#188 - Meet The New President Of NIADA Joe McCloskey

Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Today, Luke, we have a special treat. The new president of NIADA, Joe McCloskey.

What an amazing interview. Just make sure you have somewhere to write down notes because it's just full of just wisdom, wisdom, wisdom.

50 years in the business, right?

Oh, well, yeah, he's been in the car business for 50 years. I think the location, about 31, 32 years. But I mean, run it like you're going to sell it, which was just. I just like, wow, that is. Okay, that makes sense, right?

Yeah.

You know, one thing before we get into this, Jeff, he is a legend. I want to talk just really quick about another legend that passed away. Dave Keller, who's a mentor to me, taught me so much about the car business, the financials of the car business, taught me how to do QuickBooks, passed away after a long bite bout with COVID and pneumonia. He has helped so many independent dealers become great. And I don't say that lightly. I wouldn't be half the car dealer I am without him. And he will be greatly missed in our industry. And it's just very sad that he left us a little too early.

Yeah, absolutely. On a brighter note, this episode is awesome. Lot of great stuff from Joe's life, his vision for NIADA going forward.

So.

So tune in and hope you enjoy.

Welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson, A podcast by Dealers for Dealers. Here we go.

Well, thank you, Jeff. It's an honor to be here. Luke, it's great to see you. Thank you for inviting me to be on the podcast. Really appreciate it. I know you have quite the reach with your podcast and it's an honor to be here. Well, my name is Joe McCloskey. I own McCloskey Motors in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We've been in business as an independent dealer for 32 years. I've actually been in the car business for over 50 years. I started out sweeping garage floors and then got promoted to being a lot boy lot Porter, and then actually started selling cars at age 17 in high school. I was being a junior in high school and it was then that I knew that this is exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my career because I was actually making more money being working part time as a junior in high school than my teachers were in high school.

Wow. Did you start in Colorado Springs? Have you always been there?

Well, that's a good question. I actually started in Pueblo, Colorado, and my dad was a schoolteacher. That's why I know that I made more money than he, which didn't go over that well, but. Yes, but I knew that this is what I would do and always had a passion for cars. And that happened to be at a Volkswagen Mercedes Benz dealership. And then once I graduated, moved to Denver, sold cars up there, got a whole different perspective of the automotive business. Moved from a small town to much larger town, and then went off and moved back down to Colorado Springs. Once worked for a new car dealer, became his general manager and said a Volkswagen Mazda store. Then for four years worked at a Ford store. I have what I call a got quit at both locations because I happen to be humbly very progressive, moving sales along and to the existing senior vice president or whatever. They knew that I was the next contender. So we both agreed that it was better for me to move on. So then in 1989, Anna and I both agreed we'd try and open up our own business. So I found this fantastic location that was in this garage in an alley. And it was a real sketchy place and an industrial area. And so we pulled up in the front. Now open up now. We had four kids at that time and not much money. I had $40,000 and two credit cards. And so we walked into the. Opened out the garage door. It's a single car, garage door. Flung it open, and there's just one light bulb hanging on the street. And it was dark and gloomy inside. And I told my wife that this is it. This is our dream. This is the future McCloskey Motors. And thank God. I don't know what she why or what she did, but she said, okay, well, let's do it. And so we'd have kids in a playpen, and we'd start, you know, I'd be buying the cars and fixing them, and she'd be cleaning them, and then we'd start selling the cars. And so there's a little bit of a story with that, because when I called the phone company back then, this is in 89, and the phone company, when I called and asked for a phone line, because that's all your primary communication was a hard line at that point. And they said, well, they couldn't get a phone because I couldn't get a phone because the phone trunk line was full. And like, well, what do you mean by that? And they said, well, you can't get a phone. So back then, they hadn't even invented cell phones yet. And the cell phones were. They were big, but they're like giant Suitcases. But they had invented a pager. And the cool thing about it is they hadn't at that point either invented caller id. So this was a new thing. And people plug in their phone number. They had a new invention called a touch tone phone. Got them really antiquated. Myself touched on phone, and they would call up the phone number, punch in their phone number. And now I found I could capture phone number, keep calling them back and following up, which to me was revolutionary. But I grabbed their phone number with a fistful of quarters, run across the street to shopping center. And that shopping center pay phone and roll quarters became my business phone.

Well, Joe, that. That's. That is so interesting. So, you know, everybody's trying to go back to that. That garage type setup where you. You're off the beaten path and you. And you have just a. Just a warehouse. But Joe was at the. At the front of that. That's so funny.

Yeah, it actually worked out pretty well. And then we moved to a safer area of town, and then we. It's again, it's just my wife, myself, and we did hire one additional salesperson, but my wife still holds the record of selling the most number of cars in one day.

How many was that?

17 cars. What?

No way.

I did 11. I did 11 one day.

That's awesome.

I did.

Wow.

Yeah, And I was busy. I kept trying to help her, but we didn't have computers, so I was him doing all the paperwork. Not near the farms that we have now, but yeah. So that's how we got started.

Well, that's. That's so interesting. And when y' all moved, did you move to the current location you're at now or.

Or one of. One of our locations? Yes.

Okay.

North. North Academy.

And let's. Let's tell the audience what type of dealership you are. You're a prime dealership, little subprime. What exactly do you. What's your business core?

Jay? Our business is very eclectic, just like my personality. And, and that is. Is that we do financing for all walks of life. We do certainly retail. We do near prime, non prime, subprime, deep subprime. And we used to do buy here, pay here. And we were. We did buy here, pay here for about 10 years. We end up about 2,500 accounts. And so I have a lot of experience in that. During the recession, we decided to start collecting out our portfolio to build up the cash for the rest of our business, which is one of the great benefits of buy here, pay here. Even when times are tough, you have that asset of the cash coming in. And then we switched over to cac and it just seemed to be a little bit better business model for us at that point in our, in our career.

And how many cars are y' all selling total at both locations a month, Joe?

We sell an average of about anywhere from 140 to 160 per month. Wow. And our price range runs. We do have one location that's called McCloskey Trucktown or Spain in Colorado Springs. That's a big area of the market. And that sells usually about 80 to 100 big trucks, trucks, vans, SUVs a month. And then a mile up the road from that, we have an important four by four facility. Then we also have. We're pretty big in fixed operations. We have 28 service bays. Wow.

How can you find enough technicians for those 28 service bays, Joe? That's what everybody wants to know.

Well, that's a really good question, Luke. And what we do is we really try and we're migrating to a model much like you would see with your primary care physician in that we're trying to see who else can be doing the things, the operative things that the primary care physician used to do but no longer does so that they're in a high efficiency level. So in other words, the cars need to be pre staged and they could be by somebody else who's pulling the parts so that the parts. The technician's not sitting at parts counter waiting for the parts guy to get off the phone, who's doing the quality check test drives to make sure the work's being done. Doesn't have to be the mechanic who's pulling the car in for the mechanic and then getting that on a. On the rack and lift it up. So if we could just keep our model that we're going to and are working on so that the technician, all they're doing is while they're here is they're working on vehicles. They don't have to be doing all the other unnecessary things. And we're finding that we can operate with fewer mechanics because typically at that point, using that model with somebody loading up the car, pre staging the car for them, it usually takes two days per technician to do that.

That's a very interesting. I think, Jeff, that's probably the first time we've heard that discussed on the podcast about how to do that. Do you do that for customer pay as well or just for internal get ready type situations?

For both customer pay and internal, yeah.

And so do you have multiple A techs that Just do that. And then porters, or not porters, but lube guys bring it in. Is that kind of how that's set up, or do you still classify ABC through the ranks?

Yeah, we. We classify ABC because it's based upon the dispatching has to be based upon the skill set of the technician. Because you really will slow down a technician if they've got to look at videos and study how to do a job. We're increasing the efficiency and the productivity and the job satisfaction of dispatching the work based upon that technician skill set. So they can get it in, get it repaired, still have some challenges, you know, every once in a while, just like with us with computers, whatever. We have some glitches once while, but they're able to keep moving along. And. And that seems to work out pretty well with us. And again, it's constant work in progress.

Yeah, that sounds so interesting. So all in all, how many employees?

Right now we have about 70.

That is incredible. Wow, what a large. That just sounds like a huge headache. But to go from 1989, when it's you and your wife selling out of an old storage shed to where you are now, I mean, that's a life of lessons and education and experiences. What would you say in that journey, does anything really stick out to you as like, large turning points or kind of large light bulb moments that you think other dealers could learn from? Was there something where you said, okay, you know, once I stopped thinking that I had to do it all, or once I got to this better location, or once I got a flooring line, or once I got a line of credit, like anything that really sticks out to you?

Well, that's a really good question, Jeff. There's a lot, you know, I try not to lead my life or live my life with regrets, but I'm not sure they're. Regrets are more of learning lessons. Yeah, number one would be, you know, I've always had a burden of boats mentality. And we can all appreciate this, being an independent dealer. So back. What I mean by that is there's no retreat. Back in the old days when they would be conquering a new land, country's armies or navies would land on a new island or new continent or whatever. And then as all the soldiers were departing all the boats, the navy captains would go along and burn all the boats, set them all in fire. So there's no retreat. And I think every one of us can really appreciate that. The thing that some of the tidbits I would have is, number one, is there's no one. Sometimes I got into the mode where I was always reaching for that next expert, somebody that would be the saving grace for our business. Somebody with that would be the one that. The new shiny, flashy trainer business model or whatever. And that probably cost us a lot of time and mileage. What I discovered was, and it's usually at the epitome of some type of stressful time where we're having difficult times, economically or otherwise. And it all boiled down to the guy in the mirror that was looking at it. And so rather than trying to hire a trainer, and this is no disrespect to trainers because there's great ones out there, but if I wanted my people trained, it needed to be me that was going to train them. If I wanted my people to be doing business a certain way, I needed to show them how to do that. So that was very. Was very important. Two is, one of the keys is, and I think we're in that mode right now where times are good, frankly, as far as the car business is concerned, and it's been difficult for a lot of people, but the gross profits are up. We certainly have challenges and we always will have challenges in the inventory acquisition or whatever, but times. Times are actually pretty good. And I had a person tell me one time, he's, you've heard of the term drive it like you stole it, right? Well, it's run it his way. Told me was run it like you're going to sell it and it's a whole thing. So if you're going to sell your business, you're going to make sure that your expenses are down. You're going to make sure that if you're going to sell your business, your people are trained, you're going to make sure that your facility is clean and updated. Just like if we're going to sell piece of real estate or our own home, there are things that you, you know and what you're what. And often we're pretending not to know what needs to be done. And if we do that, and particularly these times, that would be my advice. And that's something we're doing now is we're going. We're having a practice drill right now. And it's actually when we're saying practice, because I don't want to get people freaked out thinking I think business is bad. It's not. But it's a drill to go back through all of our financials and say, okay, the economy's. Here's the scenario. The economy's slowing down. Times are tough businesses. Business is slowing up. What do we do to get this to keep our business running profitably and efficiently? Because when business gets good, like right now, especially coming out of the COVID our salespeople weren't maybe as aggressive on follow up and intense on getting customer referrals. And those are the things that we need to be doing now while times are good to even catapult ourselves up to new heights of success.

Yeah, it's so interesting when you say that run it like you're going to sell it. It makes me think of so many things that as dealers we talk about, you know, making sure your financials are airtight, making sure your processes and policies are all written down and documented. Like you're just going to take this little business and just hand it over to the next owner. It's got to be. And I think if you operate that way to your point, you're going to have a better running business and it's going to be less headache and a lot more speed. And we get in these times where like we don't look at expenses, we're spending $50 here and 500 there and 1,000 there and 5,000 here on these softwares and products and services that, yeah, if it hit the fan, that stuff is going to be the first stuff cut. So, so why are we, why are we tolerating it now?

Right, yeah. And we have an Elitmus test, which is do we need it? And of course everyone always says, oh yeah, we made that for $50 per car. Do we absolutely have to have it? And they'll go, oh yeah, well it. Does this function or whatever. Okay, well can we live without it? Well, I guess we could live without it. So then that's what we kept the expense.

What I found now is the fourth question would be how many of our other service providers actually provide this service and we just don't know it. And when we're. We're paying for these two separate companies, when what you didn't know is this company actually added all the features of this second company and for a small upgrade or just to turn the feature on, you can replace an entire vendor. That's. We saw that a lot at convention. A lot of these vendors are starting to step into other people's territory and you can kind of consolidate.

That's. Joe, you talk about training and all this. I know you, You've been in 20 groups since 20 groups were started. Right, Joe? And, and you, you're a big advocate for 20 groups. How did, how did that Evolve. I mean, how did your involvement in that shape your business? Because I believe it had a lot to do with it. When you talk about you training your own employees.

The. It's really interesting you bring that up because we actually headed to a 20 group trip this weekend. I've been a 20 group member for over 25 years, and I've always said that it's the single best thing to ever happen to my business. Single best decision ever made. And I made that decision when times weren't good, you know, and my wife was, who's my business partner was like, what are you doing? You're going to go where? And you're going to go join this other group. Plus, we had a bunch of kids, and she knew five kids at that time. She knew she'd be left home alone with all of them. But. But the best thing about a 20 group that I found is that it actually provides you with the board of directors. And that board of directors can help advise you. The other 19 members in the group, or how are members there are in a group can advise you, they can help guide you, they can help you hold you accountable. And that's something that we all want to do something. But after you've been to two or three meetings and they're saying, well, look, you said you're going to reduce this expense or increase your gross profit in this area. And Joe, you've been saying that for six months. And you know, very few people when you're a business owner will talk to you that way other than our spouses, but they. And they'll hold you accountable because it. We'll do more sometimes to not let those fellow 20 group members down and you'll see face in front of them than maybe sometimes we would do for our own business. Because as a business owner, you can kind of. At least me, I can kind of COVID my tracks a little bit. Right.

That's accountability. Is that. That's like the number one thing?

Right, right. And if you have a good 20 group, the key to 20 groups is I always try and bring more than what I take away. And if you have a 20 group where everyone's like that, there's a lot of content. Plus away from the 20 group meetings. I can't tell you the number of conference calls that we've had. This is way before zoom and the whole thing, but the number of conference calls we've had. But just the fact you could call somebody up and say. Or call, you know, here's what I'm faced with. You know, How. What do you think I should do? And just get some advice from somebody that's already walked that path.

Joe, so help me wrap my head around this. You've got 70 employees, 160 plus a month sales. What is your day to day operation and involvement with the dealership? Because we know, and we'll focus hopefully the rest of the podcast on, you know, your new roles in the association. But what is your day to day role in the dealership? It sounds like you're still very much involved.

I am. We have transitioned the company to my son Tom. And Tom was literally born and raised in the company. He started out vacuuming cars at 10 cents a car, so. And then. Which he reminds me of all the time. Yeah, yeah. And. But he's taken over, you know, attended all the 20 groups, been through all the training, and we knew that there was a possibility about three years ago that I might ascend to the presidency. So we really start transitioning the company to do that. You asked earlier if I would do something differently. I probably should have done that earlier instead of being so hands on, because up until about nine months ago, I was buying the majority of the cars. And if I would have maybe stepped away from that more, I could have probably worked on our overall operations better. But now we're at the point where he's handling a lot of day to day operations. And Luke, I think you attest it's important that I stay out of their way, but certainly all I do is I call signals back to my son or the key managers and let them do their job.

So how many key managers do you have, Jeff, if your son's, let's say the. The CEO or COO at the moment, how many other managers do you have there?

We have five in executive management. So I have a cfo, a parts and service director, two store managers, and my son.

Okay, so let's start with. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but your community involvement's been amazing. You've won National Quality Dealer of the Year. You've won multiple national Better Business Bureau awards. Can you just briefly hit on how important that is your business and to your life? And we'll move on from there, but I think it's so important to build that base before we talk about you being president of iada.

Well, certainly they were the honor. The key thing with receiving any type of award, whether it be a local or national, national award, is I've always believed that it's. It's not me that's getting the Award, and it is our team, and sometimes it's even our community. So when we won the 2013, which seems like yesterday, but it was a 2013 National Quality Dealer of the Year award, we. It was absolutely overwhelming and incredible. And I called and talked to some of the previous National Quality Dealer of the Year recipients, and Mike, who won it the year before me, said, look, he said, here's the thing. Let me give you some advice. He said, you're really going to have to step up your game, he said, because now people expect that higher level of service. They demand the fact that you're. If you're in the National Quality Dealer of the Year, they demand that you perform at a much higher level than everyone else. And he says, so you. You've got to really step up your game. And I had a meeting with our staff, and I, you know, of course, we're all walking on clouds with that. And I said, look, this. I'm being told, this is when the rubber really meets the road. And that is true. We found that the more awards that we received, the more the higher that level of expectation becomes. So they're very healthy. You can't rest on your laurels. Many of these honors never diminish with time. The National Quality Dealer year never diminishes with time. We did win the Better Business Bureau Excellence in Customer Service award. We've received that three years in a row. We're up for it again in the next 30 days or so. So basically, that award is by the Better Business Bureau. It's a national award. And we happen to be the only independent dealer in the country that ever received that award. And we received it three times. That's correct, yes. Which we're proud of. And again, I'm not bragging. I'm bragging about our team. I'll take credit for hiring them. Okay, well, actually, Tom hired him, but I. And we have an incredible team. But they. But that. That's one that is really an interesting award because they come in. Do they really scrutinize your business? They interview a lot of candidates. They put you through a process of how do you handle conflict resolution, how do you operate business, you business, or it's operating smoothly and they have. Who's doing the interviews are actually image business owners or managers, executive managers in our community. They come in and they. They do that analysis. And they also silent shop. And then based upon that, they make their decision whether or not you receive that award.

That's so impressive. I know your community's better off to have you so thanks for what you do for that community.

Well, thank you for my compliment. We appreciate it.

Hey, sorry to break into the middle of the podcast, but we have to talk about Buckeye dealership consultant, don't we, Jeff?

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I promise you he, he has a.

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Yeah. It's only one way, like we say so many times, to build generational wealth and wealth in the car business. And that's for three insurance. Cause if not, you're giving money to someone you shouldn't be giving it to, correct?

Absolutely. Keep the money in your own pocket. Back to the podcast.

So you, you just became NIADA president of the executive board and thank you for your service. How did you get involved in the association? How long, how far back does this go, Joe?

It goes back to, goes back eight years, eight and a half years. And when I received the National Quality Dealer Year Award was also there's a window. And the great thing about associations is I learned also early. Jeff. Yes. Well, what other pearls of wisdom, if you would, would you give to somebody? And that is when I was younger and more of a maverick, I would just pick up the phone and call my congressman or state senator or whatever and just give my piece of my mind. Incidentally, what happened was somehow I always end up being audited by some type of governmental agency. And so I'm like, okay, well if I just figure out, rather than poke my head up getting it lopped off, try and figure out what I could do to become part of a Greater group. So 27 years ago, I joined as a board of directors from Colorado Independent Auto Dealers, served all the chairs in that position. And so I'd already been a president, chairman of the board and now past president when we won the National Quality Dealer of the Year. And they, I at that point had Steve Jordan out, had some other people from NIADA out to our stores and I told him I would really like to get involved. And because I was really getting more and more frustrated with what was happening to our industry on the federal level and still am concerned about that, I said, tell me what can I do? How can I join, they happen fortunately to have a position available as a regional vice president in the West. And so the timing just was perfect. And that's how I got started.

That's awesome. So being the president of NIADA board, can you kind of walk us through what that looks like? Because there's probably a lot of people out there that really don't understand what all goes into to serving as president of the board.

So the NIADA board is actually. Let me back up just a little bit. NIADA Inc. National Independent Auto Dealers Incorporated as the association has a CEO which who is Bob Boatman. Great guy. And Bob Boatman, his boss is the board, the NIADA Board of Directors. And there's a total of 10 directors on the board of National Independent Auto Dealers. I am the president of that board, one of the 10. And then we have officers within that board. So we have senior vice presidents, president elects treasurer, secretaries, regional vice presidents and regional regional vice presidents. The country's divided up into four regions and they have. Their responsibility is to be the direct contact for the state executive directors as well as the members. And our job is to help run and advise the association through the portal of the CEO, Bob Voltman. So we don't get involved in the day to day operations of the NIADA Inc. We go strictly through Bob Voltman and certainly if a staff member has a question or whatever, we talk to him. There's normal discussions throughout the day. But Bob's the one that's in charge of running the association and essentially we're in charge of Bob.

So it sounds like you will be hopefully directing the future of what NIA ADA looks like the board does in general. What, what do you see the future of Niada 20 groups and all these things. How does it help the dealer and what do you see in the future that looking like?

Well, that's another good question. You guys really put a lot of thought to these questions because they're really on point. So for us, first of all, you brought up the 20 groups. The 20 groups are an absolute priority. And one of the things that we were discovering in the past 18, 24 months is there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the 20 groups by the 20 group members and the program had gotten stale. They didn't feel that they were getting a good return on their hard earned dollars, their hard earned investment. So we have entirely revamped that program, brought on three new moderators looking for a fourth right now because the groups are growing and we're getting a lot of interest and excitement in that so the NIADA 20 group program and educational program including certified Master Dealer is a priority of NIADA for me and for the, you know, people ask me, well what is it like you just did Luke? What is it that the future. What do you want to have as contribution? And my. What I am working towards and will accomplish is a couple different things. Number one, I believe in doing what we say that we'll do. You know, we unfolded the five year strategic plan at the convention. My job is not to go in and start changing things. My job is to make sure that we have a continuation of that plan and we execute on those items that are in that strategic plan. Number two is, most importantly is that I look at. My job is to unify all members and state associations. And what I mean by that is we all have, based upon our business models, different camps. We have buy here, pay here camp, we have the retail camp, we have subprime camps, we have lease here, pay here camps and we have service automotive service repair camps. What the one thing that we have in common commonality is we're all independent dealers. And if that is what we need to join together as independent dealers, that's that commonality and that's how we can all unify together to help protect our industry and advance our industry. And we can only do that through numbers because right now we're sitting a little bit below 14,000. It's really exciting because we have a lot of going dormant states who weren't that didn't have associations or maybe the association went dormant that are really beginning to breathe new life. They see the momentum that the other state associations have as well as the national independent auto dealers. And when you walk into Washington D.C. or have a zoom call these days, which actually are more effective because you have one on one time with your legislator not interrupted versus if you. We've all been to Capitol Hill, we know that there are distractions and you might be talking to a page, an assistant out in the hallway might be the closest you would get. But anyway, when we, we say we represent. Right now we represent about 14,000 independent business people. That speaks volumes. But if we can get that number up to 20,000, which is our five year strategic plan. So we represent 20,000. We have people in the legislator and the policymaker's attention.

Yeah, I agree. That's. That'd be huge.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I love, I love the plan, Joe and I think that, you know the staff's in place to do it and I know you'll have the will to make it make it happen. So for, I guess, moving forward, where do you see the car business going? You know, we've seen, you know, you've been on the cutting edge for years. Where do we see it going with this, the new virtual dealership and this. Do you see that taking over? Do you see the traditional model laying out? If we look to the future, what do you think is going to happen? What are you preparing for?

What we really learned during COVID because I think all of us experience the virtual aspect of buying and selling cars. Certainly there's always a segment of the population, buying population that will want to buy the cars online. What people we discovered really missed was that personal interaction. We. We also discovered because we were having complaints with our customers. When we call every customer that's been in the showroom, whether they bought or not, and again, we call every customer that once they have purchased, to have them rate verbally through. Our director of happy customers calls and follows them up, make sure that they are happy.

They.

And they said, well, my salesperson just seemed kind of grumpy, and I didn't really connect with the salesperson. This is right after we were allowed to go back to work, right? With everybody's in face masks and we're sanitizing the whole thing. We're like, well, what the heck is that all about? And then it dawned on us that everyone was wearing a mask and they couldn't see their facial expressions. And so we said, I called everyone together. I said, look, every customer facing employee. In fact, all employees. And I said, look, here's the thing. If we're all wearing these masks and I'm talking to a mask when I gave this thing, if we're wearing masks, then what you need to be is overly animated. You've got to be over the top, just like an actor or on a stage in Broadway. If you watch them real close, if you're up next to them, they just seem like they're exaggerating and yelling and their expressions are all really amplified. Well, but if you go back about 20 rows, it looks like they went, you know, type of thing. So we believe that going forward, that there will always be that business model, people wanting that customer, their action. And we've got to make sure that we're delivering a quality product. I think people are becoming much more conscientious of their quality product that we manage your expectations. We're in used car business. Transparency is really important. Let them know that if it has some leaks, squeaks, dings, dents, I tell my customers I, this car has leaks, squeaks, dings and dents but so do I and my wife still thinks I'm a pretty good buy. But the, you know, and we're looking at, you know, some people say and my son was a little concerned about electric vehicles coming into the market and what will that do? And I said well number one there's, that is maybe 10 to 15 years off and number two is we've got to get really good at selling electric vehicles. Yeah. I mean for gosh, gosh sakes we're independent car people, we're resilient, we're, we're persistent, we're passionate and just because there's a new model it's out. So like when we hybrid showed up. Yeah. After a while we all started selling hybrids and there were some people saying well I'm not going to do that or when you know, but the others you just adapt and overcome and make that part of your business model. So I see the lastly with and I've been really studying that it's interesting that the manufacturers as well as the franchises I think are really beginning to look at their business models. Particularly on a brand new car. Do you need to have 500 new Fords or new Chevys on the lot and pay all those inventory and carrying costs? And I think that they're beginning to look at that. There was an article that was out and I can't remember, there's two manufacturers I think was Dodge, Dodge, maybe Mercedes which are all owned by Fiat. But they said that their plan going forward is not to decrease prices, they want to keep prices up. So that was music to my ears because it's like that makes the pre owned vehicles that greater, much greater value and better buy.

We hope so. Jeff, you have anything else?

Yeah, no, no, no. Joe, so much great stuff. We really appreciate you sharing your lifetime of wisdom with us and insight. I mean there's so much more we could talk about because I know you've got so much more that you could, you could help educate us on. But if dealers want to reach out to you, how do they connect? Facebook, LinkedIn?

Well, first of all thank you for the compliment. I don't consider myself having, having the wisdom. I'm learning every day, believe me, I study every day, I watch trends and I'm truly a student of the business. So I still think, I still think I'm in the high school level because every time I think I begin to notice something it I get taught a very hard lesson. So thank you for that. If they'd like to reach me my emails joeigjoado.com that's Joe. Bigjoeauto.com look us up. That's my website. Is Joe, or excuse me, is bigjoeauto.com is the website and I am on Facebook and on part of the independent auto dealer group, so make sure you can reach me. Just look for Joe McCloskey on that.

Well, we thank you so much and we thank you for giving your time to us to other dealers around the country and hopefully we get more dealers involved by hearing this and we can go to Washington with 20,000 here soon.

Sounds great. Thank you. And thank you guys for all you do. You've done so much for the industry. Really appreciate it and all of your insight and input. And look, you really, when you and I talked at the convention, you really gave me a lot of valuable information that we're actually putting into action. So thank you for doing that.

Well, thank you, Joe.

All right, see you.

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