#147 - How I Built This W/ Jason March

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.

My name is Jason March. I'm in Jacksonville, Florida. We own a buy here, pay here called March Motors, and we have been in business since 1998. We employ 31 people. We have a full service facility. We have a collection staff, and we just recently let go of our BDC department.

So that's an interesting route.

Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to start off our podcast today with telling you guys that because not everything you set out to do is always going to be successful.

I feel like that is such a. That's a great way to start. So this is how I built this series. And. And sometimes you build things that don't work, and we all do that as entrepreneurs. So anybody, let's say BDC is a business development center, and a lot of dealers use it to handle incoming web leads. And so, Jason, how long did you have your bdc? How many people were there, and what made you decide to shut it down?

So we did. We're at the end of our second year with the BDC. We started December of 2018. We did two years. We had mostly two, but sometimes three people in the department. And we were having problems with, well, two things. We're in an old Subaru dealership here in Jacksonville, so we have a second story. We put the BDC upstairs so they could be out of the way and they could concentrate on leads and follow up. And we almost think the position of the department maybe led to the failure of the department because there was a lack of supervision. And I believe also that we had maybe BDC reps in the department, but I didn't have a good BDC manager. So in the future, I still like having the bdc. And we felt it was important to have a business development center because we have 20 years of previous customer history. We felt like we had quite a bit of data mining that we could. That we should be utilizing, and we weren't. So we wanted our salesmen to concentrate on selling cars in person, and we wanted our BDC to concentrate on lining up appointments and having them come in.

Okay, Jason, so I will. You've had this year. You just. You told me off the air, so I'm gonna bring this up, but you're selling 94 average a year. This 94 average a month this year compared to 70 something last year. So to me, if I. If I'm a layman, and I'm saying, well, I think The BDC was working. Am I wrong there, or was it just Covid that made the bump? What happened?

So, Luke, I think you talk quite a bit about tracking people's individual numbers and making sure that you're measuring what you're. You can't. What's the term? You can't.

You can't fix what you don't measure. You can't quantitate.

So in the last few months, we were having quite a bit of distractions with our employees that were in the department. And instead of trying to hire somebody to bring in, I just felt it was good at the time to just go ahead and turn the department off. And to the question about maybe it was working. We were tracking how many leads these business development agents were working, how many appointments they were setting, how many appointments they were having show up. And then of those appointments that were showing up, how many were selling? We were just seeing that number go from a nice, healthy five appointments selling each week to one and two appointments selling each week. And I feel like a good BDC rep should. Should attribute 15 to 20 sales a month, whereas I was getting about six. Okay.

And the rest were being generated by the salesman. Repeat referral, things like that.

A lot of walk in. We're really good at converting our walk in. Interesting.

But you'd narrowed it down to just bad management within the BDC and didn't want to fix that or bring someone in or something. You decided to go back to the traditional model. Salesmen are doing the prospecting.

And how many sales people do you have, Jason?

Five. Okay, so we have. So what I want to do instead is it's kind of have more of a off site lead management person who is on Facebook and who is handling the web leads when they come in. I don't necessarily need that person here. Yeah. I think the distraction that my BDC agents were kind of. I feel like every time you add somebody to the dealership, they have the potential of being a distraction. They're definitely going to occupy more of your time and attention. Oh, yeah. And we went from 24 people about four years ago to 31 people this year. And it just got to the point where I was a little thin on bandwidth.

Yeah. You know, so funny. Luke talks about that whenever we talk to someone who's talking about, like a rental car program, you know, you always see these shiny pennies. And as dealers, it's so easy for us to go chase these shiny objects, like, oh, someone's killing it doing rental cars, or, oh, someone's killing it with their auto spa and detailing. And you're right, we can maybe go down these roads that aren't necessarily profitable for us or could be distraction. Tax Max is friend of the podcast. If you're gonna sign up this year, we know tax season is coming. We're hoping that it's a double down type tax time with stimulus money. Make sure you're getting signed up. You use the promo code podcast, you're gonna get 25% off your signup fees. Get the tax money in your pocket before it goes into their pockets.

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You said a little bit about growing from 24 to two more employees this year. Where did you guys start though? Is it okay if I rewind back to like the beginning? Like when did you specifically get into the dealership? I think you joined with your dad.

You were born into it like me.

Yeah. Were you a five year old just like scrubbing floors and selling cars or how did you fall into this?

So pretty typical story for me. We started the business in 98. I say we, I was maybe 11 or 12.

So.

We learned by, my brother and I both work here now and we learned by detailing cars, washing cars and we got to change oil, we got to change tires and light mechanic work. And that my, my father's opinion was that helps you to learn the business. You learn the business by learning what you're selling. So that, that has been helpful for me in a management position because I, I probably know vehicles and drivability type issues better than most.

Yep.

So started, started on our holidays and, and summer vacation, washing cars. Moved into the collection department, taking payments when I was in high school. In college, I was working as a salesman during the summer. So got to learn the sales department and after college I came in and learned the service management position. I took a brief, brief hiatus. I left and went to Tesla in California and learned how to program robots.

That's cool. That's cool.

That's awesome.

Robot programmer for two years. Got to travel to Mexico, Michigan and went to Germany. Worked on a Mercedes project.

Can I ask you a quick personal question on the Tesla side? Is it, is it hype? Do you own one?

So my mother owns one.

Okay. You recommended having seen the insides, you're like, yeah, these guys are gonna Change the world or. No, it's just, it's just smoke and mirrors.

I think it's a badass American supercar.

Okay.

For under a hundred.

Yeah, okay. Okay. And the other ones, I've always said it like, unless it drives itself, I don't really care.

I heard say that. Have you ridden in one?

I literally just bought one yesterday. It's charging right now. So I just got the notification that it's. It's done charging and the guys are going to wheel it around and detail it and we're going to get pictures. But I didn't know I got to pay ten grand to turn on the full self driving, full self driving mode. So I'm waiting on ten grand. Yeah, you got all the hardware. It's there. You just have to unlock it, quote unquote. So you got to pay Elon 10 grand for this thing to park itself and unpark itself and then drive me home.

So, Jason, Jason, what's interesting, you and I kind of were on the same path and so. And. But something you did that I never did was try to go down another path. Are you glad that, that you're an independent dealer now with your dad? Is it fun? Do you enjoy it? You know, because if you weren't doing this, you have many other opportunities. Yes, you could be doing.

I think this was my path and looking back, that was a lot of fun. And working in an automotive plan is not a lot of fun. Traveling and seeing places is. But that works six, seven days a week and you're not really home much. So I think this is a good base to build a good, build a good income for a family. And I have a three year old and I have a wife. We live here in Jacksonville Beach. And I'm happy to be in the position that I'm at right now. I feel like there's a lot of potential in our market. And if Covid taught us anything, it's. We have an essential business that is in demand. Whether we're selling cars that are hybrid, electric or internal combustion, I think we're here for at least the next 10 years.

Yeah, but you, you could see, as I did, I think a while back, we had a discussion on the independent Facebook page. People worried about California and other states outlawing combustible engine cars. Well, I mean, who cares? We can sell Tesla's and finance them, right. Or we can sell any type of EV and finance them. So I think we're here to last.

I'll let you know how that goes. So we bought three EVs an E Golf and a Kia Soul, fully electric. And they're like eight grand right now.

They're super cheap.

Kia Soul?

Yeah. Kia Soul makes an ev.

I didn't know that.

It's really cool, actually. I like driving it. I bought one for my daughter as well, but I'll let you know. We're gonna buy here, pay here, these three electric vehicles because they're in the right price range. They're getting there. Like these cars are coming into it. All of a sudden. Now my customer doesn't have as much maintenance and doesn't have a gas bill.

Like, I don't know, man.

What's up, Jason? What's the hardest part of being a dealer?

I think the hardest part is keeping a good attitude and being the guy that people look for, the direction. I think when you come in and you're not having a good morning or your day's not going to what. What you planned it to be. I feel like having that. Being able to have a good attitude, a lot of enthusiasm, and keeping a positive spin on. On what's going on. It's sometimes difficult, especially in the buy here, pay here. A lot of. A lot of wrenches get thrown, a lot of customers, reasonable. So just being any rock there for your people, I think, can be the most difficult thing.

I think that's very important for everyone to understand because, you know, we don't necessarily in our industry get to hire the there. To me, they're the best of the best, so I'm not gonna say that. But they're not all college educated. They're not this, they're not that. But they look to us as leaders. And, you know, it's making sure that everybody's on the same page, making sure that everybody wakes up on the right side of the bed, and that's really important. And, you know, Jeff, we interviewed Andrew Wylie yesterday. He was talking about the same thing, about how, you know, what he cares about most of all in his business is taking care of his employees. And part of that is making sure that everybody's happy and on the same page. And that starts with us. We have to be happy. We have to be on the same page.

Jason, what do you think you'd be doing if you weren't at your dealership? Do you have any idea where you'd be? Say your dealership just went bankrupt, got blown up, Florida fell in the ocean. Think you do.

I like the independent dealer space. I like the. I feel like buy here, pay here specifically gets the. Gets software and technology innovations Two to three years after the franchise dealer does. And it's usually because the price has to come down to an affordable amount. Where the big franchise stores are paying 10, $15,000 a month and US independents only want to maybe pay 6 to 600 to $1,000 a month for a product that can do that. Similar. Has that similar capability. So you'll see things like a light product, L, I, T, E, or, you know, something that's maybe not got all the bells and whistles but still accomplishes that same thing. I feel like our space is pretty underdeveloped. I think our DMS landscape right now for the independent dealer is ripe for a DMS product that can utilize current technology online, cloud based technology. Luke, I know you guys use IDMS that was based on the Finance Express model. That's what we use, Finance Express. I feel like that's. That. That DMS was way before its time. So to answer your question, Jeff, I think I would be in the DMS space, do some support software.

What's funny, I was talking with Alan Dobbins on Facebook messenger yesterday about some DMS stuff that is servicing dealers would be a good space to be in. And I think if I, you know, if I weren't a dealer, I'd probably be in the consulting area in that too, because I think that's a, that's a good business to be in. If you. So y' all are buy here, pay here pretty big buy here, pay here store, and all of us here are buy here, pay here dealers. It's a tough business to be in. If you had to start a new dealership tomorrow, would you stay in that space or would you go for another model?

So without dear old dad, I don't think I could afford to stay in this space. Right. I like the commercial, I like the commercial vehicle aspect of independent dealers. I think there's a market for that $8,000 cargo van and that $9,000 white pickup truck. There's some guys here that are doing it pretty successfully in Jacksonville. And I don't, I really don't think it's that difficult. Yeah, they're not making a big gross. We had a dealer come in across the street from us in an old Kia dealership, and he's putting the program cars out there and they have a $700 dealer fee and I think a markup of about 500 bucks. So they're looking to make, you know, a thousand twelve hundred bucks a copy. They have four people in the store. Five people in the store a month. Yeah. So I think I like the commercial space truck and SUV space right there, right over that program year and miles. So maybe like 11 years old with 150,000 mile type stuff. I think that would be my space if I was to have to do this independently.

Yeah, yeah. I noticed that you had a good many cargo vans on your website. Are you buy here, pay here, those, those commercial type trucks right now?

So, funny thing, I'll kind of go back a little bit. My old man always was a he. He would always go to lead them group meetings and this was before we joined the 20 group. So he would go to the lead him convention here in Florida because it was convenient. And he would always come home and say, these guys that are talking about buy here, pay here tell you that you should not finance self employed, you should not finance the tradesmen and you should not finance trucks or SUVs because they're too expensive. We were doing all of those things.

Yeah.

And it turned out. And you're starting to see that shift in the last couple years in our space where people are recognizing that that needs to be. We need to give those guys an option. And women and we have been very successful in selling trucks, third row seat SUVs and cargo vans over the last 15 years.

Yeah. But we're saying we're the same. I've not gotten into the commercial end of it. And honestly it's because I don't know how to buy those cars yet. But I see a good demand for it. So I think, I think I'm gonna head that way too.

A cargo van is more of a tool than it is a piece of a piece of transportation. Because there, you know, it's a work, it is their job.

Yeah.

Well, and that's something we've learned about. And I'll just kind of give an antidote of recently. When you finance the lawn care guys, they're tough. Think about pizza delivery with a trailer.

Yeah, that's horrible. Pizza delivery.

Yeah, that stop and go on that truck. I mean the lawn, the lawn guy gets. Makes the most amount of money with the most amount of yards he can cut. So if he can pull up, not turn the truck off, you know, cut the yard, put the mower back on and shoot to the next place, which is, you know, across town.

Yeah.

Stop and go with a load. I mean those trucks are. We're really starting to see some of the lawn guys that we've done in the last couple years come back and those trucks are really.

So you're, you're thinking like Painters and carpenters who go to a job site, turn their truck off, work all day, get back in their truck and go home, essentially.

Right, exactly.

Yeah. That's good.

And their whole life is inside the van. They're keeping that van. You know, it's kind of like I argue with my guys in minivans. Said I'd love to have a car lot full of minivans because I guarantee you when they start selling off their cars, they can't afford that minivan is the last one to go. Cause they gotta get the kids to school, you know, for sure.

We love.

I love me too. If we can sell them, the problem is we'll have five.

Nobody wants them anymore.

Nobody wants them. And then all of a sudden they all sell. And then I gotta go buy five more.

That's funny. The same thing in Utah.

Why is that? I don't know why.

Real quick, Plug guys want to tell you about Dealer Re. Obviously they are a friend of the podcast. And Luke, I have kind of a question for you. I'm meaning to call Tim and Taylor to talk about can I, can I 100% fund my reinsurance company before the end of the year if I'm looking for those expenses?

Well, you don't have to 100% fund it.

What if I want to? I want those write offs. I need write offs.

But I think you can take the write off without that because you can accrue it anyway. That's a bunch of taxation.

So you think I could take the write off to my insurance as a future liability? Yeah, but can I call it an expense now?

Yes.

I don't actually have to fund it because Dealer Re, we know they let you make payments as the contracts as you collect them. So you don't have to pay for the full contract up front. You pay for it as you collect it from the customer.

Yeah, we run it on the, on our balance sheet as a liability to them. So we expense it up front. That's a lot of. That's a, that's in the, that's in the ditch. That's in the bushes there.

But we've talked about them enough. You guys should know this. This is a great way to take expenses now and lessen your tax burden.

You gotta do it. There's only one way to build wealth in the car business and that is through reinsurance. Now there might be other ways, but I promise you, all big dealerships do it. All small dealerships should be doing it. Dealer E is a person. Dealer Re is a person. You should be Using crazy. What's been the biggest game changer at Yalls dealership? What. What moved the needle the most? I mean, you went from 70 or so cars last year to 94 this year. What's the difference?

That's a good question. I think there's a couple factors here. We started trying to reach out to more that target customer. We started email campaign with mailchimp. We're just sending out inventory twice a week to 11,000 people. Wow. We started hitting the referral program very hard with our previous customer base. We bumped that referral from $100 to 150. And we went from doing one referral every two weeks to doing four to five referrals every week.

Wow, that's great.

Yeah.

We'll be stroking an $800 referral check some weeks. You know, $800 worth of referral checks. And I love it. We used to do a lot of television advertising, so we did about 12 years of heavy television advertising. 10 to $12,000, $15,000 a month. And we have stopped that in the last couple years. Last two years, we haven't been on television, and we are still seeing customers coming in saying that they have seen us on television recently.

That's funny. It's funny how that happens because I say we're the same way. We don't advertise on TV as much anymore. And it's been probably 10 months since we advertise on TV and they walk in. Yeah, I saw your little girl on TV the other day. Like, no, you didn't. But I don't ever tell them that. That's so one thing. You said you're sending 11. You said 11,000 emails to 11,000 people. Is that what you said?

Yeah. 11,000 emails twice a week.

Wow. I noticed. I noticed something on your Facebook page. I have 12,000 likes. How do you do that?

We started early with that. We were tracking likes. We were asking people to like and share for a set of four monster truck tickets.

Mm.

We were doing that very often in the days of large public gatherings. But we have a woman here that has worked for us for 20 years. Her name is Peppermint Patty. She's like our local celebrity. She was on our television commercials, and we would do short videos and always asking people to like and share, and we. We end up having the most likes of anybody in Jacksonville.

Yeah. That's amazing. I think we're maybe 4,500 likes or something like that. And we probably hadn't really focused on that in a while, but 12,000 is a huge number.

But you guys have got a good Google review too. I think you're like what, six something on your Google reviews. So that to me has a little more staying power and relevancy right now. It's funny how we kind of chase Facebook likes. I don't know means anything more. But that Google thing is still very relevant and you guys have got a good presence. You've done a great job there.

What I want to compare it to the 12,000 Facebook likes to the 11,000 emails he's sending out a week. I mean, that's pretty comparable numbers and it's pretty neat.

Is that Your own database? 11,000 Previous customers, your own you've built up over time?

Yeah. So we got a CRM in 2014 and we started gathering emails from people that were coming in and leaving applications and everything. Before that we just brought over from our dms. So previous customer information and current customer information.

And you run all that through mailchimp pretty, pretty smoothly.

So I had a guy help me with the initial template for mailchimp. And now we just update the cars that are on the lot with it and we try to do a mail on Tuesday morning at 6am and Friday morning at 6am and do you know.

Offhand, it might be a hard number. What's your, what's your open rate or click through rate or do you know anything?

It's terrible.

Yeah, it's gotta be like 1 or 2%, but.

But it doesn't matter when you send 11,000. So.

So you're right.

And if you're selling two cars, who cares?

It's like 2%. So this is what I equate it to. I figure, okay, So I get 2% of the people opening it and then I get 40 people clicking on the website from it. I get that twice a week. So I'm getting 80 more clicks per week. I'm getting 160 clicks every two weeks. You can do the math. Yeah, we're starting to see, you know, when you look at your Google Analytics, you can really start to see dumps. Right. And those are different customers than your Google AdWords or your Facebook. You know, they click. These are what I would like to think of more of as a warm lead already in your.

Already in your sphere of a potential customer.

So one thing on the mail, on the email campaign, and I feel pretty strongly about this because it's 150 bucks a month. They just went up. It's like 168 bucks a month. Send all these emails. And I contacted this woman At a. At an insurance and bond agency that they sponsor, the Florida Independent Auto Dealers Association. So I said, hey, how do these emails work for you? She says they're terrible, but they keep your name in your customers inbox and they keep you top of mind. So I don't really care how many people open the email as long as the email isn't going in the spam folder. Yeah, when they need me, they're gonna see me. Or though at least I'll be in their weekly. I'll be in what their. Their content that they take in each week. I'm in there.

I think. I think that's very important. What, during the time of the great recession, were you in. Were you in the business? Were you working every day? Jason?

I was in college.

Okay. Did you have any opinion of what happened during the end to Yalls business and if it got better or worse?

So during COVID obviously, a lot of people were referring back to what happened in the great recession. So back there in March, we were really talking to my father, like our tribal elder, like, what do you do? And he was like, well, I was in the dot com bust and I was in the recession. And. And so what. What he would tell us was I was buying better cars for less money. I was getting great customers because banks weren't lending. And it was an incredible time for him to grow the portfolio because up until that point, we were 30% buy here, pay here, and about 60% outside finance. So he was cherry picking the customers he felt would be good to add to his portfolio and then using the cash flow from the others. And obviously in that time he had to kind of pivot. And that is what really helped us to get to where we are now.

So how did Covid affect you? Better or worse?

I'd say better. We didn't take advantage of the buying. Like some of the guys I know, some of the guys I'm friendly with that are dealers, they were aggressive. They were buying and buying, and we kind of sat on our hands, to be honest. Definitely. Looking back, something I wish we would have been paying a little more attention to, because pickup trucks.

Right now, you.

Can'T even see them.

Yeah, not even there.

So I think our sales went up. I feel like personal transportation went up. And something that we were talking about the other day, Florida being a big tourist state, cruise ships, hotels, restaurants, and those billions and billions of dollars that go into those sectors of our economy have stopped.

Yeah.

And those billions of dollars went. They didn't stop. They didn't stop. Being circulated. They just went to different sectors. So we feel like private transportation was one of the sectors that really benefited from a lack of tourism, a lack of hospitality type businesses being open. And that was a big jump for us. We were going 60, 70 cars a month to 90 to 100 cars a month.

Jason, so you told us before we got on and. Sorry, I didn't. I didn't know this, but you just became president. Fiada, Florida Independent Automobile Dealers Association. Congrats on that. Can you talk about what your involvement has been like in the association? And know you recommend it to everyone like we do, so you just talk about it a little bit.

Well, I appreciate you bringing that up. And I feel like the association allows us to do what we do, allows my family to run this business. And the 30 people that work for us, they benefit from having independent dealers and used car dealers in general. I think my father was always working through the 2000s, the late 90s and 2000s, and he wasn't able to donate his time to the association. So now that we're in a different position and our business is a little less dependent on the general manager or the owner being here all the time, that has allowed us to donate our time back to the association. So we feel that if. If you're making a living selling cars, used cars, you're buying cars from the auction, and this is how you're putting the bread on your table at home. You should at least care about the state and what laws and regulations are. Are going to be placed on your business. Because if you just. If you put your hands over your ears and keep doing what you've been doing and you're not paying attention to things that affect us on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, these, these things can sneak up on you. And before you know it, you know, you're. You're having a different form in your form pack or, or maybe you didn't hear about the form that you should have put in your form pack, and now you're being. Because you've got 200 deals that you didn't collect this money on or this extra signature on. So I feel like the association is something that every dealer should be at least a part of. If you're not able to attend, you should at least be paying attention and you should pay a dues. Yeah, pay the dues. You got to donate to the pack. Yeah. I mean, when I was a kid, I thought it was kind of a waste of time, but in the last five years, I've really been paying attention the last three years, I've been active in the board. I feel like you got to do it.

No, I agree. Well, Jason, we appreciate your service. We appreciate your time today. Jeff, anything else you got?

Yeah, no, that's all great stuff. I mean, so interesting, awesome stories to hear and great information. I mean, it's just. It's so fun to listen to these dealers. And of course, you guys are hopefully listening to this whole series in the month of December and all the dealer stories, but it just makes you realize that we all have struggles, We've all had issues, we all have doubts. I mean, for Jason, you guys sat around with you and your dad and prices were low and Covid was going crazy and you didn't jump on it, and you look back and go, oh.

Not many people did.

Really should have done that. So a seasoned veteran. So the rest of us that, you know, maybe anyone else that didn't jump on it can be like, yeah, that happens.

Like, it happens.

We're going to get through it. We all, maybe hindsight look at things and wish we would or wouldn't have done something. So it's been great. Jason, really, really appreciate your time.

Thanks a lot.

Have a good. Have a good day. And I appreciate having me on the podcast.

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