#132 - The EOS Model with Dan Grosvenor

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of the Independent Dealer Podcast. This week, we've got a special guest, a fellow dealer, Dan Grosvenor. Did I get that right, Dan?

That's right.

All right, Jeff.

What?

What all we got this week?

The next 30, 45 minutes are awesome, guys. I'm super passionate about this stuff. Dan is going to tell us about himself, and he's going to go over the EOs, the entrepreneur operating system.

That's correct.

Which is a cool, cool system by Geno Wickman that he put together. Dan's a subscriber of it, and he's gonna show us how the whole vision and the whole process of this fits together to just get control of your dealership. Don't let the business own you. Right. Own the business. I mean, I'm gonna go back and listen to this one quite a few times, and I guarantee you I'm downloading the books and this because, yeah, you have a couple crazy days, and you have some nuts going on with COVID and everything's all over the place, and you're like, what am I doing here? It's like a chicken. I'm just a firefighter. Right. Dan's gonna show us how to not be a firefighter.

All right.

I'm gonna do my best.

All right, here we go.

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. So my name is Dan Grosvenor. We're in the St. Louis market. We've been in business for about 22 years. Started with my brother at that time. We had a little bit of a falling out. We had two locations at that time, and we branched off. We're brothers again after all these years. That's good. So don't go into business with family. You can avoid it. We started out as strictly a buy here, pay here lot at the time. And it was back in the day when you could buy a car for $500, get $500 down, sell it for 1995. Yep. I was one of those guys that was the urban legend. We built that portfolio up to about 500 accounts with those $2,000 cars. And, man, it was miserable. He'd sell 10 cars on Saturday and have six ticked off. People have a map, and that was obviously a whole lifetime ago. And then we branched off into credit acceptance and then more into indirect financing across the board. Right now, I still have a buy here, pay here portfolio. Last year was about 15% of our business. Each month. So it's a small portfolio as we sit here today, but as the tides change, it will become more of the portfolio, depending on what the market does. We kind of toe that line. Last year, we averaged about 100 cars a month. You know, right here. During the COVID time, we're hit a little harder. Even though Covid hasn't hit us as much, it's hit the business a little bit more here than it has in other parts of the country, which is really strange that it's. That that's the case. So we're not doing quite as many as we were from March till today, but last year we sold about 100 cars a month. Great.

And tell me the makeup of that is that 15% still buy here, pay here, you hold, and the rest go to CAC and other subprimes.

Yeah. So recently it's been more like 20 to 25% of the business has been buy hair pay here. And credit acceptance is a piece of what we do. We big with capital one and Santander and all the usual suspects.

Daniel, what's the average ACV of the car you sell?

My average acv, it's up a little bit right at the moment, but historically, we are around that $13,000 ACV. So even our credit acceptance deals are a higher ACV than typical when I have to be. Because if I don't, if I allow a low ACV and credit acceptance, what does it do? It sucks out my prime buy here, pay here customer. So I have them capped on the. If we're not getting funded. $10,000, it goes into credit acceptance. You know, it goes into my portfolio, not in credit acceptance. Okay. Have a full service department, about 40 employees.

That was my next question. Dan, for you, 40 employees makes up how many sale. You know, just give us a real quick overview of front staff and back staff. And do you have, you know, how many helpers? I mean, that's a. That's an organization, man. I mean, you're. You guys selling a hundred cars with 40 people. I can't even fathom keeping that straight.

Yeah, so it's. Well, it's. It's layers of management. So you have to have the right people. And I've for years, kind of, you know, how did these big companies. How do these companies manage to have all these. Hundreds of locations and all these. Well, I kind of made that same statement that you did, Jeff. Is that. How the hell do you manage 50, 100 employees? Well, it's about having people and having management in between. So we have three sales managers, usually about a dozen salespeople, you know, half a dozen technicians. Service manager, system service manager, service writer, BDC department.

So Dan, can I a quick question. The layers of management. Because this is very interesting to me. I have on any given time 17 to 19 employees. At what point do you have to start installing levels of management? How many employees do you think you get that? Because right now it seems like everybody's still reporting to me and I'm not sure that's the right way to go there.

Yeah. So here's the thing. So if you were like me and still to a degree it's always there is I had to have my hands in everything. Right. You know, all the big decisions I had to have. And what really did it for me is we bought the facility that we're in right now. We were renting for years and years. Bought the facility we're in right now about seven years ago. And it was a very labor and it was. I was buying out of foreclosure. It was a time when the government shut down. I mean I had just a lot of work to do. So I had to let go of the reins. I had to let go of the vine. I had to, I had to turn it over to the management staff. I had their time, who are still with me today. And you know, what I discovered is they do it better than me. They do certain things better than me. So you know, it's about, I guess figuring out what the data points are that you need to watch the key performance indicators that you need to keep an eye on and figure out what the real critical conversations are and the real critical things you need to watch and have them manage the day to day. That's easier said than done. It's easier said than done.

It's when you become the difference between what an operator and an owner.

You know, and I'm still self employed.

You know, don't you own a job, you don't own a business, but you, you're getting better at owning system. Yeah. And a business instead of you're the guy that makes all the decisions on whether the engine goes in or doesn't go in. And you're the guy that makes the decision on whether we're going to do tires for that customer or whether we're not. You know. Yeah. You've got to step away from those. Right. And that's a hard thing to do.

Is us don't even want to have those conversations. And they know that they do a better job than I do. Yeah.

It's hard as you rise up and say, okay, I am the best at closing a deal, or I am the best at making sure the paperwork's accurate, but it is not the best use of my time.

Right.

Right. I can do it. I'm capable and more capable than maybe anyone. It's in some things. Right. Maybe not others. But. But I've got to let it go in order to not be the bottleneck.

And if you're out there, if you're out there selling cars, well, then basically, essentially you're. You're a salesman. Income as a sales. As a salesperson. Right. So what's the salesperson make? Well, that's. If you're out there sweeping the lot, well, your time is being utilized at $12 an hour. I mean, that's.

Yeah, yeah. And I've gotten, I can get away from all that. I hate to sell cars, so I finally got, years ago, got away from that. But, you know, it seems like that's the hard thing for any entrepreneur to do is to start to remove themselves away because we're the ones that built the company and we're the ones that know how to do every job. And I guess what I'm leading into is some of what you were going to talk about today was, you know, how actually do you do that? What's the best philosophy to get to get out of your day to day operations and into being a business?

Yeah. So it's your baby, right? I mean, so how do you just walk away from your baby? But, you know, at some point the baby has to grow up. So, you know, I wanted to kind of go over something that's really helped us grow, and it's called the EOS process. And what EOS stands for is Entrepreneurial Operating System. And I probably should check with you ahead of time, see if we can share a screen. I know a lot of people listen to the podcast, but you also do that, the YouTube version as well. Yeah.

You can share it somehow.

Hey, just to interrupt the podcast real quick, Luke, our friends over at Dealer Re, I mean, I think we're doing some good for them here at the podcast. Dealers are jumping on board. They see the importance of having their own reinsurance company.

If you don't have your reinsurance company, I cannot say this enough. Do it. Stop today. Call Taylor Byrd. Get him on the phone. Call Tim. I'm not sure if Tim's in the office every day, but you call them, get them on the phone and get started creating wealth and not just getting behind the car.

Business.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Tax deferred monies, you're gonna put in your left pocket. You're gonna save it for a rainy day. It really makes me think that it's, you know, all dealers have got to put it in. They've got to their business. You've got to start now.

If you're giving somebody else warranty money, you're losing money. If you're not doing this, you're losing money. I mean, it's that simple.

And we're gonna get the guys on soon to talk more in depth. I really want some more training on my CPI product. I'm not getting the penetration I need to. We'll get into some more depth on that soon, so stay tuned. Okay, so if you're joining us on YouTube, you're going to see a video here that Dan is going to pull up that's going to explain this, the EOS system. And I know a little bit, only probably what I've googled 30 minutes ago when I knew this was going to happen. Same with Luke. But get online, look at it if you're listening and if you're on our YouTube channel, you'll see it. Yeah, I think everyone can see your.

Okay, good. So. And I'll try to explain the best I can too, but the visual does kind of help. So. So what it boils down to is, first of all, eos, Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's based on a book by Geno Wickman. And what Gino Wickman has done is he's pretty much taken a lot of the things on a lot of other books that a lot of other people have written and kind of made it into kind of an actionable process. And so, you know, you have Dave Anderson on, right? Everybody loves Dave Anderson. We subscribe to his training. I mean, we physically send managers. We. I personally go to his on site trainings or off site trainings and he talks about culture and vision and all these things. How do you. Clarity? Absolutely. How do you do that? And so the, you know, a lot of the training that we listen to, it's the. On what you should do, but not as much of the how. And so what this program kind of does is it kind of breaks down the how, you know. So for instance, you know, the first point is the vision component of what you need to do. So it needs to be crystal clear, like Jeff just said. So, you know, what is your. What are your values? Right. Every organization has values. It's just, are they the ones you really want them to be? And who's dictating these values? So deciding exactly what is. What is it that your company stands for? Critical step one. I thought it was a bunch of Kumbaya crap that Boeing put on their investor reports. These are our values, when in reality it is how we hire and fire and decide what we're going to do next. Another piece of it is of the vision is to what is your core purpose? What is your niche? What is it that you do? And so we had to kind of decide, you know, we were talking about before we got on here. You know, I'm part of the rich dealer group and a big part of the message is a subprime message. And so I would always struggle, as some of my other dealer friends would of man, you have this loud subprime message. Well, you're really going to turn off a lot of the prime buyers. Well, with going through this process, I discovered, I don't care. They're not my buyer. So what is my, you know, now we can handle. We have the finance companies, we have the cars, and we have all the things we can sell a car to, a fight, to a sub, to a prime buyer. But if I, if they're turned off by my message, they're not who I'm talking to anyway. My service department, you know, everything to everybody can't be all things to all people. And that's what so many folks try to do, you know, and you get chased off by shiny stuff like, you know, do I want to start selling four wheelers on the lot? Well, could I do that? Yeah. But it takes away from the focus of what it is that we're here to do, which is to help folks with credit challenges get into nicer, newer cars in the St. Louis market. I'm not trying to sell cars outside the market. This is just, we're here. This is what we're. What we're focused on. Same with my service department. We don't want to do big jobs. We don't want to do service work outside of our existing customer base. I don't really have the capacity and takes away the focus. I want to be able to service all of my customers we sold cars to and their households. That will keep my service department filled along with my reconditioning. I get to make money on them and I keep them, my customer, forever. So that's what we decided our focus is. Right? So step one is to figure out what your vision, what your, what your values are. And then you. And then beyond that, you have to make sure the entire Organization knows that's exactly who you are and that's the direction you want to go. Everyone's rowing in the same, in the same direction. They know what that direction is. And then the next step to the right. Well, actually I like to go to the left first. So the people component, we talked a little bit about that. Getting the right people, right. So we hire and fire based on our values. And the EOS model uses, uses what's called a people analyzer. And we made a couple of bad hires over the past few months. We hired a BDC manager and we hired a service manager. Historically we would make a bad hire. We have a bad, you know, team member, just wasn't producing or just wasn't the right fit. We would leave that. We would keep that person for sometimes a year, right. And know we've all done it, know that, you know, this person just isn't right. But we just hang on to him just because he's always been here or, you know, he's going through a rough patch, whatever. So what this does is this gives you the ability to rank people. Do they follow the core values? You go one by one. Do they follow this value, yes or no? Do they follow this value, yes or no, and so on and so forth. Can you figure out what your threshold is as to how often they break those values? Because no one's perfect, right? Yeah. And then what's. So that's. Are they the right person then? Are they on the right seat on the bus? Do they get it? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity to do it? So they call it GWC for short. Right. So do they get it? Is it in their DNA? Do they, do they, do they have what it takes to even be able to sell cars for 12 hours a day in the heat, cold, you know, the rejection, that kind of thing? Do they want it? I mean, do they actually show up and actually want to do this job and then do they have the capacity to do it? I mean, can they actually, are they built to even do this to begin with? So we managed to say managed. It's a failure. But the fact that we identified within, within a matter of four weeks. In particular, the service manager, he just wasn't right for this job where historically we would have just drug on and try to make something work. So I'm going to flip back over here, over to the right to the vision component, or I'm sorry, over, past the vision component, which is the data. So we talked a little bit about, you know, if you take A step back. And so if you want to, if you were on a tropical island, right, you're sitting there, you're drinking your Mai tai and you're on the beach, you know, what are the data points? What are the key performance indicators? What would you have to know about your business? You know, maybe 10, 15 things. It would tell you at a snapshot what the health of your business is. That's where these go. And so, you know, some of the things that we do, we talk about is, you know, what we're trending for the month as far as units, what we're trending for the month as far as gross. You know, how many cars do we get reconditioned last, last week. And it's looked at weekly, monthly or quarterly, depending on the metric. Most of these things are weekly. And then what also helped us move the service manager in particular along is the fact that we look at 13 weeks across the board and if the numbers aren't where they need to be and you don't see them trending in the right way, well, you can make decisions very quickly, very. Without any emotion, without any. The data is the data. Right. So that's another important piece of it. Next piece is.

Can I stop you for one second?

Yeah, sure.

You just said 13 weeks. Is that arbitrary or is that, I mean.

Well, how I came up. Great, great question. So how we came up with, with 13 weeks is we use a software to help kind of implement, to help kind of organize this. It's called 90.IO and it is a EOS based software. There's a couple of them out there. We use 90 and 13 weeks is just the data, the data stream that it shows. I'm sure there's some science behind it. I don't know what it is, if there is. And I guess that's enough time to tell you, I guess short enough, I guess to do something about it, but far enough away to actually maybe see trends is probably the reason behind it.

So you can hire a fire within those 13 weeks is what, what that factor is or that data is telling.

You well, you know, you have a problem because it's, because it's not even necessarily about higher end fire. We used it for that. We, you know, the gwc and the data wasn't our guy. And we knew it, knew it very, very rapidly. In fact, he probably wouldn't made it that long. But I took a few days off and went to the lake and you know, so it kind of get put on the back burner.

Yeah.

So you know, the next piece is processes. And this is something that we're terrible at and most entrepreneurs are. It's the, it's the, your, your core processes should be written down and followed by everybody. So just like the vision, it's, it's, it's communicated with everyone. It's clear. Same with your processes. You know, there's, there's a process for how you greet a customer, how you bring the customer in the office. I mean there's, there's a certain way that each of you in your dealership would like for it to be done. And unless it's really written down and you know, if you, unless you have, if you have an organization of any size which you talk about, how do you get from 17 employees, which I don't want to necessarily say the goal is to get to 50 employees, but how do you manage that if 50 employees, if your growth requires 50 employees, how do you do that? Well, you have to document your core processes though. You know, the name of my dealership is Five Star Auto Plaza. So it's the five star way. That's just the way we do it here. It's black and white. The over here to the left, it's the issues, right? So this, this program has a very specific way of taking emotion out of things and having meetings done in a certain way. You've all been in meetings that just. Or meetings just for meeting sake, right? That it just. We're just going to meet for the sake of getting together and just running down rabbit holes and having conversations about this, that or the other. You start talking about sales numbers. Next thing you know you're, you're complaining because the porters didn't get the cars clean enough, you know, and you never really solved anything. So there is a very specific track in which you, you follow the, it's called a meeting pulse where you go down your, you know, are you following the vision? What are the data points? You don't discuss it. If there's a problem with the data at that point, a data point, you move it on to your issues list. This is really hard to explain just audio wise, but the idea behind it is you take your top issues, you as your, as your management team discuss them and they're solved forever. You never talk about them again. You start talking about what the porters are doing. The reason why we're not selling many cars is, but you know, because, because, well, they're not clean enough. And then. Well, I remember a time back in, you know, 1994 when I had a Dirty car. And, and Tauruses are always dirty, I've noticed. And you're talking about how we can't sell Tauruses and quit buying Taurus as well. So it's a very specific track on keeping the meetings.

You know, we discussed this a couple weeks ago, Jeff, how you need to have your, you know, meetings.

Need.

If you're going to do sales training, needs to be sales training. If you're going to do service, meeting, needs to be service. And if you're going to do housekeeping meetings, it should be housekeeping. And I really, I love what you're talking about here, Dan. It makes so much sense to me.

Yep, I listened to that. That was actually a very good, very good spot. You guys did. Thank you. And then kind of the final part there, it goes along with the meetings, you know, there's the traction component. What that is, is what are the company's rocks. And I don't know if you guys have read Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, but a big. By Stephen Covey. But a big portion of this is based on a lot of Stephen Covey's seven habits. And what the rocks are, is Stephen Covey, years ago, did an example. He took a glass cylinder and he, he had a. He had some large rocks, he had some gravel, he had some sand, he had some water. And, and he brought some up on stage and said, okay, let's, you know, I want you to put all this in the glass cylinder. So people would pour the water and they'd pour the sand and they put the gravel in. Well, the rocks would never fit. Well, the long and short of it is if you put the big rocks in first, then. Which is the idea behind the metaphor, behind it is your, your, you know, the important stuff in your life, the important stuff in your business, whatever the case may be, then you put the gravel in there, right? That's. That's important, but not as big. Then the sand, then the water, and it all fits in that cylinder. So the idea behind the rocks are, what are the most important things for your business to get done for the next quarter? You usually have one, no more than two of the big things that you just have to tackle. You tackle it. And every quarter you have another set of rocks. Every quarter you have another set of rocks. Because what we have a habit of doing is trying to slay every dragon every day. And what winds up happening, nothing gets solved. Nothing gets fixed. You know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Yeah.

My problem is I get so sick of Moving large rocks that sometimes I just want to play in the sand for a while and then I get stuck just playing in the sand and I get all muddy. And I realize no one moved any rocks around. They're hard.

But that's what all entrepreneurs get. Get involved in sometimes. And I think what it was so important with what Dan's talking about is this is how you get to the next level, right, Dan?

Well, and what I also say, Jeff, is that the rocks that you talk about, are they really rocks? Are they really big? Are they. Are they really the big things? You know, sometimes they appear to be. And that's part of this issues, you know, IDS identify, discuss and solve. And what winds up happening is an issue that you think is an issue that you think is the problem. As you and your and your management team start talking it out, what you discover is that maybe what you thought was the problem was actually a byproduct of a different problem in which it needs to be solved over here. So, you know, I find myself chasing after stuff that appear, you know, urgent but not important, that appear to be big problems, when in actuality, you know, I need to be focusing on something that's not really acting on me. The important, not urgent.

And that's where I'd plug the dealer community. Sometimes you don't have upper management, you don't have those people, or you're in your own paradigm of your dealership where you think that is the big problem and then someone from the outside looks at it and says, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the real problem. Your problem is over here, started back here. And that helps talking to other dealers, your 20 group.

Yeah.

What I wanted to ask Dan was. So I think the process little wedge in this is one of the largest vision and process. I think those are huge. And we always talk about process. Document your process, document your process. So such a thorn in your side because it's such a hard thing. It's a moving target. You may have a process for 10 years and then all of a sudden you implement a new software or you have some new thing and now you've got to go back and restructure. Are there any tools that you're using? Is there a software within this that helps you actually document that? Or is this just a word document and some napkins?

Yeah, that's a great question. And that is probably the worst. The thing I hate the most, like you said, is probably one of the most. It is. But, but. So no, there is no other than other Than maybe not getting too deep in the weeds, because I have that. That same problem of man, it's got to be perfect, right? If I don't write it word for word, just perfect, it's.

Everyone's going to learn it wrong.

Yeah. It's going to get translated.

But let's go back to last week's episode for a second. Jeff and Marshall talked about this, and what Dan just described is, we do like to be perfect, but to start with, you just got to get something down and you can add to it as it goes. And Jeff, we learned that you have it written down, but you haven't given it anymore.

And Covid is going to change it. All right.

Yeah.

Also, what I've been doing forever, all of a sudden changes.

But that's okay. If it's written down as documented, you can edit it as you go. And I'm sure Dave, I'm sure Dan's editing his every week, every two weeks. Right.

And it's in. Luckily, I have a manager that's really good at it, and I kind of tell her, hey, this. This is what we want to get done. And she, you know, she's. So that's another piece too. Something that. That's. That's another piece of this as well. What is it that nobody else. What is it one that you enjoy doing in your organization? What do you enjoy doing? You know, Luke said, you know, you said you don't like selling cars. Well, you have no. Then you shouldn't sell cars. Right. You probably shouldn't anyway, but you should stay away from the sales floor. What else, you know, what do you love to do? What are you best in the organization at doing? Those are the things you should be doing. Everything else should be delegated. That's part of this process that's so.

Powerful and that's so important, and so many of us don't do that, and we don't. We don't trust that the people we hire are better than us at doing certain things. Right, Dan?

And that is actually a quote from the book is let go of the vine is you just need to let go. And you know what? Some of the things that you're doing really well today maybe only get done about 60% as well. But you know what? That gives you the time to do the things that are going to drive the business further. Now. These things are easier said than done. I struggle with this every single day. This is how it's supposed to work. That's not necessarily how I live my life every day. So don't think that for a second. But Dan.

So I've started. I started trying to implement a software called Trainual that came across one of my feeds and it's that same thing. It's his process builder Train. You will something or other. What do you. Are you using a software, are using a Google Doc or using Issue using a Word document? This person updating your processes. What do you physically use?

She's using just Word Docs right now. Okay. Okay. They will go on a work a Google. It'll go to Google Drive. But. But right now it's just. It's just Word document things. That is, that is probably the, the part that we're the least advanced in it.

Yeah, I'm gonna get these. I'm gonna line up these people from Trainual for a podcast. It's really interesting gig. So important.

Yeah, that's a good. That's a good idea. You know what we did is we just. We started writing our manuals with the help of Freeman, but we started writing ours just through a Google Drive and you could print it out and hand it to everybody. And you know, you got to start somewhere and that's the main focus here. Dan, this is awesome. How long have you been using this in your business and what shape. You know, how much have you grown since you started doing this process?

So the. We've been doing this for about a year now. We've self. Self implemented is what they call it. So they recommend that you, you, you get an EOS implementer that's are very. That are very, very expensive. Sure. We chose to get the manuals and the books and I think they even have my. You know, like they give you a whole. You know, this is actually what your implementer will actually bring in.

Jump back.

And there's a very specific. Dan. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. Yeah, you probably didn't see it anyway.

There's.

There's, there's a. There's a screen. You're not seeing my screen anyway. Oh, gotcha.

There's. They have a whole system. Where would you start? I mean you mentioned the book by Geno Whitman. Which one are you referencing?

So the. It's Geno Wickman. W I C K M A N. And it's Traction.

Okay. That's kind of his Flagstone book. Right. I think he's got five or six, but that was where you would say we should start.

You should Traction.

Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Well, and I was gonna say also if you decide to self implement. Implement, get a grip is what you and your entire management team. You need to read both of those if this is a path you decide to take now, because an implementer will cost you about anywhere from four to $5,000 a day. Yeah, yeah, no question. We just met with, with an implementer for the first time this past week. We've kind of had some culture problems with COVID It's kind of affected some of our management, and we're not exactly as cohesive as we once were. It's time for me to bring in a professional kind of that third party. So the end of next month, we're gonna have our first meeting with an employee.

But here's the thing.

Pretty far.

I mean, I don't know, Danny, if you know this offhand or with share, but what your monthly payroll has got.

To be.

You know, two, $300,000, you know what I'm saying? So, yeah, bringing in an implementer or, you know, a coach or something, it's very relative. When you see, yeah, say, three to $5,000 a day, it's like, well, I'm spending 300,000amonth, so it's a drop in the bucket for me to make sure I'm not paying the wrong person.

And, well, and so everyone. And so this isn't. This isn't my idea to start doing this right. There's a lot of car dealers that are much bigger than me that I look up to that have implemented this process. And I also know people in other industries that have implemented this process as well that I look up to. And every single one of them that have hired an implementer have said, yeah, I didn't want to do the money. That's always the biggest thing. But have said, you know, if you get the right guy or gal, it's money well spent.

Sure. Let's go back to the car business here for a second. Dan, you have a. Since you're selling 100 cars a month or so, how many cars you buy and who's buying the car for you?

Well, so we. Before COVID I had a buyer helping me out that I was grooming to do it. That's something that I think most of you would agree that as one of the most important functions in the dealership. And I've always said that one of the last things I'll give up is signing my own checks. Me too. And then, you know, not over at least overseeing the purchase of the acquisition of the inventory. Now, at some point I can't do it all myself, but recently I have been because the market has been so volatile that I have been spending a lot of my time buying cars personally. But I had been grooming a buyer. Whether he comes back or not. After this whole thing, it's hard to say. So right now, I'm buying every single one of the cars.

Wow. So during COVID you know, we've heard a lot of dealers talk about how businesses have kind of blown up, and you said you kind of had the opposite effect. What do you attribute that to? Is it. Is it your region? I mean, what. What's going on? I believe y' all had some rioting issues, too. What is that part of it?

You know, we haven't had any more writing than anywhere else with the recent stuff. We're known for a previous one, but that's long gone. You know what's funny is we have, you know, I'm in a 20 group just like most of us, and, you know, we get on a zoom call. Chuck Bonanno's our moderator, and talking to Chuck, he says he can't quite figure it out either, but he hears the same thing. Our area is a lot less affected by Covid as far as the virus is concerned, the infections and everything else. He's not really sure either, but he. That's what. And I'm hearing from other sources, too, just certain areas are killing it, having record months. Other areas, not so much. And I have a good friend in Kansas City that, you know, we have same size dealership, same demographic. You can't get any closer to demographics in St. Louis. And Kansas City is experiencing exact same. We have the exact same numbers. We sell the exact same amount of cars. I mean, it's just. It's. It's eerie. On completely opposite sides of the state, huh?

That's interesting. Very interesting.

I can't figure it out. Please, please tell me if you can.

Yeah, yeah. So much. So much regional attitudes and regional stuff, and people are migrating, too. I mean, I know my area is booming from a construction standpoint and a demand and consumption standpoint, just because everyone's leaving California and heading to Nevada, Utah, and Colorado and Idaho. You know what I'm saying? Everyone wants off the coast. So, yeah, those are super interesting dynamics, Dan. I guess to kind of put a pin in this and wrap up this EOS conversation. You kind of talked about how dealers could get started in this, and I guess maybe why I want to back up my overall observation of this is we do have dealers of every size listening, right. And there is a situation where a dealer, again, you're the owner operator. It's you and your wife, or it's you and your son, or it's you on your own and you're making a great living probably selling 20 to 30 cars a month. You're there all day, every day, but you're not looking to have 20 employees or 30 employees. Right. But on the flip side of that, there are people who want to scale and want to grow a long term business for themselves or their kids or just the impact they can have in their community. This is the only way to do it. Right.

So the thing is that you just touched on something a little bit, Jeff, and you talk about this all the time in your podcast, is that you talk about the, you know, the very small guy, just a handful of employees, and they talk about this in traction that we'll never know what the best company in the world is because it may be some $30 million company in Idaho that no one really knows about, but their profitability is off the chart, their happiness level is off the chart. So it's not necessarily about size, it's about all these components. What do you want for your life and your business and put it into a direction. You know, I didn't really talk too much about the vision part of it, but it's, but it's also, you know, it starts off where do you expect to be in 10 years? What's your long term plan? Right.

Yeah, it starts with that vision.

Begin with the end in mind and then you work your way back. What's your three year picture and what's your one year target? So, you know, so it's not. And I've learned a lot about being in the 20 groups as well is, you know, there's guys that'll sell twice as many cars as I do, but are they doing better? You guys have experienced that. You're sitting next to the guy that appears to be doing killing it and you're like, my God, how'd you afford to get here? Once you look at, once you look at their composite.

Yeah. And that's, you know, that's. So the one thing 20 group has taught me is the vision part of it, how to look way far out. You know, we look at a five year plan and we go at it and we back into it. But I think so many dealers get caught up in the monthly plan, how many cars I sell this month, what did I do this month? And that's really just the wrong way to look at it. And you've got to have this vision, you got to have a structure to get there. And I think this is great. Dan, one last question, and it seems like you read a lot. I do as well. Love to. There are a couple books you'd recommend for, other than the ones we talked about that you'd recommend for a dealer out there.

I recommend, hands down, every time with. For anybody. Dealer or anybody. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen Covey. Luke, I'm sure you've read it. I'm guessing. I mean, and I just actually had my management team, we read a book, a quarter. It's not a lot to ask. And I had them all read that. And I've reread it as well. And I realized how much I've really modeled my life after this. Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. That's a really good one as well. But I would start with everything we just talked about. I would start with, well, Seven Habits, because a lot of the same stuff is based on this. But traction is a really good one. At least see which direction you want to go.

Yeah, I'm going to have to pick that one up.

Yeah. Yes. Very, very interesting, Luke. Any other questions for Dan? I mean, I feel like I could go on forever about this. This is the kind of stuff that really excites me because I think as dealers that are in that mid grade, well, any dealer, actually, in all areas, it really comes down to what Dan said is your vision and what is your vision. And then you just got to get there. Do you want to be tied to your business all day, every day? Fine. You love that. That's what you really, really enjoy is being on the concrete and being on the sales floor and doing that. Awesome. Do you want to find a better work life balance? You don't want to be in on Saturdays or get a phone call on Sunday that you have to go sell a car or do a test drive, you know, how are you gonna get there? That's really, you know. You know, Luke, that. That excites me. So this is. Yeah.

And Dan's really given us a roadmap to get there.

Yeah, it was. I think me was the guy that wrote the book. I just, I just pointed and it wasn't even. I was pointed towards it again. There's. There's a lot of people out smarter than me that I just. I just, I am not one that could ever invent the wheel, but I'll steal the heck out of a hubcap.

Yeah, I'm with you, brother. I'm with you.

All right, Dan, thanks so much.

Thanks, Dave.

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