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. Good morning. Happy Friday. Glad to have you here. Do you remember when you were a teenager and how like the whole, actually as a young adult too, Friday, Friday, Friday was like a huge freaking deal because everyone was, you know, wanting to cut out early or whatever. And I know in the buy here, pay here world, Friday is just another work day. It's just, it's not like the leading up, the weekend doesn't really happen until Saturday for a lot of the dealers out there. But Friday's just like, you remember TGIF, all of that. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I haven't charted in a while. Like, I don't know how much dealers do business on Friday relative to other days of the week. It's a huge collections day. Well, but that's not what it used to be. Like, so many of the payments come in electronically. It affects the bank account, but we don't see traffic in the... it's a dealership necessarily on Fridays, but to quickly do that point, I think we, both of the dealers that we invited today cannot be here. We've got Jack sales managers. Yeah. Jack Carter's sales manager. Yeah. Matthew Thomas is with us. And so we'll, we'll introduce him. Yeah. And it was something that we just, it was this morning. It's like, I have had this happen or I've had this happen. And that's, which is interesting. Dealers lead really, really busy lives. They do. With, with Ishmael, I can say for those who, ishmael had something come up that is not serious he said but urgent so so he's it's everything's fine but he just couldn't be here so yeah so he's um for those who were looking forward to seeing ishmael but you know it's we as we were talking um to our guest uh and uh we'll get him introduced his name is matthew and he is jack carter's um sales manager uh you know it we were chatting with him just before we got started and about some of the different things and He is really going to be able to answer the questions around Jack's dealership. And if he can't, then we can always get the information. But I think for the most part, the conversation is going to be pretty rich. And I told Jackie, but I said, I think today's conversation is really more about the questions than the answers. In other words, instead of drilling in and getting specific about closing ratios today, I feel like today is going to be the first of an ongoing conversation. Because as I shared with you, it's like when I look at this industry and I look at, all the dots that a dealer would have to connect together to really assess their operation and figure out which of these levers do I turn to improve my business? Then I think they're good on the inventory side, the deal structure and sales side, the actual closing, they can do okay. collections they can track for the most part. There's some challenges over there too, but, but it's really this piece. It's the, it's the lead generation and the underwriting to close the leads and the opportunities that we get that I, from my perspective, this is a piece that's, it's easier to measure than it once was. We have better CRMs and better technology. We can measure better what's happening. But when I see it, I just see such a low closing ratio across this industry. And I just think it's so first we have to just figure out, What is the number and how are we tracking it? I'm going to bring Matthew in. Good morning. It's still morning out there, right? Close enough. Almost lunchtime. Glad to have you here. Thank you so much for being willing to join us. We're grateful that Jack has someone that he just really believes can speak to this topic that he could bring. I'll do my best. I joked beforehand that I was the discount Jack, like the Jackie. But I'll do my best to answer your questions. Yeah. You know, I came into this industry a little less than six years ago. I came from the signing graphic industry. I used to put wraps on cars, design stuff like that. So really came in with no idea, started as a salesman and have built up from there. So hopefully my understanding is enough because it's all from the school of hard knocks. So have you been the sales manager this whole time? Really effective in that role, probably the last two and a half years. Okay. Yeah. So I, may I start with just cause this is kind of like foundational to some of the things that we're going to be talking about. I believe you were there pre COVID. Yes. And so you, you know, and so you, hopefully you remember, cause I kind of, I primed you for this question before we got on. Cause it's like, I know for me, it takes me a minute sometimes to access old files quite a while. But, um, do you, do you see just from your perspective, not the CRM, not the closing ratio, but we're talking about the customer. Do you see any shifts in the customer's mentality from pre COVID to now? Hmm. That's a really great question. Um, I'd have to say, yeah, it's had to, I think because of what, what, what the dealership was like before and what it is now and really tied to how much cars cost and how much it takes into it. So, you know, pre COVID when I first started here, that was July of, you know, the most expensive car we had up front was five grand. You know, our, our ACV was probably, under two grand, right? Somebody would roll in with some pay stubs that looked half right. They'd put a thousand dollars down and they were rolling on a twenty four month contract. You know, it's just it was just so much different. And then as the units got so much more expensive and the money was crazy because, you know, paying ten thousand, twelve thousand dollars at auction for a Honda, you know, crazy stuff like that. But you had to have inventory. You know, the underwriting had to get so much tighter. Everything had to make more sense. And the expectation from the customer there, you know, they still sometimes come in and they have that five hundred dollar down mentality. And I'm going to do that. And it's a little bit of a shift. Like our older customers, you know, they come in and they're like, you've changed completely. You have an application. You there's underwriting. What does that mean? You know, it's kind of blown them. So but, you know, we're starting now. I'm seeing that shift. You know, people come in, they know they're going to need one to three grand. You know, we're seeing that for sure. It is nice that the cars are starting to go back down and, you know, they've been going back down and it's been normalizing, but it'll never be like it was. Yeah. So do you feel like they shop more than they used to? Yes. And why do you suppose they shop more than they used to? Is it because of the cost of car? No, it's the same reason any of us do. We're trying to get the best deal we can. Yeah, but before COVID, it seemed like that the attitude with dealers was they don't have a choice. They're coming here. They're leaving with a car. This is true. You know, I think some of them like, you know, the twenty groups and they still kind of have a little bit of that attitude. You know, they're with us for a reason. But at the same time, there's there's other people out there doing it. And you have to stand out a little bit to catch them now. Exactly. Exactly. OK, cool. Yeah, that's the part. No, that's good. I think the part when we think about like and keep in mind, I'm a guy who was in the new car business as a salesperson and then a sales manager in the middle to the late nineties, then stepped into the buy here, pay here space in the late nineties as a manager. I've done coaching all over the country and I meet a lot of dealers and we work with this stuff and we get pretty deep in the weeds with some of these dealers in terms of what their numbers look like and what they're spending and their dollars per car sold and dollars per lead and a lot of that stuff. What I'm seeing is that there does seem to kind of Michelle's point is there does seem to be a shift in the way the consumer buys. I think most, you know, most of the stuff we see across the country outside of buy your pay your just, it's a shifting world. People can bring the world to their sofa with their phone. Right. And so that's shifted a little bit. And so the way people buy and the younger generation, I feel like does have a different attitude about buying and shopping. Yeah. And, you know, I would kind of go back to this pre-COVID, post-COVID customer is that during COVID, it's like there were a lot of people that were from our segment that all of a sudden, just like there were different mentalities that were adopted about, I matter, I have a choice, and, you know, feeling like they have a lot more ability to shop. Yeah. And and, you know, the rising costs. But I just my perspective is that is that there's there's there's been a shift in the dealership and they have to close down on certain things. You know, the underwriting has changed a lot for a lot of people. Yeah. And then the consumer, you know, because of this and also because that they just that it's it. You know, we we had kids during this during the covid stuff that had a very different paradigm. They were living in during covid than they lived outside of covid. And it shifted how they think about a lot of things. And so I'm just where I'm coming from is I think that there was a shift in both the consumer and the dealer during that time, which, you know, that's. Yeah. Well, there's certainly a shift on the dealer side from the pure mathematics, like the car is more expensive. And that's pretty much true everywhere. There's still some dealers out there that have a five to eight thousand dollar selling price on their lot. But but those are few and far between. I think the customer shops differently. So. So I think, Matthew, I know you guys are in a pretty good. well populated area. You're not far out of Atlanta. You've got pretty good population base in your area. And one of the things that I, Michelle alluded to before we started was that Jack had shared on social media some months ago that you guys had shifted your strategy and you were no longer engaging outside marketing folks to drive your, your leads. And so I want to hear from you kind of somebody who lived through that and sat in that chair. What, what did you experience as that shifted? Did your closing numbers, your sales numbers go down or what did you, how did you shift your strategy? So I think you'll be surprised. You know, we were, we were, you know, big vendors like, you know, CarMax and CarGurus and, you know, AutoTrader, you know, putting all the feelers and stuff out there. And, you know, we're sitting there looking at the money and, you know, we're watching the leads come into NEO and the kind of conversations that we were having. And what we found is we were wasting money talking to people who they weren't our customer. You know, a lot of those people outside of that, you know, they don't care about a two thousand and twelve Toyota Camry. That's not, you know, it just wasn't our person. So, you know, we cut a lot of that. You know, we focused on like, you know, our Google stuff. We focused on Facebook. We focused on a little bit more of a local approach and honestly didn't see that much of a change except for the fact that I got less what I considered leads that weren't worth my salesman's time. You know, these, you know, people, you know, we, I got rid of a lot of tire kickers. You got a lot of, you know, people who are just trying to buy whatever. And we weren't it. Cause you know, there, we do a really good job of making sure we put a mechanically sound car out front. We, uh, we, we distinguish ourself and that we've got a twenty four month, twenty four thousand mile warranty that comes with the car, you know, things like that. But cosmetically, you know, we're going to let a bumper strength go. We're going to let a, you know, maybe a torn center armrest or something like that go. We're not going to mess with that. Those aren't the people that you get from that. But the people who we really need to help, the people who need a car, they're fine. They want the Toyota that's going to get them to work. And they're cool. Okay, it's got a little scrape on the bumper. I'm going to put four more when I drive it tomorrow. It's fine. You know, it's, it's, it's absolutely okay. Oh, the TPMS lights on. Cool. Are the tire pressures good? And they ride, you know, that's, um, you know, the, the people who need transportation is who we're trying to help. Yeah. Um, so I'm hearing this and this, you guys basically kind of recalibrated your approach to kind of in, in marketing, you hear the expression that you were changing from a shotgun wide approach to more of a rifle and precision sort of approach. And so you shifted kind of the customer that you're trying to reach that is kind of reaching your ideal customer. And so I don't know if you have, and just generally speaking, like what closing percentages might've looked like before and, you know, you, you had a bunch of tire kicker leads that didn't close. And so, so I wonder if you have kind of a feel for what that shifted. We don't need hard numbers. Right. No joke. Before we were seeing like, sixteen hundred leads pour in in a month, which is a lot. It's a ton. After we cut that, our leads dropped back into seven, eight, nine hundred a month, depending. And I just didn't see a big change in what we, what we did. You know, we, This dealership does anywhere between, you know, ninety and one hundred and ten with we're hybrid. So, you know, cash outside financing with a focus on buy here, pay here. I think the meeting last that I had, my marketing lady was telling me that she felt our rate was like twenty one or twenty two percent. But I feel like it's lower. I bet it's fifteen or under ten. You know, it's probably the realistic number of how many we get. um some of that I wonder is is it a a symptom of how tight we are on our underwriting too we're very selective of who we sell a car to um because we have to be we we maintain our own portfolio we don't sell our paper um you know and there's there's a lot of things that we do with like I've over the last few years since covet with people leaving out with crazy balances that they'll never pay and break even times just ridiculously high. I've pushed that we're getting a higher down payment on the front end. Our customers are breaking even so much sooner in the cars than they were like down to twelve months instead of twenty something and maybe a little bit higher monthly payment. But for us, recovering more on our collateral. Yeah. Which is super important. I want to ask you because you threw out some numbers that I'm just like, OK, because I even though I'm not a spreadsheet nerd, I, you know, I like to dabble in like, how does that work? So you were saying that, you know, from your efforts before you were getting around sixteen hundred leads a month. You cut these ones out and then now you're getting between seven and nine hundred a month and you're still selling the same amount. And so I am I mean, I'm like saying you're ten percent plus. Is it from just those numbers spot on? So you're basically your ad spend right now has decreased drastically and your closing rate has increased. um, to percentage wise to, to what you guys were, you know, getting thrown before. So it sounds to me like you're getting better qualified leads than you were before, like you said. And, um, and that just, that, that in itself is, you know, Jim, Jim can speak to what we're seeing with a lot of dealers and their closing rates. Oh, I'll take it. Well, I can tell you, I talked to a dealer just this week who was lamenting about the fact that their closing ratio was below what he was used to. Keep in mind, this is a guy who most of his career was in the franchise sector. Now they're fully invested after selling off a franchise thing. They're fully invested in the buyer payer space. And he's now roughly three years in. And he's saying our closing ratios are, he said, we call the leads, we text them, we do all the stuff. And we just still, I looked at his numbers and he was around four percent of all leads that they're closing through twenty twenty four. And that's actually higher than some of the other dealers that we work. That's right on with your previous amount of leads coming in. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like when I look at that, I think, OK, so so what is the disconnect? Like, how can we begin to analyze? And you guys are doing this all the time. And we just think as we want to kind of back up and take a wide look and look at the industry overall and see what we can figure out here that helps dealers sort this out. That's why I said today, Matthew, I said to Jack by text. This morning, today's really more about questions and answers. It's like, how do we figure out the pieces that are missing? How do we, first of all, for us, that's better understanding the consumer. Like, we want to go directly to the consumer and survey them and find out what their motivations are in buying. And back to the tire kicker thing, because we hear, you probably see it on social media, people, dealers in particular, complain about this. bad leads or junk leads. Okay. So I would break those up into, we see some dealers that get what you might think of as a fake lead. Like somebody's deploying some sort of bots and they're, they're, you know, hitting the link and they're becoming some sort of a pseudo lead. It's not really a car buyer. So you would obviously toss those out. And then you've got mismatched leads, ones that you're talking about that aren't, that's not the qualification level of the customer that you're trying to serve, at least in the buy here payer sector. Right. so we're just trying to analyze that and figure out okay but if I am so so let's let's first ask like what is your definition of a lead when you tell me you have seven or eight hundred leads like what what qualifies as a lead for you guys uh if they for me it's if they try to contact us I mean if somebody's if somebody's taking the time to grab get on our website or respond to an ad they're on their phone they click they put their name and their phone number in That's someone who's trying to contact us, maybe trying to do business even further. You know, I tell my guys, you need to get somebody in and they've done an application. They've taken fifteen minutes, twenty minutes out of their time. You know, that's you need to talk to that person. I don't know. what other guys are seeing, you know, I think, you know, salesman today, they just want to text and want to be passive. And I'm like, get on the phone. I wanted to ask your lead flow. What, what happens when a lead gets dropped? What is your guys, what do you guys do? So I'm sorry for interrupting you, but that you're about ready to get into that. Well, let me, let me guide you a little bit through our funnel. Um, all the leads come into Neo and I have pretty much what is a hybrid. I've, uh, I've got an outside person who does, um, She's like BDC begins the conversation, but she's also qualifying at the same time. She's verifying, she's gathering steps. And what she does is she gets a customer who all the steps are in verifiable application, a good idea of who they are. And then that viable lead gets handed to a salesman to continue to, to cultivate, right? They, the, the salesman gets that. And then it's the salesman's job and try to get the good down payment out of this person. find the vehicle they qualify for and to do all that. So just to give you an idea, that's, that's kind of how our funnel works. You know, once they get somebody in, they, they come to me, I, I try to put my stamp on every deal and make sure it makes sense. Um, you know, things like that. Um, So that's, that's kind of how, that's how, that's how ours, ours works. Does your PDC hand off to a salesperson through an appointment or just like, I've cultivated this, this lead to this point and now it's time for you to continue, continue that process or is it an appointment? Um, appointment is like ideal, but I think the way things work today and you're talking about consumer mindset and I blame it on Amazon and I blame it on DoorDash. Everybody wants to do it on their phone and not talk to anybody. You know, you get your groceries delivered, not have to talk to the soul. Um, so we, right. You know, and you love it too. You're like, I want to order a pizza and I don't want them to. I don't want them to know it's me that's ordering that meal. God, it's just me. It's like, sorry, sorry. We digress, but it's true. No, but no. So an appointment is ideal. Absolutely. You want to get people through the door, but we hand off a little bit sooner than that. We just go ahead and put them, make them part of the conversation, get them talking to the salesman as soon as possible. Because another part of that is what I'm seeing is people want to know. They want to know before they come. They don't want to waste their time. I don't want to waste their time. You know, somebody comes through like they're part of our funnel and my lady in the BDC sees it and she starts looking at them and she goes, this person's not going to qualify. What do we do? And I say, we just go ahead and tell them thanks. Give them the option to buy cash or maybe an outside lender if it looks like they can. Otherwise, let's move on to the customer we can't help. I just don't want to waste people's time because that wastes my time. I like that. We work with different dealers. We don't want to get them to that point of closing before they actually are invited in because all of the down payments and everything should be negotiated in-house. People do want to know. I believe that that is... DoorDash and all of that, all of these things are part of what happened during COVID. It affected how people consume drastically. And I like that, that it's like you have a BDC and it hands over, the salespeople are the ones responsible for talking about a down. yes we don't give them any any expectations you know they call people call on the phone and they're like I see you got that catalog how much is the down payment on it and as soon as you tell them the number you're done you've completely undercut your salesman's ability to gather potentially more money on that car uh and generate you know extra cash flow for the dealer you know we tell our guys but you know we sell ninety cars a month if you get twenty extra dollars on each deal that's That's a lot of money just with a little effort. Think of how much you could get and that improves everybody's life here. nice so thinking about the uh let me take you back this was before you were doing vinyl graphics on cars and this is going back to when I was having a twenty group I gave him a lot more notice just for a couple of years but okay yeah so I just when I think about back to twenty group meetings when I was a dealer in the two thousands and and then even before that just meeting dealers one of the things that you would hear because you just touched on this thing about customers want to know what dealers used to say a lot we never really proved this one way or the other but they would say that a customer who that you tell them you're approved yes we will do your thousand dollars down in six hundred a month or whatever those numbers weren't that big back in those days but but the idea is we tell them yeah you're approved we can you can buy a car and then they wouldn't show up it's like okay so so there would be a percentage of those that we would lose and the and that the attitude of a lot of dealers was I don't once I tell them they're approved then I tend to not hear from them they just go shopping well if I'm approvable then maybe I can buy a car you know anywhere and then we lose them so so you guys are not having that experience you're finding that the customer wants to know and once you get there you still lose some I'm sure but but you're seeing that it works better for you right I don't, I don't think, I don't think it happens necessarily like that. I mean, um, I've not seen it, you know, what I'm seeing is once we tell some, Hey, look, you can buy this car and this is what you need down. They're like, when can I come? Um, there, there are certainly some that shop on that side. I've seen where I've approved somebody talk to them. They don't like her numbers. I'm going to go somewhere else. And I see him again in three weeks. A lot of times they go out and maybe we're the guy that's going to help them and no one else will. I don't know. I can't always rely on that because there's always someone out there that's going to. Do you ask them? What's that? Do you ask them? No, I don't. Elaborate. I'm interested. It's a lot in. Are you surveying your customers that have bought? And are you surveying potentially those that didn't? And you're going to get a lot less people from those that didn't than those that bought. But those that bought and you start asking the questions because you're only working on assumptions until you start measuring why. And so, but I really appreciate you seem to have a very level head about this is what I've seen. And not being... influenced by old paradigms, old ways of thinking, all of that. But I would suggest that you figure out some way of surveying your customers that buy and ask them questions about what led them to you or back to you. Okay. They've actually touched on that in some of our Tony groups. That's not the first time I've heard that, and you're right. And we have in the past. I've got one salesman out there. He's like, what's holding you back? You always ask him, what's holding you back? And it's always interesting to hear, but we don't have a way of recording that like we should, so. Yeah. I would say it's worthwhile. You'll have lower percentages, but I think if you can survey both the customers who bought and some of the customers that you missed and just get a feel for what happened, if they didn't choose you, why'd you miss them? uh, good information, but I think we, you know, we, we definitely believe in, and part of this is kind of this whole conversation. Matthew is all meant to kind of, um, move past opinions like, you know, people, people. And so for us, it's trying to start to drill into data and, and surveys and analysis and figure out, let's not guess at what the customer's thinking about why they didn't buy. Let's, you know, let's, so I'll give you a quick example. We're working with a dealer. We've been working with them for some time. They're, They're spending a good amount of money monthly for a small market, small dealership. I say small. They're kind of like you guys on the periphery of a major city. So they can reach as many people as they want to reach in their Facebook radius. But they spend a good amount of money for a dealer their size. They have a dedicated BDC, and their closing ratio almost never tops three percent. It's like there's a disconnect there somewhere that we want to begin to continue to figure out because the thing is we know underwriting. You can adjust. There are a lot of leads that come through the funnel that didn't quite have enough down payment and we didn't bring a deal together. So we know we could adjust underwriting and the math there and pick up some more. We don't ever ask dealers to drastically shift their underwriting, but the question becomes I worked with a sales manager years ago. Michelle's heard me talk about this thing like years ago. He said, you know, the customer who's calling you on the phone at the dealership, they're not looking to buy a ham sandwich. Especially if they do an application, they're not looking to buy a ham sandwich. Yeah. And so it helped. When I first got in the car business, I worked at a dealership that was really slow. And all we did was train. We practiced training to each other, right? We were role-playing and training because there were just hardly any customers. But I learned a lot. And I can say that a lot of those fundamental things that we learned back then still apply. And I think this idea, when I think, because my definition of leads is the same as what you described earlier. They click on the link. They're scrolling. They got a lot of stuff. They stopped and clicked on a link. That tells me they have some need for an automobile at some point in their reasonably near future. That's why they clicked the link. And so to me, that's a car buyer. who's at a certain stage of their car buying process, but they are in the market to buy a car, not a ham sandwich. And so it just, why three percent? Like, this doesn't feel right. Well, and it's a lot of your dealers and you've talked about this lead conversion is, you know, five percent is big. Sure. For a lot of them. And that just seems, I remember when you were telling me about this a couple of days ago, I was like, that seems incredibly low. And it's big. Yeah, it just seems incredibly low. And I just want to say, though, that what we're looking at is not you should stop doing this or you should stop doing that or you should stop using this service or you should stop using that service, but trying to get to the real conversation about, all right, so, I mean, you did say that what worked for you was to get rid of some of just the shotgun approach type services and get to something that's more focused to your customer and, you know, people in your community and that kind of thing. So I just wanted to just clarify that, that we're not talking about everyone should go out and cut the service. But what we're asking is, you know, what are your closing rates? This is something that a dealer has done that has helped them. Yeah. And I would say the part that we might be skipping over is that when you say it helped them, if they spend less dollars. Right. And they are able to create, although fewer leads, the same amount of sales. What that tells me is one of the things we gain in that is efficiency with our sales team. They're not as tied up working leads that are, you know, end up being dead leads. So, yeah, BDC too. We're just not working. We're not as... tied up in working leads that aren't buyers for us. And so, so I think there are different elements that we have to consider here, but I think when I look at the thing, I'm just trying to figure out, and today can be the first of many conversations. I'd love to have you back and we can kind of, you know, drill a little deeper each time into some of these things, because we really just want to understand for dealers to be able to make some adjustments on this. And I think you guys are a good example of, because you do enough volume for your samples to be more meaningful and you have a good CRM where you can track it. that I think there's going to be lessons that can be learned and all that as we move forward. Because what it tells me is the message that you're putting out there is working. And we see your Facebook page. So we kind of get an idea, a feel and a theme of what's happening over there. And so I can see why people respond and react. And you guys look like a fun place to do business. Can I say just a couple things from what I've seen? And I'm someone that does like the marketing side kind of thing, is you are relatable and you are fun. fun and you talk to people like they're standing right in front of you. And it's not just, here's the thing with the car and the miles and all of that, but it's just like, Hey, this is something we, and Jack, Jack, um, we don't see you an awful lot on social media. Um, you know, some of the stuff Jack is out there doing a lot of that. And Jack is a very well-respected dealer within our community, a very well-respected dealer. Um, I'm proud to work for him. Yeah. I mean, and he's, he's like stepped into helping on a leadership level and, and he's very active in like the, the success group and all of that asked or answering questions that people are, you know, well, here's what we've done and dah, dah, dah, dah. So he's, he's really, really respected. And I would say his approach to doing those kind of like walk around a car and talk about the things and adding, being personal and being relatable and And being liked in that way is gold in this industry. And I would take one step further. I think what you didn't speak to was that what I see in the messaging that you guys have, and when I say messaging, it's not all marketing. Some of it's just organic, just you get to know us, and this is who we are, and this is what's happening at the dealership today, right? So what I see in that is a couple things. There's a thread of marketing. Being genuine, which I think dealers, I mean, consumers want to do business with somebody they feel like is being on the level. And then you added, you emphasized the twenty four month warranty, which says to me, you're trying to be that dealer who you want the customer to have a good experience. Right. You that. And so I think that's a part of the messaging that we don't want to lose. That's significant. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, the car doesn't matter. This is a people business. We are human beings serving other human beings. I mean, and in this industry, it's, there's so many bad actors, right? And to stand out and try to be honest with people, I love going out and doing like a rough trade video and being like, this thing's a pile of crap, you know, and just, you know, someone comes in a lot and be like, I wouldn't buy that. And, you know, you sell it to him anyway, but just, just being honest to him about what's going on and being a person to another person, trying to help yeah good no yeah well that's that's important because as we start to talk about marketing we we introduce I think I think one of the things that we're losing as dealers and I look at it overall is that piece you just talked about it's the it's the human element and the connection yes you're right people don't want to um connect they they want to leave the door dash at the door that's kind of the new thing just you could do what I do I just say it's for my wife it's you know She's eating three cheeseburgers. Yeah, that's right. I think we recognize that that's part of a shift, but these are still human beings. Even if they're just on their sofa with their phone, they're still human beings that are going to make a decision that is driven by some emotion. Absolutely. And then there's a fear factor for this customer. They're afraid of stepping into a business relationship with somebody who's not solid like you guys are. And so that's where, you know, we recognize there's a reservation on the part of the consumer. So we just as an industry, we're going to do better to drill down and figure those things out, figure out how to better connect with this consumer. And I think when we think about closing ratios, I think that's part of what I would be having. Of course, the business model and the deal structure and all that has to fit a certain percentage of the customers who are your target customers. So that's kind of given. But then as far as getting them to return our phone call and agree to do business with us, that starts to step into this human connection side. And why would they call us instead of somebody else? Go ahead. I would love to have you come back and talk about how you train your sales people to get that three thousand dollar deposit. Yeah. I mean, lots of yelling. That's not known, liked and trusted. But I mean, it's like how how does that conversation have you trained your people to have that conversation to go from, you you know, more down payment is going to do this for you. And that getting people to shift into, I, you know, that I'm going to find a way to do this. So that's a, that's a topic I'd love to come back and have you talk about. Yeah, absolutely. Love to speak about it. Absolutely. Good. That'd be fun. I, I think one other tip I could give to dealers, or there was a dealership in Oklahoma city years ago, you can go out there and we did a story about it one time on our podcast, but they used to have tire shredders at the exit. So you couldn't leave without permission. So that's one way. He's actually talked about them on a YouTube. I think that you talked about that dealership like two years ago. Yeah. And it's so funny because that's one of the ones that has a lot of viewership. And actually, I think that one of their kids or grandkids actually made a comment on that in YouTube. It's hilarious. But yeah, I mean, they would line people up and give them B shots. It's like we're in for a big day, guys. this is a dealership that had eighty salespeople on their team so this kind of yeah they were loaded for bear yeah they were loaded for bear yeah it's just like whoa this is this is the era of of the circus tent it was car sales a lot of crazy yeah yeah so anyway there's some fun stories around all righty but yeah I think I love what you guys are doing matthew we obviously have a ton of respect for uh jack and watch what you guys do I feel like you're doing it right and so I'm glad to have some time with you. I look forward to having you come back and talk some more about this same conversation and see what more we can learn next time. All right. Yeah. Thanks, guys. I enjoyed it. And hopefully I was hopefully I was adequate. Like I said, I'm no Jack Carter, but I do my best. Jack Carter, you did fun nominally. Hey, Matthew, would you hold if you have a minute, just stay back until after we've closed out the podcast and then we can say a proper goodbye and then kind of talk about next steps. Sounds good. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Oh, my goodness. Great conversation. I just I love conversations like this. The kind of the important stuff that, you know, a lot of what we're talking about here doesn't show up on anybody's composite report. You can't run a report in your software, any software that's going to tell you the things that we're talking about here. So I think it's important for us to keep on that thread. You know, and I would say like just the threads as I'm listening to a lot of this, there's in the white hat way talks about becoming known, liked and trusted in your community and different ways to be able to do that. And so a lot of the things that we've always considered Jack a pretty white hat dealer because he really does care about you know, becoming relatable and, you know, being trusted in this community. Well, it's about customer success. We either care about the success of the customer or we don't. And so this is kind of the separator. Everything we see says Jack does care. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, everybody, thanks so much for joining us. Happy Friday. We will see you on Wednesday. And I know we have, oh, it's Allison, isn't it? Yeah. All right. Have a great day, everybody. Thanks again for joining us.
