#149 - How I Built This w/ Clint Wactor

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.

I gotta start.

Donna.

Hey, everyone. Another addition to how I built this. And today a special guest for me, Clint Wagner from Bluff Road Auto Sales. And Clint and I are in the same town and honestly, Clint's probably my biggest competitor, but he does it better than me. And Clint's been in the business almost as long as we have and just a great operation. Lots of accounts, buy here, pay your store. And he's had two stores, one store now, and huge service operation. One of the best looking places you'll ever see. Anyway, thanks for being on the show. Clint. Introduce yourself.

Okay, Luke, thanks for inviting me to join you. Quite an introduction. I don't know if I'm better than you, but I appreciate that. I'm Clint Wachter and I am in Columbia, South Carolina. Been in the buy here, pay here business for about 34 years. Started small and like a lot of people and still and relatively small, but for one location and for this area, it's probably maybe a little larger than normal or average. But it's been a good career and the Internet is like, has posed its challenges for me. Like I'm sure a lot of people raised my stress level some the learning curve of it. But happy to be here and be glad to try to answer any questions you have.

So Clint, you started I guess in 86 or 87 somewhere in there.

89.

89. Okay. So and Clint, before that, you were a salesperson at a store at a new car store, right?

That's right, Luke. So I worked for new car dealers for three or four years before opening my buy here, pay here store, small store. Inventoried about 15 cars to start with and quickly learned I could sell about as many as I could afford to buy or finance. Operated there selling my accounts to a finance company for a long time until I established a credit line, then moved down to the corner in an old McDonald's hamburger place. Operated there for about 10 years, opened a second location because over the years the cars inventory were more expensive and I kind of forgot about the less expensive cars. And so I opened the second lot really to pick back up on those customers and retain that business that I'd really neglected to hold. The second lot property was much larger than the first lot and shortly after opened a related finance company and soon discovered because all my customers were coming to the related finance company at the second lot, I might as well join the two lots of so that's what I did and added service and a detail shop and currently adding a paint booth and some things. I found that it's a lot easier to manage one store with 20 employees than two stores with 10 at each one. That poses challenges. And I've hired some consultants from time to time to learn how to manage people. Really, that's what the challenge was.

That's interesting, Clint. That's the hardest thing, I think in our business to figure out how to do is to manage people. I believe, you know, so many people get to start and doing what we do by selling cars. And honestly, that's the easy part. And you've been doing this a long time and you've always had, I think, a few more employees than I have. What you know, how did you come to the decision to hire someone to help you figure out how to manage those people?

Well, when I had two stores, I also was transferring. I started a related finance company. So that was another process that was going on. And I change my accounting to gaap. And so all of that going on now. I was pretty overwhelmed. Especially when I learned I did not know how to manage people when I didn't have my eyes on them. That was really by default. I learned that I didn't know how to manage people. People always did pretty much what they were supposed to, got the jobs done when I was in close proximity. But managing people that you're not seeing every day is different. Things can get out of hand. I hired a consultant because somebody recommended I do that when I was complaining about my situation. And really it was the kind of things that the consultant implemented to my business. I would have thought silly before he said that hands on training that people require. I really didn't understand why people had to be trained that way. That we're all adults, why don't we do what we're supposed to? But that's not what happens even in small jobs. And so I had to really regroup and think about that. And the other, the other reason I really didn't like that is that takes a lot of time and effort to train people that way. We created job descriptions and everybody is held accountable for doing their job on a regular basis. You have to do it that way. And I have to require my managers to. To hold their employees accountable on a regular basis for doing their jobs and their job description. And it's done by text. I send out reminders by text to my managers to remind their staff to do certain things on certain days. And I look at reports and that, that process, excuse me, has taking 50% of the burden off of me, I would say. And it sounds so simple and so easy. The training part is very time consuming for people to understand how you want things done exactly how you. The person sitting beside that person is not going to train them the way you would. And I learned that the hard way.

It sounds like you went from working in your business to working on your business for a phase.

Yes. And even if you don't do that, the other things I learned was even the employees that had been with you for 20 years, that are your key people, unsupervised time, they will begin to deteriorate. Soon, their job performance will drop. So you can't put people in a place with people that know what they're doing and expect them all to raise their game or be taught the way that person was taught.

Clint, did you go and personally train. Are you right now personally train each employee or do you have some where you like your techs? I know you're not training your techs. What process have you put in place to make sure you're getting the training that you want each specific employee to have?

Well, you mentioned service. So that was the last department that I worked on. Sales was first. No, actually collections. The business office was first, primarily collections, then sales, and then the service department. The. As you might imagine, it's the things that get done once a week or need to be done twice a week that don't get done. You walk out in the lot. Cars aren't straight. Things like the cars aren't those kind of. That makes your lot look bad. You lose your curb appeal that you spend so much money and work hard to get. So I have to meet with my manager and the salespeople at the same time and say you have to have a certain day that you straighten these cars up and rearrange cars. You cannot change that day. If you're here to 9 o' clock that night because you got customers, that is your day. You gotta do it. And I'm gonna send you a reminder on that day to do it. And that's it. It's gotta be done. I send the manager the reminder. The manager's gotta get them out there and get it done. And that's it. So it's in my reminders, in my iPhone. It sends him a reminder to get them to do it. Part of your job. Send your job description and you sign that statement, too. That helps if you put it in writing and make somebody, get somebody to sign. Does add Some seriousness to what you say.

Hey everybody. Sorry to interrupt the podcast for just a second, but we wanted to make sure you guys know about our Tax Max partnership we have with the guys at Tax Max. Yeah, use the promo code podcast. You're gonna get a discount when you sign up. Now is the time to get hooked up with Tax Max. Tax season is coming. I guarantee you that President Almost elect Biden and the people running Washington are gonna want a fat stimulus bill to come out at the beginning of the year. Hopefully they tie that to tax returns. There's going to be some money hitting the street, Luke.

Oh, I guarantee you. And I tell you, I just signed up with Tax Max this week. It takes five seconds to sign up. We actually designated someone in our office. They're going to be ones handling it. You know, I'm looking for a big tax season. We had a good tax season last year, but I think it going to be better this year because of Tax Max.

Yeah. And we've actually, this is being recorded around the mid December. We've done our first deferred down program for a customer. Yeah, we did a fourth quarter, we estimated their taxes. We sold them a car, rolled them out, they put a little bit down. Now we're gonna get a little bit more from their taxes. So we're already using it right now. That was a deal that we probably would have put together anyways. But we're able to get a little more down payment and makes their payment a little bit affordable by getting our hands on some of that tax money coming in a couple months.

Awesome, man. What's the code, Jeff?

Podcast, podcast.

Use code people.

Be sure to use a code podcast. And back to the episode. Can you give us kind of a quick overview of what your, what the makeup of your company looks like, your employees, your managers, how many salesmen, how many service techs, things like that.

We average about 20 employees. So there's a service manager. There'll be three service techs, two guys that people wash cars, run errands, go get parts, things like that. We have three in the sales staff, a sales manager and two salesmen. The sales manager also sells cars. We have, let's see, two lady, two cashiers. One is a part time collection cashier. She can stop and take payments when we get busy. We have one person designated for insurance. One person is the highway clerk, does all the tags. We have three collectors. One of the collectors also deals with the repossession companies.

How many?

Go ahead.

I'm sorry, you said three support staff too?

Yeah. Yeah, my wife is a part time employee. I have a counter to comptroller and one lady who handles the inventory. We have a full time detail staff here, but they're self employed. They, but they work out of my shop.

How many cars y' all selling a month this year, Clint?

We're gonna average probably 60amonth. Maybe. This was a good year. Wow.

Yeah. And that's with two full time salesmen and a sales manager. So each one of those guys are doing about 20.

Yeah. They exceeded their annual average pay this year by about 35, 40%.

Yeah, sounds like a good year.

They really had a big year.

So that puts about how many with three collectors. How many accounts are you, do you have on the books right now or do you mind sharing that?

1600 about.

Yeah. He's big.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that would lead me to my next question. And again, if you don't need, don't answer if you don't want to. But is that all? Is that organic growth? Have you had to go into debt to get there? What advice would you have for dealers that are saying, hey, I want to do what Clint did and I want to sell 60 cars a month and have 1400 accounts, but where do I get the money?

Yeah, that's a big question. That's always been the question for me. Yes, I do borrow money and well, the average price or sales price of a car that I sell, I have a different model. I sell cars for about $20,000 average. But my margins are like my competitors, Carvana, Carmax and People. I cannot. You know, you can't mark a car up that you pay 15 or $18,000 for the way you do when you buy one for five. It doesn't work that way. So most of our income is from interest finance charges because the notes are larger, the repo losses are less because the margins were less in the first place. Right. So it's just different. The profit and losses are in different places. And you're right, it takes more money to do it my way. So you've got to find a lender that believes in what you're doing and understands what you're doing. And I've been able to do that with local lenders for a long time. It's getting more difficult.

Yeah. And that explains the full time insurance person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't be having someone wreck a $20,000 car without insurance.

No, you don't try. I mean, it happens. But we, we stay on the insurance and then we have our, we use a self insured Insurance plan or a forced insurance plan if somebody lets their insurance lapse. And that's our company. But it's, you know, if a guy's not going to pay and you're looking for him, it doesn't matter if you put force placed insurance on him, he's not paying you anyway. And they're just so. Yeah, that risk is definitely there. We did start checking credit here a couple years ago and scrutinizing a little better because losses did go up. Like everybody, we face the same thing with national lenders setting up shop in new car dealerships and financing low credit scores.

Yeah, that's really affected your business. I mean, you know, your customer because you have a higher income customer. I'm sure that you've seen that over the years, really, you know, last few years, dig into your business a lot, hadn't you, Clint?

Yeah, I've seen our repeat business is probably not at the level it was 10 years ago. As you know, Luke, I was probably the only show in town that did upper scale cars for buy here, pay here. So. That, and that, you know, Dodd Frank, I believe it was the new car dealers that were the only people that were included in the Dodd Frank regulation. So I don't, I can see why they got into the subprime business. And of course the results are, they are producing a lot of bad paper, overselling people and that sort of thing. So I think that's starting to come back around now.

Well, it sounds like from your numbers you guys are still doing pretty well despite that competition. We had a big year this year.

And we were helped by a lot of the stimulus money. Yeah. So I was hoping to average about 45 cars every year as an average per month. I was selling about 30 at the other lot and about 35 at the low income lot. When I joined them, I realized I don't want to double my sales because at that point losses were too high. So we implemented some credit policies and so we're trying to sell 45 good deals every month.

Yeah, that's so important. And Clinton, I think one of the things, one of the big things I learned from you was that you can, you know, we can sell as many cars as we can afford to in our business, but when you start qualifying people a little better, you know, you can pick the deals you want. And it sounds like that's really what you're focusing on now. I wondered and I'll ask this question. So Clint's original store was called University Motors and it had a great name, still has A great name. It was a beautiful dealership for what we do. Beautiful dealership period. And you moved to the other location and you went away from your original name. Why'd you do that, Clint?

Well, I talked about it, and.

All.

Of my existing customers were already visiting my related finance company so that there was no advertising there. They already knew I had the second lot and knew where it was. So that now all your past customers who did not have accounts. Well, we linked the two websites, put messages out, advertise that way on tv. And I did that as opposed to getting another dealer license or moving a dealer license and new sign work and things like that. It was already kind of confusing. We had another dealership down the street operating under a different name. And I just. It just kind of kept it simple. And that was during the period of time that I was facing challenges with learning to manage employees and changing accounting. So I was stretched pretty thin. Some of it was. I just didn't want to take on the task at that time. So that was interesting. That another thing I learned in hindsight was, and you touched on the repo, you know, bad debt, things that occupy too much of your mind to keep you from keeping pace, you know, and thinking about new things and all these Internet changes and things we need to stay on top of. If you're mentally bogged down on your losses and things like that, it's just harder to manage the company.

That's so interesting. I always look at all these shiny new businesses I can get into and I, you know, luckily I have my wife who tells me, no, dummy, keep doing what you're doing. Have you ever had any of that come up, Clint, where your focus was shifting instead of doing this, you know.

All the way down to my wife telling me. Yeah, my wife tells me the same thing every time I think I want. And you know, well, I'm 60 now, so I'm starting to lose that desire to. Even now that I know how to do it, I think, you know, I don't know that I want to go there again. And she sure doesn't want me to go there. I have a son who finished school last year and he has interest in coming here. So he's of course going to work somewhere else at a car dealership for a year or two and then come over. But that's what his plan was then. He may change. Who knows? When you're 22 years old, you know, you just. But that's. That was. I can sure that the transition to one of your kids is a Pretty tough deal just by itself to get somebody up to speed. And there's just no getting somebody up to speed. You've run this business for 35 years. Nobody can ever know it the way Luke, you know yours or you and your dad do, or you just can't do it.

You saw me go through that transition and how, I mean, used to go and buy cars. My dad at the auction and you saw him buying cars at a Mercedes store that you were working at. So I mean, you've seen the evolution.

Of how that works, right? Right. There's no more wholesale. We don't go to. I don't go to auctions anymore. If I did, I could only buy 10% of my cars while I was there. And I would spend 70% of my time away from the dealership. So I don't know where this thing is going, but it's taxing to keep up with it. A young mind, I think would a little more energetic. And young people who stay on top of the Internet, they seem to keep up with that a little better or it's less effort for them too.

So, Clint, I never asked you this before, but if you weren't in the car business or car industry, what would you be doing? You think?

You know, I'm from a little town about 40 miles from here, Orangeburg. And my family was in the farm supply business. Not equipment, fertilizer, feed and seed and chemicals and bulk grain and things like that. So that's what I went to school to do. And when I went in the business, that business was in a down cycle. Farmers were. It was hard to get paid for a lot of things you sold. And everybody was depending on rain instead of irrigation. And so I went to work for the Hudson organization here. At that time, being young and you know, at that time, new car dealer would give you a nice new car to drive and all this. So that was it. After that had a relative, a retired was my brother's father in law, got opened up by here a lot and he talked to me about it and helped me along. Of course I got a partner to kind of wade out in the water with me. You know, it feels better two people going out together when you start something off. And then he, he sold me his part after, I don't know, eight or nine years. And every time I do a little something, I double the size of my business. Whether it's buying a partner's part of a business or moving down the street. They seem like they're huge ventures to me. But I'm still one store, you know.

Yeah. That's interesting.

Going through all those experiences. Clint, what advice would you give dealers that are listening to that are maybe at the beginning of their journey or maybe they're, you know, in the middle or near the end. What have you learned from all those changes? There's things you would do differently. There are things you would put into place you wish you had done 20 years ago. Anything that sticks out to you.

Well, the business has changed so much. The advice I would give anybody now would be much different than then would. Back then, I would have done, what car? What is it? Drive time or somebody did. I would have borrowed every dime I could have and just grew as much as I could. And because it was much easier, less competition. Today, I think one thing that I've done, and probably Luke could attest to this, that the simple things that everybody says, bankers always tell you, it's not how much you can loan, it's how much you can get paid for. And I've tried to apply that. That is so true. Not just in the math of the number, because a small business person runs the whole company. And when lawsuit repos looking for cars, whatever it is that's not profitable, that's taking up part of your mind that's bad. I mean, you can't progress that way. You can't come up with new ideas and focus on other things. I think that's the biggest downturn of bad deals is the sleepless nights and you sitting around trying to figure out where some guy took your car. That's just really wasted time could be spent thinking about how you could be better.

That's so true. I think we've talked about that, Luke. I remember in. In the beginning, the first five years of running my buy here pay here, I would have those days I'd come home from work and I would still be stressing about the fact that this car, a car is missing. I cannot find this car. Or someone wrecked and they owed me five grand and that's gone. And now it's a completely different mentality. And it's not because I'm further along or have more money or five grand doesn't mean anything. It just is. What are you going to do? You know, I can either stress over the fact that I can't find that car and it can ruin my day, or I can just realize that that's part of doing business and focus that energy on making up the five grand somewhere else. You know, I think it's a great mentality shift for people you can't totally.

Let it go because you do want to find the car. But the real answer is not to make the bad deal to start with, you know, if you can. Everybody has bad deals. The. But it's getting harder to net money or make money from a bad deal. You can't really do it. You lose money now. I do.

I do, too, as well. Clint, if you had to start a car dealership today, would it still be buy here, pay here, or would you go a different route?

If I had to start this today, I think I would. I might leave off the car dealership part and be a finance company. I might loan money. I would try to do that, I believe, because, well, as you guys know, all the overhead is in the car buying cars and processing those cars and getting them ready and paying people to sell them. Yeah, there can be profit there, but at least on my end, because it's. The more. As I said, most of my income comes from finance charges because of the price of the car and the margins. Finance company would be better for me.

I think you're 100% right on that. I've thought about that over the years. Just imagine if we didn't have to worry about sourcing inventory. We left that to someone else. How much more profitable could we be? And I think the number is largely more profitably profitable because you probably could. Could take a fee from the dealer that would essentially, you know, do the same thing we're doing now.

That's become credit acceptance. Right. I mean, credit acceptance, Westlake LaBelle. That's what guys are doing. Right. You just want to be a subprime lender, hit the dealer for a big discount and try to collect. That's how I started in this business was being a subprime lender in 2008. I don't know how they make ends meet without the markup side of it. That's the reason I got into the dealership was. I mean, the technology has come a long way. You know, if you look at, like, a credit acceptance, their formula, they value the car and their advances are based on what they can repo that thing for and resell it at auction, you know.

Yeah. It's obviously a numbers game, but the overhead is not there.

Yeah.

I mean, they're paying interest on the money and they're paying collectors, but. Well, you probably. I don't know if you have a related finance company, but you see how those numbers break apart. It's hard to get enough expenses over on the finance company side.

Well, that's the question for that, Clint, what does your average deal look like? I mean, would you break down? I mean, I know both you and Luke, you both sell high end cars. And it sounds like you might even be more high end than Luke does in the buy here pay.

He's a couple thousand above me.

Yeah. If you're selling an average $15,000 car plus you're making two to three grand on the front end and then you're carrying the note at 19% interest or.

Yeah, our interest tiers up with the price of the car. Tiers down as the price car goes up. So let's just say it's a round figure. It's a $20,000 car. Okay. Yeah, it would be about 19.9 at 3,000 down 15% and they'd have to.

Have 3,000 down 19,9. It's a $20,000 sales price ACV of maybe 17.

Yeah, maybe something like that.

You're putting a couple grand mark up, so. Good healthy amount of money hitting the road.

Yeah. You know, the margin is going to depend on how much you spend on it after you get it here usually, but. So.

Let me ask you that. Sorry to jump on you again, but I want to ask Luke that same question. If you have. I see you have a 2014 Dodge Charger in stock, 64,000 miles on it. Is that 64,000 mile Dodge Charger gonna take less in recon than 120,000 mile Charger? That's a couple years older.

Yeah, it's gonna take less.

It's gonna take less. Have you guys found that? I guess I'm not having any.

Yeah, the reports are more. Cause it's a newer model car. But you shouldn't have to.

You really put less into it.

Yeah. And that's not necessarily true, but I would say on average it might. It'd be a little. It's not gonna be. Was it going to be $150 different on average or something? I think it's probably.

I think it's probably 200 max. But what, what ends up happening is with that, that newer car, your body recon is more. And so the car has to look so much better, so you end up spending money on cosmetics and less on mechanics is what ends up happening is what I've seen. Is that the same case with you, Clinton?

Well, yeah, our cars. You know, I can't even buy a car that it doesn't make sense for me to buy a car really with a rating less than 3.5. It just doesn't make sense because I have to do so much to it. Now I might go down to a 3.2 on a, you know, a truck or something because they're so hard to buy but are so expensive, but you still have to get them up and they gotta look good. And I don't know what your costs are, but you know, you buy a car in an auction, which is where almost all of my cars come from, so you're gonna pay top dollar when you buy it, then you're gonna pay a fee on top of that, then you're gonna get it back here, and then you get it back here and spend $1,200 average on them. You know, it's, you're financing a lot on that car.

Yeah, I guess my argument is I feel like on my $5,000 ACV stuff, I'm still gonna average $1,500 of recon, give or take some. And then on my more expensive stuff, I'm still averaging $1,500 of recon, give or take some. Both because the parts are more expensive and both because just because it's a 60,000 mile Altima doesn't mean it ain't gonna need a transmission, you know, one out of three times like. So I guess I have that argument. I guess the only, the point where it makes sense for me and both your guys's business models is that nicer car with 60,000 miles, you're gonna be able to take that in on trade in two or three years and give it a second life at your dealership if you, if you decide to keep it around with 120,000.

Well, it's two things. It's the interest income on the more expensive car and they're lost on the repo, the more expensive car. So, you know, you're not going to lose as much because you're not going to margin it as much. Right. And so it's, it's a whole different set of challenges with all the cars being, and I'm not saying it's better at all, you know, you know, there was a time when I was 75% car dealer, 25% finance guy. I feel like I'm kind of the other way now, so. And it's a different set of accounting challenges, you know, your discounts and so forth going over. So I, I don't know, it's been a while since I've been out of the business. The traditional buy here, pay here car lot, that buy that probably averages spending what, 8 or $9,000 on a car.

When they buy it oh, no, that's. It's probably the average now. Clint's in the fives, I would think.

Oh, really?

So, yeah, I mean, it's.

We.

Yeah, you've long passed it, and I'm. I'm past it for years. Yeah.

And I've creeped up more, too. I mean, that's. That's the hard thing for me is I start saying, well, I'm buying a $8,000 car and I'm only making three grand on my eight. Whereas opposed to back in the day, I would buy a $4,000 car and make three grand on my four. I was almost, you know, I'm basically doubling my money.

But your interest is so much less on that car compared to what. What it is on the higher price.

Right.

But I can do twice as many or three times as many.

But you're gonna.

I'm still putting that money on the road. It does take twice as many sales, and I get that. If I finance a more expensive car, I could do half as many sales. Still put, you know, 300,000 on the books every month with half as many sales, arguably at the same interest rate. It's the other.

Yeah. And plus, the bigger. The larger spread of price range you have, the better selection you have. In other words, the more cars you're going to sell. Especially now with the Internet.

Yeah. You can't buy a 3, $4,000 car on simulcast. You're in a world of hurt if you. You try to do that.

Yeah. And people are searching more specifically now. You know about the make and model of the car. They know about what they're dialing in on, what cars cost a lot better now than they once did because of the Internet. So I think. Yeah, if you can broaden your. I've done that several times. And when we're now at from probably 12,000 or $13,000 to 28,000 or $9,000 is what we are selling now. And that's the, you know, to get. We want something for everybody. And unfortunately, when sales start to. We're off 5 or 6%. A good way to get that 5 or 6% is going to 30,000. You know.

So how do you put it? But at $20,000, at 19 or 15% interest, I mean, that's a. That's what, a 8 or $900 a month payment?

No, we don't have payments that high. $20,000, you know, with $3,000 down, if you're doing a car like that for four, four and a half years, most of our payments are in the fives, maybe $600 a month.

You're doing 48 to 52 months, 54 months kind of loans.

Depends on the car. A lot of these cars that we sell will have 30 or 40,000 miles on them. Not most of them, but a lot of them do. And that's smaller cars. That's not a truck or something.

But.

It depends on the car. We do what works for us. We know what our customer base looks like and what the income looks like. And it's gotta fit.

Yeah. Sorry to break in here in this episode, but we gotta remind you of dealer Re. The only way to build wealth is our industry is with the reinsurance company. Jeff, you got one, right?

Yes, yes, yes. I set mine up. This has been my first full year. In so many ways it's helped. I mean, obviously the tax deferment, you know, just having a formal warranty company as opposed to just kind of my pseudo in house company that I was running before. It's really nice to give these guys an 800 number when they have a breakdown and say, hey, call abp. They're going to direct you what to do.

That's right.

And my shop can step in.

That's right. Dealer Re. Tim and Taylor Byrd over there are just really super guys. I talk to Taylor at least once a week and I tell you, great service. In my opinion, they're the only ones to go with dealer Re. Give them a call, get hooked up. Hey, Clint, you had something interesting happened, I guess about six, eight months ago where your Facebook was hacked and somebody stole, I guess, your inventory and listed it with very low prices. And I know you spent a month or so getting that fixed. Can you kind of walk us through that and what happened and how you resolved it?

Well, yeah, that was a. Well, what happened? I'll tell you what happened. We noticed a scam in June of this year and it was someone selling cars on Facebook Marketplace for ridiculously low prices. Say a third of the value or a fourth of the value right in that $1,200 to $2,000 relief fund money range. People that were getting those checks. So they were targeting people like that, I feel like. So we were filing a complaint on Facebook. In the instructions where it tells you how to do that, there was a chat link. We chatted, said, hey, look what's going on here? In two days it was gone. Now this scam or what they did is they put these cars online on Facebook Marketplace. They were cars that they just took pictures of. They weren't cars at all. They didn't own cars. They put them for sale. But they used our phone number, our website, a name that was very similar ours called Bluff Online Sales or Bluff Road Online Sales. And then there was a email address that was not ours and a messenger account that was not ours. So what would happen in that case is if a customer were to go to the website, they would see our website and, hey, this car is not on their website. Or if they called us or did both, we'd say, no, that's somebody trying to scam. That's not our car. And so they were safe. But if they communicated by email or messenger, they didn't know who they were talking to and they got scammed and.

You had to lose money.

Yes. I know of six people that gave anywhere from 1200 to $2500. I would bet they were three times or four times that many, because people don't like to talk about that. And so it was real. And now what happened is, two weeks later, the scam was back. Same guy, same thing, but they had grown a little more sophisticated. This time they had a Facebook marketplace name and the bluff Online name was actually a Facebook page. So they had a, like Bluff Road Marketplace or something. So they had changed things up a little bit. So same scenario. If the customer communicated by messenger or by email, a scam attempt was made if they called us or went to our website. Now, by this time, we had a big banner across the website and said, hey, there's a scam going on informing people. We reported it to Facebook hundreds of times, did no good. I got the Richland County Sheriff's department involved, and they were able to contact Facebook and get a person on the line through their child trafficking investigation sources. Facebook took the information, did nothing about it, of course, reported it to consumer affairs and they sent letters to Facebook and I sent letters to Facebook and nothing happened. A customer of ours, now, this went on for three weeks, and we said.

That your phone was ringing so much that you couldn't do your normal business. Right.

One Saturday before our phone rang every 10 seconds, we had two or three people show up at the lot with the ad in their paper every day.

And angry at you because you didn't have the car at that price.

Just. Just yelling at you like you set up the scam. Something that generates that kind of phone traffic. They're getting some people for money. And so we put the banners up and did the best we could. In the meantime, a customer inquired about one of the cars. He knew it was a scam, inquired about one of the cars and said, sent them a link and said, this is the car I'm interested in. And they clicked on that link and it was an IP address buster. And they knew as soon as they clicked that link they had messed up. So I took that IP address. I had already reported it to the FBI. There's an FG3.com website that you can report this stuff and that's the best place that I found to report anything.

And it's called what again?

I believe it's FG3 dot com. I'll look it up in a second for you. That's the FBI. So I went back and I edited the FBI report that I had made the day before and put that IP address in there because I remember they asked, do you know the IP address? And it was gone the next day. So I guess a combination of them clicking on that IP address. But three weeks of that, it was tough.

Yeah, yeah, that's hard because then you're spending money, you're redesigning your website, you're making banners, you're doing all these things to try to save your name and save your hassle and headache.

There's a good Internet attorney downtown in Columbia. I called him and he just said, I've never seen anything like this.

Yeah, well, I mean I'm looking right now. If you just pull up the marketplace in your area. I'm on a 50 mile radius of my town and I would say probably one out of every four of these ads is a scammer. It's fake.

It's amazing how that can affect your business and how it did affect your business.

Yeah, they now this scammer is evolved. You know, he changed things the second time to where I guess he met Facebook's or he wasn't breaching their criteria some way by doing some name changing or using two different. He was pretending to be like an advertiser is what he was doing when Facebook would challenge him. Now he's moved on to another dealer. And just to tell you, you gotta fight these guys and get rid of them no matter what it costs. Now I don't think this other dealer is responding very well because he's doing all of the things that the scammer is doing, all of the things he was doing to me. Plus he has made an exact duplicate of the dealership's website and just lowered all of the prices by about 75%. It's just a different URL. But people don't know your URL, they know your website. And so now I don't know what he's done about the phone number or not, but he is. So the website piece that was protecting some people with us is now gone. Yeah, he's. He's dropped that. And, you know, I call that dealership. I wonder what these people are doing, I think. And that somebody just answered the phone, said, that's just a scam. And, you know, I was like, well, that's.

You're gonna have to deal with it.

You're gonna have to. The scam will never go away as long as they're making money on it. And I wish they would do something. It's bad for people. That dealership is also a competitor of Luke's and mine, and every $2,000 they steal from somebody, they can't buy anything else with it.

That's right. That's out of the market. That's our money out of the market.

Yeah. Well, my argument would be that guy probably needs to be out of the market. I think if you're. If you're so gullible that it's a 2007 Accord with 100,000 miles for a grand with a random picture of some place or email address, and you're going to hire a money.

This guy's not a car dealer. This guy is something. They're in New York somewhere. Is where the IP address busted. Now, that could be a different server, but that's where it came up. And, you know, it could be people in another country, you know, and you would be amazed, Jeff, at how little a lot of people that are in business know about this. I had other dealers saying, you know, making comments. Yeah, they're scamming people and stuff. And I'm looking at that and like, wow, it really. No wonder scams work so well. People are so, you know, they know so little about this kind of stuff.

Jeff, you. You got anything else for Clint?

Clint?

No, I think it's all great stuff.

Yeah.

Great information, good to learn. Hopefully the dealer community has taken stuff away from Clint's story. It's really interesting and it goes to show that, I mean, the buy here, pay here, model the car business, there's a million different ways to do it, you know.

Well, thanks for being with us today, Clint.

Luke Tyke, the Jeff. Good. Appreciate y' all inviting.

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