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 everybody. Happy Friday from Oklahoma. Happy Friday from Sedona, Arizona. Good for you. You guys, is today your friend's birthday? It is Danny's birthday today. Yeah. And Danny was a guest on our podcast. I mean, people who might have seen that, you're visiting your friend Danny, who was in the podcast or the studio with us a few months ago. Right? So some viewers might be familiar with who we're referring to. Yeah. She's going to take me on a hike today and we're going to go look at pictographs and just fun stuff that most of the people that just are here visiting don't know about. Cause she's been, she's lived here for a couple of years and knows all of the secret places to go hiking. We should probably jump into our stuff. We've got quite a bit of ground to cover today and I'll give you a little background first. This, this data, you know, I'm being my data nerd self and digging in on some real you know, kind of deep numbers here. But I think this one's important, Michelle. And I actually spent enough time on this. I was thinking, you know, why do we do this? Why do we give as much time to, you know, this? And I think it's important for people to recognize. I just, I dig in here and I share information. I know dealers are busy. I know they have a hard time finding their way to this stuff. In, you know, the idyllic world that I sometimes live in, I think, you know, if dealers can get a grip on some of these elements of their business, then it'd have a really profound impact. Like it can really make a big difference for them and for their customers. So, you know, we'll get to that. I really want to make sure we wrap up today by talking about kind of the takeaways. What can, you know, what can dealers do with this information that we're about to share? Yeah. It sounds like you've got a visitor there close by. I can hear in the background. That's Dani. She's on a client call. Oh, I see. It's like thirty degrees outside right now and I'm not going to sit on the patio. So let's just dive into the stuff, shall we? I think one quick thing I want to clear up. I shared a post yesterday that I have a screenshot of some numbers and I ended up pulling it down because one of the formulas was wrong. And so I just, not by a lot, but I thought, I don't want stuff out there that even though it was only sharing part of the stuff, I just thought, let's take it down. I'll share the full numbers here. And so I'll get this shared on the screen and we can start to kind of show folks where this information comes from. So essentially what I did is I took one of our V eight groups and picked a particular dealer so that I could take their portfolio history. And just kept all the numbers the same across in terms of cost of car, selling price, amount of finance per deal. Everything's the same with a single dealer. Because I just know from working with these kind of numbers, when you have too many moving pieces, it's just hard to really make sense of any of it. So the more stuff you can lock down and isolate, you know, certain numbers, then it just makes it easier to tell what the impact is of that change. So that's what we've got here as a dealer. And we're working with about a four million dollar portfolio. And that part is, you know, you'll see numbers in here that are like actual interest collected, you know, actual adjusted gross profit. So that it's maybe important to know that that's the portfolio size we're talking about. And so as we start to get into the actual figures, then that'll probably mean more. But let me get where I can see this better myself and I can take our viewers through. And this is another one of those episodes. If you're catching on audio, probably find it on YouTube because we're going to share a lot of screens and some slides, including some graphs that I think will be helpful to to you know, in terms of managing or being able to make sense of what we're, what we're talking about here today. I'm actually have to share this from a different way. So give me one moment to get over to the stuff. So Michelle, does the screen change when I move that? Are you seeing just making sure it's going where I go? So the what I've done is I took a portfolio and forecasted it with a roll forward. Like you hear in this industry, people talk about rolling twelves and rolling twenty fours, whatever. And so I've taken a twenty four month projection off of, again, this, you know, four million dollar portfolio and using all the same numbers across with one exception. So I'll explain that just a little bit. But this top this top part marked in purple up here is if the dealer had the same repo rate as they have had across the last twelve months. So I was able to use these, I call them conversion rates, sometimes called loss to liquidation rates. This is the rate at which the dealer is collecting principal. And for those that might be catching this for the first time, that when I say a collecting principal, that number would be, for example, over here, hundred and fourteen thousand collected in principle versus the opening amount of principle in the portfolio of four point one in this case. So that's where that two point eight comes from. That's historically the rate at which they've been. So we take that and we apply it to the portfolio going forward. And same thing with charge offs, two point two percent. These numbers, by the way, are fairly typical of what we see with a lot of our dealerships and maybe the ratio of one to the other is pretty, pretty typical and um so I think it's it's um it's representative of what a dealer could expect in their portfolio and then we have recovery rate which in this case we're using point six right here which is again this number here twenty four thousand which suggests we're gonna have about twenty four thousand recovered repos this coming month as a percentage of the opening balance and then when I went to the other model I just used that percentage of this relationship of you know how much repo recovery compared to how much we charged off. And so I just kind of used that ratio, which came out to twenty seven percent. And so I use that kind of formula at the bottom. But if I take all those numbers and apply it, it gives me a projected profit and an adjusted cash flow or just gross profit there. And then I ran the same thing for cash flow. And then up here on this row, I've got the amount of receivables at the close of each period okay so this is going to be um this will come into play as we get into these other slides but the um what I really am trying to illustrate here michelle is that this idea that if we could have an impact on our charge-offs what would be the benefit and let me just stop for a minute and say you know you you've been on facebook you'll hear these dealers you know that um sometimes they want to keep a short leash on on customers and sometimes there's a motivation there to say, well, I need cars, I need inventory right now anyway. So, so maybe, you know, and, and then there's a, a near term cash benefit. If, if a dealer repossesses a car, that's got a cash value of five thousand dollars and the customer only owed a thousand, you know, then obviously collecting the car near term has more cash benefit to them. And I think what we're trying to illustrate here today is, while that's absolutely true, you know, we can't hide from that math. It does put more money in the bank short term. What I thought by running it out over two years, we'd get a better sense of, you know, what does that really mean to us though over the longer haul? You know, in order to illustrate it here, what I did was I just cut the charge off rate in half. And then I assumed that if I collect in repos the same percentage of those dollars, that I did in the other scenario, then that's, that's what I tried to model here. Okay. So when we get into the actual slides, you'll, you'll see, but I think, you know, I just want to see this, this source information over here. These are the numbers. So any questions, Michelle, before I move any further? Yeah. Um, so, you know, when you're, when you're talking about the difference between what this shows and what the actual over time shows, What are the factors that are in play in addition to what you use to determine these beginning numbers? Okay. So if I understand correctly, let me just frame this out and then you can tell me if there's something more that I need to answer. But I would say a couple of things that we're looking at. So you're looking at profit, which obviously in our buy your pay your business, our profit that we experience is we have to know that because obviously we're running a business at the end day. We certainly need to be profitable. And it's how we calculate what we are obligation to the IRS. Right. But it doesn't it doesn't hit our bank account in the same way until it's time to write that down. IRS check or whatever. But but I want to see profit. I want to see cash flow here. So I'm basically taking the starting numbers and by changing the charge off rate down here in this section, I'm then able to show. OK, so what does that mean for cash? And let me show you another line here. You're still seeing my screen, right? This is where I am. It's really small, but I can see it. OK, so and I can try to expand it. Maybe if I do this, it'll follow and you can see better. OK, so let me get then to the place where you can see. So on the cash flow line, this doesn't format great. So might be a little choppy there. But on the cash flow line, what the thing that I'm trying to look at is near term. Here's the cash flow. If our charge off rate stayed the same. Well, keep in mind, when we're charging off more. means we're recovering more repos, which impacts our cash now, right? It's our bank account now when we recover those repos at a certain value. Now, I want to, before we move too far away from that, I want to break down one thing in particular that is really kind of, it's one of those things that is, the numbers move around enough in our business that it's hard to sometimes grasp the impact of some of these things. And so there's one other thing I want to show, but now if I go to the charge off side, if I, this scenario where I cut the charge offs in half, now look at the cash flow here versus the forty one up above it's twenty eight grand. So we definitely see a negative cash impact to us near term by experiencing fewer charge offs. About that for a minute. What that means is when, if we had a more successful stretch and we charged off fewer accounts, it's going to cost us more cash. Near term. Because we don't, because the only thing, think about what we're putting in the bank each month is this line right here, the principal that we collect from the customer, this line right here, the interest that we collect from the customer. And the last one would be the repos. So when we're repoing fewer cars, we're seeing less repo recovery dollars. And for the sake of this conversation, we could say, just imagine that every one of those cars went wholesale. Okay. Every one of these cars that we repossessed went to an auction and they fetched cash and we deposit that cash in the bank. Then obviously that's going to have a near term positive impact to our cash. So wait, wait. Then what I'm hearing you say is that lower repos cost you more. Takes more cash short term. Sure does. That's why this line down here is red. We're actually, because I cut the, all I did was take these same numbers, the rate at which we're collecting. And all I did was I take that two point two charge off rate and I cut it in half. And now because I did that, you can see that instead of collecting up here, I'm collecting twenty four thousand dollars in repos. Uh huh. But down here, I'm only collecting twelve thousand in repos. OK, so that's cash. You know, my my cash near term, my cash going into the account, you know, my principal collected and my interest collected near term is going to be about the same. Yeah. But the part that I wanted to be able to illustrate here, and it took, took some work to get to the place where we can, you know, illustrate this in a way that I think will be meaningful, but yeah, that's what this red line is. And I think the material that I set out there showed that it was only a short term and it was just, it was a math mistake on my side. So hope didn't, didn't it, but it was incomplete, right? It was only one half of the equation. But I think what we see now is that for seven months, the, the impact to cash is, um, we have, we have more cash in a scenario where we're charging off twice as much. Okay. Okay. So it just, it's like I say, it's a kind of a, a tricky thing to, to get our head around. So I want to just take a moment and look at this part next. Let me make sure you can see these numbers. These are really small. So let me try to expand that a little better for everybody. You see that better. Yeah. Okay, so it's important to stop and think about the impact of just the idea of recycling or putting a car back in our inventory to resell versus getting it to an auction. So what we have here is a repo value. And since somebody just asked me the other day, You know, what is ACV? We have folks, you know, tune in who aren't familiar. So ACV is actual cash value. So that's going to be a typically a wholesale value, the actual wholesale market value based on some book or some other method of, you know, evaluating or appraising the car. And then FMV is fair market value, kind of the terminology that would be more likely to be used by attorneys in an illegal process. That's arriving at the fair market value of the vehicle to give the customer credit. right for the value of the repo. So in this case, if I just, if it's a wholesale thing, it's pretty straightforward. As we talked about, I get a car in, I appraise it for five thousand dollars. I run it at the auction. It brings five thousand dollars. It's pretty easy to see that the impact to my cash near term is five grand, right? yes but if I take that same scenario and I recycle the car instead I choose not to run at the auction I choose to forego that five grand in cash and I choose to put the car back in my inventory and and make it available for sale then we don't experience that cash in the bank account today however we do see an adjustment like if if you're the dealer michelle and you you you show in the dms that you you spent, let's use a hundred thousand dollars on buying cars that were sold in that month. In reality, five thousand dollars of that, you really just paid ninety five thousand in cash because five thousand of that was sort of credited to your inventory account because of the recovered repo. Does that make sense? Yeah, that does. So this is why I think in our reporting, you know, when we were recognizing in our VAT work that one of the things that happens when we're really looking at cash flow is these numbers kind of get washed into the mix. And it's hard to identify that. Like, you know, if a dealer sells twenty cars in a month, we don't currently ask them how many of those were repos. But we're going to start to because it's and we need to know the value. We know what the ACV was of all the cars that were charged off in that month. But we don't know how much of what was sold, you know, is really a repo credit. And why does that matter? Well, because you can see the impact to the bank accounts and the actual cash flow. And this is one of the elements that we're realizing is kind of problematic and credit. You know, a dealer out of Ohio asked the question one of our meetings and I said, you know what, you're right. That is something that we don't currently recognize the credit because we don't capture the information from the dealer. Right. About how many of the cars that were sold were, quote unquote, free. You know, we got them back through a recovery process. We didn't write a check. OK, so it's just important to kind of recognize that element of it before we move on to the next pieces. So when we look at the summary and I've got almost all the numbers that you see here, let me try again to expand that. We'll just go through pieces of it one piece at a time. So, again, this is the when things remain the same. And this line here would be the half charge off rate. So you can see where it's a one point one charge off rate. And we talked already about the cash flow. I looked at just month one. So month one recovery, there's a big difference in the cash that we bring in because we're charging off fewer, again, fewer repos that we recover. And so for folks who can't see the screen, you know, in the very first month after this occurrence, we would see about twenty five thousand in repo recovery versus about twelve five. in the case where our charge offs are cut in half. Makes sense. That's easy enough to understand. Fewer charge offs, fewer repos, you know, fewer dollars coming into the repo account, if you will. And then what that translated to from the screen that I just showed you is out of the next twenty four months, if our charge off rate stayed the same, our bank accounts would actually increase more in the next seven months. However, that doesn't continue. And that's the part that I think is important to understand. So I want to really go slow here and make sure folks understand why. Why does the thing then start to get positive? And so let's look at the profit side first. Let's put cash aside for just a minute. And let me just get to the slides, Michelle. I think if I go back, I'm going to stop sharing this and let's go back to the slides instead. You may be able to tee those up before I get there, but you got it. Yeah, so let's look at these in a graphic form instead. So this first slide is adjusted gross profit in the first year. Okay, so you can see that the profitability, even though we have a near-term cash shortfall, we actually experienced more gross profit. So let me make sure, I think I loaded a banner here. Let me show the formula for that. So adjusted gross profit is gonna be this formula right here. It's gonna be gross profit from buy here, pay here sales, again, reflected based on whatever your DMS says your cost in the car was, and then plus interest collected minus net charge-offs. So you could say minus gross charge-offs and add back in the repo recovery values. So that's gonna be our adjusted gross profit. So you can see that by charging off half as many cars, it stands to reason that first of all, we're going to experience less direct charge off, less net charge off. But the other thing that happens here that you'll see a little more in some of the slides we have coming up is the other thing that stands to reason is because we charge off less, the portfolio grows. And because the portfolio grows, we have more interest income. Right? We're still selling the same. So all of my modeling, I kept the same amount of sales all the way across on both models. So that means our gross profit from new cart, new sales, a buy here, pay here, that's the same in both scenarios. So the only thing that's really shifting is fewer charge offs, more income, okay? So now if we go to the next slide, do you want to advance that or you go? I can't. Oh, yes, I can. There we go. So here's your two. And let me, I'm going to jump back just a minute and grab that number. So in year one, we were, we were actually, we increased our adjusted gross profit for forty seven. So I think let me pause here for a minute and say, OK, so we can understand that's easy to recognize in the first year that we're going to see more profit because we charged off less. And so most dealers will say, yeah, that's what I want to do. That's what we're trying to do is charge off fewer cars, right? But I think what this does is it starts to show, okay, but if we, in fact, could charge off fewer cars, then this would be the impact to profit first, okay? And we know that. That's pretty easy to kind of recognize. And when we move into the second year, There's a five hundred thirty three thousand dollar adjustment to gross profit. We're in the in the second, you know, twelve month period. We're generating more gross profit. Again, you're going to see soon the impact of the interest income that is growing because the portfolio experience fewer charge off. Right. And we really think about our business as a finance business. That's a big part of what's happening is. You know, we're in the business to generate contracts and generate interest from those contracts, right? And to build a portfolio, which throws off more cash for us. So we're trying to almost every dealer I work with, VA clients, otherwise, they're saying they're looking to grow. They're almost all saying they're looking to grow. Yeah. Two ways we can. There's two immediate ways that come to mind and we can grow. We can sell more or we can charge off less. Well, and what most dealers look at is sell more, sell more, more sales, more sales, more sales. And then that becomes a function of the sales team. Right. Where the having less charge ops is a function of the collections team. That's that's a good point. And so it's also just, you know, you start to think ahead to policy. You know, what's what's policy? How much is policy costing us some of these charge offs? How much is, you know, lack of support solutions, whatever, you know, causing us to experience more charge off? So I think we you know, it's easy enough to understand that it's hard for me to talk about this without sounding like we're, you know, talking down to folks. That's not what's intended here at all. We're just trying to make sure we don't. glaze over some stuff that is really fundamental for a lot of our folks that are new, but also even our experienced folks, they just don't get enough time at their desk to really dig as deep as I've gone here today. So let's go. So that's adjusted gross profit again, about a half a million dollar gain. each of the two years that we're measuring here. Now let's look at interest collected. Interest collected in the first twelve months after, even though we saw the slide that said seven months, we're going, we got less cash. But from an interest earning standpoint, we're actually by the close of twelve months, we've increased our interest earnings by fifty one thousand dollars across those twelve months. OK. OK. And now across the next twelve months, it's a wider spread. We got about one hundred forty two thousand dollars of of higher interest collected. For those who can't see the screen, we're at about one point one million in dollars. at the same charge off rate, whereas if we cut our charge off rate, the second year of interest earnings would be just over one point two. And so so you've got, you know, that kind of increase in interest, which is just one element of it's one element of income. But it's important to remember that is cash. Like the only time we experience interest income here is is when we actually collect it and put it in the bank. Right. That's when we recognize the interest income, you know, in the buyer payer space. Now, that's assuming simple interest. I mean, just for those who there are a few out there still doing something off of simple interest. But now this is the slide that this is the only slide I'm going to show you that's negative from the. The scenario, let me take down this AGP formula. So when we look at this, if our charge off stayed the same. then I showed you that we're actually experiencing less cash flow in the scenario where we cut our charge off rate. So this is important for dealers to stop and think about, you know, if I did succeed in cutting my charge off rate, it's going to hurt my cash near term. Okay. So yeah, in this case, across twelve months, we're actually down about twenty one grand across twelve months. So down about three percent. But when we move to year two, it flips. And so now this is the part that I think. When if I track that same model now, I'm up two hundred grand. in the second year versus what I would have been had my charge off rates stay the same. Does that make sense so far? I'm trying to track. Okay. Yeah. It's, it's kind of heady stuff. It really can be. And I think, you know, again, I try to just lay it out in a way that, we could visualize. But I think the simplest thing to think about here, Michelle, is if you remember those three lines that are cash, principal collected from the customer, interest collected from the customer, and then the repo recovery. Well, we know when we're charging off less, our repo recovery is going to be down. So for this cash to actually show more cash flow in year two, that has to mean that our portfolio is growing. We must be collecting more principal and interest, which is absolutely true as the portfolio grows, right? And so it's growing because we're charging off fewer. You know, we're still selling the same. We're just charging off fewer accounts. And so now this is why you start to see in the second year, the cash turnover. So remember that, let me jump back to the other slide. Look at the ROI on this. If I knew that I could put twenty one grand in in year one, and turn that into two hundred grand in year two. I think everybody on Wall Street would do it. Every buy here, pay here would do it. Buy here, pay here dealer would do it. It's like we're giving up twenty one grand in year one and we're generating two hundred grand positive in year two. So it's just it's it's just math. I mean, it's just it's the reality. It becomes money you've already invested working for you. That's right. Yeah. Put that capital at risk. And so, you know, you think start to think about this. I'll finish out the slides and then we can kind of talk about the pieces that I think are are significant. The change in receivables in year one is is not that big. You've got it. It's a well, I guess it's the way that the graph is built from zero. It's a half a million dollar increase. in year one uh you know you're for those who are not seeing the screen four point six in year one versus five point one almost in uh in the at the end of year one if we had less charge-offs okay so I gotta be careful about the way I say this and then at the end of year two we're up um Eight hundred thousand seven ninety six. So in this scenario, you know, if we if we had the same charge off rate, we'd be at about four point eight. And with by cutting our charge offs in half, we'd be at about five point six. So, you know, it's easy to see that that means we have more portfolio. It's going to throw off more interest earnings. right so it's it's just it's going to generate more principal and interest from the customers who are paying and so I think you know again I realize when we step into this topic that we're really kind of in this place where I know dealers are working to do this I know that many of them are trying to reduce their charge off rate every day a week right um trying to save some repos and I think that we do hear dealers sometimes though, that slip into this place where, you know, they keep customers on pretty short leash because of that cash element that, you know, if the customer's not going to pay, I'm just going to recall the car, you know, I'm going to reset the car and I'm going to refurbish it and put it back out there and sell it to another customer. And, and obviously there's going to, There's going to come times when we have to repossess as a matter of enforcement. Obviously, I think what I wanted to have a chance to break down here today is if we could succeed. in making policy adjustments uh investments and training you know wherever wherever it's going to be necessary to do that maybe maybe it's adding some reinsurance that helps us you know be able to save more accounts and be able to uh you know avoid repossessions because I just think that what you can see in the math here is there's the profitability aspect But I think folks who spending time with me know that I'm cashflow first. I'm just trying to make sure we're generating more cash from the money that we're putting at risk because that we can spend. The profit we can't spend, the receivables we can't spend. And so I just want to see dealers be able to put cash in their pocket. And what this clearly shows is that again, that twenty thousand dollar cash investment in year one would turn into a hundred thousand dollars in year two. And that's just, I just, that's, that's a lot of dollars that one could invest in training. could invest insurance in whatever they choose, whatever they can identify that is going to help them. Now, will they cut it in half, Michelle? Probably not. But I thought it was appropriate to do that here because it just creates enough disparity that you can see the difference better and see the impact of that. But I think that the math should still carry the same ratio. We can succeed in cutting charge-offs. And I think for me, first and foremost, it's... Some of the quick tips would be let's not have our collection team let this get personal. Let's not let the customer get too far behind. you know, there's some things that we can do to, you know, avoid. And I would say that the longer the customer has been on the books, the more true this can be, you know, in terms of how flexible adaptive we can be, what happens is, I mean, take a quick story. Like I remember years ago as a, as a dealer manager or as a dealer, and then later as a, as a general manager, you know, you would have collectors talk about when it was time to, you know, customer wants to trade into another car and we're looking at their account and, And the collection team is like, they're a pain in the butt. I don't think I want to finance them again. And I look at the account and said, they've been paying for two years. How many customers do we have who do not pay for two years, right? And so I understand that from your perspective, it's frustrating and maybe we need to find ways to solve that. And the way I would respond to it is this is a nice opportunity. If we agree to finance a customer again, it's a nice opportunity for us to have a conversation and try to enact some new practices and new policies and have things go a little smoother from here on out. But I think this is an example of where when it gets personal, you know, we sometimes are ready to, you know, end the business relationship. And listen, sometimes that's what we have to do, right? Sometimes that is the right course of action, right? I'm simply saying the math now supports in a better way the idea that, you know, saving, you know, five, ten, twenty charge-offs a year has a really profound impact on the business inside of twenty-four months. And so it's really just, you know, it's something that I think as we look at that, then we want to make sure we recognize. And as we make our repo decisions, sometimes we're frustrated and we make a decision to end the relationship. And I'm simply saying, I get it. It's part of what, and enforcement is part of what has to happen when you're financing subprime customers that hasn't performed very well in the past on their other credit dealings. I simply say the math supports that we would want to have more of these customers stay with us. Yeah. There's a couple of comments from George, as I'd like to pop them up here. One happened earlier in the conversation. It says, since months with more repos often equate to fewer new sales, the reduction in cash flow is not as counterintuitive as it first appears. Most buyer-payer dealers have come to grips with the fact that every new sale means negative cash flow. Right, right. And then the other one was, it drives me crazy when a dealer says, if they don't pay, I just repossess it and sell it to someone else. I don't realize that they're still losing a loan because the customer who buys that repo would have purchased another vehicle. That's a good point. I'm glad you brought that up, George, because that doesn't come up enough and you're absolutely right. That same customer who walked in would have been buying a different vehicle. If I'm the dealer... That means more negative cash for me today because they're financing car purchase, maybe at an auction. So he's absolutely right. And. What's also true, right, is that you're proud of me because I'm learning to say personal joke. But it is also true that when that happens, another thing George didn't touch on here, which I think is is a very real thing to consider, is when you look at what dealers are spending. in advertising and cost of operating their business to attract a customer, like the actual cost of acquisition, which we don't hear enough about in Buy Here Pay Here, that cost of acquisition is very real. And so if that repo car had not been there, had still been in the customer's driveway, the original customer, they were still making payments on it. Then the customer that I paid a lot of money to acquire is in fact a new customer. I'm building my portfolio. Whereas in the scenario that George is referring to, yes, I still sell a car today, but it's offset by a charge off. And while I renew my payment stream, I think what we showed here is the impact of that is substantial. And so I think you've got those direct costs associated with it. It's a real money. It's what we spend to have our business open every day and what we spend to advertise to get a customer through the door. And now if we had no repos on the lot and they were only buying new cars, our portfolio would be growing. Yeah. And, and this, I mean, it kind of gives you like, like I mentioned before is your focus shifts from like, you know, sell, sell more cars that's going to, and to versus collections. And I, and I see all the time recently, well, I think it's been one of those things that most dealers it's like, how do we collect better? How do we collect better? How do we collect better? How do we collect better? And so, you know, there are a lot of really great, great experts in that field that can help you with that. And, and as we start to collect better, and experience less charge offs, yeah, it's To me, I'm getting that it is a long game, what you're talking about. It's another one of those things that you discuss frequently. It's like, this is a long game. When you can start to make these kind of shifts, that over time, it... know it it just really changes the structure of of what um what your cash flow and and all of those are I do have a question and I hate throwing these some of these up because it's like it's gonna put you on the spot but it's a um uh where can we get the template of the spreadsheet thanks for all you do thank you um dj um I think the spreadsheet itself, I can probably create some. It's built inside something I wouldn't share, but I can create that. I'm happy to. I would say, let me put my email address on the screen. Anybody who would like to have this, just shoot a note to me at jim at whitehatway.com. Just shoot me a note and say you'd like to have it, and I will create that in the spreadsheet form. So that you can experiment with that yourself. But yeah, I mean, certainly we do screenshots quickly. Most folks can have screenshots from what they've seen here today. But I think the spreadsheet is available to use in that way. So we can do that. But yeah, I think the thing that is so challenging in this segment, Michelle, is like, I would give people two takeaways here. So if you said people are, how do I improve collections? How do I improve collections? A couple of thoughts. Look at, and we can find and share, excuse me, the episode we did more than a year ago around customer advocacy. Look at the possibility of having a customer advocate to your team. And you're going to say, Well, I don't, my budget, I don't, I can't really budget for one more person. I'm saying, look, look at these numbers again and come back and tell me, are you sure you can't budget for a person who could shave your charge off by twenty five percent or two percent or back to say what's. And the likelihood is with someone in that position where it's they're not dealing with collections, they're not dealing with sales. This is someone that's there to help them navigate all the challenges of having their car, all of those things. Not only could it decrease the amount of charge-offs, repos, but it could also increase the amount of referrals and repeat business because people feel really supported with this dealership. Yeah. And we really ought to do a separate episode around that because today we really just dove into the mathematics, but you're absolutely right. All these intangible elements, like what's it worth to have people out there saying good things. So they're, they're buying, they're still driving their car and enjoying it and, you know, telling them. And what's the value of helping someone in a tight spot, fix, overcome, you know, and, and work with them because that's the kind of review that, that just is that's gold it's like they worked with me and and you know and and they have not just because the sales people were nice and you know all of that that you get a good review but it's like hey I came across the problem and and you know the customer advocate or they just really worked with me and we figured out a solution that was going to be good for all I mean how much more gold that is to your credibility and your presence in your community. That's big. Yeah. So, you know, I think that probably, you know, summarizes the part I wanted to present today. It's it's, it's tricky stuff. Like it's, it's hard to get to some real math that is, that is meaningful. And I hope we've, we've done something here. The comments suggest that we help some folks and I'm, I'm thrilled about that. We, you know, it's, it's why we do it. It was where we started. Like, why, why do we dig into this? Because it's my belief that when we can help dealers to be more successful in some of these areas, it really makes a big difference. It does. And Jim plays in numbers. So this is fun for him. Sometimes I got other things I could be doing. Right. But, but yeah, I mean, it's, it is, it's, it's important work. I mean, it's, and I just don't find it, as I say, dealers, dealers, There's plenty of dealers out there that are pretty handy with Excel and they might like to do this, but they're busy tracing down cars that they bought at last week's auction and whatever. They're busy. They don't have enough time at their desk to do this stuff. And so this is part of what we like doing through the podcast is kind of sharing the higher level stuff that is- Mind time to ever get there. Great segue. If you're in need of help, please call or text a nine oh three eight one six oh two one six. That's Jim's cell phone. And, you know, he can send you a link to schedule some time, too, so that, you know, you can ask your questions and and then see if there's something that we might be able to help you with. Yeah. We'll do a free discovery call with somebody to see what, what can be done. But yeah, you know, having said that, Michelle, we're at a place where we're, we're, we're adding coaches. So we've got other people that bring a lot of experience that can step in and maybe help solve some of these things that are going on. I think the first thing is let's just, let's have a conversation, find out what's going on in the business and, and what, if it feels like something we might be able to, you know, Okay. So let's jump. We got more things to do today. I appreciate everybody tuning in and we'll make this available. Just email me. Yeah, Jim's like, obviously everyone who's watching is very well aware of the fact that we are not in the same place. Jim's going to go back to visiting with family and son's coming up from Austin to spend the weekend as well, which is quite a treat to see mom and dad. And I'm spending my best friend's fifty-ninth birthday is today. I'm just having a great time. Yeah, I will. Hey, everybody. Thanks so much for joining. I hope you have a great rest of your weekend. And we will see you back on Wednesday. Thanks again. And isn't it Kristen who's going to be here next Wednesday? Very good. All right. See you all later. Thanks.
