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, everybody. It is Friday, and it's the day after the 4th of July, Independence Day. And, you know, which is like everybody, well, not everybody, most people are with family. Yeah. or and or neighborhood things and um so you know our our uh sleepy little bedroom community kind of um it's it gets really loud and and we uh we I we've kind of told you before that we've got this really just amazing view of the whole valley we live in um in the ogden area north ogden and it's utah utah and uh we sat and you know we didn't do fireworks ourselves and it was just the two of us because we're getting over covid and and all of my children um who live in the area were a hard no yeah and for those those who were tuned in earlier michelle has regained her sense of taste and smell I did I did I it the trippiest thing ever to not be able to, to taste anything. So, but, but we were just, you know, we sat on our upper deck cause it's a little bit above the, some other tree line. And I swear to you, there had to have been a thousand different fireworks displays that were going on all around us. And, and one of the things that we were, we were like, just reflecting on when we had kids and we were little, you got like the, the stuff that sat on the ground that, you know, might've sprayed up 15 feet, you know, and this was a lot, but today I, people are buying the stuff that you see at the city displays. It's just, it's crazy. Yeah. And, um, so it was just like these massive people. We actually sat on the, and just observed across the Valley. Cause we can kind of see, we have a little bit of elevation at our spot. And so you kind of see out across the Valley and yeah, I mean the number of just between home fireworks and then all the cities that we're doing, you know, all their different, it was incredible to see. And I, I gotta say Anna Maria Beck apparently put out a shout out or, you know, we did take video, but we won't share it Adam. No, I'm not. I might share it. I'm just saying, Anna Maria, I might share it and tag you. She's like, no one wants to see your video of fireworks displays. No one wants to. And then one of our friends pipes in and he goes, what if it's from the Magic Kingdom? It's like, still, no one wants to see your fireworks displays. Well, Anna Maria, that's why they created the unfollow button. That's why, you know, you can unfollow if you don't like my fireworks. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. So, yeah. So it's Friday, which yesterday, because it felt like it was a holiday. It felt like it was already the weekend this morning. Jim's like, we've got a podcast. It's like, no, we don't. Yes, we do. And we have a guest today. And so, you know, Michelle's like, it just, you, you get your mind in that. It's, it's a weekend and it's, you know, but it's not. So it's kind of like a, it's like a long, long weekend with a little reprieve or a little, a little, you know, we're going to check in with work and. Yeah. It seemed quiet around the, like Michelle and I have our coffee outside on the patio often. And it sounded like the city was pretty quiet this morning. A lot of people probably not going in for work on a Friday, but yeah, Um, before we bring in our guests, I would a quick announcement. Our, uh, our numbers are coming in on our, with the first month I've done what I call a quick look with our V8 groups. And so I sent out a little short two question thing and they sent in their numbers. And so I was able to turn around those numbers this morning. And it's interesting to see, like the reason I did the quick look is like, I wanted to be able to have people get a feel right away. And it looked like, um, month over month, at least of the dealers who I have data from both months, a month over month, the, their volume was down 19%. over may and again this is a small sampling right it's just the people that I have um who submitted the thing and who I also have for may so most of them but um and then they're they're down payments were down about eight percent those are the only two questions I sent or requested so just a kind of a quick look at what happened I mean june versus may I again married into buy here pay here uh doesn't it just kind of do this I'll Um, yeah, we can ask our guests. He's got tons of experience around this too, but it's been my experience that once you get past tax refund season, it's kind of steady into, excuse me, into October. Uh, you know, it's, and then it'll get slow in the holidays, but, but you know, it's like, it's kind of going to be steady, I think. Ready? Yep. All right. Let's bring in Mr. Tracy Myers. Good morning, Mr. Tracy Myers. Hey, good morning. It actually feels like a Monday to me. Does it? Are you going to be working tomorrow? No. Oh, yeah. We're car people, right? On the retail side, that's what we do. Yeah, that's true. So I want to first find out, you know, we've known about you and everybody talks about how, you know, dynamic you got a lot of charisma and you guys do some really great things on social media and have a lot of fun with events and do a really nice job on the marketing side. And so I wanted to first find out, like, how much of your business is buy here, pay here? And you also do some retail sales? How's the mix? Yep, that's a good question. So we actually started in retail and we got into buy here, pay here. When we were looking for, I say we, but my father, I bought this from him in 06. My great grandfather started the first Frank Meyer store 103 years ago. Oh, wow. Oh, my goodness. You and Gordy probably have a lot of things to share. We do, actually. We do. Yep. Love him. But when we were looking for a way to gain market share, we realized that it's really tough to compete with the new car dealer. So how do we do that? The answer is in our space, you don't. So we went to subprime special finance and then we realized there's a segment in deep subprime, deep special finance. And they're just they're close cousins. They're one one paycheck away from being a buy here, pay here dealer. And I guess that's been 30 some years ago now. And we made a transition to lease your pay here. But for all intents and purposes of our conversation, we'll just stay in the buy here, pay here lane. But other tax advantages and a few other things, it's still buy here, pay here. you market the same thing. But to answer your question directly, we do a mix at our original store and it will sell 115 cars here. We'll do 80 to 85 retail and the rest will be lease your pay here. And we have two standalone lease your pay here stores and they're about 50 units each. So I want to make sure, because I missed part of what you said. Do you do both buy here, pay here, and lease here, pay here? We made a transition about a year ago. Gotcha. How has that been for you? Because, you know, that's something that we understand lease here, pay here pretty well. They are very similar except tax structure and who actually owns the car, that kind of stuff. But, I mean, you know, the processes are pretty similar, aren't they? Processes are the same. The customer is the same. The car is the same, ACV. collections, which is the important part. And on that end, of course, and you know this as well as anybody, if you can't collect the money, it doesn't matter because you can sell yourself out of business and buy your pay here or lease your pay here. So yes, it's exactly the same except on the business structure side. Right. Yeah. And to that point, we just one of the things we've been doing, we kicked off in January, something we call V8, which is virtual peer groups. And in our peer groups, we took a run at it because I'm not very smart, Tracy. I thought I'm going to try putting buy here, pay here and lease here, pay here in the same group. it's working it's working fine you know they got to adapt a little bit to to kind of make to make everybody line up apples to apples but yeah it's quite similar right so anyway glad to hear about that so I also want to hear about this event you got this cool event coming up and I'm I'm learning as we spoke before the broadcast started you've been doing this for 11 years now this uh mastermind event and a dealer told us about it like last year and said man I can't get it it was longer longer than that that was back when we lived in florida was it? It was. Cause I think that we went to dinner with Greg and his wife. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Greg is, Greg is awesome. Yep. And Greg's the guy. At the end of the event, we opened the floor. Anybody have questions, comments? Greg said, yeah, can we do this like three or four times a year so we don't have to have a 20 group? And I'm like, brother, this is a lot of work. We have jobs. But anyway, Greg's a great guy. But we, being Troy Spring and myself, we started this. We were at a conference yesterday. And look, we've all been to hundreds of events, right? We take time away from businesses, our families, and any commitments that we have to travel. For us on the East Coast, it's usually cross country. Occasionally we'll get Florida or Texas, but it's usually on the left coast, right? So you're making the long flight, you're booking in a tourist town, so everything's more expensive. And I don't have an issue with any of that because I believe in education. but we're sitting through about the second or third session of the day. And I look at Troy and I'm like, man, there's got to be a better way to do this because all we've heard so far is just pitch after pitch after pitch from vendors. Yeah. Now they were, cleverly disguised pitches and we're all salespeople and I can really appreciate that. But there still had to be a different way. So I had been to mastermind group meetings in the marketing space before, not automotive related, because I'm also an advocate of stepping outside of our space and learning from other industries and bringing things from other industries inside to ours. And I've learned as much doing that as I have from automotive conferences yeah but that being said I i had witnessed mastermind events and participated in those in marketing groups before and I said that may be something we can do the hardest part of that when we started this the conversation was 12 years ago well 13 actually we skipped a year for coven um but so 12 years ago when we had the first event or was we were planning that first event is people say what's a mastermind group And we're like, yeah, that's a great question. And you try to explain it. And unless you experience it, it's one of those things, it's really difficult to put it into words what it is. We've gotten better at it, but we're still not that good at it because we're so accustomed to traditional conferences and conventions and talking heads. And once again, nothing wrong with that. But it's the same old, same old. You can dress it up and put lipstick on it, but it's still the same. Yeah, the mastermind group meeting. So we have dealers or actually we have everyone in the dealer space. So we can have everyone say from porters to dealer principals. They come in, sit at round tables. They bring up the topic. So at the very beginning of the mastermind group meetings, we say, look, what are your pain points? And we're going to write those on the whiteboard. There's usually about 30 topics. We generally get to about six. We're just conduits. We conduct the conversation and the dealers pass around best ideas. So it's a big, long best idea session, which still isn't an accurate way to describe it. But if you've been in a 20 group meeting, a proper 20 group meeting, they have those. And that's always been my favorite part. The composites necessary, but it's not very sexy. The idea of meeting, man, that gets me excited to go back to the dealership and implement. And that's really what that is. And we say, well, we don't know everything. So if they have questions and we can't communicate with them and give them the answers they need, how do we fix that? Because that was our pain point after the first meeting. So we said, what we need is we need one expert in that space, in each space, right? So CRM, BDC, phones, sales, go down the board. Now we've got AI text conversations at this upcoming one. That always changes as well. So there's one person that we vet from... from one vendor space. And we've turned down as many as we've accepted, by the way. So if they say, hey, I've got a problem setting up or my BDC is losing money. And we've heard that a lot, actually. If you don't set them up properly, they can be money pits. We can say, look, we've got an expert in the room right over there and they can contribute to the conversation. Right. And sometimes the conversations, the topics, the pain points, we have conversations that last seven or eight minutes. And sometimes we'll go from 930 until lunch. It grows and it morphs and it adapts. And we're talking about something else at the end of the conversation than where we started. But that's the beauty of the mastermind. Yeah. So are you doing everybody in one room typically is what I'm hearing? Yeah. They never leave the room. There's no breakout sessions. It all happens in one room. Yeah. Sounds fantastic. Yeah. And like I say, dealers have really enjoyed that. And so, yeah, it's definitely a reason. So now the other thing you do that, because I see that the conference runs two and a half days or something, but do you guys do your mastermind just on one day or how does that part work? We do. Mastermind's August 1st. It kicks off on August 1st. And the CIADA conference, which is North and South Carolina, we partnered with them right after COVID because we didn't have a home. We lost our hotel facility. We could have regained it, but all the prices went up. We were wondering if it made sense anymore. If anybody even wanted it. So we were kind of stepping, putting our toe back in the water and went to the executive director at the CIA, John Brown. And I said, look, there's, and this is just my, my take on things. From my observation, there seems to be one to 3% of dealers at any convention or conference. And they they're the deep divers. They want as much information as possible during every session. They're taking lots of notes or asking lots of questions. They like to be uncomfortable and the rest are there. They get what they get. They learn. They don't implement a lot. And that's part of the process. And there's nothing wrong with that to each their own. But we wanted to serve that one to three percent. It's no different to Carolina. So I told John, I said, what if we brought the mastermind group? We kicked off the session. We can partner or not, but we could at least use your space and we can serve that one to three percent. And maybe we could bring some more dealers over to your space because we have dealers that were traveling cross country and they could stay for the ADA. And he said, well, year one, and to his credit, he's very smart about it because I would have done the same thing. He said, let's not partner year one because we don't know what, we know you, what you bring to the association but we don't know what this meeting's about so we've used the space we'll be completely separate and then we'll see how that goes yeah and at the end of the first day he walked up to him and he says we're doing this again next year right yeah yeah absolutely so they've been partners ever since yeah they uh he and the rest of the association really believes in what we do and what we bring to the table because we're here to educate Absolutely. Yep. I wonder, you've been doing this a long time, and I've talked about that at these conferences, I kind of see a pattern. I wonder if you share the viewpoint. You talk about that 1% to 3%. Do you also see that same 1% to 3% that are often the ones at the front of the room with the clipboard, do you see a correlation between their level of success? I find that those dealers are amongst the most successful, the ones that are still at the conferences, still acting like they don't have it all figured out, right? And that's kind of been my observation. Of course. Absolutely. And it's always like that. The ones that will call me. When I got back from NIDA a few weeks ago, and time flies. It's crazy when you get older. Time is weird. It drags when you're younger. It flies when you're older. When I got back, I had seven or eight dealers that had made a point to find me and communicate with me. And now they're talking to me and they're asking me all these questions and And which is flattering, but I don't charge for that. And, you know, why they're seeking me out is the same reason I saw people out when I was a young dealer. My dad always said, look, find people who are where you want to be and do what they do and let them become your mentors and call them and call them and call them until they take your call and apologize up front for taking their time and say, look, I just want to be where you're at. I want to learn what you know. And I don't know that I've ever met anyone in any space really once you got in front of them or you got them on the phone where they wouldn't get back to you. they're really flattered by that. And I am too. So, and I feel like that's the least I can do in automotive because it's paid all my adult bills and all my families for that matter, for generations. Sure. I don't want to miss the opportunity to learn a little bit from you about your view on marketing, especially as it relates to our buy here, pay here, lease here, pay here space. Like what is, what is generally your approach to marketing out there? If you just had a couple of minutes with somebody, I mean, what would you think they ought to know if they're getting into buy here, pay here for the first time? Yeah, well, that's a really good question. Most of the most of the folks I see that get in and they're from a new car store or traditional retail, and we made this mistake as well, is they're not selling programs or trying to sell cars. And if they go to the website and like if a dealer calls me, say, can you help me? Leads are down. Nobody's communicating. Our website's broken. The provider really stinks. I need to switch websites, whatever. They're all the same answer, by the way. Usually I go to the website. It's OK. You got you got 38 Chevy Cruzes. yeah listed in inventory and there's no story no one's shopping for a chevy cruz no and all due respect to chevy cruz yeah you understand this right so I say look you you learn you have to develop as my dad called it down the road motors you have to learn to tell a story I want a tahoe great, I can show you how to get a Tahoe, but here's where you start and here's how you get to where you're going. I think that's why we've been so successful, even in the special finance subprime space, because it's exactly the same. Yep. People still, you know, appreciate a story and they appreciate being educated about how the process works. And as long as it's not too like over the top educational, but they, you know, they, they, you know, walking into something that they, they don't really know what to expect. That can be kind of scary. And then you already have your walls up and you already, you know, it's, it changes the dynamic of the conversation, but if they've already seen through your marketing, there's a process, these are the things, this is the stuff and they're prepared and their walls are down and they're a lot more willing to sit and have those conversations with you. Oh, absolutely. And we share that whether they have, and we have some 800 credit scores that come in, people with good credit that buy here for generations. Some of them we helped establish that 800 credit score years ago. And some, they just come in because we have a nice vehicle on the website or they're driving by and they said, let me see what they got. But the story doesn't really change. Our process doesn't really change. Do we need to adapt and we need to flow? Absolutely. Because some people, as we know, customers like to take your process to the end of the process. So if your process is A to Z, I tell myself, people, look, they may take you to Z. You go to Z, but then you always have to take it back to A. Always have to take it back to A because they skipped all those steps. Right. You're trained to do. And they're also trained to buy cars or shop for cars a certain way. And our process is, we say, look, that's the way most dealerships do it. We make that a positive, right? We don't do it that way because we feel it wastes your time. If you're going to buy a house, what's the first thing they do unless you're a multi-billionaire? You get pre-qualified for a home loan, right? And then you go shopping for a home that falls into what they approved you for. It's not the other way around. We think that's the right way to buy a car. So that's, yeah, that's what we train. And that's worked for us for a long time. Do we have, we call them one percenters that, balk on it? Absolutely. They're switched over to a manager or the owner immediately. You don't try to shove the process down the throat. If you listen to the way we do things, it actually sounds like that's the way it should be done. I don't know if you're Android or Apple folks. You have such a great question. Android or Apple? We're a split family. I am too. So, but do you remember who's the Apple person? Okay. Do you remember the first time you tried to use an Apple product? um it was complicated yeah not the phone as much but like my laptop right once once you get off of yeah it goes backwards right yeah but when you figure out where that button is or that it's like oh my god that's where it should be everywhere because it makes more sense right when you retrain your brain I see I really like you thank you This is not going my direction over here. Look, my dad and my brother, every time they see me, my wife and I with our iPhone, they're like, you know, so I'm like, okay, it's your fault. See, I can't change now, Tracy, because it's got to become, it's kind of become part of my identity. Like I'm so, I'm so rooted in, you know, got to be Android. I could squirrel. I'm not going to. But yeah, I think, you know, when I hear you talk about that, it's so fascinating to me. Like we didn't tell our viewers, most folks probably know that you're in North Carolina, right? Is where dealerships are located. And so some folks might be able to pick up the accent there. But I think that one of the things we talk about and when we travel and do coaching and meet new people, we say, you know, because they'll try to tell us, you know, Jim, what you might not understand is our customers around here are just different. And I think, you know what? They're really probably not different. Yeah. No, these customers in North Carolina or some guy in Texas, the customers kind of want the same thing. And I think what I'm hearing you say on the marketing side is when you can tell a story that says, you know, your your your journey, your experience starts here and it'll end here and you might have a little fun along the way. That's way more fun to sell than a used car. You know, and so I think it's just kind of. Well, that's what I'm hearing you touch on is like it's a it's a it's a way for us to introduce people that, you know, these are human beings that we're financing. And if we can have a little fun with them and have them, you know, get to where they enjoy doing business with us, that's a win. I have a question for you. And this is, you know, we since started, I'm married and buy here, pay here, have different background. And one of the early conferences that we did, we talked about how buy here, pay here is like a chicken sandwich. And that was the topic. And it was about Chick-fil-A and why is it that people will pass all the other chicken places to get to Chick-fil-A? That's the thing that we should be looking at and trying to emulate, trying to copy. And so one of the things that came up an awful lot during that conversation was we just, how do we connect? I mean, it used to be that they would come in every week or every other week and they'd bring in their money, their cash, and you would have that quick connection with them. How are the things and what's the stuff? And you'd get a quick visual on the car and all of that. How are you staying connected with your customer in this age that AC is? Yeah. Where nobody wants to be connected, right? Or they want to be connected by devices, which is more difficult. Well, look, I think we've lost the opportunity to stay connected to the car. I'm a glass half full person, but the days when my dad started the buy here, pay here side, and we would have someone go outside and walk around the car. Those days are almost gone because everything else has conditioned them to not connect. There's some positives to that. The positives is we can do text messages. We know from data that text messages, they all get read. always whether they respond or not it's a different thing altogether but we know that we can communicate that way okay the thing that we have we have done and done successfully and we think that people uh still can do uh even though that that expense keeps going up I think it's super important um two things one the community events like we host here at the store we have community appreciation picnics not customer appreciation picnics but community appreciation picnics which our customers always show up for sure because we shut the store down and have rides and free food and they're coming, right? Are you selling cars during this? We do. Yeah. But we also can keep connected with the customer. We have trunk or treats. So once a quarter, we have events like that, that bring in people, not only from the community and say, man, this is a pretty cool place, whether I buy a car here or not, Or our customers are always coming because they know us. These are people we go to church with. We meet in the mall. You think I've gone to the mall. You know, see, I just dated myself. We've seen him at Chick-fil-A. That's a better. I was a mall rat at one time. I went to the mall the other day. I was like, this is so sad. But things that tend to go by the wayside. that at once upon a time became oversaturated like snail mail. I used to love snail mail, right? When I got something with my name on it that was personalized, I said, man, this is the greatest thing ever. But I'm from a different generation, but there also used to be a stack of mail in my mailbox like this because I'm a business owner, just stuff, right? Now there's nothing in the mailbox. So think about going back to snail mail for your customer. Thank you. Thank you. We get more responses from our snail mail than anything. Don't actually call and say, hey, this in the mail I've I've um I've been doing some research and I was like jim I think we need to talk to people about doing inserts or doing you know a postcard or something in their mailbox because people nowadays again it's not that thick but if you if you've got a story on a postcard that connects and they can throw it up on their, on their refrigerator or whatever. And it's, or however, thank you. And I, so you're finding success with this. Oh, actually a lot of success. Thank you. Thank you. And everyone is, and I, it's not that I don't think that social media is important, but if you really want to target someone, and target your community and target the new generation. They all have a mailbox. They've all got a mailbox. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind. Well, and look, a positive for us as well. It also lets you know if they're accepting mail at that mailbox, which if they don't, it could mean that they're not at that address anymore. That could be a win-win, but that's not why we do it. But we found kind of the residual effect by sending that out. So we're doing newsletters every month. uh and that got a little pricey but we look at the return or the communication which is what we need from our customer base especially I think in the buy here pay here at least your pay your business um the communication became uh more than we had had in years sure they could actually call and say oh my god I got this was so nice this was a surprise I'm like I didn't know you still had a phone because you haven't called us in some of them yeah So happy to hear that that has been successful to you because that's, I mean, that's been something that I've just been looking into and, and like connecting dots. It's like, it makes sense. I like the mailer idea. I really am fond of a door dash insert, but when I don't think anybody's done that. We'll see how that goes. But otherwise, I think, yeah, I think that's good stuff. You've touched on some of the things that we felt like were probably part of how you guys have built a, you know, a longstanding business. There's a lot of goodwill I hear you talk about that's wrapped up in what you do. And that's about community engagement and community. And keeping engaged with the customer base that you already have and kind of keeping them, you know, I call it sticky, that customer who's going to stick around and do business with you for a long time. And so I heard you talk about that, you know, you got generational customers and that's. I love that you have a program. that anyone I mean you can work your way through and work your way up and whatever into a more expensive car or whatever because their credit you've helped them be able to see I take it that you have like a credit repair program or is it just that or do you report So I looked into credit repair programs, and there's some good ones out there. But I found out that the best way to repair your credit is to make your car payment on time. But you have to report that, though. We do, and we do. So you're right. And we tell them. And some people are scared. They're like, well, what if I don't? Well, then you're not going to anyway. I mean, and we say this respectfully, sometimes it's not going to get much worse because we see multiple repos and sometimes life happens and they're just in the way. So I'm hearing that you take people that have had multiple repos. Oh, sure. Okay. And that's like, well, maybe not with all dealers. But you know, if you've had like first time buyers, first time buyers with banks and I went to the finance company convention, everything's got a convention these days. And I asked the question, why aren't there more first time buyer programs? And this wasn't for automotive. This was just lenders in general, but same space, right? And they're like first time buyers have the highest default rate of any customer. that's on their books. So that makes a lot of sense to me because sadly with once again, showing my age here, but with the 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, maybe up to 25 years old that I'm seeing now, man, my dad, he was showing me how to write checks at 12 and 13 years old and showing me budgets and the importance of paying the bills and don't, don't use a credit card unless you have to use a credit card, things like that. And, Man, it sounds really bad, but I know a lot of parents aren't teaching that. I'm not going to put everybody into the same. I don't hear it because I like to hire for our sales staff. I like to hire young people right out of high school, right out of college. Bad habits. They're big eyed, bushy tailed. They're full of energy and ready to change the world. And so we can show them our processes and teach them our belief system. and they can communicate that to the customer well. So to someone who's been in the car business and they've been beat up by some sales manager for 30 years, and that's really tough to change that. We're therapists as it is with our customers. It's really difficult to be therapists with our team members as well, which we can do that, but it gets really tough. But when I talk to the 18 to 25 year olds, and take the checkbook out of the equation because those are, you know, nobody uses checks anymore except for me, I think. And I'm not connecting my, I'm not connecting my checking account to any app either, by the way. Oh yeah. Yeah, no, no, forget that. But we have to understand that that's what most people are doing, 18 to 25. And a lot of their parents didn't teach them anything about budgeting, about credit. And while we aren't teaching these things in school, we're really doing a disservice to our young people. Yeah. And we spend a lot of time on education and we obviously work with dealers primarily, but we look forward to being able to extend some of our education to consumers because that is part of, you know, we see the same thing that you're describing there. But I don't want to forget to we want to. Learn a little bit more about the event. And by the way, I'll extend the invitation. You mentioned Troy Spring, who we don't know, but I would love to meet Troy and have a chance to bring Troy to the show as well. You know, I don't know if he operates in the buy here, pay here side or if he's retail or just what he does, but obviously he's welcome here if he wants to come over and have a conversation with us about your event as well. but I want to hear about your your involvement with wrestling you you're you do events and you're I think a partner maybe in a business that is uh yeah so this is pro wrestling that's what we call masala wrestling wrestling Hulk Hogan wrestling not collegiate Olympic wrestling right right uh yeah so we were talking about events earlier events or events are all the same pretty much And I remember when my dad, going back to my father, who, by the way, has been the best mentor. I've been very fortunate. Best mentor anyone could have that wanted to be an entrepreneur. He was tough. He's still tough. But when I was seven or eight, he knew that he wanted to teach me business. And I didn't care anything about the car business. I'm seven or eight, right? You don't like cars, but as we know, the car is the commodity. right even in on the retail side is the commodity uh and the first when I asked uh potential sales people you know why do you think you'd be good doing this I love cars they go to the bottom of my list right because that's not what we do yeah it just happens to be the end result of what we do nonetheless he knew that he would need to find something that I really enjoyed doing and I enjoy collecting baseball cards and comic books so he taught me business through baseball cards and comic books Sell low, sell high. Here's what it's worth. So if you buy it for a quarter, it's worth a dollar and you sell it 50 cents or seven, you know, just sell it for a little bit less and say, okay, I can do that. So my son turned, oh my gosh, he's 22 now. So eight years old, he loved wrestling. And I did too as a kid, right? So we connected over that as father and son, that was our thing. We'd go to all the wrestling events and, I got to thinking, well, he doesn't like baseball cards and comic books. It's time to start teaching business just like my dad did, right? Because we tend to pass these things down for better or worse, the good stuff and the bad stuff, right? But he liked wrestling. I said, okay, so I've got a car lot. How many wrestling events have you ever seen at a car lot, right? Here in the South, there's several. I don't know about where you're at, but that's a thing here, right? On a Saturday, they put the wrestling ring up and the local, your uncle that wants to be a wrestler. Oh, wow. I had a little training and they have their thing. Well, I said, I promoted events before you like wrestling. I'll show you. So I taught him as we were planning that I was teaching them business. We sold more tickets than I expected for the first one, and we got ready to have it two weeks before I canceled it because there was no way we could sell cars to the number of people that were coming to this event. So I rented the convention center and decided to have an event there. We were going to make it a fundraiser. The first year, we had 2,500 people there. Wow. And now the annual event, which is in November, we had 10,000 people there, which is annual. It's a three-day event from around the world. But we also have our monthly events, which lead up to that. So the stories, because storytelling, right, leads up to that November event, which is three days. And it's all for fundraising. But it also taught my son business and became a business by accident. So yeah, we travel in a two hour radius of where we're at. We'll go to local high schools and local convention centers and we'll do our event and we live stream it and pack the place. give some of the profits to charity. And so it's been a lot of fun. And now my son, he still likes wrestling, but he's not interested in that business at all anymore. And now he sells cars. So my duty has been served on that side, but it's a successful business. And, you know, we were talking about fishing a little bit before we went on the air. you know, I'm not good at it, but I like, I think we all need to be invested in something else other than what we do, because that's who we are if we're not very careful. And I think the car business, I think there's way more examples of that than there should be. This is who I am. That's not who I am. That's one of my roles in life, but it's not who I am. I'm a father, I'm a husband. I'm a, I'm an event promoter, but that I can check out and use a different space in my brain and Because even though it's all the people business, it's just a different space. It's nice once a month, even though it's not a one-day-a-month job. It's kind of like a school teacher saying, well, you only work part-time. You don't work summers. Sure they did. Right. They're working all the time. We're always planning those events, but you know, it became a nice little business and I'm, I'm selling cars. This is the unexpected residual effect. Some cars to as many wrestling fans that come to our shows to buy season tickets, which I didn't know, never expected that to be a thing that never knew we existed as a car dealership. So it's just more outreach and being involved in a different segment of the community because wrestling is a niche of a, of a niche. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting. It sounds to me like you've got a lot of your customers come from that niche. So there's a little overlap there. Yeah. Yeah. There really is. Fantastic. That's a fun story. And I love I love the you know, when you were a kid, your dad, the baseball cards and comic books and all of that. And I mean, who would have thought baseball cards and comic books would turn into comics? Pro wrestling. 10,000 people. 10,000 people being there. Yeah. I remember having the conversation with my wife and I'm like, you know, my dad, you remember I told you a story about my dad teaching me business with comic books and baseball cards. Oh, yeah. Well, what if I taught our son business with pro wrestling? I don't think you can do that. It's not the same. It's not a tangible. I said, yeah, but it's an event. I can do events. Events are easy. She said, okay. She's super supportive. Said if anybody can do it, you can do it. And so now 13 years later, here we are. I love it. I got to say, if I were if I were at your mastermind event, my hand would be up around, you know, can we get the thing on the board about how do I how do I not have my business be my identity? Like what you're talking about? Because we just see a lot of dealers that are kind of, you know, I call it tethered. They're kind of tethered to their business and don't think they can be away. And so this is part of what, you know, it's part of my work is to try to help them. gain some separation, move towards some sort of absenteeism, do some more fishing or, you know, wrestling events or whatever they're going to do. I think that's super important. And we see it, unfortunately, a lot. Look, even on the new car side, I've known a lot of guys that work for new car stores for 15, 16 years. New ownership change came in. They let everyone go. And, you know, that's when, of course, the unfortunate financial aspect came. takes place right of that that sometimes we don't think about because we're ingrained in something so deeply but relationship problems happen maybe substance abuse problems happen and I'm not saying that as a we think these things happen I've seen these things happen that's who they they internalize that they were I'm the general manager of this place right and when when that place wasn't part of them anymore They really felt like they lost something. And they did, but there's different ways to grieve that and mourn that. And look, that's a good thing. It's gone doesn't mean it was bad. It was a learning experience. It was just a season. And what can you do now that you can take what you learned? Yeah, absolutely. And listen, I didn't prepare you for this, but it's the 4th of July weekend, and I can see your patriotic hat in the background. If you can reach it, I think folks would love to see that. We've seen it in your social media spot. What if I give you an exclusive? Oh, I love this. I've got my brand new one that I had custom made. This has never been on television. Never, ever, ever. It's still on the box. I'm so excited. This is next level. Oh my gosh. That is amazing. I love it. Time to break it out. That's amazing. The others are a felt. This is the original. Sorry. Oh, no, you're totally good. Yeah. So this one is 30 years old. Outstanding. Love it. Yeah, don't fall. Well, I'm remodeling my office. So this one is, yeah, this is bad. But this one in the museum, I don't have a museum. There should be one. I can't get rid of it. The belt is literally coming apart at the seams. That's so good. I love it. I love it. That's like an official top hat kind of. Oh, no, no. Yeah, this was made by a top hat company. Correct. It's fantastic. Rebecca, and she, yeah, she's loved the hat. Loved the hat. So I can't, somehow it reminds me of, when I come out east, I want to find time to go, I'm supposed to go fishing with Mr. Tim Bird, who I'm sure you know. Yep, I know Tim well. And so I'd love to be able to spend some time fishing with you. And the big hat reminds me of the stories that I have to share about a guy named Lynn Hickey, who was a big Dodge dealer in Oklahoma City. Are you familiar with Lynn Hickey? I don't know Lynn. So no, he's long since passed, but the dealership has quite a story and I would love telling it because a lot of what I see, I saw him do from a marketing perspective and events is a lot like what I see with you. And there's some lessons there. That's like, it's just really fascinating. I think, uh, you know, folks, um, would want, would benefit from, uh, finding Tracy on social media, finding my, I'm connected to him over on LinkedIn and Facebook and he's kind of You can watch and see what he does in his business. And they have a lot of fun over there. And you can just tell that that's part of what attracts folks to their business. And so we enjoy watching what you do. Or it pushes people away. Yeah, we depend on who it is. That's okay. That's all right. Absolutely. I think the importance of marketing is to deal in the rule of thirds. Absolutely. trying to make everyone happy and you can't make everyone happy. So if your marketing is a third's going to love you, a third's going to hate you, a third don't, they don't know you exist. Then you can at least be successful in the marketing part. You have to have the three P's once they arrive, the people, the processes and the product. I love it. People, processes, and product. And I think to that point, I think our morning show, Tracy, would have a lot more viewers if I would quit showing up. Like if just Michelle was the thing, then I think we'd have a lot more viewership. No. Listen, we appreciate you making time to talk and wish you lots of success with your event. It's not too late for people to hop on a plane. We didn't talk about it, but I'm sure you don't have to be a member of the Carolinas Association to be part of it. No, absolutely not. That's why we do the one-day mastermind. You can come in. It's beachfront, so that's pretty awesome. You can pack an extra day ahead or in the rears and hit the beach, or you can stay for the C80. It doesn't matter. We have a lot of dealers coming in. It's one intense 10-hour day. Yeah. So, and if you don't like to be uncomfortable, this probably isn't, well, this probably is the event for you if you don't like it. Yeah. But we tell people just be prepared because you're, you're in the mix. You are the show. You're just, you know, it's not a lot of talking heads. We do have presenters to break up the mastermind groups, but it's your 15, 20 minute quick presentations. And then we get right back into it. So it's really special with this unfair advantage, mastermind.com. Yep. I love it. I love it. It sounds like it's quite an event. Yep. It's a lot of fun. We encourage dealers to get there, buy here, pay here, lease here, pay here. You ought to get there and get a chance to get plugged into that event. So again, Tracy, thanks for making time to sit in with us this morning. I'm sure there'll be plenty more appearances. We look forward to bringing the hat back. Absolutely. You've got the exclusive today, man. There it is. It's right there. It's so special. It's fantastic. Yeah. We're looking forward to having you again on the show in the future and, and hope that that's something that you would enjoy. Absolutely. Just let me know. Thank you guys. You too. If you don't mind sticking around for a second for a proper goodbye, but we can go ahead and wrap up the show. Thanks again, Tracy. Alrighty, I love the hat. I like it starts making me think, you know, we've we with white hat way, which is, for those of you who watch the show, every Wednesday is white hat Wednesday. And, and the logo for that is is a white cowboy hat. And there's lot of good story behind that as well that it just makes me feel like it's time for us to get our to get our hats it's inevitable that I know the white hats are part of our future right it's just I think to me it's kind of fun to just right now it's like just it's a it's a thing like it's it can all picture it right but yeah anyway we're having fun with it we'll get there and I think um yeah that's definitely a source of inspiration but Well, let me think here. Anything else before we go? Yeah, we just remind our fans to bring us updates of our drops on Monday. And then next Wednesday, we're going to roll the conversation that we had with Taylor Bird at the convention a couple weeks ago. So he's really interesting things that were part of that conversation. So I would invite people to tune in on the White Hat Wednesday. And then I think the following White Hat Wednesday, we will have the recording that we did with Gordy, who is Gordy Tremolin, who is the outgoing, or he is no longer the president of the board. That's, you only get a year. And now he's the chairman. So, you know, yeah, chairman of the board. We should have music cube for that. Oh, yeah. It'd be an awful lot of fun. Everybody, thank you so much for making this part of your Friday. We really appreciate the support. If there's anything that you would like to be able to hear us break down, talk about, whatever, discuss, feel free. Send us a note. And we hope you guys have a fantastic rest of your weekend. Thanks again so much. We really appreciate it.
