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, it's Friday! Welcome, y'all. Happy Friday. Yep, happy Friday. I just put my good microphone in here. Yeah. Yep, so glad to have you here, and glad to be winding down a busy week. Last night was my third V8 meeting of the week. It was a busy week for you, yeah. It was kind of a busy week for both of us for different reasons. Different reasons, yeah. Yep, for sure. It was a busy week. Yep. Michelle has kind of taken on a role as a caregiver with her brother, and so it's a beautiful opportunity. It's nice that... Yeah, again, if anyone has got family members with ALS, you know, just like it's sisterhood, brotherhood, whatever, it's a rough thing. And so just kind of had my brother here for the last week. He's going to be here for another week or so. His wife's business is just like really requiring a lot of time, a lot of her time right this second. And so I was like, let me give you a break. And lots of compassion for those that are living in the caregiving. And so just, yeah, it's... I just kind of have a lot of gratitude that I feel fortunate that we're in a position to be able to have the ability to do that, the space to be able to do that. And so, yeah, it's been... It's been an interesting experience and an eye-opening experience about what folks go through. Not just the person with the illness, but the family members. Well, and it's just watching and observing the emotional dynamics. Yeah. And the roller coasters and the, you know, I can only imagine what it feels like to not be able to adult care for yourself. And, you know, that's kind of rough. But just really grateful. Of course. Yep. So other topics for the week or updates. I mean, I have had some meetings with some more of the DMS people making some progress. Got an email from the folks at DCS. I don't know if you saw that. They have their first, they have the layout of the white hat. portfolio summary oh I love that oh that's awesome yeah and they they asked a question about handling of residuals on leases so I kind of shot that back and we're gonna I just love that yeah I love that it's and even like not slapping something together but it's like okay is this work what else do we need to do how do you want to handle this I love it that's just so amazing yeah And then from our Wednesday podcast, I'll be following up with dealers on the DMS agreements. We asked them to send copies of their DMS agreements to our attorney for White Hat Way. And so she's going to be fielding those. Again, for those of you who haven't had a chance to listen to Wednesday's podcast, this is a data question about who owns and how can it be utilized. Right. And so, you know, we're just, we're just sent, we, we, do you have it here? So if you, if you have and are interested in kind of participating in this, the White Hat Way attorney is Allison out of Ohio. Allison Harrison. Allison Harrison out of Ohio. And she's giving time to White Hat Way for things that we need to take a look at. And I'm really, really grateful for that. But we're asking if, again, I'll put it up there, Allison at alhlaw.com. for your DMS and CRM and DMS contracts so that we can have her look into contractually what that data does and how it moves and how it can be used. Unless we come up with something else that takes priority, I do have in mind to talk about what a DMS divorce looks like on next Wednesday. Yeah, well, because we've got clients that are going through DMS divorces. So this is like, all right, how do we do a prenup? So that everyone knows when this happens, what happens with the assets. Because your data is an asset. And it is probably one of your bigger assets that's being held in a DMS. Yeah, and obviously there's a couple different elements. There's the protective side of that, making sure that it's shielded and protected. And that's not so much where we're going. We just want to know who owns it and who has access to it. And so that's kind of what we're trying to figure out. And then the divorce stuff, what it looks like to... It's funny. Everyone understands that. And we were talking with another colleague, and we were like, how do we collaborate? And I'm like, so what would a divorce look like? And no one ever talks about that from the beginning, but it's super interesting. I think it's a wise thing to know. And like, so contracts should have that kind of, and a lot of them do. They have like, if this, the severance of the contract and all of that. And so it's, but it's just not something that people look at. So if we break up, what do you mean? If we get divorced, what do you mean? So if we part ways, what happens with the stuff? Who owns all the stuff? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, so that's important stuff. So we'll dig in a little deeper on that. In the meantime, just reach out to us or you've got the email there, but we just want to get copies of the actual, whatever your most recent renewal or contract would have been with the EMS provider and CRM provider. Okay, so shall we get to our topic of the day? Our topic is topics. Topics, multiple hot topics. And this is mostly coming from some of the stuff in social media, but after doing three V8 meetings and talking to dealers all week and running through numbers, there's just... there were some themes that kind of surfaced in more than one of the groups. And so... I love this. I really, really do. One of the things I love about us, you, doing V8 and having those conversations, just like, it's just... Because it's expanded our pool of dealers to have a finger on the pulse of the stuff that's mattering to them. Like right now. Like right now. And one of the things that Jim said this morning is that there are themes. There are things that came up and... in multiple meetings same kind of stuff or or some like um this was a topic that came up for the bigger dealers or this is a topic that came up for the the mid-sized you know that kind of thing so it's it's really cool and just feel super grateful that we have a platform to be able to share some insight and um and you know get the question get people thinking about the answers or you know what solutions might be and that kind of stuff so Yeah, and then last night we also, just as a quick aside, we have one dealer who shared their sales history with me so that we can perform an analysis of down payments and other things. And that... Sales history is almost 3,000 accounts or 3,000 buy here, pay here contracts. So, you know, as I said to one of the dealers who's newer in the group and has about 100 contracts, I said, just think about how long it's going to take you to create. Just picked out one dealer and said, think about how long it's going to take you to create 3,000 sales of history to be able to examine. And so this is just part of the value of what you can do when you, you know, you have obviously the trust of those and you have a confidential environment and you can share that kind of stuff freely. And having a moderator that understands that one size doesn't fit all. And so knowing how to navigate the answers for those questions. Yeah. Yeah. And so talking about the moderator thing, we'll talk about that as we go through these kind of bullet points. The first point was going to be sales volume. You know, we dealers are always talking about sales. Did we do a thing? Do you want me to do a thing? I'll do a thing. Sales volume. Okay, sure. So sales volumes topic number one. And it's really that's not new. I mean, dealers are always talking about sales volume. And when we get on these meetings. we're starting to kind of open the meetings with, you know, wins and losses. Talk to us about, you know, some recent successes and some, and maybe some setbacks and they can be personal or professional. And so, you know, we went through some of those and the sales volume thing, people were almost always including, you know, our sales volume is, Back up. Most people had a pretty slow July, but they're reporting that August is back up. And so we'll see what those numbers look like when August comes in. And I still see on social that everything kind of ebbs and flows for everybody. And it gives you a really great opportunity to just, as you're feeling an ebb, um, to like, what can I take this time to improve for the next flow? And so that the ebbs don't come as, as a surprise. And so, cause you know, I'm like, I know on a lot of the social, we've got a lot of newer dealers that are on there and they're just, they're, they're, um, they'll throw out a question. It's like, It's really bad here. Is everyone else sucking? And again, I mean, this is something that it comes up all the time. So sales volume is something that a lot of dealers really, really, that's bread and butter. And when to be concerned, when to not be concerned, when to seize opportunities, when to, you know, all of that. So sales volume is a big one. and then the other one was just quickly was capital capital is also obviously a question often I i can say that we had some very experienced dealers like dealers with uh many years in business who are finding themselves in a in a bit of a cash crunch and so this is something that you know is um we didn't spend a lot of time talking about that one I mean obviously that can be kind of specific to their operation whatever's going on but um capital prices are are they coming down I haven't seen that okay but they're um they're and so what's kind of like the median um cost of money right now well if you they they typically have a base price plus points you know and so the the the combination of those is putting dealers in especially a new line of credit they're in this 17 18 range that they're paying for the money and um you know that sounds I would just quickly I would throw this out there that that's That's high. That takes away margin for error. It does. But I would just say that if you think about you're getting more than that 18% on 100% of the money and you're paying that 18% on about 50% of the money, so there's still margin there. There's still spread to work with. But just know that that's part of what happens there is the cost of money is up. But I would say just regardless of what you pay for. It's just planning and it's just you being smart about how you're using it then, right? Yeah, and where you get to, what kind of programs are available and what kind of flexibility you have within those programs to do business the way you want to do business or have been used to doing business. And so those kind of things come into play as well. But, you know, the other topic was reinsurance with a couple of our groups and a handful of our dealers, reinsurance. comes up we've got dealers doing some products and contemplating others we've got other dealers who are saying should I do reinsurance yes or no and one of the things that I do as a moderator especially as these groups kind of mature and get to know each other better and they can you know converse more freely between themselves then it lets me just kind of stand back and be the moderator and stimulate conversation between them and get answers from one another so obviously you know with my experience we see and work with a lot of dealers but The temptation often is to step in there and kind of insert yourself in the conversation. And occasionally, obviously, I do and will. Well, if things go off the rail, that's kind of... Or once the conversation lulls, right? If everybody's kind of shared their stuff, then I will kind of add my perspective. But... But the idea of the format is for the dealers to learn from one another. So I am very purposeful and I resist, you know, chiming in whenever I can get the dealers to help one another. You know, dealers that understand each other's businesses because they've been meeting for a few months and, you know, many of them have had sidebar conversations because, you know, share contact information and all of that. And so reinsurance is coming up. I feel like, you know, the dealers obviously are feeling more solid in I'm going to ask the question and everyone's going to give me an educated answer. Yeah, we definitely have dealers speaking freely and asking the questions. You know, I obviously work real hard to make sure they're reminded. Yeah. everybody here is here to contribute to your success. And so we're all under confidentiality agreement. And so, yeah, so I just, part of my, my job is often to get them comfortable with the environment and being able to speak freely and ask the questions that are, you know, kind of troubling them. And so that's part of why the wins and losses. So what are the things that about reinsurance that are troubling dealers? Just cash required. It's sometimes when they're brand new, it's going to be, am I eligible? And is it too soon? You know, is it too early for me? And then it's question of, Does it really make sense for me and my strategy? You know, we have dealers in these groups. We had a dealer last night who does their own warranty. They do their own 18-month warranty, no reinsurance company. They manage it themselves. So for those listening who aren't familiar, to my knowledge, warranty is about the only product. Don't quote me on this. That you don't need to have warranty. You don't have to have a third-party administrator or some sort of a- Or licensing or like specialty, aren't there- There's like offshore accounts. Yeah, that's why they do them offshore or on Native American reservations kind of thing because of certain governmental requirements for being able to do that yourself. And so it kind of sort of bends that. Because warranty is included and it's your own money. So we had a dealer who's explained that they have done their own warranty and they actually don't put money necessarily in a fund. They just manage it from within their budget. So, you know, and they're established and got a good amount of cash flow and healthy company. So that works for them. There's a lot of ways to do it. Yeah. And I just think this is something that we, you know, we're talking to dealers who are, they're asking the question of other dealers, like, how much do you, do you do a 12 month warranty? Do you do a six month? What do you do? And what does it cover? yeah yeah that's right and then um and then what uh like how much do you fund like what do you what do you put into the fund monthly and so they like one of the things that happened last night in the meeting was that the dealers wanted to hear from other dealers or what what they put in on their particular warranty fund because that they were basically saying I i have I have the input from the provider. I know what they want me to put in, but of course they earn more when I put in more. And so they want to hear directly from dealers. What are you doing? And is it working? Especially if you're doing it yourself. Yeah. And so it's like, this is, this is completely internal. This is what we do. And, and, and so with that dealer that does it internally, is it a well-established dealership? And so there's probably thousands or what was this? Yeah. I don't know. The dollar amount. No, the amount of contracts that they have. Oh, hundreds. Hundreds. I mean, they're in the 300 account range, 350. So yeah, they have a pool, but they don't actually put it in a separate fund or even a separate bank, bank account, whatever. They just kind of manage it inside their own dollars. But they probably have limits and budget stuff that way. They have a very clear policy about what's included, what's not, deductibles and all that stuff. So they have that. Yeah. Isn't that cool that, you know, it's like there's so many ways to skin a cat. I'm not going around skinning cats, people. So please, sorry to all the cat lovers out there. But there's so many ways of doing something and serving people. And it doesn't have to be one size fits all. But it's like, I have an opportunity to serve. I have an opportunity to protect the asset and the consumer and all of that. And it's just like... how can I get creative and do this myself? And, and I just, I, a lot of, a lot of kudos. That's just, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty awesome. You left out is how can I do it and what will it cost me? Like, do I have the means to fund all of that? So do you want to share with, um, you know, like what, uh, how big of a, of a dealership was that? What was the consensus of like, when I get to what point should I have this? We didn't talk about that one. I think that has come up in recent conversations with dealer clients because they're getting mixed information. Well, I guess one of them was one of our V8 members, but he was saying that... Mixed information from different companies or different dealers? Yeah, different companies, different agencies. So is it mixed information or is it just this is the way we do it and we don't do it the way this other person does it? The dealer or the agent? No, the agent. This was about the agent. Some agents were willing to start a dealer on CPI right away, regardless of the number of accounts they may have or their volume of sales, and others weren't. And so that was kind of a source of conflict and was causing the dealer to consider, well, should I change? you know agencies in order to do this or you know what should I do so that was the conversation there and you know I i don't I don't try to advise I mean I just want them to make sure that they're obviously my my interest is in protecting the dealer make sure they don't step into something that can get them in a bad place so that's basically what I said is just understand if you step in right away you could find yourself negative in your pool, if you had some early losses, early claims on a CPI program or whatever, then those are the things that you have to kind of be aware of. And it's best for dealers to hear it from other dealers so that when they're talking to somebody who's got a commission writing, then you've got to filter that information accordingly. Oh, yeah. And, yeah, yes, exactly. So that's kind of what happened there. But, yeah, reinsurance was a question, and really it was just a yes or no question. Like, you guys do it, and how do you do it, and should I do it? And often what happens, that leads to one-on-one conversations with dealers after they have phone numbers of their members. So it's like, I want to have a deeper conversation with you, so can I call you later kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Great. That's fantastic. Yep. and then the last thing that was uh kind of a big buzz thing is um service this came up in a couple of our group meetings this this um month and this week and I would say that the big question is and I i really refrained from diving into the conversation though I have pretty strong feelings about this kind of thing but when when we're talking about Imagine you're a small dealer in Middleville, Ohio, and you have three lifts and three techs. And so you've got the ability to turn through a certain amount of cars. So now as a dealer, maybe you have a warranty program, maybe you don't. But you want to support your customers because you know when the car's not running, they're not paying. So you've got to have a way to support your customer work, right? Yeah, and I just, it's like, I've been around you long enough to know that there are 12 more questions that are coming behind that. It's like, okay, who's handling your recon? How do you, and it's just, because if you've got three bays, What's your product flow? Are you going to handle recon internally or externally? In order to keep your product flow, how many, you know, is one bay enough? Do you need all three at some times? And it's just like there's a lot of questions associated with that. And so, again, a three lift, three tech illustration is probably a good one just because that's common. That's kind of common, yeah. Yeah, for your smaller, newer dealers. you know it's one thing if you have 10 lifts and you can say you know we have four of those for customer work and and you know whatever you can work that way but I had a very specific conversation with a dealer many months ago and as a result that conversation he went back to his team and they shifted their practices and he said it was a huge win not just from a flow standpoint but also from a morale standpoint How did it affect them financially? Well, it may be too early to say. I've probably circled back on some of that. I can just say that the... Indications that I have without looking and going into the specifics of how they've made their decisions internally, is that really the question on that is, if I'm a small dealer with three lifts, could it make sense? This is a question really for those who are facing this customer repair, because we had a dealer very specifically say, They had a slow sales month because they had some pretty big warranty jobs that came in and tied up their lifts. And so they couldn't recondition their own inventory, which is an exaggerated example. This happens though. It happens. We talk to dealers all the time and it's just like, ugh. So it was the same conversation I had with this dealer in the South many months ago. And I said, let me ask you, could you get comfortable with the idea of dedicating your lifts to your recon. You only work on your cars and make sure that you have inventory available for sale to keep your inventory and sales pipeline in flow. But what about customer work? Well, there are mechanics all over the area, so go get those repairs to your customer work outsourced. And the dealer will say, well, yeah, but I'm going to pay, you know, internally my rate is this, and externally I'm going to pay $50 an hour as a point, $50 an hour more. $10,000 foot view, how does that level itself out? Well, a dealer can go back and do their own math, do the math on, OK, so if I pay $50 more per hour and I have a typical a month is X number of hours of customer work, then how much more am I paying to have the customer work done externally? Because For me, I've always viewed this through a financial lens. Yeah, it's a customer service matter and I'm trying to make the customers happy. But if I'm making customers happy today, yesterday's customers, if you will, the customers who bought three months ago, I'm making yesterday's customers happy, but it's at the expense of my sales department and my ability to create new customers. That's obviously a problem we need to solve. Well, because there's a cost to that. If you're not able to sales are down considerably, but that's a huge cost. Yeah, and it's important. We probably should take time to break this down a little bit further. Because in our buy here, pay here business and lease here, pay here, we have a different layer of complexity with our work. And when a customer buys a car, there's the sales arm, the people who help them buy the car, and then there's the lending arm. So take it out of buy here, pay here for a minute. And I'm a bank or a credit union, and you're a borrower. And you come and you find a car at a dealership and you say you want a $16,000 loan. I make you a loan now. as a credit union or whatever for your car. Well, think about the separation of those things. You've got your dealership where you bought the car, and what is that dealership's responsibility here? If any, what's the contract say? And then what is my role as a lender... And so I think in our space, we have this separation that we have to create. And I think dealers struggle with it a lot, especially when they're new. And all I'm really suggesting is how about if you made this your line and then you just worked from there. And so, for example, if I just said, I'm going to make sure my techs are available to recondition the cars that we buy. We make them available so that we can continue, that our sales department can continue to function at full capacity. Step one. I'm at full capacity in my sales department, step one. And now you'll say, well, I sell more cars and put them in the portfolio if I can't support the customers that bought last month or the last year. Well, you're going to support them. I'm just saying, if I think of that back to the credit union example, it's a financial matter. If the customer qualifies financially, I'm going to help them financially. If they have a warranty, they have a warranty. But there's nothing in the warranty that says the service has to be done. Sometimes people write that in. I don't know what the legalities are around that, but I just know that it's really for me, it's a question of finances. And it's a question of back to the thing about if you just run some simple math, if I have five customers that I send to an outside shop this month, Besides the financial piece, there's some other things to consider here, but if I have five customers and I pay $50 an hour more on those hours over there, then that's one number to put on one side of the ledger, and then go back and ask yourself, how many sales would I have to do in a month to overcome that? So this dealer was talking about, we had a slow sales month. I mean, that's terrible. They had their worst sales month in their history of 12 years. And so it's like, okay, so why do you cannibalize sales? And they attribute that to the inability of the shop to be able to utilize time and equipment to recon because they were so busy with the other. It's a business choice that they made to bring that custom repair back into their own shop and tie up their own lifts on some heavy work. And so that, that really just begs the question, if we chose not to do that, just run through that math and say, if we sent all customer work out to a third party service center and there's, there's, you know, there's extra expense associated with that. You hope you can develop relationships with some folks who can turn that stuff around because you want it to happen quickly. You need it to happen quickly to get the customer happy. But then also it takes pressure off of the whole thing about when the, think about the stresses that most people feel in their own service departments it's like the customer's calling we've told them the car should be ready on tuesday so of course they're calling at 8 30 on tuesday morning saying is my car ready can I come get it and so there's all this pressure that is created whereas if we put that on another shop yeah and so that dialogue is between the customer and that shop we're just involved financially Okay, so you still have to keep that line clear. Well, and one of the things that we've encouraged dealers to, if you're going to do outside shops, is to have a customer advocate in your shop who is the person that is helping to orchestrate and keeping everything moving smoothly. And there are dealers that it's like that has been really, really, really beneficial to them to get to that point. And it's not just service matters. So people can look up customer advocate or customer advocacy in our YouTube playlist and find the podcast we've done on that subject in the past. Yeah, I think this is really just for me. I'm trying to keep it separated financially. And I'm saying there's just... If we can measure the price that we pay in our sales department for tying up our techs, and not to mention, going back to the morale piece, imagine what it's like for our own techs when we have... when we have pressure from management to turn around these cars because the customer's calling, the customer's getting upset because the car wasn't ready when it was supposed to be. And so we create this pressurized environment. And while we still have to move cars through quickly from our own service and recon center, you can imagine what it does to the techs and the internal kind of process whenever we just focus on Now I realize we're saying this stuff goes out on YouTube. There could be a tech listening to this and they're going to be complaining, you know, it's just, but it's a reality. We're just saying, could we, could we financially just move that stuff externally? Does it cost more? It absolutely does. Does it cost you in sales if you don't do it? It's that's true too. So I think you just have to study all that carefully. And I would say if you started from a place of, Anything after the customer buys the car is a financial matter. Try to run things through that lens and say, it's not a sales matter. It's an account support matter and it's a financial matter. And it doesn't mean that you won't have some lifts free and that you won't choose to bring some light stuff in and turn it around quickly in your shop. But the priority, I think, and my recommendation would be, based on what I see these dealers struggling with out there, my recommendation would be recon your own cars, keep your cost of car down, keep your risk on the new sale reasonable, and manage the timing on that. Plus, you don't have the pressure on the techs in the same way. Yes. As you were talking about all of this, I was thinking, you're talking sales and the financials. And I kind of look at it like it's actually three things because, well, from my perspective, is that your shop, if you've got a shop, that is a third point to this triangle. And that it's, I would imagine that a shop If it's like we do in-house and we do recon, it's like the shop is now answering to two different departments. Good point. And there becomes a conflict and a struggle about who is my master. Good point. So I can imagine that for anyone who is trying to... Mechanics are artists. They are also people that can tunnel vision themselves. They're listening to things. They don't have to deal with people. They're like, this is my canvas and I'm gonna fix the thing. And when you have people calling and I've seen some where there's a phone in the shop and it's like, oh my gosh, that's a disaster just waiting to happen. Or even if it's like they're calling the regular line and then someone's coming back every five minutes and it's like, where are we at with this? Where are we at with this? Where are we at with this? That does not happen if you're doing internal work. To a shop. you know it's it's so to me this is just me I am not a dealer but um I also I my brain works in systems and and um streamlining and all of that if you had because you know a lot of dealers are like I want to have the work in house so I can keep track of my inventory And keep costs down. And keep costs down. So what if, you know, some of them, it's like the oil change, the whatever, we can do it at a discount, is that you just do oil change, that kind of like what would happen at a Jiffy Lube? That's what's in-house. And then you've got your recon, so you've got a lift there that they're also doing the oil changes for the recon. But you've got a way for people to come in and, you know, do simple things. And if it's like communicated that we have this, you know, we want to be able to keep in contact and, you know, make sure. And then that gives us an opportunity if we see that there's something when we're doing this that we can say, oh. This is something that you should be thinking about. Do you want to schedule an appointment? We can do that, you know, get you into, that's when the customer advocate comes in. But I can imagine the morale piece with a shop, one, not getting interrupted every five minutes because it's like, Let me put my head down. I don't know about you, but when I get interrupted every five minutes, it takes me twice as long to get a job done than it would have if I had just been head down because now I've got to get myself back into the rhythm. of doing the thing and all of that. It gets worse than that. Back to our three tech example is you've got a car on the lift and you're waiting for parts. Parts supposed to be here two o'clock this afternoon or whatever. So, but your lift is tied up. So sometimes what'll happen is in these, these three lift operations, as an example, uh, Somebody will come back and say, hey, we got a heat case with a customer. I need you to pull that car off that you've been working on. And it's like, how do you do it? Because it has to kind of run or something. Whatever. So they have to roll it out back. And this is the stuff they deal with. So they roll it out back. And now suddenly they're off of that job and onto a customer job because it's a priority. It's a heat case kind of situation or an urgent matter. And that's frustrating for techs. I'm just saying, look, techs, we love you. Michelle and I are coaches. We don't have techs on our staff. So my point is, we can speak about this stuff as kind of a third party in that we value the artistry that is the technician, right? And so technicians are hard to hire, which is another thing that came up in our podcast stuff, or our B8 meetings this week was the hiring thing. People are struggling still to get people hired and show up, like they can get them committed verbally to take the job and they don't show up. My question would be, which would be an interesting thing to find out is, are there less techs? That's a good question. I mean, we've had some people on the podcast in the past who better can answer that. I don't have enough knowledge. I can't remember his name right now, but they actually does like a connection with tech schools and all of that. It's like, how can we support you? And then, you know, we're helping to create more techs. And so we have access to those techs. Jay, his first name. I think it was Jay. Yeah. Jay, if you're listening, I'm so sorry. We've slept since then. But yeah, just to kind of finish out the thing on the tech thing is like, you know, when you have to pull work away from the tech, stop them in the middle of a job, then, and listen, we love our techs. We appreciate, we need them. They can be kind of as a group, as a kind of an archetype. They can be a little cranky, okay? And we're trying to keep them. And so this is one more area where we have a chance to kind of manage that in a way that makes life a little easier for them and lets them be productive and do what they enjoy doing and turn out the work. Yeah. So in a previous part of my career, I worked with engineers. Mm-hmm. And I really do because I've observed the techs and I've observed engineers and they're very similar in that it's like, don't bother me. Let me do my thing. And that they can get cranky if they're not able to just do their thing. Stay in their lane. And stay in their lane. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why when you're talking engineering and you're like creating a new, because we worked, I'm talking about creating an app and a website and all that. So these are people that are writing code and that's an art as well, like a shop is, is that's why we had a roadmap. And it's like, we will not throw you any curve balls because the minute we, and there's bigger money a lot of times on things like that. Actually, no, because our industry has a lot that's coming through. It's like understanding that a tech needs to, or an engineer thrives in an environment where they know for the next X amount of days, I'm not going to get hit with heat cases, right? And so it's, you know, it's just like, or whatever. So it's like the roadmap kind of thing. So I can stay in my lane. I can do the thing, finish the project. Let's do the thing when I'm done with the projects. Like, what do you need me to do next? Next project. So you touched on finish the project and it's interesting. I didn't expect to end up here, but I'm glad we're talking about this because When you talk about finish the project, it's been my experience working with techs and even myself just doing mechanical jobs, technical jobs, whatever. So maybe you don't make it about a car tech and go back to your engineer who's writing code. An engineer is assigned a project to write code and they're 90% of the way done. And now somebody comes and says, hey, changing the roadmap, we need you to go work on this. And I'm like... I wanted to see this to completion. Demoralizing like anything. Back to the mechanic, it's like a mechanic, part of the satisfaction of the work that they do is finishing the job and hearing the car run and knowing that they've solved the problem. And it's like high five, yeah. Yeah. So when we deny them the chance to finish the project, it's like, that's gotta be really frustrating for them. And so I just think these are things that, and this was not part of the thought process, you know, whenever this first came up, but I think as we think through all of the elements that, and again, back to me, it's like all those things are internal considerations, but financially considering that if we just look at that one dealer, What did they save? What would it have cost them to send those jobs, those warranty jobs to another shop? And then measure that against what would four more sales in their sales department have paid them in comparison? But those are straight line questions. Yeah. And we're constantly... encouraging dealers to consider that there are squiggly lines that wrap themselves around all the straight line stuff. It just does. I mean, you can go, here's your balance sheet, boom, straight line decision, we need to do this and this and this. But morale? Mm-hmm. is a huge, important squiggly line. Yeah, for sure. And so that's, you know, that whole service thing, it's, when you say cranky, I mean, we've been in shops where they love working there, and one of the reasons why they love working there is because they're not thrown curveballs every five minutes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I think for me, you're right. There's some squiggly lines elements to all this. But I think just to recap, there's nothing that Michelle and I talked about that I suggested in the way of managing customer repairs that suggested I'm not going to make the customer happy. Oh, yeah. No, no. It's about how do you make the customer happy, get their thing taken care of, but keep morale up. I'm going to take care of the customer. So there's nothing that I suggested there that says I'm not going to make sure the customer is happy. is handled in a timely manner. And in a way, there's even an outsourced delegation element that facilitates growth. Because when I can get comfortable with the idea of sending that outsource to techs in other areas, you know, independent garages near me, whatever. Then when I can get that going now, my ability to grow and scale my company, because otherwise I'm, I'm limited in my capacity by the number of lifts that I have. And it reminds me just quickly, I worked with a dealer last year that, um, you know, was in the salvage business. And one of the things that came up with them is that they make a lot more money on their salvage cars. Why they buy them. Well, they are, they're good at the paint and body there. They can turn those cars around and have a newer car with lower miles. Problem is they could only produce about eight of them a month. They were just so slow to recondition. And they did a great job. They did a good job. And the cars were good. And they sold quickly when they came out. All good stuff. So profit margins were higher, all of that. Yeah. But their sales volume was going to be stunted to about eight sales a month because you can't produce any more than that. So it's like that was a clear bottleneck. And they've since solved it and started buying in additionally some clean title cars. So they still do that and they have that. So you have a choice when you come into the lot. Yeah. And so they still have those margins, but it's just clearly identified a place where it's a choke point. And so this is kind of what we're talking about here in terms of having a limited number of lifts and this choke point. And so I just think it's going to be a continuing thread. And I think we just want to help dealers find solutions. And I would just ask them to think about Think about after the car is delivered that it's a financial matter. It's a financial matter. It does not have to be in your shop. And you still got ways to, whether it's a side note or warranty or service contract, you're still going to have ways to get the customer happy. It's just the car does not have to be repaired in our shop. And sometimes we... we create our own headaches by just telling ourselves that it has to be done in our shop to save that money. And in the course of that, sometimes we end up reaching over dollars to pick up pennies. And it's like, that's where we got to be careful. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, we had a lot of things that were talked about today. And actually, I don't want the acoustic cinematic thing. I'm like, why do I feel like I'm falling asleep now? Yeah, a lot of great topics, reinsurance, sales volume, service. We did a lot on service, so... Thank you so much. It's Friday. Hopefully you guys have a great collection day because it's usually Friday and a great day on your sales floor as well. Thank you so much for joining us. I know that you guys are busy and have a lot of choices to where your time can go. We're really, really grateful for you joining us. If you And any of the other podcasts, when we talk about charts and all of that kind of stuff, please go to YouTube, our YouTube channel, and like and subscribe while you're there so that you can see the stuff when it's stuff that needs to be today. And maybe come back next Friday. The two topics I didn't get to was auto pays and referrals. Auto pays and referrals. Next Friday. All right, everybody. Have a great day. Thanks again for joining. And we will see you on Monday.
