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. Hey, good morning. Hi from Utah. Yeah. We're back from journeys. We went different directions. I went to Oklahoma for a time. She went to Arizona. Now we're back. in studio and had a little bit of a technical snag this morning. Sorry to be late. We're just, uh, we, after transporting the board and, and, uh, you know, moving it around buttons and knobs got pushed. And so I'm going to get to, I get to play with it this afternoon and see if I can get it to, to, uh, before we have our podcast on Friday. So we're just doing it the old fashioned way. And we've got a guest, Kristen Acosta standing by and, uh, she's a general manager in, um, Iowa, Iowa. We've been there about twelve or thirteen years and, uh, She appeared with us back on January tenth and we talked about the sales analysis that we performed for her where they sent she sent us about sales history on about three thousand of their sales dating back to two thousand eight and showed their charge off rate. Their net charge off rate is extraordinarily low. And so we invited her to come back and talk to us again today about this matter of exactly how they go about collections, because we know that's where it's at when it comes to those low numbers. Anything we need to talk about? No. Okay. And let's do that. Krista. Hi. Welcome. Glad to have you here. We had a little bit of an internet lag, so we'll warn our viewers today that there may be a little bit of internet challenge. So if it lags or freezes, just stand by. We're going to march ahead. Jim, gave me copies of all of the stuff that you sent him because I mean your numbers for uh your collections are are outstanding and and you know that's good collections is good training good people good and we wanted to kind of get to the get to the the nuts and the bolts of what it is that you do that allows you to get the kind of numbers you do so do you want to talk about the Yeah, let me explain for our viewers. We're on a White Hat Wednesday, which for you, Kristen, I don't know how much you know about what we do with White Hat Way, but with White Hat sort of education, it's largely about customer success. It's about how to help the dealer be successful and have the customer have a successful outcome. And obviously, when you look at things like your static pool results like we can talk about collection success you know but what's the measure of success and I can just tell you having worked with kristen for some time now by almost any measure that you want to measure collections results their portfolio performs extraordinarily well and I think what this leads to for me kristen is we talk about I wrote an article years ago and I called it the third p basically a lot of times people talk about p and p being policies and procedures which I think are obviously essential, but you can't really talk about policies and procedures until you talk about philosophy, right? So you got to talk about what is the approach that you bring. So that's the biggest part of what I was looking forward to talking about with you this morning is if you'll back up and start us with, if you had a new hire, you know, and you're trying to help them understand kind of how you think about customer relations and collections, let's start there. Just kind of talk. Do you want to talk about how she hires? Well, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so back to the hiring process, one of the things that I look for in people is prior sales experience and prior customer service experience. Um, because we really try to deviate from a collector and more of a customer representative. That's how we label it. When we hire it's an, uh, an account representative, they are the representative for that account in all aspects. Um, but mainly for payments. Um, and then when it comes to the interview process, you need to look for someone that's a problem solver. because that's a big part of it is that has to be in their personality to be able to solve problems because that's what it is. You don't want someone that's just got a firm hand, you need a problem solver. And then someone that's also strong-willed because it can get, hard, it's really a mental toughness to do that job. It really is. And so you've got to look for that mental toughness. So those are the things that you're going to want to look for during the interview process. People that have those qualities, because what it boils down to with my collections, it's just a simple mission. You have to sell yourself to that customer because at the end of the day, their money only goes so far. And you want to make sure that you're at the top of their list. So they have to like you. They have to want to pay you. They can't be afraid of you. So that's why sales and customer service comes into it, because you the collector has to sell themselves to that customer. So when Friday hits, they pay you first. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the problem solving part of it, because I agree. It takes a certain amount of creativity to just first got to listen, got to understand and investigate, learn what the problem is. Because we understand, you mentioned in some of your material that sometimes customers want to turn in a car, they kind of want to give up and it's understandable, life gets difficult. But I think what we have to do is be able to investigate, be creative, figure out what's really going on in order to be able to solve the problem at hand, especially in a way that's going to save the account, not just get today's car payment, but to save the account and keep them paying, right? So now we can talk about if you did succeed in hiring somebody, take me into how you would brief somebody who's new on how you guys think about collections beyond what you just shared. Outside of problem solving and customer service, it's just telling them the customer is never the enemy. The reason why we have jobs is because of the customer. And yeah, they can be difficult, but that is why we have jobs. So we need to be in their corner. We need to be their champion. And a lot of times, the reason why they come to us is because they struggle with adulting more or less. And so you have to tell yourself, okay, you're their life coach. You're their financial advisor. You're going to have to help them in ways outside of just when's your next payment. A lot of times you have to present yourself as a coach to these people. And so that really kind of helps our approach with the new person. Like this is kind of what you're going to have to do with these people. You know, you got to kind of hold their hand, help them adult. And a lot of times they really appreciate that. They kind of need that help. Sure. Absolutely. And an important part of that is someone that is approachable. So someone that's friendly, you know, can can be true to their word and all of that. One of the things that I noticed is is you were an underrated method is persistency. Yep. And that it's like then. So you said something about call, text and send a letter every day. When does this when does this persistent we're trying to communicate you start for you guys? So we usually day one is usually a call, a text and then a late letter. And then the next few days is call and text. Now, if for some reason, you know, a few days down the road or their numbers disconnected, we do have permission to email them or message them on Facebook. So we'll try other avenues. But just staying on top of it, because if when I say my collector's been gone and I filled in for several days, sometimes it takes five to seven days for them to respond. But most of the time they will. You just have to be persistent about it. So you just got to let them know, hey, I'm not going anywhere. You know, once you talk to me, I'll leave you alone. And that's kind of. what they realize like oh if I just talk to her she'll just leave me alone and then we work it out and it's all good but um you can't give up after a few days um you know we have like late letters too and then in the state of iowa we have right to cure so you know that's on day eleven um but we just are persistent um You know, when it comes down to other things, you know, down the road, like we have references and things like that for tracking people down. But for the most part, just staying on top of them. And they realize, well, once I talk to her and work this out, leave me alone. Yeah. So for our listeners that aren't familiar with that right to care thing, because not every state has that. You want to just kind of explain quickly how that because it is a factor. I think the fact that you guys have such great collections in a state that has more stringent requirements around possessions, some of the kind of things. Talk to us quickly about kind of how that works, what your requirements are. Yeah. So with the right to cure, if there's any account balance passed through more than ten days. So on day eleven, we send them a notice of default. It gives them twenty one days to bring their account current. And so in that time, we cannot repossess. We have to wait until the end of that twenty one days if we do move forward with the repossession. So that gives us basically from start to finish, thirty one days that we still have to work the account. Usually if they're on an arrangement, we're not going to take it. But that's what the right to cure is. So we have a thirty one day window before we can even take a vehicle. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you mentioned being a good problem solver and a lot of times being a good problem solver requires you to have good tools that you use to solve problems because it's like just saying pay me is not a good problem. It's not solving a problem. So what kind of tools do you give your collectors to be able to work with our customers? Um, so we do, I know a lot of people don't like them, but we do like partial payments, you know, it kind of depends upon the problem, right? Like what problem the customer's having, if it's like an unexpected bill or, you know, a short term financial situation, there's partial payments. We do offer deferments, um, If it's a repair bill that we can help them with, we'll be like, well, we'll just do the repair bill and then we'll do a side note for the repair. So that way they don't feel so overwhelmed. Um, if it comes to like, say they're, uh, they've lost their job. We try to stay on top of who's hiring to give them suggestions. If you just gotta get creative and there's other times we've They're out of a job. They don't have any money, but they need a payment on the account. It's things they don't think about like, hey, is there anything you want to sell on Swap Shop to maybe kind of help you just get something on the account? Who's some people that might be able to float you some money? You've got to be creative for them and think of – because they get so – hyper focused on that they can't pay. It's hard for them to see all their options. So that's your job is to help them see what they can do. And it's like, you know, maybe call your electric company if you ever made an arrangement with them, see if they'll help you out. Just kind of help them see the bigger picture that there are going to be options. Yeah, that is true that when people feel like in a pinch, they become paralyzed. Yes, exactly. someone to offer them, what about this? And in a friendly manner. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Difference. Yeah. You're really talking about a level of customer service and support that is going beyond. And I think this is the part that I really wanted to try to, you know, identify for our listeners, because I'll tell you, Kristen, I've been, you know, in buy here, pay your dealerships all across the country. And I, I don't hear enough of them doing what you're describing. I hear they're making the call or leaving a voice message. It sounds very robotic. It's very processed and procedural. And like I say, robotic is the word that often comes to mind when I hear them doing that. And I think what I can identify and use, same thing that I've heard. You remember we had a thing on social media, it's been a couple of years ago. We had a collection supervisor who described how they have had so many scenarios where they have to sit and help a customer find new car insurance or, you know, through all those kind of steps. And it's like, I think it's important for people to recognize in order to have the kind of success that you guys are enjoying. you really want to be supportive of the customer in a lot of different ways. And so that starts with identifying what the problem is. And then just stepping in, because I've said that I find that our customers in the buyer payer space, one of the things that kind of makes them, as you said, they, they struggle to adulting, which by the way, I'm also very adult. I'm not a big fan myself, but it's like the idea there is, If you can help them begin to sort that stuff out, a lot of our customers just don't know how to solve their own problems. Right. So I think going through that is just good. Well, one of the things that I saw from the you're really good when we've had you in the past, it's like you get such you send such detailed information that conflict resolution is something that believe very strongly in training your people conflict resolution. First off, why is that so important to you? It's so important because Our customers spook easy. They do. If you talk to them the wrong tone, they can take something a certain kind of way. So they spook really, really easy. So you want to be able to handle a difficult customer or customer that has a problem, and you want to handle it in a way that they feel comfortable talking to you. And then that helps with the problem solving. When they're angry and they're upset, you know, they don't want to pay, just come get the car. That conflict resolution training sets you out of that heated moment. And it's like, what's really happening. You know, you know, um, You know, you find out they either lost their job, something unexpected happened or it broke down and they're just frustrated. So that conflict resolution helps you take take you out of that heated moment and just start asking determining questions. And those questions will help you solve that problem. And it helps you just kind of maintain your calmness and not to reach their level. And it helps you de-escalate them to where you can just have a conversation and just get to the root of what the real problem is. So I noticed in that that you use and this is this is something I see a lot of dealerships that they they struggle with. And that is proper training. And so you use something that's called skill path seminars. And I've been to the conflict and skills. And that was like a decade ago. And I'm thinking to myself, oh, I could do a refresher because it's been a while since I've worked with teams and managed teams in this. But it really is. And for those of you that are listening, write down skill path seminars. Most cities that are close to you will have some kind of a curriculum. And I know for me, when I would send some of my team members there, maybe one hundred and fifty dollars. I don't know how much it's changed for them to go and they're gone for the day. But it is really, really, really valuable information. they do a lot of role playing and they just you know they've got people that are professional and learning and teaching people how to de-escalate a situation yeah and they they have a lot of courses online now I think maybe that kind of shifted with covid because there's a lot more online but you know there's conflict resolution specifically there's you know dealing with you know a highly escalated customer like you cannot believe the amount of topics that they cover that Your people in your company, whether it's managers or salespeople, it's so good just to go through that list. And it is a hundred percent worth of training. Yeah. Well, that conflict resolution isn't just with our customers. It's with team members. Yeah. Yeah. All of that. But it's it's good life skills. And so I love I love that you invest in your team. because that is so important is that that you know we see we see people uh dealers that will just like just shadow them and throw right into the end of the brain into the mix and and I have watched um just in my own experience because in some of the the positions I've had where I've I've managed customer service teams that if they don't have proper skills they become paralyzed. And they will take these things home with them. And then you have a team member who just doesn't like their job anymore. And so that teaming helps a lot. And we know it's a difficult job. And I think the conflict resolution stuff is obviously important. And I think I can't resolve a conflict. I can't even have a conflict unless I can reach and speak to the customer. So I think when I think about how you guys have, in order to solve problems, you have to have some degree of engagement and have the customer be willing to talk to you. So I think if we can go back a little bit, one of the things we talk about is having some level of trust, because I've heard you say that in a different way. It's like the customer can't be afraid of us, right? And so I think that's a really important psychological element that people who are newer to the business may not fully appreciate what we're talking about here in terms of uh you know this level of customer engagement and building up some degree of trust because you I know in some of your material you talked about you want your collectors to know the customer you want the customer to know the collectors right and know the team know the company so so kind of talk to me about how that works like what are some examples of how you guys achieve that so pretty much how I train right out of the gate. We do things a little bit different. Most people say, call them and be like, you know, your a hundred dollar payment is due. Is that cash or card? Like whatever, whenever we call a customer, it's just like, Hey, Mr. Customer, you missed your payment today. And then we stop because nine times out of ten, they will tell you it's going to be in later. I was short on my check. And then most of the time, if you just say, hey, you missed your payment just in passing, usually they will tell you what the problem is and they will work something out with you. So that's kind of the big thing. And then as you get to know your customers, like we have a customer, she pays cash. She always is within five days of her due date. So day one, day two, we don't even call her. I did have one collector that called her like on day one, kind of like she was trained to do. And the customer got so offended. And it's like, no, you'll learn like after day six, if you call her, she'll be like, oh yeah, I'll be in. But you need to give them that timeframe because they will be in and they do get a little bit offended. Another way that we put trust in the customer is sometimes they've had a reduction in hours or they've had something come up and they need an arrangement. But maybe they can't do an arrangement just yet. So we tell them, pay what you can when you can, providing they make their regularly scheduled payment. And so we give them a little bit of leeway to do it on their own. Like, hey, can you run an extra fifty? Can you run an extra hundred? Now, when that goes so far, usually we'll rein it in and we're successful at reining it in. But we try to just give them that leeway. So those are some things that kind of help just putting that trust in them. Yeah, there is a lot of strength in, you know, just like, hey, you missed your payment. Yep. And exactly because, because most people don't like silence and they will fill it up with a lot of times. Exactly. I get to the why. And, um, and you know, Jim is, he teaches a lot of salespeople that exact same thing when you're, when you're doing a truth check in their credit report poll and what they've told you their circumstances are is it's just like, Oh, there's a discrepancy here. Yeah. And, you know, you touched on the sales and underwriting part. I think it's worth mentioning that, Kristen, they have a very consistent underwriting practice. They don't use a sophisticated software in their underwriting. So I think we could dismiss that because some people would be listening. Well, you know, yeah, if I had a great underwriting tool, if I can underwrite these deals better, which means I have to mention our dealer friend, Tommy Brandes from Pennsylvania. I've known Tommy's been a dealer for thirty plus years. And Tommy is one of these folks who says, kind of to the point of what we're talking about today, is you can structure the deal right in terms of down payment, length of contract, payment amount. You can underwrite the deal based on the customer as well as possible. But if you don't have the collections team kind of dialed in, or you don't have a solution and a system and a good mechanism working on the collection side, obviously you're going to have a much higher default rate. You can't support the customer and solve these problems. on the collection side. And so I think it's important for folks to understand Kristen and their team do not have a super sophisticated underwriting system. They have a consistent one. They follow the same method that they've used forever in making those decisions. And so I think consistency is going to be job one on the underwriting side. And then when you move into the collection side, one of the things you kind of touched on that I picked up on is flexibility. Like this idea that, you know, we talk about being friendly but firm. but you're also going to be flexible and creative in solving problems. And I think this is another area where collectors can take it personally. We've seen dealers who really want super low delinquency and it kind of becomes personal and they can become a little hard on the customer. So I think that idea of partial payments and flexibility is something that we also want to talk about. Like, how did that even come about with you guys? And by the way, I know you told me that you started in collections before you were you know, a general manager. You really started collections and quite enjoyed it. So feel free to kind of work that into your answer. Yeah. Yeah. So I came from a sales background, so it was just a natural. And that's kind of when we kind of discovered that that was a good piece of the puzzle because I still had all that sales in me and to get the customer to like me and to talk to me. But as far as like Partial payments, things like that. So we have always gauged our success by three things, our write offs, our recency and our delinquency. So if our delinquency is a little bit higher, like for us, seventeen percent is high delinquency. But I look at my recency number and I see over at ninety six, ninety seven, ninety eight recency. I don't look at it as partial payments being a bad thing that tells me okay there's a lot of people behind but they're all paying and that's super important so we just got to keep that momentum to keep them paying um so we don't look at partial payments as a negative thing um and so we use the partial payments a lot as far as if someone's maybe has a garnishment or if they were short on hours uh it's like okay so your paycheck is fifty percent less. Can you pay half of your car payment? We'll catch you up the next week. So just to kind of keep that to try not to build up too much of a positive balance. And their willingness to make partial payments goes a long way with us. You know, they're willing. When people stop paying, that's kind of a problem. But if they're willing to just do partial payments to us, that's a good sign. And so it's just kind of something that we've kind of just always done because we really watch that recency. When recency goes down, that's when it's a little bit alarming. We monitor that number so much more than we do delinquency. Good. Explain why. Because with the recency, that tells you, ninety-eight percent of your customers are paying. They're on arrangements, maybe they had a little hiccup. But when your recencies get lower and lower, your customers aren't paying. Now you got to play catch up and get people back to paying. Even though we got a high delinquency, They're on arrangements. They're on the right track. Eventually, it's going to balance out to where those delinquencies will go down in time as their arrangements come through. But we watch that recency because that tells us people are paying. And so when that drops, that's what's alarming. We don't care that someone's behind necessarily as long as they're paying. We just want to keep them paying. That's kind of our mission. Just keep the customer paying. So if by chance we do get it back in a repossession, we're close to the green or well in the green. So that's kind of our philosophy is just do what we can to keep the customer paying. And it's, you know, that recency is like a measurement of how how active they are in their account. And so, yeah. And it's a really good collection tool for us too. If somebody's behind, we just say, hey, you know, you don't have any activity on your account. Can we just get something on there? Because we don't like to see thirty days without any activity. So that's kind of how we word it. Just so that way they're trying. There is activity on the account and it's a good collection tool to be like, we'll still work with you. We just got to give us a little something to just show some activity on your account. And they usually do. Yeah. So, you know, we're always mindful on the morning show that, you know, it goes out on YouTube and anybody can listen to it, including collectors. So I don't want to be too specific. And customers. Yeah. I think it's important to think about how can you share with us a little bit about how your compensation works in the collections team? Like, again, not too specific, but do you have incentives in certain areas? So there's a base salary and then With delinquencies, there's an hourly bump per week if delinquencies that week are under fifteen percent. And then there's a higher bump if delinquencies are under thirteen percent. Same with recency. There's an hourly bump for the week. So we want her every week. If we're at ninety six percent recency, there's a pay bump per hour and at ninety eight percent or higher, there's a bigger pay bump. Then once a month, there's a bonus if there's no new repossessions added. And then there's a bigger bonus if the write offs that month were three fourths of a percent of our portfolio. So the right. So our net write off needs to be less than three fourths of a percent of our portfolio. Wow. So I think you told me about a year ago that you were twelve. So it must be about thirteen years in your in your work. Yeah. So the I'm going to guess because you touched on something significant there in the thirteen years that you've been there, there probably has not been a week go by that you didn't have those weekly numbers that you mentioned delinquency. Right. It's a weekly focus. It's really daily, but you have a measuring stick that every week is a kind of a barometer on where you're at. And I think that that's important, looking at both delinquency and recency, having it in the pay plan, because it does reward flexibility, which I think is an important thing that we want, especially with people that are newer to buy your payer collections, lease your payer same. It's like, if you're newer to that, You might be inclined to reward delinquency only. We know a lot of dealers who look at delinquency kind of exclusively. And I think that's dangerous because it doesn't tell the entire story and it kind of penalizes your team for cooperating with people and doing what you're describing, which is keep the customer paying, you know, they would, a collector would suffer on delinquency bonus if they allowed partial payments right and so we important to kind of recognize that but I think again going back to just kind of philosophy and approach I think what I'm what I've heard and maybe michelle you you can pick up some more here and just trying to help our listeners think about what is the approach that you bring I've heard you know cooperation I've heard you you know sell yourself and have something of a relationship with a customer which begs the question about how do you guys approach uh autopay do you have a fair number of customers on autopay we have a very high percentage of auto pay it's really funny actually back when brad was in twenty group back in the nineties his best idea time if anyone's familiar with twenty group there's idea time and his idea time was putting all the customers on auto pay and everybody thought that was just insane like it was just uh outlandish to not see the customer so he was a little bit ahead of his time but we've always had a very high ach penetration usually like, ninety percent or higher. We very rarely have cash customers. So that's also been a huge part of our success is the very high penetration of automatic payments. Right. And is that part of your sales process is to get them set up on the automatic payments as well? Yeah. So it's not even an ask. We just say, do you want to do checking and routing or debit card for your payment? So it's not even now there will be some people like, I don't want to do that. And then we have to respect that. But usually just saying, here's the ACH and then People just, they're down, you know, it's good to go. You know, when we talk about White Hat Way, one of the things besides being approachable and, you know, working with people is being very clear in understandings. And so one of the things that I noticed in your notes, it's in the notes, we're take notes, notes, notes, notes, notes, notes. And that most DMSs really allow you to do a lot of notes on an account. And then making sure that if you've got someone else handling a batch of customers, that they are reading the notes. So they're kind of familiar. Sometimes we get excited and don't go back to just take a quick look at something. And then like the one gallus that was calling on the first day, And you probably had some notes in there, what their pattern is. But talk to us a little bit about how you make sure that your understandings are very clear with your customers. You mean as far as how we note the account? Um, so we just pretty much note the accounts verbatim, you know, even as small as like when we call and text a customer and there's no response, we note that because when they're upset about something, it's like, Mr. Customer, I have. Ten days of notes where we called in text, called in text, and you have not responded to us like we've been trying to get a hold of you. So that's super important just to show that we've been trying to get a hold of you. And then customers don't like inconsistency. They don't like having to call and talk to somebody else, and the person doesn't know what's happening with their account. It really frustrates them. We try to be as specific as possible. It's, you know, customer called in, they're paying fifty dollars today. Next week, they're going to pay an extra fifty. So we'll note the account. And then Frazier allows us to do a special message. So as soon as their account pops up, that's in the forefront customers to pay X amount on such and such date. So we it's very specific. Everything that we talked about is in there. So that way there's no confusion. so do I gather that you don't have like if I'm on your collection team I don't have a certain portfolio that are my customers do I work the entire portfolio if I work with you guys yes okay so I could speak to any customer at any time and you said you work pretty um intensely the one days two days like it's it's for one day late so if I'm a collector I'm going to be working that entire queue if you will of one day late customers so I I'll speak to any customer at any time again I don't have my pool or my portfolio contract right that's important because it's a it really goes to approach And it goes to kind of your system. And again, the kind of the procedural parts of this. And I think that allows you to have consistency in the way that, you know, people work accounts. And then I think, you know, we should probably let Kristen get back, but I did want to talk a little bit about how do you handle, because I know you've seen it where collectors start to take the job personally, right? It starts because you do build a bit of a relationship with the customer and you get frustrated when they don't follow through on their promises. So how do you manage that part with your team? Um, it happens and it's just reminding them the customer is not the enemy and reminding them too, that they're doing everything that they can. Cause that's kind of something that we've experienced recently. is she just kind of feels like she's hitting a wall and so I went through every single past due account with her it was two pages worth you know whether they're on arrangement or not and I'm like you're doing all the right things I'm like I'm not alarmed by anything that I'm seeing so you know having someone to review those and just make sure that you're on the right track is a bit refreshing and so she could just kind of take a step back like okay I'm not doing anything wrong It's not me. I'm like, your accounts are fine. You've got these arrangements. You've got some due date changes. Like everything's fine. But just really reminding them that we're here to help the customer, you know, be their champion, be on their side. And so that's just super important. Just remember, like, this is what we do. This is what we're here for. That's why you're in the position because you are the most qualified to help these people. You're in the right spot. This is just what we do. And they're not the enemy. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I love that you, that you, uh, um, it's not punitive. It's like that you might be feeling that way, but it's like, let's look at all the good things. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because, um, know people everybody has bad days and collectors and all of that and and you know you just it's it's learning through experience and through different uh classes courses all of that and also through having um a good lead leader to just have those conversations and, and, and be, you know, you as a leader are not just an advocate for your customer. You're an advocate for your team. Yeah. And so it's like, yeah, you're doing a good job. And, and I know one of the things just in your team, um, culturally you that, that, um, Brad and it's Brad. Yeah. Okay. Um, that there is a deep culture of support for all of your team. And so they feel appreciated, and they feel supported. And I've been in a lot of respect for what you and Brad have created with your teams, where even just when the economy was getting really bad, Brad's like, I know groceries are tight. Here's some extra money for food. Exactly. To be able to help. So, you know, it does, just like we want our customers to feel like they, that we're approachable, we're being neighborly, we're their neighbors, that we're here to help. It's so important too within, you know, most people listening would be dealers, is that you have that same culture cultivated in your team. Is that you're approachable and that you are neighborly and you do care. Yep. I think the other thing I heard from that, Kristen, is you guys do appreciate your customers and you respect your customers. I do want to caution listeners because I know when we've had some of the stuff we shared in the past, we've had dealers kind of chime in and act like, you know some small town in iowa is different and I just want to make sure that people know when they hear this no you it's important that people recognize these practices that kristen describes they're going to pay dividends in any market anywhere and with any customer base. And so I think it's important to not dismiss that and recognize that these practices that we're talking about, this philosophy and approach is going to pay dividends. Is it an investment that we make? Does it take a little more hours from our team to be advocates and help the customer talk through their stuff? It does. Is it a worthwhile investment? I think when you see Kristen's charge off numbers, you'll say, yeah, it's a worthwhile investment. yeah yeah it drives me nuts when I've worked in customer service and and you you know you you dive into some of the bigger companies it's like you've got thirty seconds to get the problem solved and be on the next call and and I just it's we have the opportunity in buying your pay here to really it's not a punitive thing to take time to develop a relationship it's an important part of what we do oh can you hear me yeah we can okay I think that we are. Yeah, we can wrap up. I know. I know Kristen's got to probably go help the team shovel snow. You guys got some snow there overnight. Yeah. Yeah. I'm with you, sister. Thank you so much for joining. We really appreciate you being so willing to share what works well for you guys. You and your entire team, Brad, have been just so supportive and and helping share that with other dealers. So if you wanted to stick around for just a second, we're going to close out the podcast so we can say a proper goodbye. Sounds good. All right. All right. Okay. Good stuff. Like it's just, it's always challenging when you talk about things that are a little more intangible, you know, it's part of what we do with what at ways talk about some of these intangibles because they're, they're just as relevant. They're just harder to identify. But I think there were a lot of things that you heard Kristen talk about there that are there. They're very significant elements of their success. And I think it's not all things that you can measure on a piece of paper. So it's just important to just before we wrap up, George is like all buyer payer dealers are small town lenders. And if we can remember that it's no matter what size or town they're in. And then Karen, hey karen thanks again um just like great episode yeah and I think the other thing that we always say is look these are human beings that you're working with regardless of your market you know that I think these are human elements that we're talking about and so this is uh an important thing to recognize all right well it's wednesday and we are um Absolutely. Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking the time. And if you have any questions or want to be able to reach out to us and ask questions, reach out to us and we can get you guys contacted. Again, thanks so much for making this part of your Wednesday. And we will see you in a couple of days.
