#18 - Joe Mok - An Industry Leader In Sourcing.

Today we have Joe Mok. Now, most of y' all probably seen Joe Mok on Facebook. He's all over it all the time. But this guy, he's up in Chicago, super smart. He's going to talk about some sourcing, about some turn about why or why not to open that second lot hiring buyers and talk about some major lenders. But I really think that you need to sit back, listen to this and take a lot of what Joe says to heart. He's a really smart guy.

It's great. He's a wealth of knowledge. He's been around it for a while. He knows how to get cars. I mean, he's an expert in that industry of sourcing. Small disclaimer. We have a little bit of an audio issue with Joe. So it's not your podcast acting up, it's just our Internet streaming. Also, like to thank everyone who's subscribing to the podcast. The success, the listenership has been off the charts, completely blowing away any of our expectations of what we thought we would do with this podcast. So really appreciate everyone. If you're subscribed, great. If you're not, subscribe, share it with your friends. Well, share it with your dealer friends that would be interested in the content and get it out there. It's a great thing. Welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, the podcast for auto dealers to learn and grow together. Here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. So tell me this, Joe. So what's your like, what is your 9 to 5? What do you do? I mean, is it. Is it the turn app? Do you have a dealership still? What do you do?

Yeah, so I still have the store G Motor Cars. We had two stores. We're down back to one. We thought we could take the success that we had at one store and apply it to another store that was about 30, 40 miles away. And it didn't work. It was in a more rural area. And we just saw all the buyers still flocking to the one main store.

Even though they would drive 30 miles away. Just under the impression that that was a better place or better deal or.

You know, I couldn't figure it out. The area we're in, like I said, was just kind of. Kind of like a dead area. I thought there used to be a Chevy store there. They went out of business after a hundred years, so I thought that there'd be a good. Still a good following going to that location. Then there was a used car store that went in over there and they went out of business. I Just wonder if some of those two stores kind of plagued us. I don't know. But, you know, so I did it. I did what the advice of a franchisee told me. He said, joe, do a lease for two years.

Yeah.

Test it out before you purchase the building.

Mm.

I was like, hour 23 ready to sign the line to purchase.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I said to the. To the building owner, I said, you know what? A little birdie told me I should probably lease this for two years, try it out. And he was. He was cool with it. And that was probably the best advice I ever got.

Cause you'd be sitting on a purchase right now trying to sublease it to someone else. Yeah. Yeah, Joe, that's seriously eye opening. I spent all last week in a City about 30 miles to the north of me looking at property because we get a lot of customers from that neighboring city. And so I just keep thinking, like, man, we need to have a presence there. We need to have an actual lot. And this piece of land came up. That was a good deal. And I'm like, oh, we could build it out and do this and this, and. And then I started leaning more towards a lease. Like, I should probably just lease somewhere and kind of feel it out, you know?

Yeah.

Talk.

Talk to Jody Midget about it. He'll tell you. He'll tell you. You know, he's got a. He's got an awesome operation. He expanded into a second one, and I believe that he's got it for sale or there's a sale pending on it. Steve Whitmore did the same thing. You know, it's. I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball.

There's plenty of success stories, though. I mean.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I don't. I couldn't put it together.

That's what my thoughts are. Is it better for me with this neighboring town? They're about 30 minutes away on the freeway. We get a decent amount of business from their customers. There's no buy here, pay here. They totally like. When you look at the DMV registrations, compared to the sales in the county, it's totally out of whack. But then I just keep thinking, do I need a physical presence, or do I just need a digital presence? And maybe that's a better future. Like, I don't need to be in all these small communities. I just need to have a program set up where those people can buy it online, feel confident that they can drive the 30 minutes, pick up their car and go home or vice Versa, I can deliver it to them 30 minutes away or.

Bingo.

You think that's a better. I mean, is that the way it's going anyways?

It is. And it's also less overhead for you. Better, in my opinion, better quality of life because you don't have to manage. You know, the toughest part of this business is not the consumers, it's not the financing. It's not finding cars, in my opinion, it's the employees. That's what I found. I found that managing people is more difficult than I ever anticipated. When I started this business as a one car, one person operation, I had total full control of everything that went on. I had control of what was said to a consumer or customer. My word is gold bond. My promises are my promises. Now I have to honor everybody else's promises that they don't even follow through. I've had to deal with theft at the other store because I was at one store, not the other one. So there's ones who are cut out for it. I may not be cut out for that. I often ask myself how Ray Kroc did it. How does McDonald's. Obviously that movie is, Is incredible, but it is if you're going to open another operation. Can you see me? Can you hear me okay?

Yeah. You got some crappy Internet there, Joe.

All right. Is it better now?

Well, it's just your Internet freezes every once in a while.

Okay. Get somebody involved and have them put some skin in the game, some of their own money, and then they'll, they'll truly treat the place like it's their own. And that's probably why success of McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts and 711 is, you know, these guys have their own money in it.

Well, it can be done. And I think what I have seen where. I've seen failures where. And I'm not, I'm not putting this on you, Joe, because I wanted to, I wanted to open up another location as well. And Alexa, who is my sounding board on most of these things, she's the voice of reason a lot of time, you know, as entrepreneurs and as car dealers, we think we can do anything. And if you're not maximizing the location you have currently, and if you don't have the processes, procedures and people in place at your current location, there's no way you can duplicate it. And until you have enough employees where you have a management team, you have layers, it's never going to work. Having a new location and the people I've seen do it that are Successful at it. Steve Matthews has three locations, and I don't think he had his second, definitely his third location, until he had over 50 employees. 50, 60 employees. Because at that point, you have levels of who deals with what, and your processes and procedures are already in place. And then we go to Freeman Motor Company. You got Marshall and Eric, who, in my opinion, are two of the best minds when it comes to the independent space that, you know, they had, I think, almost 80 employees before they even ventured into the second location, and their second location hadn't been open that long. But it's without. Without those layers and without everything run properly, it just doesn't work because I can't do it all. Joe Mott can't do it all, and Jeff Watson can't do it all. Especially when you spread it out over 30 miles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's true. And I go back to that a lot, man. I'm like, we're not maximizing where we're at now.

That was. That was Alexa's number one thing. When she brought up to me because I wanted to go to a place, it's about 40 minutes away, I thought there was some real advantages to being over there. And she asked me one day, she said, what should the current dealership do? I said, it should do 40 to 50 units a month. And she goes, well, how many are we doing? And I said, well, 30. She goes, what are we talking about? Why are we even approaching that subject?

Right, I got you. That was smart.

Okay, well, good side, Good side conversation. But probably split that off for another episode sometime.

Yeah, second locations. But besides, the store Turner still is coming around. Actually, today we launched the desktop app, which I was just on before we logged on here, and it was pretty, pretty slick.

How many cards are you selling a month on there? Or how many cars being sold a month?

I don't have the exact numbers on it. It's not real high because we kind of toned back on the advertising and pushing it out until the desktop version was available. We thought that the app version would be the way to go, but we found that the users were finding it difficult to do their research and navigate through it. We found that the desktop is better for. For managers and whoever's buying the cars because they're sitting at a computer during the day, and what they'll do is they'll research it, they'll watch, list it, and then when it runs, then they'll go on their app and purchase it there. So we really scaled back. I'm kind of pushing out. I Haven't done. I haven't really advertised or talked about it. We were going to launch at NIADA or Orlando in Vegas. We did scale that back. We're probably gonna schedule a launch somewhere in Chicago for the fall session.

Nabd.

Nabd.

Hey, Joe, you know, we're talking about your. Your auction app, Turn, and I. Let's have you. You know, your. Your background is money managing. Right. Or Wall street type of background. And in this space that you've got into is, in my opinion, kind of crowded almost what makes Turn better? And why did you decide to get into that space when I believe it's getting kind of crowdy and you got some really big hitters in that place. Cox is there, this is there. And ACV would just be, you know, just be a couple of them.

Yeah. You know, I got into it really to begin with when I felt that the. That ACV and Trade Rev was kind of shunning out the independent dealers. I thought there should be a platform for the independent dealers to have a level playing field along with the franchisees of selling their inventory and mostly selling the inventory. But what this kind of grew, it kind of turned into was while the independent auctions, which there's over a hundred of them in the country, we're looking for a platform to put their inventory on to compete with a Trade Rev. To compete with a acv. Compete with an ove. OVE is not really like an ACV or a Trade Rev, in my opinion. It's kind of.

Manheim Express is going to be their. Their deal there.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. But it still doesn't incorporate the independent auctions, which. Which our meeting or our podcast is to talk about inventory sourcing and acquiring vehicles. And you have to have a bunch of different avenues in order to acquire the inventory. Don't just look at a Trade rev. Just don't look at it. Acv. Don't just look at a Turn. Don't just look at a Manhunt Express. You got to look at them, you got to search through them all. You got to find that diamond in the rough and don't be limited to just one spot. So, yes, that field is crowded, but there we do feel that there's an opportunity within the independent auction world.

To.

Showcase some of their inventory. Just like Mannheim and Odessa and Traderev.

Very good. Speaking of, since you brought it up, inventory sourcing, so you sell what, 60 to 80 cars a month? Something like that?

Yeah, that's pretty good.

So if we're not that big and we're having to source 30 cars a month, maybe 40 cars a month. You know, what's the difference between the people sourcing those cars and then sourcing double? And how you know, where all do you buy? You don't have to give us all your secrets, but you know, how far out do you buy? You use different buyers to do that. How are you getting it done? Well.

Secrets. No secrets here.

Yeah, we've seen you on Facebook.

Yeah, we don't, we definitely, like I said, we definitely don't limit it to one platform. We don't limit it to Odessa Manheim, America's auto auctions or any of the independent auctions. We really scour the portals nightly. I have a, I have a guy named Mike who works for me. He's a buyer and he's, he's a computer geek and I mean he's on at night looking all over the place for inventory. And you ask distance, Distance doesn't matter. Me can go from California to South Carolina, down to Florida, up to Connecticut. Washington state's about the only state we don't buy out of. We buy out of Texas, we don't buy out of New Mexico, we don't buy out of South Dakota or North Dakota because trucks don't run through there. There's not a lot of trucks going through there. So we buy from areas where transportation is readily easy and we know it's pretty simple to get back and forth. We do have a buyer in Florida. We have one in Orlando, one in Tampa, one in Miami and. Oh, and one in Nashville. And what I found is some, some actually some customers of ours who've retired and moved and say There was a CarMax auction in this, in the city that they're moving to or the state. I'll fly down there. And they're completely, they've never been in the car business. As a matter of fact, the guy in Nashville is an ex cop or retired cop. Not ex cop, retired cop. And I went down there and I spent the day with him, showing him the things that I care about on a vehicle. I'll give him the numbers, we'll give him the numbers of what we want to spend on the vehicle. I just need him to be the eyes, the ears in the bidding obviously for CarMax because they don't have simulated. And you know, we pay him 200 bucks a car and he's retired. That's side money and he loves it and it affords us to get some inventory, non salt inventory out of an area that may not be tapped into yet. You Know, Nashville's. Nashville is a good market, but it's maybe not the Chicago market or a Miami market. So. And you know, there's other markets that we haven't tapped into. I just, like I said, I was just in Tampa. An old and retired FedEx driver, truck driver, lives in that area. So I took him to the Tampa CarMax, signed him up and showed him some, you know, same thing, went through the dog and pony show or, you know, and he's, he's all ready to buy cars for us. So that's one way, the other. The other. What was that?

No, I was just saying. So, doctor, step on it. But real quick. When you're talking about buyers and having buyers in different places or just having a buyer in your own place help us smaller guys, how do we know when we're at the point where we need to have a full time buyer, whether that's ourself and we're gonna free ourselves from the dealership to go buy, and that's our passion, or whether we don't have a passion for going to the auction, but we need to get a full time buyer. When does it make sense?

Well, you know, I want to say after 20 or 30 cars of retail, I decided that I have a buyer. I hired a buyer that I auctioned the physical auctions. And I always. Oh, shoot. Can you guys hear me? Why is this Internet unstable.

For a second?

Okay, so there was a guy who I always saw working for franchise stores. And I was watching, he always had a piece of paper and he had meticulous notes. And I just went up to him and said, hey, how's it going? I'm Joe. What are you doing? And I kind of interviewed him on the spot there. Well, it turned out that the stores that he was working at changed ownership and he was looking for a job. So, you know, our friendship kind of took off from there. And he's done a pretty good job for us. But nowadays, being a buyer doesn't mean actually going to physical auctions. I actually find it to be a big waste to go to a physical auction. I require him to kind of. He does go. He still goes to physical auctions, but not as often. I kind of want him in. In the office, kind of like the war room, we call it, so we can all talk about the purchases that we're gonna make. But that gives him the ability to purchase from, you know, five, six, seven different platforms. And it gives us an opportunity for sales manager, me and Mike, the buyer, to talk about, hey, would this be A good car for us. And we all kind of put our opinions in and say, hey, you know, you know, forget it. That's got too. Too many miles, or it's got too many issues that we're gonna have to recon on it. But it's all. I also find it's a waste of time nowadays going to the physical auction. So you go to your average physical auctions, about a thousand cars. You may. You may like, I don't know, 20% of them. That's 200 cars. Out of the 2200 cars. You're really gonna. You're really gonna drill it down to cars. Out of those 10 cars that you have them are like. Or auto checks. And then you're only gonna have the ability to buy two of them because the rest of them either outbid or they wanted too much money. So you just wasted maybe five, six hours of hours trying to buy two gifts. So that's why we don't really do a lot of the physical auction thing, except for the camaraderie. Go there and to stay. Keep a face out there. But the other thing requiring vehicles is if you're not involved with your chamber of commerce, if you're not involved in some kind of groups besides the car group. Okay. Instead of car groups, business. Small business companies. And you guys know what I'm talking about. Like latip. You ever heard of those?

Yeah.

Okay. Going to those and making connections with them. And, you know, we had it. We had a heating and air company that called me up and said they had 13 vehicles that they needed to sell. Perfect. We went over there, we appraised them all. I gave him a spreadsheet of what I would be able to. What a pristine one would retail for. I put what it would go for at the auction. I put how much reconditioning per car, and I put in the last one. What I'm willing to pay for the vehicle. So what I did was I wanted to be completely transparent with him and say, hey, this car, Christine, is probably a $15,000 car. However, the top of the roof looks like Godzilla walked on it. So it's. You know, it would cost me 3,000 to fix this. I'm willing to buy this car for $8,000. It would probably do nine grand at the auction, but I'll buy for eight. And we bought them all. And we've been flipping them like crazy.

That's a good lead. And actually, on that subject, we know you do a lot of commercial vehicles. Let's talk a little bit about how you got into the commercial vehicle side and also what do you find that works well in your market? Because every market's different. And you know, how do you, how do you source? I hear this, you sourced them this way for this particular thing. But what else are you doing?

Well, what do you want, you want to talk about how, why are we successful in commercial vehicles or how do we acquire them?

I think successful in the commercial vehicle would be a good thing to talk about.

Well, I do believe location, location, location is a reason why we do well with them. We are in Chicagoland area. We are in a. I don't feel it's a well educated state city and I don't mean any disrespect to that, but there's a lot of laborers, there's a lot of, you know, may not be able to work for somebody, but they're, they're a painter or they're a drywaller or they're a plumber or they're whatever. So we have a lot of self employed individuals in the city over here. So that's a big plus is having, you know, if you in a city or state that really doesn't have really much tradesmen, then what's a cargo van for? We have a lot of companies out here. We buy the airport, we do a lot, we're at the airport. We do a lot with o'. Hare. You know, there's a lot of factories here in Chicagoland, Illinois area. A lot of heating and air companies, a lot of population. So there's a lot of tradesmen out here. So I'm fortunate enough to have those fields really in my backyard and not too far. The one advice that I would give to any dealer is don't be afraid to try something out of your realm. Try something different. Okay. Cargo vans are commercial vehicles. Guess what? If you see a street sweeper, maybe try it, you know. And the reason why I bring that up is last night I'm sitting on the couch and I'm looking through. I can't remember where I was looking. I think it was one of those government agencies that sells their merchant their vehicles when they're done. And they had a street sweeper. And I sent a message to Mike, 11:30 at night, and I said, send him the link. And I said, hey, take a look at these street sweepers. They got low miles. They seem to be reasonable. Let's give it a shot. You never know, you know, Boom trucks are pretty, pretty popular. You guys familiar with those? Those are for the lights and electricians. I Didn't realize how popular those were. We don't have any, any in stock. I can't find them. You have to be careful with them though, because some of them are rusty. The boom has to get tested, so you have to make sure you know what you're doing on them. But don't be afraid to step out of your wheelhouse and try something different. Look at Dan Real with the, with the school buses. I don't know if you saw that on the independent dealer. That was pretty impressive. He found a niche or a market maybe for little school buses, for short buses.

Well, in the short bus.

So, you know, he's very familiar with them.

I don't want to go there. Yeah, but, you know, so don't be afraid to do that. But the other thing is if you acquire this inventory, you have to have a way to get out of it.

Yeah.

And financing is a problem.

Right.

A lot of banks will not touch commercial trucks. They won't even touch a Chevy Express. They won't even touch a Chevy Express even if it has passenger seats in it. And it's called an lt. So, you know, that's one of. I'm happy to have that. We have a source that we can use to sell, you know, finance this product.

You're just leading me down the path because one of the, one of the notes I had down was to talk to you about your relationship with major lenders. I know you work with Ally and I think you work with Cap One, right?

Yeah. Yep.

Talk about how you got those relationships and what they mean to your business. You were going into that now with the Ally, I assume, in the commercial vehicles.

Yeah, yeah. Ally is a strong, strong, strong bank for commercial vehicles. But how did we acquire those? You know, we acquired those back. We're having our 10 year anniversary this year. I want to say we acquired those about eight years ago. We were rather small, maybe 20, 30 cars in stock, selling 15 to 18 cars a month kind of in a small little warehouse before we moved into our current location. And I think it was just being at the right place at the right time and also knowing the right people. I worked for Chevrolet, Chevy Store for five years prior to that. And I always knew my Ally, or at that time was GMAC rep there. And she was still at the company even through the changes of 07 and 08. And at that time I was able to get in. We also had chase Come in, J.P. morgan Chase. I don't know if you guys have that out there. So we were fortunate enough, early enough to have Ally, to have Chase Cap One came on maybe three years ago, but we built a relationship with Ally. And one of the things that I was always conscious about was my book of business. I always want to watch my book of business. And what I mean is, how does it perform? I don't want to send Ally a bunch of paper that's going to default. Okay, if, you know, if I felt that there's something a little iffy. We didn't run it through Ally. We didn't run it at all. We made them get their own financing. As a dealer, one of the things is a new dealer, we're all. We all want to get funded. We all want to get that approval. We want to get our money. Okay. I mean, that's just our nature. But you also have to protect the interest of the people who are going to help you succeed. And the one thing with Ally you can ask. I contact my underwriter every once in a while. Hey, how am I performing? We'll spend 30 minutes of going what my repo rates are, what my delinquency is. And we're always at or below what the national level is. So, you know, and the other thing is, if there is a repo and they need paperwork, you cooperate with them. If there's a buyback situation, you buy the car back. You don't sit and argue with it. You don't ignore letters. You buy the car back, be done with it. You want to stay off the radar.

That's interesting, Joe. I had never in, you know, everybody knows what we're talking about now that Jeff and I are buy here, pay here stores, and we, we don't, you know, we try our best when we underwrite a loan to make sure that that loan is going to succeed. And I think it's. What you're talking about here is very interesting to me. I never even thought about the prime side of it or the outside financing side of it that you really still need to verify, you know, the customer that you're selling to and that relationship and make sure you're not getting cars repoed. That's really interesting.

I hadn't thought about that.

Dead air is not good.

You know, the best advice I can give is the dealer and your customer, your consumer, your client. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we got you.

It's got to be a marriage. It's got to work together. And a happy marriage is a successful marriage. And that's how it's gotta be looked at with your customers, with your banks, with your vendors, you know, there's trust factors in there. It's not a secret. I think I have probably one of the best relationships with Ally. We go out to dinner a lot. We communicate a lot. We communicate with the underwriters. So if there's a stretch call, they'll take my word for it because they know I'm not going to stick it to them. And you know, so there's a lot. Like I said, it's a marriage. You got to trust each other. There has been, there's been plenty of times. And you can ask my, our underwriter where I have to call an app in because consumers in front of me, I can't flat out tell them, hey, you're not going to get approved. And the underwriter will call me and say, hey, I'm on the fence with this. What's your thoughts? And I will flat out say decline it or, you know, really think about it. And they'll hear it in my voice because the customer's in front of me. And I'll do some secretive talk of, you know, hey, I wouldn't do this one.

Yeah, that kind of thing's going to build trust with the underwriter that you're not always just trying to kill it vehicle or push that stuff through.

Yeah. Or just. I'm not trying to push it through. The other thing is people with too much debt coming in to look at a, you know, 15, 16 escalade and they're, you know, I mean, I may make money on it, but what good is making money on it if I know I'm going to tank this customer who's not really that smart, you know what I mean? To realize that they can't afford that car.

There's, there's so many, yeah. There's so many dealers that won't do that. And that's, and that's part of our job as the car industry is to make sure that, that we put the customers in the cars that they can afford and not necessarily the cars that they want. Even if you're buyer pay or if you're prime, if whatever, you make sure customer knows what they're getting into.

Yeah, yeah. And I've seen that several times where people have left me, they've gone down the street to the Chevrolet store and they get a $450 payment on a Chevy Cruze based, come back to me a year later and want to trade out of it because they can't handle the payment. And GM financial did buy them because GM financial buys everybody and they're buried. And there's nothing I can do. And I flat out, and I'm thinking of somebody as we're talking about this, I flat out said, should have listened to me. Should have listened to me.

Happens all the time.

Now you're, now eventually you're gonna have a repo on your record and they're gonna come after you for a bunch of money and whatever the case is and your life's miserable. So, you know, you need to. One of the things is you need to set people up to succeed, don't set them up to fail. And that's, you know, sale. Here's the difference between the franchisees and the independents, okay? The independents are in it for the long run, alright? We're there. We want to see our customers grow. I love the fact that, Luke, you put on your Facebook page when someone holds a title, the happiness in their face, you help them succeed.

That's right.

Not only did they pay off a car, but you gave them an accomplishment in life that they may never had before. So you definitely helped them out. But we need as dealers, independent dealers, we want to see our customers succeed. Salesmen at big franchise stores. They're there one month, they're in another Chevy store, one month, they're in another store one month, they don't care. They don't know what a book of business is. Yep. So sorry. I think that, I think we got off the point of sourcing and stuff like that.

I think we hit all the points, didn't we, Jeff?

No, I think that's great. I mean, that's part of it, right? I mean, you got to source the right vehicles, but you also gotta source the right customers, you know, and it's the marriage between the two that makes the most sense. Sure, I could sell a ton of buy here, pay here eye candy, but I know that that's not gonna run the note. I know they're not gonna be happy with it even if they do get it paid off. Because my tracker's record shown it's either too much car, too much payment, or it's a crappy car that's gonna give them issues every other month. And they're gonna hate the car, they're gonna hate me. So I think these all go hand in hand. When you talk about inventory sourcing, getting the right cars for your customer, for sure.

Back to the inventory sourcing. So connect with your chamber of commerce, connect with some business, local groups that get involved with them. The other, connect with your local Hertz or Enterprise rep. I don't know why Hertz Or Enterprise does not get more involved with the independent world, with the independent dealers or the niada. And I've mentioned it to them several times, hey, you should really be a partner. But they're kind of like, they're not really relevant in the indie side. Hertz has vehicles that they have to sell all the time. Enterprise has lease turn inside, you know, but you can also purchase their off rental vehicles. Here's an interesting story, I don't know, secret story, whatever it is, But Enterprise, if you connect with your Enterprise rep, okay, they send cars to the auction, everybody knows that. But they're on a strict turn. Also, they need to turn their vehicles once they come off rental within 30 to 60 days. Most vehicles have to go. And one of the things that you can do is you can negotiate with them. You could buy that vehicle cheaper off their lot than you could at a Mannheim or Odessa. And you know why? Because they don't want to skew the mmr. So a Suburban that goes through the sale and it does maybe 30,000 consistently with 20,000 miles is 30,000. They'll never sell to you at the sale for 28 grand because it's going to skew the numbers. But if you buy it, off the record, they'll sell to you for $28,000.

Interesting.

Because it hurts their residual or it hurts the market if they do the other way.

They're smart and I kind of appreciate them for that, you know, but that's, you know, those are some other ways that you can acquire vehicles. I'm not one to go on Facebook and Craigslist and offer up and start flinging offers to people. It's just, it's a waste of time.

And whatever your level, that doesn't scale, that doesn't scale at all. The one offs, the here, the moment pops.

I'm looking for the more reputable. Yeah, I'm looking for. Right. I'm looking for the more reputable, more relationship building stuff and just feed me the cars.

Yeah. My question for you, Joe, is does this scale at any acv? Because what I get nervous about and traditionally when I was buying cars for my dealership, I physically had to sit in every single one of them, you know, and I would have my Mannheim and my Odessa list and I'd have 50. And then I'd go down the night before and I'd preview them all and narrow it down to 10. And then, you know, because I had to physically be in them because they were such cheap ACVs, they were all red light, they were all this so how did. Is it possible for dealers like me to convert this to online and trust either the Mannheim market report or the rating or the. I mean, my stomach turns thinking I'm Gonna buy a 3000 ACV on, you know, simulcast.

Right?

It shouldn't.

What's that?

It shouldn't. Jeff, you're too worried, buddy. Shouldn't. That shouldn't be the case.

But like I'm saying, I mean, I would have a short list of 50 cars and I would narrow it down to maybe 10 that were decent, maybe 10 that were anywhere decent. So if I got a 1 out of 5 chance of getting a decent car, that means 4 out of 5 are gonna be total turds. And if I'm just buying them online, do I win in that situation?

That's what condition reports are for.

Right. But you know, there's also common sense in this whole thing. Okay, don't be buying 150,000 mile Hyundai Sonatas. But if it's a Toyota Camry or a Corolla, you know, feel more confident. I would say, Jeff, you need to. Well, there is some safe. And I have to check the NAA rule on a as is vehicle. If it has a bad engine or trans and you buy it online and it arrives to you, can you still arb out of it even if it's red light? Okay, if it was a green light though and you didn't psi it and then it comes through. Okay, yep. But you know, there's a new dealer in Illinois that I was training on Monday and he went to Mannheim arena on Tuesday and he bought a Hyundai Sonata, I think it was a 13 Hybrid with 130,000 miles. He bought it, red light and trans is gone. And he calls me from the auction and says, do I have to pay for this vehicle, honestly? And I said, yeah, you have to pay for the vehicle. And he goes, can I get out of it? I said, you can't get out of it because it's red light. And that's it.

I should have said, what are you doing about 130,000 mile Hyundai Hybrid is.

What you should have said, right? Exactly. So I said, well, I'm going to give you a little advice here. I said, well, how's the vehicle history report the auto check the carfax. It's got an accident. I go, go arbitrate it for frame. They'll find it on a unibody car. I don't know what happened from there. But you know, you have to know what you're purchasing in those cars, Jeff. I wouldn't be buying Volkswagen Passats and Jettas with 150,000 miles for two $3,000 red light. But I don't have a problem buying a Tacoma or.

I don't know what he's saying, but.

He'S talking about junk cars. You know, you know, if you buy, if you buy. What he's trying to get across is know, know what you are buying. And if there's no reason to buy.

A car that has even Chevy's man GM product, we need it.

Everyone needs to go buy more cars from Joe so that he can upgrade his Internet from dial up that he currently has to something closer to a fiber situation that's just stream. From being the Facebook guy, I'm surprised his Internet's not better. Who knows?

Maybe, maybe, maybe it's time to wrap this one up.

Jeff, how does he even. Oh, he just lost.

He's gone. All right.

Sa.