#126 - NIADA 2020 Convention Goes Digital

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Thank you so much for tuning in. Let's do this.

Hello.

Welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Today we have very, very special guests, Mr. Steve Jordan and Mr. Shawn Peterson, joining us from NIADA to talk about convention. Luke, you were the one that told me things have changed. I think everyone knows by now. Give us a summary and let's have these guys explain to us. Things are going to be different this year.

It's still blowing my mind that we're having to cancel this, but I understand it's not on, y'. All. It's on. I'm sure it's on the virus, but. So we were supposed to have one in June, then it was pushed to September. Now where are we? Steve and Sean?

Yeah. So I got to tell you, it was a heartbreaker. I mean, this will be the first time since 1946 the Niada will not be meeting in person for its annual convention for all the reasons that everybody's aware of. But look, for us, it came down to the decision of, you know, what can we control, right? And can we deliver the kind of convention experience that our attendees and vendors and the industry has come to expect from niada? And we feel like it falls into the category of one of those things where we would love to be able to do it and we'll work our asses off to make sure that the convention is a success. But there's so many variables beyond our control that can affect the kind of experience that our people will have. So the worst case scenario would be to keep pressing forward, moving forward, and then have a convention experience that was disappointing. That's the one thing you cannot do. And so with that, we looked ourselves in the eyes and we had the hard conversations and we said, you know what? As much as we want to do it, we can't will it into place. Let's just cancel the in person conference out of an abundance of caution, you know, and not only all of that, but, you know, you've got all the safety issues and, you know, the social distancing issues and the gating requirements that each state has. You know, right now in Las Vegas, they're still under the phase two reopening, which means they can't have gatherings of more than 50 people. And we don't know if that's going to change between now and so if you're going to cancel, now is the time to do it. And it gives you enough bandwidth to pivot, make a Move to a virtual conference, which, look, at the end of the day, when we make the pitch to dealers to come to the convention, the single biggest hook is the convention education. Right. Of course, there's networking and there's parties and there's open bars and there's receptions and dinners and all the fun things that you do as an association. But the core to that is, how can I make my business better? What is the one thing, the one nugget takeaway that I'm going to be able to take back to my dealership and make 10 grand a month or save 10 grand a month, and, you know, that'll more than pay for my experience. So we feel like we've been able to take a lot of the same core educational components and pivot that into a virtual conference. So, you know, Sean has been on the tip of the spear helping us pull all of that content together. And really what we've decided to do for the virtual conference is focus the education on three things. Cars, customers, and credit. So with that, let me, let me turn it over to Sean, who again, has been on the tip of the spear and helping us pull all of the agenda topics together for the virtual conference. And you can talk a little bit more about that, Sean.

Yeah, so one of the things that we've done throughout the course of the pandemic is to pull the dealers. You know, what are the challenges that you're facing, what are the hardest things, what's working for you, what's not working for you? And to Steve's point, one of the things that consistently came back to us was we need three things. We need cash, we need cars, and we need customers. So we designed our virtual education experience around topics that address those three things. On the inventory side, what do the wholesale markets look like, what sourcing inventory look like throughout this thing, and what's it going to look like into the future? We know that prices are high and supply is low. How do you recondition? I know that was one of your topics in one of your recent podcasts. What does it look like for the retail dealer? What does it look like for the buy here, pay here, dealer? Do the auctions have some perspectives? We've got some great things lined up in online retailing and contactless delivery. As states have put shelter in place orders into effect, then pulled them back on those, and now that car dealers are essential, a lot of dealers had already put those processes into place. Some of them are fine tuning them. Is this a trend that's here to stay moving into the future. So we'll talk a little bit about what online retailing works. We'll get a lot of dealer perspective. I think one of the highlights in this agenda is the opportunity for dealers to hear from dealers. There'll be a lot of dealer panels, a lot of discussion from those perspectives. And then on the financing side, on the cash and credit side, we've got lots of sessions geared towards what's the future of floor planning look like. That was one of the things that we heard from the very outset that a lot of dealers had their lines whacked right out of the gate. Are they going to get them back? What does that look like with inventory low. So lots of fun topics to dig into that. We'll have some discussion on the future of indirect lending, what steps are going to come into play, what credit looks like for customers, what credit looks like for dealers. As many different angles as we can attack. We're going attack it from, you know.

Nothing backpedal too far on the. On the reason not to do it. But one thing that really connected the dots for me and maybe will help other dealers is I had heard word that there's large, large vendors that are large supporters of the association that are just not traveling. Right. They're not going anywhere. They're not going to be there. The vendor hall is going to be a ghost town. There's not going to be money to get behind events and activities and make this thing successful. And I don't think any of us dealers want NIADA to have an event that's not to that par. So that's where it clicked for me is I said, hey, man, you know what? Yeah. There's no sense in doing this if it's gonna be this ghost town of a convention and you don't have the large sponsors there to make sure that NIAID can float this thing. So that's just my backtrack and we don't need to get into it. But that really clicked for me as duh. Like, well, what did that.

I do want to know. I mean, what did that look like? Because we know what vendors have done for us that, you know, there's been vendors that have really stepped up and kind of cut rates for some people for a couple months. What. What does the vendor situation look like out there, Steve?

Well, for us it was a mix.

I think Steve was going to say mixed.

Mixed bag.

Mixed bag. Sean, tell us, tell us what it looked like until we get Steve back.

Yeah, Steve's never looked so good. Great picture. We should frame that for him too. Yeah. So it's certainly. There are a lot of companies that have travel bans at least through the end of the year. Some of them, they're still indefinite. They don't know what they're going to do in terms of travel. I will say this. Throughout the pandemic, I think vendors have been extremely supportive of dealers, extremely supportive of Niada. Given the constraints that they have in place via travel bans or travel restrictions, whatever the case may be, they're certainly willing to jump all in in this virtual convention that we're doing as well. One of the things that is a highlight of this is a dedicated virtual expo hall. So we want to make sure that dealers still have the opportunity to connect with those vendors for solutions that they need in their dealership. So we'll have really, the expo hall is going to be open for the entire three weeks. So we're doing a little bit something unique with the convention going virtually rather than, you know, the traditional footprint that we have when boots are on the ground in Vegas or Orlando, wherever case may be, where we do three consecutive days. Well, we're going to take that three day footprint and do one day a week so the dealers don't feel like they have to dedicate, you know, four hours a day in front of their computer for three consecutive days. Right. We'll have, we'll have agenda content will start on Tuesday, September 22, and then we'll do something Tuesday, September 29 and then again Tuesday, October 6. But the virtual expo hall will really be open that entire time. So the dealers can go schedule appointments with the vendors, engage them, you know, talk about what they need and to make their dealership better.

And is this going to be a live virtual event, Shawn, or is it going to be pre recorded? How's that going to work?

Yeah, so a little bit of both. We'll have an education agenda that has specific times where you can log in, catch that particular broadcast. If you're not able to make that particular broadcast, that will be available on demand afterwards. We'll also have additional on demand content that doesn't hit the specific dates and times of the agenda, but will be made available for dealers and that will, you know, you buy the convention package, that content will be available for you from the time it gets posted, let's say September 23rd, after, you know, the Tuesday 22nd sessions get posted the next day and then it's available for the rest of the year.

And so we're purchasing this thing. So what is it going to cost us I know what. I know what a normal event cost. What is the virtual version cost, Sean?

Yeah. So this. We've got a great opportunity here, and it's an opportunity that benefits both the NIADA and your state association and you as dealers. And what do I mean by that? So we've partnered with our state association network where a portion of your registration fees will go back to the state association. The state associations lost out on the opportunity to have their conventions as well. So we're gonna split the registration fee 50, 50. There's a unique registration code if Luke's in the Carolinas and Jeff in Utah that you can punch in that code and it'll help us disseminate the funds. So what we've done with pricing is come up with a great deal of 299 for one registrant and then 399 for a rooftop up to five. So, you know, Godwin Motors can sign up for 399, get five unique email addresses, and Luke can be watching one session and Alexa can be watching another session and the collections manager or whomever, and these will be available.

You said that the. I mean, we don't have to be there other than the couple of live sessions, which will also be recorded and available later. This is something you could log into at any time. Time.

Correct?

Correct.

I mean, that's cheap.

Yeah, that is cheap.

What.

How does. If we had questions during these virtual things, what do we do? I mean, you know, that's the one question I have because, you know, a lot of the. Really, when you dig deep, you get questions. How does that work in this situation?

Yeah, those are. That's a great question. You know, so we're working on a platform that will allow those questions to be submitted. And certainly when you're talking about recorded on demand kind of content. Content, it's, you know, obviously you're not going to be able to engage with the presenter while the presenter is actually in front of a microphone recording. But we are working on opportunities where, you know, if you, if you have a question that comes up in the course of hearing something that, you know, there's a way to engage that presenter. You know, obviously we'd like to make it a little bit better than email, but that might be what we get stuck with. But, you know, there'll be an opportunity to pose the question and for you to engage and hey, you said something. Boom, boom, boom, ba boom. And have a little conversation with them through some form. We're still kind of working out the kinks on that.

Have we looked at how far along on setting the agenda are you, Sean?

Yeah, so we're actually, we've got the agenda topics finalized. We're extending the invitations to the presenters now. If you go to niadaconvention.com you can actually see what is finalized. Most of the, like I said, you know, kind of broad based session topics are finalized and will be posted by the end of the day today. Certainly by the time you guys host the podcast, it should be up and going.

That's great. And you said cars. Well, Steve said cars, customers and I heard credit or cash, I guess. Okay. And is that. So we're going to talk, we're going to have hopefully somebody to help us get more inventory because we've been just, that's been a real issue. Are we gonna talk about transportation or anything in that car section? Because I know that a lot of dealers have had real issues transporting cars lately.

Yeah. So like I said, one of the things that, that we want to do with this particular content, you know, certainly the quote unquote live stuff, you know, the stuff that's on the agenda, it's gonna be a lot of dealer panel focused discussion. So you know, what works, what are the challenges, what does it look like going forward? And certainly those that are on those panels are going to be able to kind of talk about those sorts of things. The idea on some of our education is to kind of start broad, you know, what's it look like, what's the online retailing world look like and then get into the specifics from there. What's the inventory acquisition world look like from a broad based standpoint? Get into to more specifics. One of the other things that we're excited about, I think there's a lot of questions that people have on what's the economy going to look like and then specifically what's the used car marketplace going to look like heading into 2021? You've got an election in between convention and the first of the year. So what does the future look like? We've got a great session with an economist to kind of talk globally about what the economy will look like for small businesses between, you know, September and the first of the year and then peaking into 2021. And we're working on nailing down a session that focuses on those ideas specific to the used car industry.

Sorry to interrupt the podcast, but great news. The independent dealer podcast has its official first sponsor, Luke. Our very first sponsor. The great guys, Tim Taylor Byrd over at Dealer Re have stepped up and said, hey, we're gonna sponsor the podcast that allows us to continue to make the episodes. It allows us to increase our production value, expand our exposure, get the word out to more people. Our promise to the podcast nation, Luke, to our listeners, to those that tune in, is that we will not turn this into some sort of paid ad nonsense. We are only going to accept sponsors from companies that we use in our own dealerships and that we stand behind and know will benefit those that listen. Dealer Re is definitely one of those companies, right, Luke?

For sure. And I. You know, the history I have with Dealer Re goes all the way back from 2011. I've known Taylor probably since he was in high school, and I've known Tim for all that time. Really good people. This is a quality company. They've been doing my reinsurance since 2011. And for dealers out there don't exactly understand what reinsurance is, go back and listen to our podcast on it. But if you understand what, to a point, what reinsurance is and you want to investigate it, you need to contact DeLorean. That is the single best decision I've made in the car business was setting up my reinsurance company. And I know that sounds like a huge statement, but it is the truth. It will change your life, it will change your business and change the way you do business, and it'll help your customers as well. So, Jeff, I can't recommend anyone more highly than delauree.

Yeah, it's a great first sponsor for us. That's episode 19, if you want to go back to 19. That's May 17 16th of 2019. We spoke with Tim. We talked all about reinsurance and how it's going to benefit your dealership. Tune into that. Give the guys over there a call, explore your options. They're doing a special for our podcast listeners, so if you do call them and you say, hey, I want the podcast special they're throwing in the College of Automotive Management. It's a federal compliance ethics course that's done online. So this is so that you can stay compliant inside your dealership. You can teach your people. It's like a $500 value that they're giving to the podcast listeners when you get signed up with them. We had to have something to sweeten the pot. And also they know that we sent you.

Yep. And it's gonna be you get this done. You won't regret it. I promise you that.

All right, back to the episode.

So we will. We won't have the traditional, you know, entertainment type keynote speaker we had, you know, like for example, we had Michael Irvin all scheduled for. But, but he's not going to be a participant, unfortunately of our virtual convention. But we will have Michael Irvin for next year, a little, you know, preview. But we will have, Dave Anderson is coming back to do a little leadership training for us and then we'll have some, some general sessions that will, like I said, focus on, you know, some key industry topics, these economy type discussions. But I'm also happy to announce that the head of Automotive from Grant Cardone is going to come and do a general session presentation for us.

That's always good to get us fired up there. And people should know Dave Anderson, we've had him on the podcast once and this guy can get you motivated and get you going down the right path. So we talked about cars. What's the customer aspect gonna look like? Sean, what is, what's our, what's our funnel down there?

Yeah, so that's kind of where a lot of the online retailing stuff is. How do you engage customers in all of this? Right. So, you know, we've got a great dealer panel that's going to be queued up. You know, what's kind of been the success points for them. And we're going to have, like I said, buy here, pay here, dealers on that panel, retail dealers on that panel. What's worked, what didn't work, what have you tweaked? You know, we're going to talk a lot about, we're going to get a case study put together. I won't tell you who the dealer is yet because I've got invitation pending I haven't finalized they will participate. They just haven't got it finalized yet. There was one dealer that partnered with one of our vendor partners and just crushed it. They just built this great platform and put all these great processes in place. So we're going to do little case study discussion with them. One of the things again, you know, the idea of online retailing, you know, I think before the pandemic a lot of dealers may have thought about that as, oh, you know, that's the carvana thing, that's the room thing. That's right. That's not us. And I think that switch, at least my perception is that switch is flipped a little bit where, you know, there's certainly that model, but there are models that exist, I think for all dealers and what online retailing and contactless delivery and customer engagement looks like without having customers with feet on the ground from first look at a car all the way through delivery, one of the other kind of topics that we got queued up for that kind of customer track is the idea of a bdc. How can. You know, I know there's a lot of discussion and I know you guys have had that discussion on your podcast, BDC or not to bdc. But if you do have a bdc, how can you utilize that to get into the sales process deeper than what you may have thought otherwise? And maybe that conversation changes some. Some minds on whether BDC is appropriate. Or maybe it changes. People go, hey, you know, maybe I don't want to be bdc. And so anyway, we'll have. Based off that, that is a.

That's gonna be so helpful, I think, for so many dealers, because we were thrust into this new world overnight. I mean, essentially. And I know Jeff's really, you know, thought a lot about it. And, you know, we're gonna. We've delivered cars, Jeff, I think you've probably delivered cars at this point. And everything's different now. And we. There's. Some dealers have been slow to adopt, and I think if they can listen and watch, they may learn a lot from. From that type of education. Mm.

What I like, Sean, is you said a lot. Dealer panel, dealer led, dealer information. Obviously the rub with some conventions is when you show up to them, they're just big sales pitches from vendors who tell you all the reasons why your system's wrong. And this is the future. And oh, by the way, we have the answer. So I'm excited for that. I love that that is a big focus of your guys, is to make sure that these aren't just infomercials. Obviously there are some industry experts, and those are great because these guys, they own a software company that has a solution, but they're very tactful about giving us the full facts. So I wouldn't tell everyone to ignore any vendor led session because there's a lot of good information there. But are there sessions that are going to be geared towards my employees? When I'm looking at what package I want to buy, is this something where I want to have access to my collections manager or my sales team to say, hey guys, here's these five videos I want you guys to get in and watch over the next couple weeks?

Well, I certainly think the answer to that question is yes. You know, again, because of time constraints, you know, we. What you'll see on the. On the print agenda, you know, we won't be able to get into every nook and cranny of the dealership. We just don't have the bandwidth or time to do that. But that being said, you know, we'll have again additional on demand content that can be there. But you know, I think that there's a lot of things in here that will be very applicable to a lot of different dealerships.

Right.

Certainly the sales team would benefit from the idea of online discussions. Your buyers could benefit from the inventory and cars discussion. We're going to have something about reconditioning. I mentioned, you know your guys podcast jump that. That little nugget in my head. So you know, you're. There may be some benefit to some of your service folks that working on your cars.

Well, I would definitely say that's the silver lining to this whole situation is employees and key people that I either wouldn't have taken to Vegas. For me it's easy.

I couldn't afford.

I couldn't afford it. Or yeah, didn't want to leave the lot empty. This is a great opportunity to educate those middle managers even lower levels. Yeah. And kind of get is ridiculous.

And we fully expect and dare I say even encourage the dealers to utilize these training sessions in your, you know, Monday morning meetings or whenever you have staff meetings. I mean there's you know, 45 minute session, you know, if you break it up into two 20 minute segments or put them down and have them go, I think there's a lot of great opportunity to train staff.

So I'm thinking, I'm trying to still wrap my head around exactly how it's gonna work. There's gonna be a, there's gonna be one day a week for three weeks. And is it, are they gonna be trainings running all day during that one day?

So one of the things that we wanted to avoid was having dealers sit in front of their computers for eight hours a day.

Right, right.

You know, Vegas, when you're in Vegas, you know, you're there, it's a different story. You can, you can kind of come and go. So we're going to have a dedicated block of time where you know, there's going to be sessions that run or broadcast during those times. So right now we've got everything geared up. We need to kind of pick a block of time during the day that will capture the entire country. Right. So that we can consider our friends in South Carolina while still considering our friends in Utah and California and such. So we're going to start things at 11 o' clock central time and we'll run for about four hours a day on the content. Well, we've got a kind of A dedicated hour in the agenda for visiting the virtual Expo, you know, to give, you know, again, I mentioned that the virtual Expo hall is going to be open, you know, the entire time, but we want to at least put some time in the, in the agenda to encourage people to at least go check it out and then they can schedule the times to, you know, circle back with the vendors, you know, on a Thursday, let's say. So yeah, so you would log in, let's say, you know, we kick off at 11 o' clock central, 10 o' clock mountain, 12 o' clock loop for you. You know, there'll be that opening general session, then you go to the next general session and then we'll have a little break and then three hours or sorry, three breakout sessions for 50 minutes. You pick one of those three that you're interested in, you come back for a second round of breakout sessions, pick one of those. And then again, the ones that you weren't able to watch, you can come back and get later on demand or if you have a customer or you say, hey, I just can't dedicate time on Tuesday, September 22nd. They'll be posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, and you can go in and grab them on the 23rd or the 28th or.

And I hope dealers really understand the, what you're doing here. States have been state associations right now. A lot of them really rely on these, these conventions. They're having to get a bulk of their revenue for the year and y' all giving back 50% of this. You know, if, if you don't feel like you want to support the national convention, but you want to support your state, this is really a big deal that y' all are doing that. Any states doing anything particular to, to their state during the convention?

Yeah, so we're actually gonna have a discussion. Great question. We're having a discussion with our state executives today. There have been some that again because, and I think the Carolinas is a perfect example of this. Right. A lot of, a lot of the dealers that attend that convention have historically gone to get continuing education requirements or pre licensing education credit or whatever the case may be. So we're in conversations with our states about the possibility of delivering some state specific content that would be available on demand. It would be, you know, something that, you know, you know, Jeff might not have any interest on hearing Colonel Schwedo from South Carolina give his fire up speech and talk about titling in South Carolina, but Luke might. And that could be available for Luke to say, all right, here's the ciada specific content, and he can go watch that on demand or staff and watch it on demand later.

That's. That's awesome. Jeff, do you have anything. Any more questions?

No, I think for me to wrap this up, and as you guys were talking, my brain is just flashing, and I'm saying, unfortunately, what's going to happen is this is going to be so successful and so enjoyable for all those reasons we talked about that. This. I guarantee this is not the last time we do it. It's really, really fun to be in person. And I know there's a great camaraderie that comes from meeting dealers and the serendipity of the hallways and the restaurants, but, man, the upside to things like this and just the future in general. I remember about a year ago, I bought one of those silly little virtual reality headsets from Facebook, you know, the Oculus Quest or something. And I thought to myself, this is the future of conventions. Every dealer is going to put on one of these stupid little headsets, and we're going to walk around in virtual meeting rooms and virtual convention halls and virtual expo halls, and it's going to be like you're there, but you're not going to travel and have the hotel and have the viruses. I'm just going on record. July 2020, sometime in the future, 10 to 15 years, Luke is going to be giving a presentation via headset virtually to 2,000 dealers.

Well. While battling Darth Vader in a lightsaber battle, right?

Yeah, the fruit slicer or something.

Oh, gosh. You know, I hope, Jeff, you make a valid point. And, Sean, I think there's a lot of innovation that's come out and will continue to come out, not even on the dealer side, but on the association side. And I know in the past, we've recorded all of convention. Is this something that you think the association moves to in the future of having it virtually why the actual convention is going on? Or. Or is that maybe premature?

Yeah, I think there may be some premature to that. I think the answer to that question is, we don't know, obviously. I think to Luke shaking his head, going, I hope not. I think there's so many of our dealers and vendor partners that just. They love being together. I think that's one of the great benefits of being a part of an association, is you get the opportunity to network individually. I know you guys just got back from your. One of your 20 group meetings, and that's one of the great draws of being in a 20 group, is to be able to, you know, look your friends in the face and talk about business. And I think that's a valuable, important part. So we will, I think, always have some version of an in person convention. Now, whether there's additional content that gets delivered virtually, I think that's to be determined. But certainly look, you know, looking forward into 2021, we're very excited about having all of this pandemic stuff behind us and being able to get to the Wynn. Our 2021 convention is going to be at the Wynn in Las Vegas and we're geared up for, for a great in person convention in June and we'll, we'll see what else accompanies that. But that will definitely happen. And you know, barring any kind of catastrophe with this virus and nobody forces. But we're excited for that opportunity as well.

Thanks, Sean. That's great. Yeah, appreciate your time, man. And if you connect with Steve again and once he gets his WI fi situation figured out, tell him thank you for us as well. Will do.

Thank you guys for having me.

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