#262 - Luke Visits Jeffs Dealership

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.

Yeah, look at us.

We are on location.

On location at Jeff's location. But I had to represent my dealership with a little T shirt.

So Luke flew out here to St. George, Utah, to come take a look at my operation. It's been four years. Never been here.

So have you ever been to my place?

I've never. Okay, I'm gonna wait another four years, and then I might show up. But what we're gonna do is kind of a cool thing. A lot of times we go, like, nose blind, right? We go nose blind to our dealership. We don't see things. We just kind of get used to doing it the way it's always been done, and we have no idea how to do it any differently. So Luke's come out here, we've had some fun, played around, and he's gonna give me some critiques on my dealership, right?

Yeah. Because you don't see. Talking about nosebinder, you don't see what I see when I show up. And I'm a stickler about things when it comes to how cars are lined up, where they should be parked, how.

To get customers in and out of.

The lot, it really matters. And it's something that you don't see if you don't go to a bunch of different dealerships. So I encourage everybody out there to make sure that even in your own town, just go visit some dealerships and see what they're doing that you can incorporate into your dealership. And especially, you know, there's plenty of.

Us out there that have friends in the business.

You need to go see their operations because they will invite you to say, okay, what's going on here?

And when I showed up here, I.

Didn'T like a few things you didn't. And luckily, Jeff is crazy enough to let me kind of take over his.

Staff for just a little bit and.

Say, hey, this is what we need to be doing.

So in this episode, guys, hopefully you're watching it on YouTube. If not, listen to the podcast. We'll try to explain the philosophies and ideas behind some of these merchandising techniques or layout techniques or dealership tips, tricks. So hope you guys enjoy what's interesting.

When I first got here, the lot just wasn't, in my opinion, laid out like I would have done it. And Jeff was like, okay, tell me what you'll do. So you know, that's what I did, what we're trying to do, and I think what you're always should be trying to do is funnel your customers where you want them to go. And we do that with chains and blocks, you know, blocking people off. Jeff has the luxury of using cars to do it. So when I got here, they were, they were kind of parked straight and there was this like nothing going on on this side. So I was like, well, how can we fix this? And I decided that the best way to fix it was to angle the cars. And when you angle the cars, it allows the customer to know exactly where to drive. And you'll see everything is angled like on a, you know, 45 degree or so and it funnels them in to where you want them to park. And that really matters because if you just have this area open, they can go over here and park and your people will never see them. So what you want to make sure they do is know where to park. And you want them to park there so that your, your folks, your salespeople can see them number one. And number two, get them out of their car. Trapping them in is the best way to do it.

Yeah.

And so what we created here, if someone does want to keep driving, they can drive around that last car and go down in there. Well, then they're trapped. And I know that doesn't sound like the right word to say.

Yeah.

But it is what it is.

Yeah. They gotta stop and put it in reverse. And by that time your salesman's come.

Out to greet them, you can get to them.

Yeah.

And I think that really inviting people in is the best way to get people to stay.

Yeah.

And if you have your cars just willy nilly parked everywhere, you just don't know what to do. So this is a way to do it. Use cars to filter people where you.

Want them to go.

Yep.

Smart.

Alright, Jeff, I'm gonna take them behind the scenes.

Behind the scenes.

Man, that's nice the way that gate opens, Jeff. That's big money spent there.

Yeah, yeah, a little bit. So Luke's gonna show you kind of the transition from the front of the lot to the back a lot, the recon center, some of the layout, time to line type situations.

So in my opinion, Jeff has a mess back here, but you know, whatever. And when Marshall and Eric would come to my dealership, when I, when they first started coming out, dealership, they would tell me I had a mess too. So, you know, it is what it is. But Jeff Luckley has a very good Break from cars that are for sale to cars that aren't for sale. And that's really what you're looking for. We've achieved that a couple different ways. And I still haven't got to the exact point that I want to break it up. But Jeff has a great layout for his service department, for his detail department and tire department. I guess here. One thing I don't like, the way Jeff has things done is over here in this corner, you'll see he's got a bunch of parts cars. Well, you know, I don't think you need parts cars. I think parts cars take a valuable space. Unless you have a fill like our buddy pokey brimer has, you can just put them in, you know, you don't really need them. You can order a part from a junkyard and get rid of this salvage stuff and buy the part.

That's my opinion.

Jeff. I know you don't like that, but if we got rid of those, we could probably put our cash cars back here, which would help a lot, I think, Give you more space out there for retail cars. And we could also maybe produce a better line. If you go to Jack Carter's dealership.

They may have changed a little bit.

Because now they moved some stuff off site, some recon. But he had lines that went into the building that created the time to line, you know, so, you know, you pulled them in and they just went like this. And that's what we've created our dealership. Three different lines. One line is just for incoming cars, and two lines for cars that got to go back through the shop to.

To be finished.

What we call our F2 process. But here, Jeff needs to work on this. And there's just a little too much of everything everywhere. You need to be organized, and this isn't quite organized enough. Now, you probably know how it works, right?

Yeah, of course.

So how's it work? Come and explain to us.

So in the back here, I've got a couple different sections. And it'll be hard to show you on the video, But. So all of our cars are laid out by when they come in. And just kind of basic three sections. So here to my left, you're going to see all of our fresh either trade ins or auction purchases. Everything gets stacked in any of these five or six lanes to the left. As you can see, my. My repair shop is just right here on this side. We got four bays. And so all those cars kind of get stacked over there. That means they're waiting for an inspection. They're waiting for parts. They're waiting to get parts put on.

So my question, Jeff, if anybody from your dealership walked out here, would they know which ones are which and how do they go through?

They would know by looking into the software system.

So I'm an advocate of knowing without having to look at software. So CarMax used to do this by.

Having toppers on top of the cars.

Which I think help we accomplish this by having certain cars in certain lines. So I think what you could do to improve that is have maybe two lines that are cars that have not been inspected yet, and then two lines.

Maybe they're waiting on parts or waiting.

To go back through inspection, things like that. That's a way to achieve. Yeah, achieve that without having to look at software.

Well, we use everything through the software. I don't want anyone looking at a car and just inspecting it. They only come out here and get cars when they have an inspection sheet and then they find the car.

I get that, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is.

If I.

Needed to go figure out where a car was, if I was a salesperson and I had somebody really wanted a certain car, I would like to be able to look back here and see the car and go, well, actually we're just waiting on a part and go from there.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. I'm saying that I don't want them to come back here and look at a car and assume that just because it's parked in a certain area, it means a certain thing. I want them to go into the software system, look at the PDI sheet, look at the, you know, the jacket to assess it. And I don't want to have to put a car in a certain lane. What if I all of a sudden have five lanes of PDI and two lanes of this and I'm trying to cram it all into my two lanes.

We have that sometime in a while. So we have to adjust our lanes accordingly.

Yeah, it just sounds like a lot of work.

We face them one way for first inspections and we. And we face them the other way for F2.

So if the left side view mirror is bent in, that means that it is on a Tuesday. And you can also side view mirrors bent out. That means it's a Wednesday.

You can also use chalk pins right. On your windows, which we do as well sometimes if cars need body and stuff like that.

Yeah. So that's the way mine lays out. And then it wraps around from left to right, you know, make ready, repost, have their own section. And then of course, we have kind of our little parts pickers, cars that we feel like we need to pick.

Some stuff off of.

Sorry that Jeff's all up in the camera here. Yeah, we're trying to do this without our trusty Liana, but, you know.

Okay.

Hey, let's walk through the shop.

Hey, everybody, we hope to see you at Buy here Pay here United, April.

30Th in Las Vegas.

I can't wait.

I was in Vegas yesterday.

Yeah. But I'll tell you this. Buy your pay here United.

Last year, the summit was incredible. You know, we talk about this. Dealers helping dealers. This is what this is. And it's dealers. There's no freaking pushy vendor room.

There's no, no craziness. And we had a lot of education. I'm going to be hosting the panel. I think everybody get a lot of use out of.

We're going to be there together. Come see us April 30th through May 2nd. And it's going to be great.

It's great.

Rate at the Bellagio just.

Now. We're in the shop, buddy. Yep, this is a nice shop. How old is your building?

So about six years.

Wow.

Seven years old.

It's. It's clean, the floors are done right. It just, it's really nice. You know, it's close for me, but very tight. I'm used to a bigger shop, but Jeff did really well here. It's. It's nice. What I love about it, Jeff, and I'm envious, is that I can walk through one of these doors and be in your dealership. Yeah, that is so important. It helps you with employees. Number one, you can cut down on managers.

We are split up our service department.

Between three buildings and that creates a nightmare. Having this set up where you can walk out of the showroom and into the shop is huge. And big dealers used to be like that. Not as much anymore, but they used to. My buddy, Steve Matthews dealership in Wilmington is built like this. It's Dale's dealership now. But it is so nice and I.

Just really like it.

Yeah, yeah. We built this back to back. So if you can picture my building, the front half of it is sales offices and cubicles and the back half is this small four bay shop. Obviously, when the design was done and I put the plans together, it was much bigger. And then as budget made us shrink, shrink, shrink. So, yeah, we were a bit tighter side to side than I would like to be. Front to back. It doesn't really allow for any large boxes from the mechanics. That makes it a little bit tough. And definitely we have to choose what is here. And one thing I tell them, I say if it's a tool that you touch daily, it can be up front. If it's a tool you touch weekly, then please put it in the back of the shop. And if it's a tool you touch monthly, it needs to be outside.

Right.

Our welders, some of these things, you're not touching those things daily. They need to be outside in a different building or stored in a shed. They don't need to be underneath your feet. So having a tight shop like this makes you definitely cautious of prioritizing, you know, in organization and cleanliness. And this is much, much more disorganized than it should be. Right now I've got parts benches with stuff sitting on top of them. We've got, you know, some cores laying around and at least the floors are somewhat clean. It's still very nice this weekend, so.

It'S still very nice. And you should try to keep your shop as clean as possible. Clean shops, usually a well run shop, don't come to my shop because it's dirty.

100% cleanliness, guys. I mean, if you want people to respect your tools, respect your building, respect.

The parts, respect the work they do.

It'S got to be clean.

Yep.

Okay, so we're going to walk through.

The door from the shop into the showroom and I'm going to show you what's so great about this and what's cool is your, your service manager sits right here, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This little rolly desk, that's our parts service manager.

And look at this right here. I can walk into the dealership. Very cool. Come on. And then look, it's Adrian. He's in the key box.

Always in the key box.

So Jeff's office is super wide open and he really, it's really a good thing. Number one desk here on this side, up against the window. These salespeople can see everything that happens on his lot, every piece of it. And they had the beautiful views of the mountains over there, which is even better. And Jeff is over here. So when he is here, he's able. If for some reason somebody can't get to it or you got too many customers in here, Jeff can come out.

And help a customer as well.

He may not do that.

I definitely will not.

He can do it. But when you look at setting up a dealership, these things are important. And his manager sits over here, which I know Adrian comes out and talks to customers, but this allows everybody to know what's going on at all times. Because a big problem is sometimes salespeople don't get up. And, you know, some people just don't like to talk to people at certain times. But if you have managers that can see everything that's going on, it really helps.

Hey, guys, real quick.

Buckeye Dealership Consulting.

You know, they're great sponsor of the.

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How many times we said it? Reinsurance, reinsurance, Reinsurance, cpi, vsi, vsi, vsc.

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Really talking about putting the money away.

For a rainy day fund. You know, we've discussed that in the newsletter the last couple weeks, is that.

You need to have capex. Expense, expense.

You didn't have money for those unforeseen things.

Hopefully you own your property, or if you need a down payment for your property, it's right there.

Your reinsurance company is a great way as a forced savings account.

Put it in your reinsurance company and lend it back to yourself.

You lend it back to yourself, take.

The tax deduction when you buy the.

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Free at a pretty good rate.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

So reach out to Buckeye.

They'll take care of you, and we'll see you soon. All right, Luke.

So that was my St. George location. Here is the Cedar City location. It's my second location. I've had it for about two years. A much, much smaller kind of footprint. We only carry about 20 cars on there. And so I'm. Let's show you guys on YouTube some of the vid photos. We didn't get any video up there, but here's the.

Jeff.

Jeff forgot.

Tell me what you think.

Jeff forgot some things is the reason we didn't get video up there. But anyway, Jeff, your location up there for one. Everybody look at the backdrop. I mean, it's, it's picturesque, which most everything is out there. So you've got so much going for you here. And you say it's a smaller footprint, but actually it's a much larger piece of property. Right, Jeff?

It has the potential. Yeah, it's a full two acres up there and it's got potential. It's, it's, it's I'm just debating on how much headache I want up there. Do I want to keep it a small footprint in a small car lot or do I want to take over the, you know, the muffler repair shop and build out the back storage area. And one thing you mentioned to me was I'm a small car lot trying to look like a big car lot up there. And that was a problem, right?

Yeah, it's a huge problem. You know, you have a Ford store next door and I think they're Jeep as well, maybe. I mean, it's a big new car franchise store and in a somewhat smaller town. So you have the ability really to, I think, showcase yourself because of your location here. The one thing, the one problem is you'll see. The first picture we see is this Grand Caravan. Number one, nobody wants bands anymore. And number two, number two, it's not, it's not good looking. It's got dents, the paint's coming off. And so when people see this first off, like I, like I always said, when first. Well, I didn't say this, but I think head and shoulders did years ago. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. And, and this is what you got, right? You got a dented door, paint coming off the roof, paint coming off the, the bumper. You've got one car back, this Dodge Dakota, which a lot of people like trucks. So you have this Dakota sitting back. Those need to. Your first piece, your first prime car you, you're trying to sell needs to be your best car, in my opinion. Jeff.

Yeah, put them out on point display. I mean, this shows it a little bit more. One thing you'd mentioned to me, and we did put this into action up there is for some reason the guys were trying to crack. They were trying to squish everything on the front line, right? So we've got quite a bit of frontage that goes down this main street. But they were trying to put every single car on the front line. And you're like, no, that's not a good idea because they see everything. They have no reason to pull in a B. You're putting some of your ugly stuff out front, which we just talked about. But be you need, you need to give them a reason to pull in to see what else is in there for sure.

And also what we talked about on this front line is the cars need to be pulled up further. You've got plenty of room between the road, a little sidewalk piece and your green poles there. Those cars need to be even and no Matter how you part them, if you park them, you know, kind of at a 45, touching each other or whatever, those front bumpers need to be even with your green pole here. And you do that just to create symmetry. In my opinion, the more symmetry, the better you can do. And as big as your lot is, we want to try to make it look smaller and more intimate because people don't know you own this whole section. Right. And so what we can do is say, all right, this is a 2 acre piece of lot, but we're only going to use a third of an acre to accomplish our dealership. And if you're only carrying 20 to 30 cars, you don't need any more than a third of an acre, especially with this footprint. So instead of having all the cars in the front line, let's pull some and fill in this, this middle area, right, Jeff?

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point that you made, is just making sure that it looks full. You don't have to have 50 cars in inventory to look like you've got cars. You know, that's, that's definitely something we put into play up there.

Limit the size, limit the footprint of your dealership on the lot you have. Because if you can do that, it looks like, looks like you are busy. And if people think you are busy, they want to do business with you. There's nothing worse in the world than riding by a car lot and it looking like this. Nobody's pulled in there. Nothing's going on. It looks like all their. They only have one row of cars. So, you know, if I didn't count these cars, Jeff, I would think you had 10 cars out front maybe, and that's all the cars you had. So I don't want to shop somewhere. It only has 10 cars.

So if you need a line of.

Credit or you're looking to get financed on a property. Yeah, the guys at Primaland, great bank.

To go to to talk to about your capital needs.

And the great thing about primaland, you're.

Not trying to educate them on your.

Business because guess what? They know what it's about.

They can even help you get your, your finances in order. We've talked about that. It's hard to talk to normal bankers.

About what we do as buy here, pay here dealers. Primal End knows what we do.

They lend on that type of thing.

So you need to reach out to Primalin. Todd Yates, good buddy of mine, he's the, their head of sales and all that good stuff.

Reach out to him. He will take care of you. And they're just good people over there. Back to the podcast.

Okay, so here we are looking kind of at the front of the building. It is a small, you know, kind of a four office with a little, kind of a parking bay on the side. But I've tried my best to keep the look consistent, you know, between my two locations. You can easily identify based on the colors. The green balloons, the advertising, marketing messages, they are connected 100%.

And that's so key, what we talk about, especially with just one dealership. And it's even. It's even more important with two dealerships. But with one dealership, you've got to make sure that your advertising, your branding, your outside of your dealership and the inside the dealership are all on the same page as well as your website. Same colors, same message. Because if you don't have the same message, you don't have the same colors. People may think they're at the wrong spot, but you do a very good job at that. I love the color scheme. It's bright. It's. I don't like, but I like the way you've used green, and it really looks good. The one, the one issue I had with your layout here is it's very dark. I enter in, and that's. That's a problem. I probably would line out some just on the outside looking at. Probably line out a couple parking spots for customers so they would know where to park. I'd probably remove some of the. The window dressing that you have because makes the inside dark. I would move the people out of the office onto the sales floor as well. You have a good space inside, but if people are in offices, they cannot see if someone pulls them a lot. Actually, while we were there, Jeff, when we first walked in, you know, nobody knew we were there. And so that creates a problem. There was another customer that came up while I was there. I had to tell the young lady, hey, there's a customer out there. She never would have seen that customer. So make sure your people are out so they can see everything that's going on. And your other store is perfect like that.

Yeah, it's definitely not laid out like my main store with the sales cubicles kind of being out front in the lobby area. These guys are back kind of back a level in offices. And you're right, it does create a lot of blind spots. Some of the window clean decals that we did also create a little bit of a. A little bit harder to see outside. I don't love that. You know, you kind of have to look through a decal to see the car lot. That creates an additional layer of blind spots. So, yeah, a couple things I would change there. When I bought the place, we did, you know, we put some money into the paint to make sure it all looked good and new and, you know, match my color scheme. We resurfaced the parking lot, which you can't tell in these pictures because it's just got a bunch of snow and mud and dirt all over it. But it was a really bad tore up kind of asphalt. So we went out and did a chip seal, or just a seal on it to give it a nice sharp black look, which hopefully will come back in the springtime. So just those little things I think dealers need to remember, you know, what are your signs look like, what are your banners, what are your balloons, what are your pendant flags? If you have anything out there, make sure you're putting money aside to just continually keep those things updated, looking fresh, looking new. It's like you said, Luke, it's so hard to walk onto a lot that looks like it is just neglected and aged. And I think that gives the bigger mentality of like, man, if they're going to treat their property like this, are they going to be treating their cars like this? Do they treat their customers like this? You know, things are neglected, cigarette butts, trash, overgrown areas, weeds. You know, just simple, simple little things you can do too, to just kind of keep your place looking sharp.

Oh, yeah. And it's, you know, most of us have lot quarters that are sitting around scratching off lottery tickets half today. So make sure they're out there doing what they're supposed to be doing, picking up everything, cleaning things up, because it really matters.

You know, there.

There used to be a time in, in buy here, pay here. I'll speak specifically to this, where it didn't matter what your business looked like because there were not many options out there. Well, today is a lot different than that. You have national companies, Car mart, Drive Time, US Auto Finance, AutoCAD, Credit King. You have these companies that are huge and have amounts of money that we could only dream to have access to. Their stores look great. They're in old, new car stores that they actually put money into. It looks great. We have to compete with those people if we want the best customers in the buy here, pay here space. So that means we have to give resources to making our dealership look like it should. And we're all guilty of letting it just, you know, fall to the wayside every once in a while. But get. Get a fresh eye in there to look to tell you what you need to do.

Yeah.

That's what's so great about this, Luke. And it was fun having you out here. I would recommend any dealer if you have other dealer buddies. Of course, you've met people at convention, conference through your 20 groups. Just invite them out to come hang out for a couple of days and just get a fresh set of eyes on your lot. You know, some of the things that Luke brought up in this video and other stuff we talked about, I've already put into place some of the things I'm not going to.

Right. Yeah.

And that's just the way it is. You don't have to do everything they say. But it's so nice to have that fresh set of eyes come in and say, hey, you might be a little bit blind to this, but here's what I see, or here's my opinion, or here's how I might do it. And that just gives you these kind of fresh takes. So this was actually a lot of fun. Luke, I'm glad you came out.

Thank you. And be open. Jeff, you were very open to it. I tell you every time. You know, one of my best friends is Marshall Zoner and Eric Freeman from Motor Company, and they live on a different plane as to what their dealerships look at. Look like compared to mine. But every time they come in, I just get ready. Cause I know they're gonna. They're gonna pick it apart. But you know what? Every time they pick it apart, like you said, I make those adjustments where needed. Sometimes they don't understand my business, so I don't make the adjustments.

Yeah.

But be open to it and get people out there to do it because it's gonna really help your business.

Awesome, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions about anything you heard or saw in the videos or through the podcast, I won't ask.

Or want us to come out and look at your store.

Yeah, Luke will come nitpick the crap out of your place. He loves that. So. Or leave us a message. Send us an email. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll talk to you next week.

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