#146 - How I Built This w Andrew Wiley

Alright, so this is our how we built this or how I built this segment. We used to go four or five during December to really dig into who we are, who's listening to us, who's engaging on Facebook. This way we get to know a little bit about all these dealers and if you ever have any issue in that area, you'll know who to call.

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. Great. I appreciate you guys inviting me to do this. My name is Andrew Wiley. I own Consumers Auto Warehouse in Stanton, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley, out in the mountains, relatively rural area. I've been in business 20 years this year, so hit number 20 this year. That's great. We sell somewhere in between 25 and 45 cars a month. We do kind of a hybrid mix. We do some buy here, pay here, some special finance and the rest regular retail. We also have a rental car agency, independent rental car agency. It's not branded, so we rent cars. It's really easy to do in Virginia and we have a separately branded service facility to do all our, all our recon work. And we, we work on cars for the general public too. So that's, that's kind of our three. Three. You got your hands in everything, little bit of everything. And it was all slow to develop. It wasn't, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about how I built it and it was in many ways random. The different things that we added through the years, we just kind of take little pieces that work and expand upon them and get rid of stuff that doesn't. Currently rental cars isn't a big thing for us. Travel is not a huge thing right these days. But the other parts are doing well. So we've got 18 employees, including myself, full staff over in the service department detail guys. Then down here we've got a good sales team, we got a collections manager, very little office staff. We kind of share the duties on some of that.

Andrew, that's really awesome because I've been in every business that you are currently in. How long have you been in the rental car business?

Portion of it A long time that actually started again in Virginia. It's super easy. There's no fee to get a rental car license and to put a car in rental, all you have to do is pay the registration fee. You don't pay tax on it or anything. So it's 45 bucks. Put a plate on it, get insurance and Go. And so that actually started pretty early on. When we first opened, what we were running into is we were selling a really pretty low quality vehicle. And so they were requiring lots of post sale maintenance, as we like to call it. And we were running out of D tags to put people in. So I said, well, let's move that over into a more managed fleet. And so we just put a couple of cars, put a rental plate on them. And, you know, we were charging people really small amounts, kind of half courtesy vehicle. And then people started saying, hey, do you rent vehicles? I need a vehicle. And we expanded upon it from there. So we got about 15 or 16 cars in rental, almost all just standard cars and minivans. We don't do any SUVs or specialty vehicles at the moment. It provides a unique opportunity too, because we, when we need to loan a vehicle out for like some sort of community service thing, a parade.

We all.

You know, the university up the road, we donate two cars a year to them for their use. And they're just rental cars. So it makes that transaction, those transactions easy. Easy on the insurance. My insurance company doesn't. Doesn't have to hear about me putting a V tag, which is against some rules anyway, and common sense. Yeah.

Yeah. So do you have them? Is that rental company a separate llc?

Yeah. So Luke will scream at me for this. I think it is not okay. And again, I think that's a. That falls into the category of how we've grown. And it just started out, you know.

Yeah. Doing it in Mafa. Yeah, yeah.

Adding a couple of cars in and then expanding. And I debated it and thought about it then. It would require new licensing and all the rest of that. We're scaling that operation back a little bit now. We were super aggressive in it. We had 25 or 30 cars and it was a big thing for us. And then it got away from us a little bit. We started to have the wrong kind of clientele renting from us, and the losses started to pile up and it became more of a headache than it was worth. So we've dialed it back quite a bit in the last year.

Yeah, yeah, I've been there. I've been there. Andrew.

What?

Your service department. So did it evolve out of your core business because you saw that you were selling cars? Either service them or was it open day one? And the second part of that question, you said it doesn't sound like it's in the same property. How far away is it from your current dealership?

Yeah, again, it's. It's in the same parking lot, but there's a business in between us. Okay. And that was more of a function of how we ended up acquiring this property. But no, I didn't open the service department at first. When we were open in 2000, for the first five or six years, five years we were open. We didn't have any service. We outsourced everything. It went to various shops around. We had a couple people that were good, couple people that weren't so good. Some issues with that. And then we ended up renting a couple of bays in a, in a business that, that business that's in between me and my shop now. And we did that kind of slowly eased into it and we were only doing our own maintenance there. And then in 2005, 2006, economy was doing really well. We were doing really well. I had bought the property on the other side of that shop that we were renting from and decided to invest in a shop then. So that's been open 13 years now, since 2007. It took several years to get that to be profitable.

I understand.

Is it a standalone business? It's branded separately?

Yep, yep, it is. It's again, it's independent. It's no franchise or anything like that. It's got a great reputation. But it's still over 50% is internal work.

Okay, so that's it.

That's, that's a goal success though. That's great.

That's, that's a goal for me. If we can, if we can be 50, 50. And actually we're, we're finally getting to 60, 40. 60% customer pay, warranty work and 40% internal. I think it's successful is my opinion. And it's at that point it's a standalone, it pays its own bills, it does what it's supposed to do. So I think that's a good success. Andrew?

Yeah. Yeah.

What'd you do before you got into business?

Yeah. So that my story of how I got into the business is a little funny. I had absolutely zero intention of ever getting into the car business. It's not in my family. It's not something in my background. It's not something I ever had any interest in. I will still say I'm not a car guy. I'm not a car nut. I don't have project cars out behind the shop. I'm not into rebuilding British vehicles or don't have a, you know, a parted out Corvette in the back that I'm working on. It's just not my thing. I, you know, I Went to school, got my degree in finance and economics. I've always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. When I was 16, I owned the concession stand at a local swim club. This is something they like rented out for the summer. They just 500 bucks, you run it for the whole summer. Years old, I was doing that with a buddy of mine and kind of got the bug then. So I always felt like even when I was at college that I was going to do something entrepreneurial. Oddly enough, my college experience was all in food service. I was manager of the dining hall at James Madison University, had 400 employees. It was thing there. And so I was actually planning to get into kind of the restaurant movie business. I was going to do a Cinnamon Drafthouse type thing or Cinema Cafe Alamo.

I don't know.

Depends on part of the country you're in where you eat and watch a movie. But at 23 years old, when I was getting out of school, it was apparent that nobody was going to lend me the money to do that sort of thing. It was too big of a project. And I was engaged to be married. It's my ex wife now, but her dad was in the car business. He had owned a Dodge store and was working for one of these subprime finance companies. And he said, oh, you should try this special finance thing. And I told him flat out, I said, dude, I didn't go to college for five years and get a degree in finance to sell cars. That's not my thing. After a summer of bartending, I said, well, maybe I'll give it a shot, you know, I'll try it. And I went to work for a dealership in Northern Virginia in Alexandria and ran their special finance department there. And just like so many other people, once you get in, it's hard to get out of the car business. I did really well, was successful at doing that, moved back closer to home, ran a special finance department for a Nissan dealer in Harrisonburg, and then spent a few years being a rep. I was a rep for a few different finance companies, a couple of which are still in business. But as I was getting later into my 20s, it was kind of apparent that being a rep for those companies was not the big cash cow that it was right when they first came out. And I said, well, you know, nobody around my area is doing bad credit financing very well, so I'm going to open my own car dealership. And that's how it all started. I got my parents to put up some collateral, borrowed against credit cards, opened a Teeny tiny store, not where I am now, but in Waynesboro, Virginia. It's about 15 minutes from here in an old converted 7:11. And, you know, went the route so many other dealers do. I signed up with every finance company is willing to sign up a brand new dealer. Credit acceptance, some of the, some of the smaller ones. Now at that point I did have some contacts in the industry because I've been a rep. So I got a couple of places to sign me up just on good.

Faith.

And we just grew out of that.

So, Andrew, there's been a lot of talk here lately on the Facebook page about how much money you need to start. And you say you do a little buy here, pay here. And I think everybody's like, how much money do you need to get into the buy here, pay here business? But yeah, let's just say what did you, how much money did you have cash when you started?

30 grand.

30 grand. And that was in 2000, so. So that's probably how much? 60 grand now or something to that effect maybe.

And I, you know, honestly think I could have done it with less. I, you know, I got a line of credit with a local bank for about a hundred grand. That was my floor plan line. And yeah, so we started out buying, you know, three to $5,000 cars and just slowly grew from there. And you know, it's 20 years, but we've upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and we've held on to our roots though, because we still, again, I'm not a strictly buy here, pay your lot. I'm not strictly low end and I'm definitely not strictly full, you know, full retail kind of business, you know. So I believe that having your hand in all of it protects you from the big swings in the market.

Interesting.

Makes it a little difficult for pricing and for. Yeah.

And branding.

Branding and all the rest of that. Yeah, it does. But I think if you're, you work hard at it, you can, you can meet the needs of a lot of people. Now we don't sell exotics, we don't sell anything really, really high end. In fact, probably 25 grand is about as high as you get here.

Western Virginia. I mean, that's fancy. That's living high. How many accounts do you service right now in house?

About 175.

Okay, so slow grow. Did some buy here, pay here, I assumed, haven't gone into debt, don't have any leverage against that.

You know what we did and you.

Don'T need to tell us if you.

Don'T want to, but no I don't care. But yeah, no. So I, I didn't even start doing the buy here, pay your stuff until after the, the Great Recession.

Okay.

The timeline for my dealership really is, you know, 2000 to 2005 was kind of slow growth mode, slowly expanding, adding lenders, getting a good reputation. During none of that did I have a shop. So that made it more difficult. But we, we slowly upgraded. I remember the first time we sold a vehicle over ten grand. It was like a big deal to us, you know, and grew and grew. And then just like a lot of people that have been in business long enough, 06, 07, until it all fell apart, were good years. I mean, you, you know, it was hard not to make money in the car business during that time frame. The lenders were, were loose, they were, they were aggressive and we took advantage of that and we actually got up to where we were averaging 55 cars a month and none of that was buy here, pay here. We didn't do any of it well. When the Great Recession hit, all the lenders shut down. We had customers but nowhere to put them. We had, you know, and I was faced really honestly. We had, we gotten up to 25 or 26 employees in late 07, early 08, and by the beginning of 09 we had six. And every day was a challenge. And it became apparent that the only way I was going to get through that was, was carrying my own notes. And so again, you know, reached into some savings, came up with a business plan, talked to my folks again, they lent me 30 grand. They had some neighbors that had some money. They lent me 30 grand. That was kind of the season, the buy your pay year thing. And 09, 2010, I decided I was going to go with it. I signed up with Spartan to get a line of credit for the buy year payer and to really expand it, which was kind of unfortunate timing because right about then the car market started to come back. I didn't need it as much. And here I was tied to system that definitely can provide you with the money, but in a very difficult way.

Tight, tight reins.

Yeah, yeah, I learned a lot. That's one thing I definitely will say about that. I got, I got certified as a consumer credit finance professional thanks to Spartan, and learned a great deal about compliance and how to do it right. But I was lucky enough in 2015 to pay them off and convert it. I got a local bank that was willing to do a line of credit for me and so we still use them. I've got about Half a million bucks drawn with them on those accounts. We use that and again, we still use credit acceptance. We do business with Ally, we have local banks, we use cuddle. So we got kind of the whole wide.

Yeah, that's a really interesting business model. And I tried to do that at some point and I never really, never got excited about the outside financing. And then finally I just said, you know what, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna finance even high end cars. So we kind of just went away from that. Very interesting how that developed. What's the hardest part of being an independent dealer for you? What's, what's what? Every day wakes you up at night or every morning you go, oh my God, I gotta deal with that today.

I, you know, I think for me the biggest thing is taking care of my employees, which is an interesting side to things. But, you know, I feel a great sense of obligation to the people that work for me. 2008 was the hardest year I've ever been through. And to have to lay people off and, you know, go through that sort of cycle really is my worst memory of the 20 years I've been in business. Of course, 2020 is a year where, you know, when the pandemic hit, it felt the same. You know, back in March, had no idea what was going on, how it was going to affect us, what people were going to do. Kind of went through the same cycle. Thankfully, you know, we made it through that without a whole lot of attrition. So. But yeah, making sure, you know, that's, that's my main thing is trying to take care of my employees, making sure there's enough business, making sure there's enough activity for them, making sure that there's enough ways to keep them paid and taking care of their families. I guess that's the thing that when I go to bed, I think more about them than I do about myself or even my customers. I guess the customers come second. A lot of businesses, I think, maybe flip that around, but I think if you take care of your employees, the customers are going to get taken care of.

That's so true. You know, in my mind they're probably both equal that, you know, if we take care of our customers, they'll take care of us as a business and we'll be able to take care of our employees. But either way, employees are so special. And when you create that culture and you have people staying there with you, it's an amazing feeling. And I think we all worry that's probably everyone's biggest problem. Not problem, but everybody's biggest focus is should be their employees and their customers because that's what makes things go around.

Yeah, it makes me think, you know, when you said that, it's like if I were to answer that question five or eight years ago, it would definitely be the biggest stress for me was the customers. Right. And you're like chasing cars and collections and people not paying their notes and thinking that some cars heading to Mexico. But you're right, it's like now for the last year or two, it's really been employees. Whether that's keeping your current ones happy and safe or trying to find new ones to fill the holes that you have. It's like, it's really interesting you mentioned that because I didn't even realize how much that is actually flipped. As far as my day to day headache goes, it's 100% employee related.

It's interesting. Right now our service is slow. It's slow. I don't know whether it's the elections or what, but there's just nobody coming in and I've got four full time techs down there working. And every time I walk into the shop, my first thought is not, oh my goodness, how am I going to pay the bills? My thought is these poor guys aren't making much money and I feel bad for them for not for not. It's like I feel this obligation to provide them with work, you know, and it's not like a bottom line thing. Obviously I think about my bottom line. I mean that's important. I got to stay in business. But I'm more concerned about their, you know, their financial and even mental well being. You know, to come into work every day and stand around for, you know, four, five, six hours without work is a tough thing to do for those.

Out there that don't have a shop. I so feel what you're talking about, Andrea. And people won't understand that is that when you have a shop and you don't have work and your guys are flat rate and they're not making money, you at their hybrid and their income goes way down, it hurts. And you try to figure out a way to generate it. Is it out going, buying more cars so that they'll have internal projects or whatever it is, and that's what we end up doing a lot of times as you know, as employers is we figure out a way to get their bills paid. I mean, that's our job. Right. And that's really neat that we both have that same.

It's an interesting concept in Five years that I've had my own shop, I have never had anyone twiddling thumbs. Never. And I don't know, I would love to get to what you guys have. I would love to be like, well, I don't know how I'm gonna fill these guys with work tomorrow, you know, I don't know. I can't ever get a hold of the personnel. I can't get on top of having enough mechanics.

Twice a year, typically twice a year I'll have that problem, Jeff. And it's a scary feeling. And if typically it lasts about a week and then all of a sudden the floodgates back up and you're, and you're slammed again. You see that, Andrew? Is that what normally happens?

Yeah, normally. Again this is a little more prolonged. I mean it started about for the election and it's continued for the two weeks since the election that it's been real there and we're running specials, I'm giving away half price stuff. I'm doing anything I can to fill the bays. But wow, it's just not happening right now.

So let's talk about. If you weren't in the car business today, what would you be doing? I mean, is it.

I don't know, I mean, before we started recording you kind of hinted towards that question. And when I first got into the car business, my answer would have been, well, I'll just go work for somebody else doing the same thing. I'm good at it. I could go run a store or run a department or whatever and make good money and. But now, I don't know. I mean, it's been so many years running my own show, it's a little difficult to try to anticipate what would be next. And maybe that's a bad thing because I'm not planning for the future, the eventualities, but maybe it's a good thing because I'm all in on what I'm doing and can't imagine. And again, it's like I said, I don't have this great love of cars. I'm not, not one of these guys that really enjoys the fumes in the lane at the sale. That's not my thing. I like running the business. I like seeing how all the cogs of the wheels fit together and how we can maximize things and analyzing the numbers and analyzing our activities and that's the sort of thing that gives me some pleasure. So I guess I would have to find some other business or career that would let me do that.

Buy here, pay here, refrigerators or Something.

So, Andrew, you know, you have a pretty diverse business model right now. If you had to open up a new dealership tomorrow, would it be the same? Are there some things you would change what you currently do? Is it a different business model? Is it the same? What do you think?

I think if I. If I actually. And this is something I've thought of doing, is it. I would split the two. I would split off the buy here, pay here and the retail part of my lot and make them separately. While at our size, they provided us with different income streams that seem to balance each other out, I think they've also hampered us from growing too much. And maybe that's not a bad thing. I mean, again, I'm content with what I'm doing. Making enough money, my people are making enough money. But I think I could have been more successful if I had a separate buy here, pay here lot. And that's all it did. And then I had a retail lot and that's all it did. So. So that we could focus on the right kinds of inventory, the right kinds of training for the employees. It is difficult to go out on the lot and pivot from the guy that's wanting to buy the 2018 truck. That's 30 grand, then shipping over to the guy that's just happy to get a ride and needs help with his financing. I think if I were to start over, if I have to pick one or the other, I'd probably pick buy here pay here. I just think the long term prospects for buy here, pay here when it's run right, provide for more potential growth in your business.

Yeah. If you could put up with the ups and downs of cash flow and getting hammered on taxes. Yeah. I think long term is the way to go. You have about 70 cars in your website right now. How many are you selling a month?

So we're kind of in the mid to high 20s right now.

Okay.

We were, you know, and our objective at the beginning of the year was to consistently hit 40. And for the first three months, we were right there. We were. I think we were averaging 42 cars. We dropped off pretty good and we kind of hovered in that 25 to 28 since the, since the whole pandemic thing. And I don't know how much of that to blame on the pandemic and how much of the. To blame on us pulling back a little bit and just being cautious and whatnot.

So, so, so with COVID it sounds like you had a little effect from COVID did So in our area, it bounced Back quickly. And our. Our limiting factor at that point was inventory. Did you see an inventory problem sourcing inventory this year, or did you not have the ability to sell more?

We did see it, but again, at our volume, it wasn't as dramatic. I was just watching the Facebook page and listening to other dealers and seeing dealers pay retail plus for cars. We just weren't going to do that. So we, you know, our inventory did shrink a little bit during that time frame. We looked for other sources. We tried to buy cars off the street, and we just really tried not to get ahead of ourselves because it seemed like things were changing, you know, week to week, month to month. Virginia, compared to some other states, has had some pretty fairly stringent restrictions due to Covid and they're still there in some regards. So it did, I think, put a damper on people's mood a little more in my area anyway, then maybe in some other places that kind of looked at it and said, well, you know, we got past it and moved on. But we managed to get through that pretty well. I was impressed with my used car buyer and how he did. He stayed on top of, you know, we were kind of just in time. Inventory. We were buying it and selling it. You know, we didn't have an aging problem, that's for sure.

Nobody did during that time, I think. Well, I think my freaking term went up to like 12 or 14. That was just.

Yeah, but we didn't get stuck with anything. We don't, we don't have anything out on the lot that's, that's. That were way heavy in. We didn't, we didn't pay way up for stuff. We, we shifted. We bought a little bit more distressed inventory stuff. We needed to replace the body panel on.

Yeah.

A little bit more work to. And that helped provide work for the shop when it was slow. And so it all came together. Okay.

So, Andrew, what's the most exciting thing you're seeing in a car business right now? What makes you go to work and keep working hard?

I don't know, Luke. That's a tough question. You know, I'm not seeing anything. That's crazy. I guess the advance in technology is good. The acceptance of online buying or the greater acceptance of it anyway. The fact that you can buy cars anywhere. That used to be kind of taboo. I think some people were ahead of the curve in that regard and did really well with it, but they had to work through all the kinks and the craziness and everything. And I think that the auction companies have come Along. I think competition in the auction side has been good. It's nice to see companies like ACV come along and provide other avenues and to sell cars that we didn't used to have. So that's been an advantage. And so, yeah, I guess technology's been it. I don't know that it really excites me that much, but it's. But it's been marginally helpful anyway.

Are you in a 20 group, Andrew?

I was not in anymore, but yeah, I was in. I start. I was in a lead them group way back when. Oh yeah, dropped out after the Great Recession, got back in. I got back into a group that wasn't really suited for me, kind of a bigger group, some heavy hitters, and switched into another one. And then just due to some time commitments on my part, I just ascended, I guess to be president of the Virginia Independent Auto Dealers Association. And at the same time, this has been a long time coming. I kind of forgot about it. But I just got appointed to the motor vehicle dealer board in Virginia, so plus I got remarried. There was just a lot of things.

That.

Prevented the kind of commitment that a 20 group required.

For sure, it is a commitment.

And you mentioned earlier you use dealer Re, right? You have your own reinsurance company, you know, dealer Re, we tout them and it's funny, we come across another dealer that uses them.

I tell you that if you were going to ask me the one piece of advice I would give a dealer, it would be to start a reinsurance company early and go with it. And you know, there's people that say, oh, you have to sell this many, you have to sell that many. Forget about all that. Just find a way to get involved in one and do it. Because it saved my butt when things went sour with the economy. There was money to tap that I could use and now I get to look at the reports and see it grow. Everybody knows that that money you send off to the warranty company, they're not spending all that money they're keeping. So it's awfully nice to be able to keep some of it yourself and manage your. Manage your risk yourself.

Andrew, do you give away a warranty with each car you sell or is it you sell them as VFCs?

We just sell them, but we sell them with the buy here, pay here. Of course, dealer Reeves got a great product for that. That's actually one of the reasons I switched to dealer Re was that they have a pay as you go buy here, pay here service contract. That's a big cash Flow is a big issue for a buy here, pay here dealer and to shell out thousand bucks, come sell a car to put a warranty on. It doesn't make sense for dealers. They say, oh well, I'll just fix it, I'll figure it out. But when you can just pay the portion per month, you know, it creates an avenue where the customer can share in some of that risk and you can profit from it at the same time. So absolute single best I've ever done.

Yeah, for sure. Y' all always hear me talk about dealer Re and this is a real life. I'm a real life too. But you know, they are sponsors. But Andrew uses dealer Re and he, he can tell you it saved his butt. And I have heard so many dealers say that during the Great Recession, their money that they put in their reinsurance company saved their butt. So that's awesome.

Andrew, tell us what else. Do you have any other tips or things you wish you would have known when you started? Like you've been at it 20 years. Say there's a dealer that is just getting going or maybe in at 10 or 15 or maybe 20, obviously starting a reinsurance company. We're a big fan of that for long term wealth building. Anything else you wish you would have known 20 years ago?

Yeah, networking, I think is the, probably the biggest one. I spent the first four or five years that I was running my store in a vacuum. I was just, just all by myself and trying to reinvent the wheel. Yeah, it really was. And so when you talk about joining a 20 group, being on the independent dealer page, asking questions, I think is the big thing. Joining your state association, that's a good one. I know a lot of people say, I don't want to share secrets with the guy down the road. You know what? The pie is big enough. Share the secrets, learn something from somebody, ask questions, learn about the wholesalers, get the reports, educate yourself. But networking would be something people should do early and often. They should definitely get involved.

Amen. Yes, sir.

Any kind of networking group they can do, whether it's online, in person, state association, national association. If you're in a state that doesn't, doesn't have a state association, do that and get out there and ask questions. Because you know, everybody's done this stuff before. You get so many interesting and unique ideas. You can save yourself a lot of money from going down, that's for sure. And you can also just ease into it the right way with somebody that's done it before that's proved to be super Helpful in a lot of regards.

That is. That is such sage advice. And you know, we. I've been in business 35 years, but I haven't been doing it for 35 years. But to talk about, you know, before the Internet was blown up, when we first got in business in 2000, when I first got into the car business, I tell you, we didn't have a way to network. So you'd had to be at the auction and you talk to people and you were afraid to tell somebody exactly what you were doing. But today it's changed so much and it's just such great advice to join your association, to network, to call other dealers to do this because it makes a huge difference. I would have saved a lot of money and wasted a lot less time if I'd have done that earlier, if I'd have bought into that earlier. So that's really great advice.

Sure.

Yeah.

I have the exact same road as Andrew. Everything you say. It's funny how our trips into the used car industry are so similar in that, you know, get in through the finance side, but the same thing. I tried to reinvent the wheel for the first five years and I don't know how I got turned on to a lead EM20 group. But my very first meeting, I remember it Asheville, North Carolina, sat down and just had pages of notes like I just didn't know what I didn't know, thought I was doing great. I thought I'd figured out this whole formula and blah, blah, blah, blah. But you just, you just don't know what you don't know.

Yeah, I remember. It's real telling. One of the first meetings I went to, they did a presentation on doing the presentation, the four square, whatever kind of thing. And they were talking about a four square. And I thought they were talking about the kids game like you play. I was like, what does this have to do with the car business? I had never, I've been in business five years and we'd never done a formal presentation with customers. We'd never done that. And we were able to really turn things around. Another example was when I was in a 20 group. A lot of people know Joe McCloskey out of Colorado. I went to visit him at his store. He let me in, he let me talk to his finance guys. And this was before I had a finance manager at my store. And I said, well, I don't think I'm big enough. I'm only selling 25, 30 cars. I don't think I can make it worthwhile. And he Said, just go back and do it it. And that kind of accountability and that boost gave me the strength to do it. And the year following that, I know I made 100 grand just from, from changing my operational and doing it a different way. So you can learn a lot from, from just shutting up and listening.

Were you, were you in that. In McCluskey's 20 group?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. You were in R1?

I was in R1, baby.

Yeah.

You were a little out of my league. Out of my league. They're all great guys. But truthfully, I talked to Chuck about it before I switched, and he actually hemmed and hawed about switching me to another group. He's like, you know what he said? It's still the car business. Whether you're selling 300 cars a month, where you're selling 30 cars a month, it's still the car business. And there's still a lot of the same principles apply. And in fact, sometimes it helps to think big. I agree to think ahead and think of the bigger picture instead of, oh, I'm, you know, I'm this 30 car guy. I can't do that. So, yeah.

Andrew, what are you predicting? What are you looking at going forward? What are you most excited about with your dealership over the next year? Two years, five years?

Well, I mean, in the short term, I think that the country's due for a pretty robust rebound. I know the stock market is doing great and all the rest of that, but I think there's still a lot of uncertainty. Change of administration, the election, the pandemic, the vaccine, all the rest of that. And I think once we get past that and people feel super comfortable going back out and doing things again, that that's going to benefit a big part of my, my operation. I think a lot of car dealerships are going to see some improvement there. You know, long term, I, you know, I just hope to continue to grow all the little segments of my business. I'm not looking for some explosive, huge leaps and bounds. I'd like to just see strong, steady, incremental growth with what I've got. Unlike some people, I'm not interested in opening three or four different stores and expanding my operation greatly. I just want to see 20 or 30% increase. That relates to my bottom line. I think that that's a better plan, you know, financially for me, for my family, for where I am in life. I'm almost 50 years old. You know, I want to be able to enjoy things. And so I'm just looking for that little bit of Extra that I think I can eke out of things.

Yeah.

You know, it's so funny because going into the next six or 12 months, I was a little bearish. You know, I was a little like down on tax time not being what it was going to be. And my year has been a little sluggish and we're a little bit off gross wise, which is funny because I'm sure everyone else is opposite of me. I've been giving away cars. But we did our episode a couple weeks ago with the Tax Max guys and obviously if you guys haven't listened to that, go listen to it. And you know, all the stuff along there. I think they've got a promo, the podcast. Use that if you're gonna sign up with them, which I definitely recommend you do. But what I'm driving at is it really helped me kind of get a different perspective on what's going forward. And to your point, like, yeah, Wall Street's doing great, but I think Main street is going to be coming out of this too. You know, a vaccine, a strong tax time, maybe a new president that is going to definitely be excited to dump some stimulus into the economy to kind of get things going, which, you know, as much as I hate government spending over the top, unfortunately it benefits us. So I am looking forward to getting some of that tax money here in a couple months, which I wasn't before.

And I think we're going to get it too. Is what, according to Tax Max, they said that big tax season. Andrew, you. Are you looking for a big tax season to expect it?

Yeah, I think we're going to be all right with tax season. I think that, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how people that were on the pandemic, you know, unemployment and all that, how that affects it. But I think, I think timing wise, it's going to be good because if the vaccine comes out, you know, just when taxes are hitting is when all that good news is going to start to hit and they're going to talk about distributing that money and hadn't even thought about distributing the vaccine. You add a stimulus to that add tax season, I think you're going to get a triple whammy.

Yeah, I like it.

And you know, that's gonna help. And you certainly, you know, again, I agree with you, Jeff. From a political standpoint, you might not think that the administration change is great for business, but in the short term for us, I think it probably will be.

I agree.

I think that it's gonna put a little shot into the economy on Main street where we need to see it. And that should, that should boot well for us.

Well, great. Andrew, we really appreciate your time today. Really appreciate you being here. Jeff, you got anything else?

No, no, no. That's absolutely it. I mean, great wealth of knowledge, so much information, stuff that I know I'm going to go, you know, make sure I've got my, my, my stuff in order. A shop, a shop where mechanics are actually like wondering if they have work tomorrow because they've got so much done. Like, it just blows my mind.

It'll all work out in the end, that's for sure.

That is, that is key right there. Thank you.

I appreciate you guys.

Great deal.

Thanks. Thank you for joining us today.

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