'll make sure people know that next week's podcast sessions are set. Wednesday, we're having Michael Sansone. We pre-recorded a session with him. Yeah, he asked me to do some stuff put together for that. Yeah, so DCS, or Dealer Controlled Solutions, they're the software company out of New Jersey. They we're the first to officially test and be complete, complete. Yeah. Yeah. And so we know that there's a couple others that are just right there. Oh yeah. So we just haven't had a chance to test it. So again, it's, it's, uh, that is on the monthly, uh, No, that's on the White Hat Way portfolio summary. It doesn't have to be monthly. You can run it for whatever range you want. But it's like it verifies your principal balance, starting balance, transactions inside your principal and closing balance. What we encourage dealers to do is to run that at the close of the business for the last day of the month. No, this one will have to be, this one can be run anytime because all it's really doing is going back to the, whatever period you're running last year, last month. And it's gonna, you started with this much principle. You, you added this much new contracts. Well, haven't you said that it's that, you know, if people are doing, you know, funky accounting and unwinding deals or all of that that it can really screw those numbers up so that I know our clients it's like we encourage them do it on this day and your day your month is closed when you run that report your month is closed you're not going to back date anything you're not going to we encourage that I mean just because of what you said you're chasing your tail from an accounting standpoint and and in our case we're working more with you know portfolio performance and helping dealers kind of pin down their numbers but You know, it's kind of all in this White Hat way context of, you know, what is it that White Hat way can do for dealers in the industry and obviously ultimately consumers. But yeah, this was one of the things that we requested back in June. The DCS, again, worked it out and got it. And so Michael came and we recorded it. And so I'll share that. We'll do react to it. You know, one thing that I... I recognize is that to ask that of DMSs, it's not something that they can turn around in a very short amount of time. Because it just requires the bandwidth of their engineering team or whatever to be able to rewrite, fix, create code. It's not something that there's just a lever on the side of the dms that they can go oh okay we'll turn this on but blink it requires some stuff and and that's largely because what we're asking for some of the information comes from the receivables you know the module if you will in the software so it comes from sales and so you got collections and so it's it's going to be challenging so that will be on wednesday We'll be talking with or we'll be doing a reaction to an interview that you did with the folks at DCS. And then Friday, we'll reconfirm. But it looks like we have Calvin Ruth. Oh, excellent. Yeah, he's been kind of all over buy here, pay here stuff. And yep, it's like, great job. Yeah, there's some stuff happening in his world. And so they kind of featured, you know, some of the progress that he's enjoying. And so I'm happy to hear the story and spend a little time with Calvin. Yeah, yeah. He's from the opposite. I'm originally from Oklahoma myself, but he's from the opposite corner of Oklahoma. But looking forward to get to spend a little time with him on Friday. So he probably, you know, uses the, he has the accent and the... What accent? What... You know, when I first started dating you and I told some of my girlfriends, they're like, does he call you darling? And I was like, yes. And she goes, doesn't that just melt you? It's like, yes, it does. It just melts me. Today's topic is about fruitcake. Who loves, who just can't do without fruitcake? That's a psychopath. Yeah. No, fruitcake is something I kind of threw in at the last minute. But I like it. I really do because it's just, you know, it's, yeah. It's just a mixed up. It's a thing that is, and you know, it's like it's the holiday time, so using that. It's a thing that is, but it's a thing that most people, ugh. around yeah um yeah that's like I've I've actually I and I probably will have listeners out there that are like you've never tried my fruitcake I have yet to try a fruitcake that I love yeah um so I'm done trying fruitcake So, you know, today was like apples versus oranges and buy here, pay here. How to fix the buy here, pay here fruitcake. And this is actually a pretty, this is, you know, something that we've touched on at different times. And it's not an easy thing to unpack necessarily, but... there there is a way to do it um that that we've as we you know we've been doing some strategy and planning and and all of that there's a way to do this yeah not only can it be done we're we're a big part of the way there through what we've done with v-eight because you know you you get in a v-eight group and you've got dealers that are lease your pay here they're on different software they're you know they're look at they're always going to be um degrees of separation in the way people operate like in just terms of business practices you're always going to have that because you know even a franchise you can't dictate everything and we're not franchising we're these renegade entrepreneurs and so they can be all over the place but what you can do is get to the place where regardless of what software anybody's on you can run that through a filter that at least lines up the numbers we had a real good example last night and this one was more business practices but I'll give you an example we have a dealer that we've been working with now and they're one of those dealers that we talk about that just they're kind of on an island they hadn't ever been in a twenty group they hadn't ever had this is one of your groups yes so they were new to the business and they um they basically had some practices in their their business that they didn't realize were not industry typical And because there is no industry typical playbook, right? There's no blueprint and buy here, pay here. And so what that really prompted the thought was you could see in the chart that when they got in the group and we provide them a little direction and they started reworking their numbers in the fourth quarter and processing repos, in that case, they were processing repos differently than what most dealers do. So now that they have started to shift that, now the numbers, you can see in the graphs where their numbers are coming into line with the rest. So you ran, you know, you... that this conversation kind of, it came up in V eight months ago and they were like, why are we so off kilter with the rest of the, of the dealers? And like you said, multiple DMSs, but it was because they didn't know any better. And, and it, and they didn't know that there's, there's a way to be able to look at dealership to dealership to dealership and compare apples to apples and, Or oranges to oranges, but not apples to oranges. And listen, we're not a hundred percent of the way there in BA. We've made a lot of progress. We basically, and I meant to have it teed up to show you, I'll bring it back. But we have a really simple data submission form. Dealers basically submit about twenty, twenty-two numbers each month. you know, what you'd expect, inventory balance at the close of the month, sales breakdown, collections numbers, portfolio breakdown at the close of the month, that sort of thing. So it's pretty simple. And then we take those and create ratios. But, you know, it comes up in our conversations. So what we had to create is a separate from the data submission form, we created a member profile sheet so that we could know if what's included like when you in your amount of finance like your term of loan is longer well yeah it's going to be longer if I'm doing a seventeen hundred dollar service contract right and so that's not so you so you can compare that and like pull that out if you need to pull that out so yeah I think this is an example of where we recognize white hat way and our v-eight thing is a is a product of white hat way it's a that's a solution that was created by white hat way with the idea that We're just trying to make lives easier for dealers, get more information in front of them so they can make good decisions. But that information needs to be valid. You can't sit there and talk apples to oranges and really learn much. So this is why it's just so important. And we recognize, and I told the dealer, I said, look, we're never going to ask. I said it in our meeting last night. We're not going to ask somebody to change their business practices just for the sake of changing business practices. But when you get into these environments where you want to be able to compare and You want to know, is your portfolio performing? You want to know, do I have enough markup in my cars? Do I, you know, all this stuff. It's like in order to do that, we kind of need to be apples to apples so that you can make a valid comparison. And so this is what's starting to take shape for us. We've made a lot of progress. Yeah. And, and one of the things that, that I'm seeing is that even though there's different sizes of, of dealerships, that it's, it's, I'm seeing this across the board that like, this is a way to, to, you know, look at repos. And so it doesn't matter if you're a newbie or if you're someone who's got two thousand, three thousand accounts. It's like, it's, there's, there becomes this, um a closer standardization of practices um for at least within the software at least within the software so that you can compare and compare and so you know we we I watch social media and you know we're always kind of looking at what are the things that are that are big topics and stuff And, you know, you see a dealer pop in there and ask a question. And it's like, I love when you see seasoned dealers that have been in twenty groups now, you know, V eight groups, whatever. And they start asking the questions because it's like, well, how do you do this? And what do you do for this? And what? Because that totally skews that totally changes the answer based on. And a lot of, you know, like your dealer that came in a few months ago and saw this massive, that they tweaked a few things and now it's coming into this thing where you can see how there's... you're really are apples to apples. And so how's my apple doing compared to your apple? And it just, it, it's a very powerful thing as a business owner to be able to, you know, to know that. And there's so many dealers out there that we talk to all the time that, that, they have been a lone island and you know, we, this is one of the beautiful things, um, that we have a really great opportunity to do. Um, you know, we, we refer to golden five hundred, um, then there's the silver five thousand and then there's the bronze ten thousand. Um, and so that, that like encompasses about the amount of people that are in the buy here, pay here industry. The Golden Five Hundred, these are the ones that have been in and out of Dealer Twenty Groups. They attend the conferences. They do the stuff. And so they, for a lot of them, already kind of know this stuff. well there's still five hundred compared to fifteen thousand yeah it's there's a lot of people out there that don't well when you say the five hundred that know this stuff they only know as good as the data is like the data is just not stacked up in my experience now um you know brent carmichael is on his way into the chair of director of education obviously brent and ncm have done a ton of work and I know that brent's you know got A lot of integrity in the data they've done with NCM. So I'm not suggesting that there's not good data. It's just that it's been a struggle in our industry all along. And, and, and when we stepped into V eight, I knew kind of what to expect and what we were up against. And I purposefully kept it very simple, just a metrics that we could all agree were valid, useful numbers. And that's been good. I just think it's helped illustrate that. And while the dealers in our V-Eight groups have been patient about that whole thing, we do have some numbers that are relevant and valid. And so I think we're being careful to only present stuff that we can have confidence in. Of course, the validate part is something that we're doing that we just said, you're not going to get meeting access unless we have received not only your data, but validation of that data, which really just means backup reports, source reports they have to send us or grant us DMS access. So that's step one so that we can see for ourselves what's happening. Because when you look at the quick example, I think I gave you this morning and I touched on it just now, like, when you look at a dealer and you say, well, gosh, my, your APR is the same, your down payment's the same, your selling price is the same. Why is your term of loan longer? Well, I got a seven hundred dollar doc fee or I got a service contract on mine that you don't have. And so these are the kind of things that you have to be able to examine and filter that stuff out in order to really get to something that's more meaningful. We're working on it. And, you know, I, I, we bring this conversations all the time to the podcast and it's not a, you know, it's like we're, There's always something that you're learning. It's like, hey, everybody out there in the industry that's listening, here's something we learned. It can help improve your business. I really love that this is a platform that we can go to. Just so you all know, too, is that there are things. We talk about our roadmap for There are things that we, you know, you're going to see more and more things come into as products or whatever for the industry that are for the industry and not just for V-Aid or not just for whatever. It's like, this is going to help everybody and let's, yeah. and so there are there's some some um you know we just we just a couple of days ago started talking about um one product that we we haven't wireframed there's so much stuff that we've already got wireframed it's like this is how it works and and all of that but there's one that we haven't really wireframed yet but it's like It is something that is so on our a big thing that may not be for twenty twenty five, but it may be for twenty twenty six. I think it's twenty five, but it's like we definitely have a game plan around that. And as you said, it's it's not something that's meant to be exclusive. Like we're building it in a way when you build it with that in mind. then, um, you know, you can make it available to others because you really, you do want to make, um, make the job easier. I say it all the time. I dealers have heard to say it in VA. I talk about it on the podcast. It's like, I think dealers and buy here, pay here. I have a really difficult job. I've been there. Like I was a dealer myself for a long time and I managed dealerships before that. And so, um, I just think the job is difficult. They have, it's challenging work. It's an important need that they fulfill in the financing sector. And I just think one of the things that we can all do is work together to get better information in front of dealers so that they can make better judgments. And in the end, they could end up helping more people. It will make the experience for the consumer better and the experience for the dealer better. It's like there's a lot of stuff out there that we have an opportunity to be able to improve. So we're not building a thing that we're hiding to ourselves. We're going to profiteer. Whatever we build, we're going to be mindful going in that we're constructed in a way that It can be done and be of the benefit to the industry. And in that regard, we said again and again, we're happy to collaborate. Like we we just happen to have a perspective on the industry that allows us kind of unique position, unique perspective and allows us to. And plus, just being a numbers nerd. Right. It helps me to kind of focus on the number side and help dealers get to a place where they they do have numbers that. correlate that means something because I, you know, they're making business decisions. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And the, and one of the beautiful things about it too is, and the position. And so I just, I'm excited to be able to, to see all the things that are, that are done and completed and out there is that we're a lot more nimble. Right. Than a lot of other companies, um, on organizations. We are a lot more nimble and, you know, we've had conversations with some of the bigger entities and it's like, um, It takes us a little bit longer to move this super tanker where you're just a speedboat. We're like, well, you know, we're not going to slow down. We're going to continue moving forward. And so hopefully trajectories meet. Oh, I think it's inevitable. I think, you know, we're naturally drawing people to the mission that is, you know, who really wants to get in the way of progress and making people's lives easier and so on, you know? So, and I think one last thing I kind of teed up because I went and looked it up. I can credit this quote to Harry Truman. He said, it is amazing what can be accomplished when you don't care who gets the credit. So I'm approaching this whole thing that we're talking about around data. Look, I'm happy to collaborate with anybody. Yatway is just happy to start the conversation, bring people together who can help solve the problem. But I just want to see the problem solved. I don't really care who gets the credit. And I think we can certainly work together in that regard. And we just feel like we have a unique kind of perspective on a lot of the pieces. And so as a result, we're happy to collaborate. um, just drive a conversation and work to, to help, uh, dealers get to the place where they're, they can count on apples looking like apples. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think I have anything else to say. She want to wrap up. I, I don't think I have anything else either. You don't have any like closing jokes, nothing. You got nothing. um no but I haven't been asked who is frank and why are you wearing his sense like I'm noticing this is I don't want to get too so just so you all know I use frankincense oh it's a lot which is it's it's and you know it's funny I've talked to some of my girlfriends it's like I do have frankincense and I have myrrh and and they're like what is that it's like oh the you know because it's you look at the nativity it's like gold frankincense and myrrh the three and frankincense is a really beautiful essential oil so it's harmless it's harmless there's no frank there's no frank and there's nothing you have to make sense of okay good all right everybody have a great rest of your week weekend and we will see you on wednesday when we're going to be talking with uh With Michael Sansone from DCS. And then Friday is Calvin Ruth from Oklahoma. Yep. All right, everybody. Have a great weekend.
