#174 - Kick Off To Convention Season w/ Jeff Martin

Hello.

Welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast, brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Luke, the podcast has been going great. We're super excited with the growth. Thank you guys for your reviews. Sharing this with a friend. It's still moving forward and we are getting into convention season, so this episode, a real treat. We got Jeff Martin. He is the executive director of Tiada and the upcoming convention.

Yeah. So we discuss upcoming convention. We're going to have a bunch of dealers there. There's going to be a bunch of vendors there and they're going to really. It's time to get back. It's time to network. It's time to meet people and Jeff's going to tell us how to do that at the upcoming Texas Independent Automobile.

July 25th, 26th, 27th, Round Rock. You fly right into Austin. Super easy. So we hope to see you guys in a month at convention in Texas. It should be a great time to get back together and start networking with everyone. And that's really what it is about, right, Luke? We're learning from each other. We're making connections, we're growing. It should be a really, really great time. And of course, Luke and I are going to have a session there. So we're going to guys and say hi.

Record a live podcast there.

Yeah, yeah, live, live. So maybe you'll be involved. Also, Luke, we're going to try something new, too. In the next coming episodes. We're going to. We're going to sit around and do a book of the Book of the quarter. A book of the year. Right, Luke?

So, you know, we've just been going through a lot of struggles with management and me maybe not doing what I should be doing at the office. And I. And I kept thinking about, what's the book that I need to go back to? And the book is Good to Great from Jim Collins. And that book we're going to dive into. I believe it's something that all of us can benefit from and we can take it part by part. I'm going to have a bunch of notes and we're just going to talk to it and maybe to make us all better dealers.

Yeah. So I'm a couple chapters into it. I bought the audiobook version is a little slow for me, so I bought the physical version. So I'm going to read it to make sure I'm retaining but going to follow along. And Luke's going to kind of guide us in this expedition of From Good to Great as told by Jim Collins. And it is a lot of great stuff. He looks at all these businesses and why did they go from good to great? What was it inside of that business that made that company excel? So I think it'll be a great, great thing for us as dealers to just kind of grow ourselves from our management standpoint, not just, you know, always cars, cars, cars.

So, yep.

All right, guys, here is the episode with Jeff Martin. Hope you enjoyed.

Welcome to the independent Dealer podcast with.

Hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

A podcast by Dealers for dealers. Here we go.

Texas, we talked about, we joked about it's. It's kind of the kickoff convention, right, for convention season. I mean, Georgia, Tennessee, I don't know, guys, but. But Texas is the big. This is this. It's big, right?

Yeah, we're obviously, we're excited about it. We'll have probably a little over 300 dealers will attend the conference. We'll have probably around 550 total attendees, including our associate members and spouses and things of that nature. But, yeah, I think you're right, Jeff. For everybody, this is an exciting time. You know, all the states that have conferences, I think are trying to put those on June, July, August. And I know when I talk to my counterparts in other parts of the country, they're all very excited about that. It as well.

Jeff, if I'm a dealer, let's say in a surrounding state or Louisiana or Michigan or somewhere like that, why do I care about the Texas convention? Why should I?

Yeah, that's a great question, Luke. We've been very fortunate, really. Over the last five to six years, we've had a number of dealers from other states who attend our conference. And primarily it's because of the education. We have five tracks that run simultaneously. One track is primarily compliance, and that is usually focused on Texas, but the other four tracks are open to any dealer in the country. Would get something out of it. In fact, I will tell you that on Tuesday, we have panel discussions, and our panel discussions are usually made up from dealers from other parts of the country. We'll have dealers from Montana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, a number of areas. And I feel like our Texas dealers get a lot out of that as well, hearing what other dealers, how the industry is impacting other dealers in other states. And so, you know, another thing that we've put in place a few years ago, if you are a dealer and you're attending from another state, then we give you the same rate that you would get if you were a member in Texas, and we give half of that registration back to the state wherever you're coming from.

Wow, that's neat. That's good to hear. And where is it in Texas? Is it the same place y' all usually have it or do y' all switch it around?

No, it's actually in Round Rock, Texas this year. It's at the Kalahari Resort, which is a brand new resort. It just opened in 2020, so it's got, you know, all the things you would want at a resort. The indoor water park, the outdoor water park, the fine dining, restaurants. I think there are only four Kalaharis in the United States and this one was brand new, opened here in Round Rock.

Well, that's really neat. It's a good place to bring your family if you're going to go. I know that. And even though Texas is hot as a firecracker in the end of July, there would be plenty of things to do and have fun in that resort, I'm sure.

Yes. Certainly want to emphasize the indoor water park. I think if to your point, if you're in Texas in July and you're coming from Montana, which I understand is really hot in Montana right now too. But yeah, indoor water parks are probably going to be a little bit more down your alley.

For sure. For sure. Is there a theme to the convention this year? A theme of the education? You know, it's been so long since we've been in person to do education, maybe we forgot what education is about. Can you dig into that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. So we don't really do any like overall theme for the conference. We focus very much. When we start building our conference, we usually start about 16 months prior to the actual conference. And we focus very much on education. We spend a lot of time. I'm very fortunate that we've got a great team here. We travel around the country and go to a number of the national conferences. We sit in on literally hundreds of education sessions, taking notes and trying to bring back a good mix of education for our members. But to be real, real frank with you, Luke, I'm not a huge fan of themed conferences and dress up conferences. I feel like if you focus on the education, that's what the dealers are there for. And that's what we kind of pride ourselves on, having the best education in the country. And we spend a lot of time kind of sourcing that education. If you trying to help answer the questions and help our dealers be successful. And this is where they find that the networking speaks for itself too. You know, having the dealers and you guys know, you guys are both dealers having the opportunity to visit with other dealers about what's going on in their industry is every time we get feedback from our conference, that's the number one thing that people talk about. We have what we call on Monday. We do do. The roundtables will have 12 different roundtable topics. Dealers can rotate around. You get an opportunity to sit at three of the roundtables and inevitably our members or our attendees always tell us, you know, the dealer roundtables were fantastic. It's kind of a forced networking environment. But the networking is what the dealers really get, really get out of the conference. So the short, I guess there's no short answer now that I've talked this long, but the long answer to your question is, for us, the theme is education.

And I think Jeff can speak a lot, Jeff Watson, that is gonna speak a lot to the network. And he loves that about conferences. Are you ready for that, Jeff?

Yeah, I mean, obviously that's the best part. Luke and I talk about all the time. It's dealers helping dealers. You know, everyone's business is a little bit different and there are these broad topics that we all talk about. But man, you gotta ask questions and you wanna get input from dealers that have done it before or how they might be doing it differently or looking at it at a different angle. And you're like, wow, I never even thought about that. Like, I didn't even think that this was a possibility or that I should look at it from this angle or that, you know, so there's so much strategy to the way you position cars or buy or price or handle your employees. So it's a great, great thing. And one thing I was looking at the agenda, I mean, it's. You guys pack it into, I mean, realistically, a day and a half, right? I mean, it looks like you got some welcome stuff on Sunday. You've got all day sessions Monday and then about half day on Tuesday. So if any dealers are too worried about being out of their dealership, fly in Sunday night, hit all sessions on Monday, half session on Tuesday, fly home Tuesday night. You're in Texas, you're in the middle of the country. So you're only out of your dealership for two days.

Yeah. And we, you know, it's one of the things that I would say our members have been very loud about, Jeff, is don't make this a week long conference. Don't take, you know, we've got to be selling cars, we need to be making money. And certainly. And that's one of the reasons that we offer as much education as we do simultaneously, because we recognize that every track is not going to be for every member. We have a buy here, pay here track. We have a retail track, as I mentioned earlier, we have a compliance track. And then we also have found that technology and management sometimes seem to be in their own track. And what we would suggest is find two or three of those key people at your dealership. If you can pull them away for a day or a day and a half, you can get all the education you want. We still have the governance of the association, which that's just part of associations. And you'll see a lot of that on Monday, where we have our board meetings, our house of Delegates, we elect our officers, we talk about setting our legislative agenda, any bylaw changes, but really for the core member, they're coming for the education. And so to your point, Jeff, if you're there Monday and really half a day on Tuesday, you're gonna get all the education. We've got an awards ceremony on Tuesday night. And again, that's usually for the dealer or the member who's a little bit more involved in the association, but we've heard that numerous times. Don't build a conference that has a lot of downtime for our nonsense.

Yeah, I don't want to sit around and go to some social or some sponsored lunch pitch. So speaking of pitches, Jeff, do we have. I mean, does Tiada have a commitment to have a no infomercial education sessions, like. I get it, if we're going to be talking about GPSs, yes. You should probably have it presented by someone who has been in the industry for 50 years making GPSs, or compliance guy who runs compliance. I don't want Joe Schmo, dealer up there telling me about compliance. Right. So I get it, you have to have the compliance guy up there. But I'm guessing these guys have very specific situations that they're not there to just pitch their shtick the whole time.

It's very rare that we have anyone who is an associate member. And we love our associate members, we love our vendors. We feel like they have a place and we really focus on making that place the expo. That's where a dealer should go and have that opportunity to talk to someone about their products and their services. We're really excited about our expo this year. We're gonna have over 120 vendors in there. And we've got a number of new vendors, particularly some of that was driven through, through the pandemic. You know, we're seeing a lot of new faces in that Expo. But specifically to your point, Jeff, we have a sign up in our education that says text to this number if you feel like this is turning into some type of infomercial. And, you know, it's funny, obviously everybody wants to be up there. Let me go out there and talk about my product or let me talk about my service. But in reality, what associate members really want and what our vendors want, and we have very frank conversations with them, they want dealerships to be there. And you know as well as I do, the one thing that will kill a conference is if someone feels like it's an infomercial. And if the dealers stop showing up, well, then the vendors are going to stop showing up. And so we've always focused on making sure we can get as many attendees as we can. And the way that you get those attendees, in my opinion, is by building education that they want to go see. And so we have panel discussions, and there are many times where we may reach out to some of our key sponsors and say, who are some of the dealers that you feel like we should have on that panel? And we're excited to have those dealers on the panel. But I feel like a dealer hearing from another dealer is always going to come across better and it's going to be more successful than having an associate member up there talking about their product. And I got to say, we've got phenomenal sponsors and vendors, and they see that the same way.

I kind of picture it, Luke. I picture, have you been to, like, the professional sports games, right, where they have the phone number to text for rowdy fans? I just picture me like texting and then all of a sudden the guys, the security guards come in and haul off the presenter in the middle of this presentation.

We actually did. So, Jeff, you say that we actually did get one of those texts one time from one of our members who texted to say, I just wanted to see if this worked.

So, you know, that's interesting. And we don't want to be pitched to. But I tell you what, one of the greatest things I get out of a conference is the expo.

Okay. Hey, everybody, sorry to interrupt the podcast. Real quick, we need to tell you guys, Buckeye Dealer Consulting is sponsoring the podcast these days. Luke, what do they do?

So, you know, I use Buckeye for a part of my reinsurance company and it's great. They came up with some products that I didn't know about before. The new one thing they're pushing a lot is this PSI product post sell inspection. Why give your money to these big Auctions, when you can reinsure yourself and if things go wrong, you don't have to worry about someone else sending you a check. You can do it out of your reinsurance. Another, you know, another product I use with them is V. So one of.

Those products anyway, it covers my portfolio vehicle, single interest.

There we go. And it, it covers my portfolio for those damages outside of normal repos. Buckeye's been around for a long time. They're great guys. They care about you call them, right?

Yeah.

And they're going to be a convention.

Yes sir, all of them.

So come out to Austin, see them, talk with him, ask him questions. Back to the podcast.

How many vendors are going to be there? Because you know, we have not had that face to face contact with so many vendors for so long. I think that's something that is really going to be front and center at the conventions coming up.

Man. It's a great question, Luke. And it was a big challenge for us because we started selling our, you know, we had two things that we struggled with and I say we really, anybody that's trying to put on conferences, we were struggling with this. How are you going to deal with the social distancing? What are the CDC guidelines going to be at that time? What are the guidelines going to be in your state or in your county where you're having it? So when you start talking about and we could do it with education, we I think pretty early on realized how we could separate people in the room if you're having a classroom style education. But you guys know those expos, man, that's a free for all and trying to tell people to socially distance and where you can stand. We were working with the fire marshal. We looked at spacing out our expo and exactly what that would look like. We looked at having people snake through the expo as opposed to just going wherever you wanted to. Fortunately, we're not going to have to deal with any of that. But it did add an extra layer, just kind of planning for us. And I know the associate members were in the same position. Our vendors, particularly some of our vendors out of the northeast, they are still under no travel bans. So we have some of our associate members who have been vendors in the past who have said we want to have a presence at your conference. But unfortunately if we don't, if they don't have, if they don't have sales staff on the ground in Texas, they're not going to be able to have a presence because they're still under the no travel ban. Now I Will tell you, in the last month we had a number who have said that they weren't going to be able to attend. And all of a sudden now they are going to be able to attend. So we're going to have again, we'll have, I think we have 127 booths. I think we have about 17 left at this point and you know, a number of new dealers as we had talked about. And we're pretty fortunate we're not going to, we will not have a mask mandate in place in Texas and there's not going to be social distancing. We're going to try to make everybody feel as comfortable as possible.

Yeah, Luke's going to have one with the pie where you just walk up and you get, hit him with the pie in the face. So be sure to come. What you were saying though is so good, Jeff, earlier, is that so much, so much new technology has been born through this, right? Like so much new digital retailing and remote retailing and all these new text platforms and video and all this stuff has come along in this time and we don't know, you know, so both to Luke's point, it's so great to go see these new vendors and see the stuff that's been reinvented and realize that you've been working with a dinosaur for so long and all of a sudden this solution you didn't think existed actually isn't now exists. And I would say Texas convention, I mean Texas Expo hall, it rivals the biggest ones, right? I mean, as far as vendors, the national convention, I would think maybe has the same or I don't know. But you guys, I mean, it's not a, it's not a little peanut circus, right?

Yeah, no, I always say, yeah, no, we definitely, we're very proud of the expo. It's something that, and I'll tell you, one of the reasons that we've been successful in building the EXP the way that we built it is we did get a lot of input from the vendors we listened to. You know, every year we have a meeting with all the vendors who want to attend. We schedule a separate meeting and say, what can we do to make this expo better? And so they've helped in, you know, coming up with ideas to drive our vendor or drive our attendees to the expo. But yeah, no, it's a pretty good sized expo. I mean, there are some, you know, big booths, you'll see all the big names that are in the industry. But also to your point, Jeff, and I know I mentioned this A couple of times. But, you know, the number of new vendors that we have, and a lot of that's driven by the technology, or a lot of that was driven by people trying to figure out how to deliver vehicles and, you know, the kind of the touchless transactions that were going on during COVID And so we see a lot of the new technology that is out there that I think people always felt like was coming, but the pandemic just sped it up. And so a lot of those vendors will be there as well.

That's awesome. I can't wait to see so many faces I hadn't seen in about two years. Jeff, during the pandemic. Let's go off a little bit of convention. Let's go to what you've been hearing from dealers in your state. What is one of the biggest issues that Texas dealers have brought to the association in the last 12 months?

Well, I mean, it's one of the things that I know you guys are doing a live podcast at our conference, and it's the topic that you're covering. I mean, inventory is the challenge. And, you know, that's. That's on everybody's mind right now. You can drive up and down the street. You can see whether it's the franchise dealership or it's the used car dealership that, you know, a used car dealership that is. That's, you know, set up to have 80 cars, and they've got 12 cars on the lot. I mean, we're all struggling with that. And our dealers are no different. You know, trying to find that inventory and paying for a vehicle that may be two years older than what you used to carry, but you're paying the same price that you paid a year ago. And so that not only is the inventory and supply chain issue now, it becomes kind of an economic issue. As you guys know, cash is king and cash flow. You got to keep these businesses open. And people that are really leveraged, I think they're going to have a bigger challenge. The banks are. They're going to be asking, they want to get paid as well. And our guys have got to be selling cars. So that's the big issue. Funding is always a big challenge as well. And then the thing that we talked about earlier, you know, technology. How can I do this and be more efficient? You know, we went through a couple of kind of some regulatory questions and challenges that the pandemic brought up. We had a number of people that were working from home, and our state agencies didn't really. They weren't really set up to recognize people working from home, or the way they would say in Texas is working from an unlicensed location. And that created kind of some. Some new challenges for us. But everyone was working from home. And so we were fortunate during the legislative session to be able to work on some legislation that opened that up. It's something certainly, Luke, you know, three years ago, we never would have even thought about going to a legislator and saying, hey, what if we have some dealers who want to have employees who are going to work from home? And some of the things that came out of that then, Luke, was when our dealers were communicating to us, hey, this is something that we found that we can do. And, you know, like, let's say if you're in the buy here, pay here industry, maybe their collectors are more efficient working from home. And again, that was something. Two, three years ago, we would have never even thought about that. And we actually were able to pass some legislation that's going to allow that going forward.

I'm glad to hear that Texas really got in there and helped the dealers out when it came to that, because I know there were certain parts of Texas that you couldn't even open your door. We have. We have a friend in, I guess, the Fort Worth area, and they there for a bit. They couldn't even go to work right. It was that. Was that not the norm in Texas or.

It really wasn't, Luke. And, man, it was a challenge when the pandemic first hit. And that's kind of rehash all of this. But so Texas never, never closed. We never. They never took the position that the auto industry was not an essential business. But there were some counties and then even some states who had different ordinances. And so I kind of laugh. Our team is used to, you know, going to auctions and recruiting members and working on legislative issues and doing magazines. And all of a sudden I was like, okay, we're going to pull up every county ordinance and every state ordinance, which in Texas is a lot, and read through those ordinances and try to help our dealers understand. To your point, can you even be open? If you can be open, what. What does it look like? And there were some states that took. I mean, I'm sorry, some. Some cities that took some pretty hard stances. And it was for, I would say, probably about a week to two weeks before we kind of got that worked out in all the different counties and cities, and the county and city ordinances wouldn't always match either. So you may be in, like, McLennan county for example, which is where Waco is at. Waco's ordinance and McLennan County's ordinance did not match. And so then it really depended on where your dealership was at. And it may be two blocks away. And one dealership was under. Under a different ordinance than the other. And that was the biggest challenge, I think, and probably the great. One of the primary roles that we were able to play as an association. I know all the other associations across the country were doing the same thing, you know, trying to help their dealers understand, number one, can I be open? And of course, you know how dealers are. What they really, the real question they're asking is, how much trouble am I going to get in if I do open? That was the real question. They don't ask it that way, but that's what they mean.

So I tell you, that's great. Appreciate all the work you do, and I know that Texas is in good hands with you. Jeff Watson, do you have anything else for Jeff Martin?

No, I think that's great. Just to wrap up a summary. July 25th, 26th, 27th, Austin, Round Rock, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's. It's actually Round Rock, Texas, but that's just north of Austin. So, yeah, Austin Airport. And then, and then, and then drive.

Up to Round Rock, and that's where you'd fly in. And you could get an Uber from Austin Airport up to the convention center, the hotel. Right. Okay. So anyone trying to get in there anywhere in the country, it's probably a two, $300 round trip. You got a $40 Uber ride and you got $190 hotel room. Like, come on. There's no excuse not to get out and get educated for a day and a half.

Yeah.

And we're going to be there an awesome time. Hey, let me add one more thing real quick that I think is just kind of unique with the Texas Conference. And, and I would just encourage other associations and other dealer members who are listening to your podcast, you know, certainly get involved with your association. I know Jeff and Luke do a great job being involved in their respective associations, but one of the things that we've done with our association that has. It's probably been one of the most valuable things that we've done. We have a really professional group of attendees. And as we had mentioned earlier, the education is one of the things that brings them there. But we also, about five years ago, we started bringing legislators to our. And we have probably around 15 different legislators who attend the conference. And without fail, every single Year, we will have a legislator who will come up to me, and they say almost the exact same thing they always say, I just didn't know that it was this professional, you know, And I think that, as you know, you got. We have a tough image as used car dealers. And so when we can bring legislators to our conference and they can see us in that setting and they can see that we've got a group of people who are interested in one being compliant, being educated, taking care of their consumers. But when we can show legislators, you can show them that in action. When you go to the legislative session the next year and you see those same legislators, they remember what they saw at that conference. They remember that really professional looking group of people who are used car dealers. And it just, I think it's invaluable. We, like, say we started that about 15 years. I mean, about five years ago. We have about 15 legislators who show up. And now we get calls from legislators who are asking, hey, by the way, can I come to Yale's conference this year? They've really started building some of those grassroots relationships. And so I feel like if you have that platform, you know, in your state, if you have that platform as a conference and take advantage of it, ask, you know, even if you start with one or two legislators, and then you can build on that over the years so that when. When something comes up, like a pandemic or whatever it may be, and you have to go to the legislature to, to, you know, express whatever your concern is, the image that they have in their mind is that professional conference that. That they went to.

That's. That's a great idea. I've never thought about that ever. So great, great job there in Texas.

All right, looking forward to seeing you guys in July then, right?

Yeah.

Yes, sir. We'll see you then.

Four weeks. Thanks, Jeff.

All right, thanks, Jeff. And we appreciate it. All right, buddy, so glad you joined us. Please take a minute to leave us a review and share this podcast with.

A friend, the independent dealer.

Podcast dealers, helping dealers. Sam.