#250 - End Of Year Action Items & Podcast Stats

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Luke, it is almost the end of the year. We are heading right into December and we're heading into our How I Built this series.

We are, Jeff. And it's always the most wonderful time of the year, right?

Yes.

Did you like that?

The gift that keeps giving.

Yeah. And so we have some awesome guests coming up and just to kind of introduce this. Jeff. I think we kind of want to just to discuss how the podcast is doing and also kind of how we built it. Right?

Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is the How I Built these series is always our most popular. So as far as episode, you know, downloads, listens. It is. They are our top. Probably out of our top 20 episodes, I think 18 of them are how I built this. Guess what, Guess what our most popular episode is. Luke listens downloads.

I think that I know on YouTube it's with what's his name, Big time buy here, pay here, man. I just totally went blank, Jeff.

So I'll tell you, it is episode 191.

Okay.

It's. Will there be a tax season? Tax max from last year, 2021. Everyone was so concerned with, you know, all the earned income credits and everything going on. That's what people wanted to know about. They wanted to listen to Bill and find out if there was going to be a tax time last year. So.

So what I was thinking was interesting. What I was thinking was Ken Shilson is the biggest one on, on, on YouTube. I know that for a fact.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm looking at our podcast download. So that one, you know, followed by Jack Carter, Michael West, Kayla Bryant, Yordy Chuck, David Zapata. I mean those are our top episodes, guys. It looks like we really peaked at about the 190-200episode. Right, right, right there at about our 200th episode is really where we peaked as far as listenership. So if you guys haven't gone back and listened to episode you guys, you know, 190 through 200, that looks like where everyone really appreciates the stuff we had. What's our least listened to episode, Luke?

Probably our first one or two that were just.

I was really hoping, I was hoping it was episode three where you talked about your background, but it wasn't. It was actually episode 3.5, episode 25, episode 38. Some of our early episodes where we talked about convention, you know, our early Monday minutes. But you Know, those are still getting a couple hundred listens. Overall, the podcast, you know, we are at about 150,000 downloads. So thank you to everyone. That's, I guess what I'm getting at right here, Luke, is thank you to all you guys that listen, that share it with a friend, that leave a review on itunes or somewhere else and.

It put up with us for, for four years.

Yeah, yeah, it's really been fun. I don't know, I think it's probably a real recycling type audience. People tune in for a couple of episodes and then tune out and they get sick of it.

But I think, you know, you know, one of the things about How I built this series is that the reason, the reason people like it so much is because we can relate. We can, we can hear about stories where we went wrong, where stories where we went right and then listen to other people's stories about where they went wrong and where they went right. And I really think that that humanizes the business. And if you can do that, people relate and people want to, want to learn that way. And we've seen at conventions that people want to learn from each other, not necessarily from so called experts. Nice to listen to so called experts every once in a while. But some of the best experts are actually people who are doing it every day.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so, I mean, thank you to everyone that listens and thank you to the sponsors too, that back up the podcast. You know, those are the guys that stand behind the independent dealer and say, hey, you know, we're going to put our money where our mouth is and help you guys get this education out. It, it helps us, you know, spend on Facebook ads so that we can get the word out to more people. So obviously guys like Buckeye who are key sponsor of the podcast and have been for many, many months.

Yeah, years. Years at this point, I think. Yep.

Yeah, obviously great products, which is going to lead me into a hot topic that I wanted to talk to you about. And since guys, we're not going to talk to you for the next couple of weeks, we're going to run our How I Built this series all the way through the month of December. So this is the last time we have to talk about year end items. So I want to sneak some of those into this episode. Luke, I am trying to build out my CPI program better. Right. I'm really horrible at pushing it. We don't have good penetration. It's like the top 15 worst customers are on the program. How do I get more of my customers into My CPI program.

Well, you know what's great about Buckeye as well, they have great training, Jeff. And so it's a training process, and I'm not very good at it either. We just kind of started our CPI process maybe six months ago, but the growth I've seen in that six months, it really lets me know how much CPI I've left on the table. So, as I preach, with every product you're selling a customer, you sell 100% of the product, 100% of the time, no questions asked. If someone doesn't take it up front and they drop their coverage, you have to add it right then. And if you just do that and you continually do it and mine it, and maybe you even have to hire someone, depending on how many accounts you have, to just work insurance, we have that. But that is how you build that portfolio. And CPI is such an important product. And, and this is not a sales pitch. CPI is an important product to your portfolio. If you don't have it. If you don't have it, number one, you're leaving a bunch of money on the table. Number two, you're not protecting your portfolio as you should be protecting it, because what will happen is someone loses insurance and you go and repossess that car. Well, you just taken. You just take an account off the books. Why not add cpi, collect that money?

Yeah.

What I like a beast.

I like that. It's not. It's not just a product that I have to finance. Right. So if I sell Gap or I sell a 33 or I sell some other reinsurance product, it's something that. All I'm doing is tacking that onto the loan. Who knows if I'm going to collect it. CPI is actually additional payment. Additional money that would have gone to Geico or Progressive or somebody else, right?

Yep.

So that's the big difference for me is this is an additional revenue source. It's not just an additional accounts receivable amount that. Who knows if I'll ever actually realize it. This is a monthly income stream that can be big. I mean, if you're doing like I'm $90 a month, which I think is fairly cheap.

That's very cheap. Yes.

I mean, if I could get that on three or 400 accounts, it's a big number. It's huge. I mean, I don't know what that. I don't do public math, but that is a big number. That is money you would not be getting otherwise. So anyways, I thought about wrapping it into like a VIP program. Right. Where you say, okay, here's what you get for our VIP program. It's, you know, a, a 3, 36, it's gap forgiveness, it's, you know, CPI product, it's, you know, towing, it's lockout service, and it's a free key or something. You know, whatever kind of a VIP package. You can put all of this into one.

So I have thought about, I've thought about that before, Jeff, and I, I can't wrap my head around that portion of it. And I'm not saying that's not what you can do. I cannot wrap my head around making the numbers make sense there.

Yeah. But it's part about selling 100% of the product 100% of the time. Right. So if I look at the five reinsurance products or four reinsurance products I can sell if I can wrap those into one instead of trying to get customers to make decisions on every single one of them. Do you want a warranty? Do you want Gap forgiveness? Do you want free loaner card? You want roadside assistance? Do you want, you know, wrap it all into one VIP package that says, hey, for an additional X amount a month, you're going to be covered top to bottom no matter what happens.

I like the idea. I mean, you know, it's funny. I think that's a, I think that's a lease is what you're talking about, Jeff. You know, it's similar.

Yeah. You could throw in like a service like, hey, it's free oil changes.

Yeah.

You know, you could really create a transportation solution that says, hey, no matter what, you're either getting a free tow or you're getting a loaner car, or you're getting oil changes, or you're getting this warranty, like for this additional amount that's wrapped into your payment, you are covered. So anyways, that's one of the things I'm messing around with here. At the end of the year, I want to have up and running before January 1st. Um, the other thing is looking at my numbers, you know, and, and I'm wanting to get my management team together for like an off site goals setting session. Right. I've been reading that book Traction, and it's been referenced a ton of times, the EOS system, you know, and part of the big thing they say in there is that you need to have your annual off site meeting with your managers to go over what your next goals are. Quarterly, annually, you know, do these projections. But to take it away, don't just try to do it on like a Friday morning when everyone's calling you and bugging you in the office. But to actually go take 24, 48 hours, leave the dealership, go somewhere else and just kind of have an intense goal setting planning session.

I like the idea. I'm not sure that I could implement it in mine because we have, we have some single mothers in our office that are actually managers. So I think it'd be kind of hard to implement it. And so what we've actually done, and people may notice or not. I'm actually in a new facility today. I will. How do I undo this, Jeff?

I don't know.

Anyway, I'm in a new facility today and the reason is we outgrew. I don't have enough offices.

Right.

And so my new office is in another building. We have part of our service facility and it's huge. And I've got a big conference room here inside of my office. Monitors, whiteboards, all this. And what we're going to do is twice a month we're going to have a manager's meeting up here. And so what that's going to do is help do what you're talking about. And I really think it's very important because sometimes we talk about managers making decisions, but if all the managers aren't together on decisions, it creates problems. If they're not together on goals as well, it creates problems. So I really think it's important and that's what we're moving to. And actually our first meeting is next, next Wednesday. So I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, I think it's good if you can get them away. Put your phones on silent, do not disturb. No one comes in the office. Don't bug us with any issues for the next two or three hours. Like we're just going to have intense discussions that come out of here with game plans, decisions, responsibilities delegated to everyone that they're going to come back and report on at your next meeting.

Yeah. And you know, at some point I think you can probably actually, you know, have a. Not a chart or. But something you fill out at the end of every meeting to kind of make sure everybody knows what's on that, on that docket going forward. I think it's so important to hit your goals by doing something like that.

The other thing that I'm really kicking in right now is we are doing our Tax Max training. So you guys know Tax Max is a sponsor. It's some program that I believe in firmly and we started that now. So December 1st is when we start our fourth quarter program, a little Bit late, but we have started to send emails out to all of our current customers to say, hey, here's your chance to upgrade or get a second car. And then we're going to follow up with phone calls to a lot of our low balance customers. And then we're going to start, you know, just asking every single lead. Hey, hey, what are you doing with your tax return? What's your typical tax return? Do you want to get into a nicer car or have a lower payment contribute tax return? So again, guys, I think it's huge. People are stretched thin. Money is tied out there. People are upside down. You need more down payment to make these deals work and make payments affordable. It's the way to do it.

Yeah, I agree. I think I've referenced this stat before, but I'll do it again.

90.

I think it's either 90 or 98% of people who receive tax returns spend it within the. Or spend like 90% of it within the first 48 hours. So it's super important to get the money. The best way you can. Tax facts is a way to, to help you get that.

Yeah. And that makes me think Luke too. Are you buying inventory right now? Are you stocking up? Because I see some deals and, and then I have some aged inventory that I start getting nervous about and I'm like, oh, man, I need to unload this. I need to unload this. And then at the same time, I'm like, no, I'm going to wait. I'm not going to get impatient. I'm not going to get crazy. I'm going to hold off for a few more weeks and I'll sell this in January or February, guaranteed.

Well, the problem I have, yes, I am stocking up right now. I'm buying as many cars I can every week when we already are probably close to the highest amount of inventory we've ever had. But I know that right now it's taken me a little longer to get things done in my shop due to part shortage, this, that and other. So it's. I'm having to almost. I'm having to have at least 25 more inventory to get to accomplish the same goals that have been happening. So I'm just stocking up because I know that if I don't have these cars ready to roll on February 15th or February 25th, we're going to be in trouble because we need to sell. From February 15th until April 15th, we need to sell probably 100 cars. So we got to figure out how to make that work. And the only way I know to make that work, even if the economy switches one way or another, is to have the inventory now have it ready by then and ready to roll at that point. So, yes, I'm buying more cars.

Yeah. And the thing that makes me sleep well at night is because my acv, I. I keep trying to chase the lower and lower acv, right? Because I want to make the cars affordable even though they're not there. But I'm like, man, even if the economy tanks and things don't happen and tax time doesn't pan out, I mean, a $5,000 ACV car is not going to go any lower than $5,000. So if I can be in that area, you know, the stuff that makes me nervous are the teens or the twenties or. I don't know what you're holding on to, but if those take a dive, maybe you could get a little bit hurt by being overbought.

But I don't think. I mean, I think in a safe spot, I think inventory under $20,000, you're probably okay is the way I look at it. Because if it does drop 10%, it's not dropping that much, but drops 20%, it's not dropping that much.

Yeah, so. So, yeah, I'm also getting a lot more repos in. So that's one thing. And again, Pastime, great sponsor of the podcast. Thanks to them, I get my repos back super fast. So that's been handy. I just, you know, we look at the location, we know the repo decision's been made, and my guy goes and gets it. But having those repos come in is another kind of weird little source of inventory where I have had higher repos this month than the whole first half of the year. I mean, almost. Almost the entire year combined. Like, all of a sudden, in November, I repo a lot of cars.

I did, too. But you know what's funny is this, is that I think we got so used to not repossessing cars over the last two years that it seems really, really big. Right. And it's not as big as it really is. If historically, if I look back, my worst repossession month is. Is I think June, August, and December. And I can't tell you why, but that's kind of the way it falls. And if you look at this year, it's kind of the same exact way. November may be bigger in December, just because I've looked at. At some accounts and said, you know, it's time to be done with this.

Yeah, it was Definitely that's what happened for me in November. I said, hey, I want to get ahead of this. I don't want to have all these things just come crashing down in December. So, yeah, I pushed a lot of them into November. People that we just needed to cut the cord on. And I'll probably have a whole nother stack of them in December to cut the cord on. But on the upside, loot, I. I'm not going to have any income tax to pay because I will have for 2022. 2022. So, yeah, you know, I guess there's that upside. Right.

Well, I don't have that problem, Jeff, but I hope that. I hope that we can. Can weather the storm here a little bit with these reposts. You know, more than anything, a repossession hurts your psyche. And so you start grading a little worse or this, that and other. Which, you know, luckily we, we have, you know, underwriting programs that help us not do that. But it's still. If someone's on the borderline and, and you have to put your mind into it, if you've repossessed a bunch of cars, you don't always. You don't always make a good decision.

So.

So I kind of. You just. And even when it comes to buying cars, you're taking a lot of repos in you go, oh, man. Well, I don't need to pay this much for these cars because our repos are bringing anything. I don't know. It's just a bad mindset to have to deal with. That's just my opinion.

Yeah, it definitely is. You get scared of certain makes and models because you see yourself repoing them more often and you're like, ah, crap, okay, I'm not buying any more Grand Caravans. Like, it just seems like nobody wants to hold on to them the second they.

Yeah, I've been quit doing that. But yeah, you know, I've got one or two no buys. We actually put on our list that there were really good sales sellers of ours, but unfortunately we've. A lot of the repos in this last two months have been those cars for mechanical reasons. You think make, I think the people who buy them and mechanically.

So.

So what you'll find a lot of times is sometimes cars appeal to certain audiences and those audiences don't maintain their cars properly. And so you'll start getting these. You start getting them repoed a lot. Now, they may be further along, but when you, when you get them repoed, you realize the reason they. The loan failed was because they didn't maintain them and they drove them too many miles and they're too expensive to repair at that point. And so you have these huge losses on cars that, that really probably would have lasted the with the right person would have lasted. So we just decided to put them on our no buy at that point.

Interesting. Well look, to wrap this up guys, if you're still listening, thank you so much for supporting the podcast. Make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter which you can do through our website. That's tactical tips that go out every Sunday. More of a management level type stuff. You know, how you should affect your things you can do in your dealership. Quotes, actionable items. We'll be focusing a lot more in there about year end tasks the next couple of weeks, things you should be doing at your dealership before the new year and then things you should be doing when the year wraps up to look back and see how things performed and then be able to project out for 2023.

And the last thing I want to encourage people to do before we get off and before we turn you over to how I built this for the rest of the year is if you have not contacted your CPA and talked about what you should be doing in the month of December. Today is the 1st of December, right Jeff?

Yes.

You need to, you need to get on the phone, send an email with your CPA today. Don't wait. Make sure you have at least through October wrapped up very nicely so you can make projections because most people don't make money in November and December. That's. That's going to probably not happen. So wrap it up, go ahead, prepare. If you've got to make some changes or have to take some tax advantages, do it because today is the day to do it, not tomorrow.

There are some time sensitive actions you need to do. Right. We can't just do all this in April and. And backdate it. I think pretty sure there are some stuff that have to physically happen in the year that you plan on taking.

That deduction or selling accounts and this, that and other.

Yeah. Repos cure periods. I don't know. Account inventory. Write down. I don't know if that's time sensitive.

Write down has. Has to be done by 1231. You could actually take repos after. But we won't.

I got a ton of cars to write down. I'm excited for that one anyways. Great.

Luke.

I guess we will turn it over to the how I built it for the next couple of weeks and yeah.

We'Ll say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. If you need us, reach out to us.

Yeah, we'll talk to you guys next year.

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