Building With Intention: Lessons From the Volie Journey

Foreign. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally today, joined by Scott. We haven't done a video in a while, but it's good to, to get back together. Scott, how are you doing today?

Doing great, Jake. Good to be on. Heck, I, I feel like you semi retired from these. I've, I've done the last few here, so it's good that we're on together.

Yeah, yeah. You know, kind of the nature of things and I'm sure we'll, we'll talk about that a little today too. Just you know, handing stuff off and whatnot. But you wanted to get back on here. We did one of these maybe a year ago or so, some of the learnings that you had to where we're at. But we've hit another new milestone here. We've got now about a thousand dealers, a thousand rooftops on Folly's core product, the BDC platform. So we wanted to get on here and share some of the learnings and lessons we've had up to this point. So Scott, what's on your mind?

Yeah, I mean it's been a, it's been a wild year. Been a great year. Tons of, tons of learnings. Yeah. Last time we did this, the thousands customer video that was, that added in the dealer identity customers as well. So the first thing I learned was that when we originally built Valley, it was, it's very flexible platform and dealers could essentially do whatever they wanted. But what we really learned is we need to have an opinion instead of just rolling the ball out, standardize the campaigns, give coaching advice and, and really help. Help put a strategy in together that, that we can do with the dealers as partners. That seems obvious, you know, as I say it, but when we started out we, you know, we, we had. Most of our original customers were people that already had a strategy in place and, and they're the early adopters and they came looking for us. So as we sell deeper into the tail, um, we've, we've got to be the authority where they want us to be the authority.

Yeah, I would, I would really just emphasize that people want us to share the opinions and share how to help them. So we aren't doing anyone any favors by letting people set themselves up to be unsuccessful.

Sure, yeah, yeah. I mean it's been a great year. We realized that where we really fit, we can really help a dealership grow their business and, and make their people more productive. But, but we've learned it all getting to this point.

So what's next?

Well, in order to become the platform you guys want us to be everything we do going forward. We're going to start with reporting in mind. We're going to standardize every campaign. We're going to have this defined before we write any features. And that was a good learning is being accommodating and not being the authority. It's kind of a cousin to the first one but it doesn't help to give, give advice on what's working. We'll very shortly have reporting down to the attempt. And once we standardize everything and there's about 20 million calls in volume a month and if you don't standardize it, it's hard to share that really rich data with the customers. We're a slow turning boat. Before our database was small enough that we could dream of a feature and institute it. Nowadays it, it takes a lot. We've got a lot of people depending on us and we're much more conservative with, with the things we push. The call screen needs to be nearly perfect. We're putting a lot in the back end nowadays to make sure that that long term scalability is, is a big, is a big focus. We just move slower than before. It's, you know, in some ways it's less fun. It's very gratifying where we've gotten to but it's, it's a level of maturity that we need to get to. So I learned dealers are starving for ways to grow the service business. Obviously it's been our focus the whole time. Service bdc, the industry is heading this direction more. I spoke with one dealer and he's like with my brand our customers have very few places to buy a new brand of this vehicle. But they got a thousand places to service and I can make this as big as I can. The more we do, the more we realize what the opportunity is. You know Jake, let me throw it back to you. What are your some of your key takeaways in the last year?

Well, the biggest is one you already said is that we aren't doing ourselves any favors and we're not doing the customers any favors by not speaking up when we see that they're not executing things in a way that I mean we're in a thousand rooftops for volleyball, you know, across the BDC tool and that spans the whole country coast to coast. And you know, we have definitely some knowledge of what is working and what isn't working. We know what the number should be, we know what the activity should be, we know how your agent should be converting and can usually pay pinpoint to why they're not. So you know that that's really the biggest thing that, that comes to mind for me. And then, and then the second thing I, I would say is, is more so just communication is hard. So communication is hard internally. Communication is hard. You know, with your customers. You know, we, we need to be very, we need to put a lot of effort into being in sync with, with everyone we work with. And communication is hard in general. And that extends to your personal life too. You know, how often do you say something when you know to a sibling or, or even your spouse and it doesn't connect? Well, if it's that easy to, to miscommunicate and misunderstand when they're your most important people in the world, it's pretty easy to have bad communication when it's your co workers and your company. So those are the two things that we've really learned this year. In my mind.

One of the things that you focused on a lot is pacing and working with the CS team to work with everyone on pacing. We're much more opinionated on helping our customers with their agents and pacing.

Right.

Mm. There are services is, is an effort business. And the difference between 50 outbound attempts and 150 in a day in a lot of these dealerships is 10 extra appointments. So every outbound appointment you make, either they weren't coming in or they weren't coming in as fast. And pacing, pacing is everything in these stores. And that's another area that we, we do a really job at of, of giving them the feedback they need. A couple more maturity things that we, as we grow up as a company that we've learned, we've got a wide variance of customers and skill levels. We instituted a new training program for, for agents. We instituted a, a 12 week managerial training program. We've got big plans for 2026 and you guys have asked for it and it was a good learning there. Also step away here for a second. Along the lines, again, with maturity, you can't do everything and do it well. We have a very, very aggressive product roadmap, but we've scaled it back just a little bit because we didn't want to get too deep and roll out a handful of things that we did poorly. So we're, we're, we're, we're trying to be a little bit more, more mature there. We, we've tried to sell.

Unfortunately, that's a lesson we've had to learn a multitude of times.

Yes, we've Learned it at 100 stores. We've learned it to 200 stores. We've learned it at 400 stores. We'll learn it eventually. We, we, we learned that we need to simplify our customer success folks roles. That's why we took training out of getting people onboarded out of their hands and have a dedicated person for it. We're trying to get our CS reps out of tech support so they can focus on spending time with you guys to improve your business. Really kind of the theme of the year has been AI it's been the theme of the year for the last two and we've spent a lot of time wondering where we fit in. So that's kind of my final key takeaway that we learned getting to this point is that volley is the perfect layer between the robot and the humans. Humans are never disappearing from a dealership and they need some way to work with all the technology. We've got a good internal strategy ourselves. We also want to work with with our dealers favorite companies they work with and, and I think we've got a good plan but it's been a great year and can't wait to do this again when we crest 2000. Jake, what about you? Any any other takeaways for this, this this call?

This isn't a new learning by any means and it and it's something we all know but the time moves pretty quickly too. So you know we're recording this one before the holidays. I hope that everyone has a great season. Spend some time with with family and enjoys the time and and we at Valley, we're ready to have a kick butt 26.

We love working with you guys. We love what we do. We're totally committed to learning, getting better, helping you grow your business. There's a lot of stuff coming down the pike from and the need to manage all the communications, make your people more efficient. It's all right there and we're up to the challenge and really looking forward to it.

Thank you Scott for joining and we hope that everyone tuning in has a fantastic day.

Yep. Happy holidays.