#267 - Navigating Turbulant Waters w/ Steve Levine

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. Today we have a familiar guest of the podcast, the king of compliance, Mr. Steve Levin. Steve.

Oh, man, I'm gonna use that. I like that. The King of compliance.

Yeah.

Bumper stickers and everything.

I don't know anybody else. I don't know anyone above you.

That's the list. And he's so good at it. He has his own convention about compliance.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that's exciting. And it's coming up pretty soon in May, so we're going to, we're going to talk about his convention coming out pretty soon. But first off, Steve, Luke and I wanted to just drill you with some stuff that's going on right now. Right. It's what you would call turbulent waters out there.

Yeah, that's why we picked that name for our conference this year, because it is very turbulent out there. I've been doing this 30 years. I don't remember a time where there has been this much state and federal regulation lawsuits, just a whole lot of challenges all at once.

Well, Steve, that's kind of weird to me. That. I mean, it's not weird, I guess, but during the Trump administration, we felt like we got a little reprieve from that. Is it just because there's a different administration in Washington that makes everything kind of all of a sudden do a 180? Is that what happens?

I guess yes is the easy answer, but it's a little bit deeper than that. You know, the CFPB was really stretching its legs under Obama, and then Trump coming in surprised everybody, so it kind of cut their agenda. During the Trump years, you saw a lot of state activity. A lot of the consumer advocates knew that they weren't going to get any help at the federal level. So the states got very active. Now, with Biden coming in, you've got a very active CFPB and ftc. Plus, on top of that, you still have those states doing their thing. So we've never seen an environment where you have the states behaving like this. Plus you have two federal regulators that are both very engaged and almost trying to outdo each other, which is a lot for our industry to take on.

Typical federal agency trying to justify their existence, right?

Yeah.

And the more press releases, the more people they can put on notice. It's very justified. They are.

I mean, it's really noticeable.

What do you see in Steve, before we get into the Questions we have, what are you seeing out there as some of the most egregious offenses or what are these guys coming after?

Yeah, because let's, let's, let's say one thing. Not every car dealer is doing it the right way. And so there's weird, there's. Yeah, I'm sure I am. So. Well, yeah, so there's reasons, there's reasons for these things. So Steve, what exactly what are you saying and why are we targeted so much?

So, so I think some of the big ones, and it started with some things that the FTC issued guidance on and then it carried over to the state level. A lot of interest in ancillary products and particularly how refunds are given post repossession. And they're looking at the products themselves and really challenging. Are the benefits illusory? Are they priced fairly? Do customers really need these? You know, the infamous one was the nitrogen tire product that, that really didn't have any more nitrogen than anything else. I mean that's the other poster child. But, but there's a lot of things like this, you know, folks that are extended service contracts when there was already a two year limited warranty or there's manufacturers warranty left, I mean, things like that. So that gives the regulators, you know, something to sink their teeth into and then they kind of portray everybody in that same negative light. So I think that's a big one.

It's so funny, there was a post just this morning that, on one of the dealer groups and it was a guy complaining about the, you know, the pricing schemes that people do, right? It's, they have it priced at or below MMR and then they have this huge disclosure of all these things like you know, obviously tax, title, license, doc fee. But then there's destination and recon and certification and you know, a whole list of little things in the fine print and the dealer had posted it to be like this is garbage. Dealers should not be doing this. This fake pricing thing is horrible. I was surprised by how many dealers jumped in the comments and were like, well this is the way it's always been done, so get on board or get out. And I'm just like, what are you talking about? Like the way it's always been done. Yeah, that's the reason why dealers have such a bad reputation is because guys like you think that's the way it just needs to be done and that we need to have these pricing schemes and Surprise People with $6,000 of, of markup when they get to the dealership.

That, that's something that, I mean, I was actually going to talk about the same thing is that there are real things for the FTC to look at and I believe that is probably on order of magnitude the most important. And it's like I don't even see them enforcing things like that. What do you see out there Steve?

Well, certainly advertising is an issue. I mean one of the first things that I do when I start with a new client is a website review because I see a lot of problems on websites and also social media. The advertising that you're speaking of that there's been federal regulation for years about that but sometimes I think that some dealers want to hide behind that and oh, I'm just going to have this 6 inch disclaimer in fine print. Well, if I'm doing that, I'm doing what I need to do and it's not open and obvious, it's not transparent and they're just trying to deceive folks. And the thing about advertising is that the regulators are looking for it. They don't even have to leave their office, they don't have to get a complaint about it. They know where to look, that they're seeing this stuff. You know, from the FTC's perspective that they proposed that this new dealer rule that if it comes to pass it's going to completely change advertising and sales for the industry. And the ironic thing is there's already laws in effect that do that. But, but the FTC just, just thinks that, that there's this rampant abuse going on. That's a whole other story because I don't know that that flags. We'll see.

You know, I remember years ago the FTC decided they were going to clamp down on, on essentially one line and one line was we'll pay off your car no matter what you owe. Right. And, and people were doing that but, but I guess the problem was they weren't disclosing how it was just going to be rolled into your next.

Right, right.

But the FTC just came and just went crazy on that. I'm waiting, I'm waiting for the shoe to drop where they just come in and take some of these big dealer groups and just lock them down and throw them in a room somewhere, which I know they won't do. But in South Carolina we, we've had some issues here in the last two to three months where in South Carolina your your highest doc P 225 unless you go through a certain process to get it higher. Anyway, big new car groups and these are typically the ones that they're causing the problems are charged an astronomical fee. They didn't ask permission to get the fee. And then when our local agency decided to go in and, and say, hey, I need your documents, they refused to give them to them. And so now it's essentially gone almost all the way to the Supreme Court. And you just like, I mean, there's so much money in the new car lobby in our state that this organization, the Department of Consumer affairs, essentially has been stalemated by the amount of money that has poured in. And they're kind of hamstrung and it makes no sense. And I mean, I hate to go off on a tangent my state, but these are things that FTC should really be looking at, not some of the garbage they look at, in my opinion.

Well, okay, so doc fees is a great example. And fees in general. So there's this litigation in Indiana right now, class action litigation, and there's this law firm basically going after all dealers over doc fees because the way the statute was drafted, it basically said, I forget the exact number, but anything over $250 is prohibited. And, and they're basically arguing, saying, well, but it doesn't expressly say that anything under that amount is. Okay, so. So they're actually going after the entire industry over that. And, and they're going to browbeat folks.

Oh, it happened, it happened in South Carolina about five years ago, and that's the reason this law came into effect. Well, now they're trying to destroy that loyalty. Anyway, that's a different story.

That's what's silly is it's like you're going after people that are, like, you're splitting hairs. Right? Like my doc fee was 199 instead of 250. Right. Like, I still had a doc fee and I still disclosed it. There's egregious offenses out there. Like there's those dealer groups. Like the example this morning of like, that's just, that's blatant misleading of a consumer. Those are the ones you should be going after. And every dealer that listens to this, I mean, you get mad at buy here, pay here for having high prices. But at least, like, my prices are honest, you know, like, at least I'm putting them out there honestly. And I don't have anything that's a back end that's required, you know, it's optional. I got a doc fee, I have my state required fees. And then after that, you know, I don't have a destination charge. I don't have Transportation charges. That's required. And I surprise you with it at signing like anyways, every dealer listens to this needs.

Let me give some really good advice and any fee that you're charging, make sure you have a justification for it. Now, I looked at a buy here, pay here dealer recently. Don't have a related finance company. They are the one financing and they were charging a dealer financing surcharge, which if you look at the statute, that's a fee that is allowed to be added if you're placing the paper elsewhere. But they weren't, but they were still charging the fee. And, and you know, I look at that, I just shake my head and, and you know, it's those kind of abuses that are going to grab the headlines and make it really hard for everybody.

Yep. You know, we went down this tangent and Jeff, we originally decided we were going to start with red flags because they're coming up soon. Are you, are you good and compliant, Jeff?

Yes.

Good.

I finished my safeguards class.

I like it.

As they get around here, Steve, what.

What do we need to know? You know, we, we beat this down back in November, December, because I think the law was supposed to go into effect on December 9th, but they, they pushed it to June 9th, I believe six months. What's best practices? Where does, where does the deal start if they haven't started?

So, so FTC pushed some of it to June 9th. They didn't push all of it.

Okay.

And, and so, so that's a misconception out there. Oh, that they just delayed the whole thing. No, they didn't. It's. If you haven't done anything already, the first thing you need to do is figure out, okay, where is all my customer information stored? You know, is it on the network, is it on servers, what vendors have it? You know, just, just itemize where your information is and then start with doing an assessment of. Okay, where do we stand today in terms of our safeguarding efforts? You don't have to be perfect June 9th. What I'm telling folks is in order to avoid a potential issue, you have to show that you're making a meaningful effort. So do a written assessment, start looking at your vendors, start asking your vendors questions, send them a questionnaire. You don't have to be perfect day one. But you have to be able to show that we know it's serious and were not being negligent. We're practicing really strong, concerted effort in this area. Safeguards is scary because there's already a bunch of litigation going on. Anytime you have a security breach that the plaintiff's lawyers are drooling because they're going to make the argument, well, it's because you were negligent. You induced people to give you credit applications, you took their personal information, and then you didn't protect it adequately. And that there was just a big settlement and a class action against a new car dealer group in Maryland over this millions of dollars. And this is pre safeguards rule. So you can expect FTC is going to jump on some folks pretty quickly and the plaintiff's lawyers are looking at their chaps because now you have the federal agency saying, okay, this is the best practice, and if you're not following that, you are grossly negligent.

Is it safe to say that.

Our.

Large vendors, who we use daily in, in the automotive space, are up to date with protection and safeguard rules? I mean, is that safe to assume or no?

I don't think it's safe to assume. I mean, I. I can't give, like a papal absolution, I could tell you. My observation is we were on this early. We started working with folks early last summer, and there were a lot of companies, including some pretty prominent companies that I didn't think were up to snuff and weren't paying enough attention to this. Now, my impression is that they've done a really good job of getting up to speed. I still see some smaller companies that are not giving it the attention that it deserves. And, you know, if you're a dealer and you have a company in that situation, it doesn't mean that you have to cut them off today. I think it means that you have to say in your risk assessment that we've identified this risk with so and so. We've given them 60, 90 days, whatever it is, to conform, and we're going to follow up with them. And then you actually do so and you update your report. I think if you do that, you're doing, you know, proactive measures to help keep your customer information safe.

Hey, everybody, real quick. Buckeye Dealership Consulting. You know them as the sponsor of this entire podcast. They've stood behind us for years. They stand behind the independent dealer. They do reinsurance things like cpi, and.

They'Re going to be compliance unless. Yeah, that's right. They're going to be there. And I promise you that Steve has vetted all their products or someone in house has. So we were talking a little bit during the episode about how there could be issues with the products you're selling and the verbiage and things like this, but using a great vendor like Buckeye Dealership Consulting, I don't think you have to worry about that, Jeff.

Yeah, and they're going to help you with the refund issue. You know, when you have payoffs, when you have repos, when you have trade ins, you know, to make sure you're refunding those back end products prorated or however you set it up, make sure that's all accurate because that sounds like that's a big focus of what these regulators are coming down on. Yeah, back to the episode.

That's. Yeah, I like that.

Yeah.

It sounds like most of it is like common sense. If you're being smart, you're documenting it, you're trying, we're never going to be perfect. Like you said, it's. I think some of those companies that dot all their I's and cross all their T's still have issues or could have issues. Right. It's like you look at some of these identity theft situations or stories you hear about, it's like, man, I couldn't have prevented this. Like this guy was smart. They figured something out that nobody knew about or whatever the case may be. But what we're trying our best. I'll tell you what, man, everything freaking two factor authentication left and right. And I mean I get like, I don't get anything done in my day because I'm trying to track down some sort of security code.

It's really complicated. I mean, for a dealer to do this. Right. Especially a lot of dealers that don't have a dedicated IT resources, sources. It's a lot of work. I mean. Yeah, I saw one last year. I worked with the dealer that they had suffered an incident and I mean they were locked down, they had really strong IT that they, they had good measures in place and that they were the victims of a blunt force attack repeatedly for over a month. And, and eventually the hackers found one computer, just one computer that somebody took home and accessed the network working from home and that started the whole thing. I mean these hackers are really sophisticated, they're really smart. And to stay one step ahead of them, it does take work.

Yeah, it's scary.

It is, it is. And you can, but you can have.

I mean not but you can have, but you can also help, I guess, safeguard yourself by having insurance for these type breaches. Right. Did you recommend that, Steve?

So I've been on the cyber insurance bandwagon for years. It is expensive. I tell folks you have to treat it as, you know, a disaster scenario, get a big deductible because that'll bring the cost down some. But what folks have to realize right now is with safeguards, you cannot get cyber insurance unless you show that you've got a robust safeguards program. I mean, it's not like it used to be where, you know, send them a policy, they check the box and move on. You've got to really be able to show that this is living, breathing in order to get that insurance.

I've heard that if the insurance companies knew what we did, they wouldn't even write the policies for us, you know, if they knew we were, you know, car dealers. And some of us are buy here, pay here dealers and the kind of information we handle. So yeah, that's get it while you can and keep it as long as you can, I guess, huh?

Yeah, it's really an important tool. The dealer I was just talking about when they suffered that incident, luckily they had the insurance. And that very day, you know, we're on the phone with international law firm that has a cyber investigation unit and the insurance company and forensics companies and yeah, I think I added up the dollar value of that first phone call was like $10,000 to have all those people on the phone. But it really made a big difference. You know, this was a multi state dealership that would have had to not only contend with federal, but the various state issues and having that firepower made all the difference.

Very neat man.

All right, so this, Steve, my issue part of the problem I'm running into too is or that keeps me up at night is my credit reporting, right? And I think some dealers, and if you're a buy here, pay here dealer and you are not reporting to credit right now there's a, probably a pretty good argument that says just keep not reporting because once you start reporting or once you put your foot in that, you just, you can't go back. And it's such a mystery to me because when I through my DMS, I send in, you know, the Metro 2 file to Experian or to Equifax, I don't know what happens to it, I don't know what's in it. I don't know what's going on, I don't know what I got wrong or right. But then I have a customer come to me and complain and say it's not showing up on my credit, I don't know how the soup's made, I don't know why, I don't know what's going on. Like what responsibility do I have in that situation? Where it's like, look, Mr. Customer, I sent the Metro 2 file off. Now, I don't know how Experian dissected that, but if it's not on your credit report, you need to talk to them.

So credit furnishing and also the handling disputes. This is the number one lawsuit being brought against creditors these days. Doesn't matter whether it's car, credit card, or whatever. Number one, and has been for years. So there is a lot of liability. You can't just depend on your vendors to get it right. That's what I always hear. Well, we send it off to the dms. We don't know. But the government says it's your job to know. So I tell everybody, I don't care whether we're the small guy, a big guy. You should be doing some audits to understand what's being reported and to make sure that the sequencing is logical. A lot of times my partner Richard does these audits. He's fantastic at it, and he finds anomalies in the logic being used in the reporting. And it's easy enough to correct, but you just can't depend on your service provider to do it, because at the end of the day, it's your information. And the regulators look to you when.

You say it's easy enough to correct. Like, I don't buy that. I don't know where the black box is. I don't know how to fix anything that goes into that box. I don't even know. It's not like I just call up Experian and say, hey, yeah, you know, Bob that lives over here, we need to fix that. July reporting. Well, that show up like, well, that's where I've our phone call.

It's one. Oh, it's E. Oscar. And I'm sure you're using that, but if you're not, then you need to be. But you can go into the. You can go into the backside and fix most of those things. And that's, you know, I mean, all of us out there receive multiple disputes from. From our clientele daily.

From credit repair companies that just throw.

Sure. And it's. And you got to keep. Keep a log of that. And you got to go into eos, or you got to verify the information is correct and you got to check the box and you do what you're supposed to do. But I think there are times, because I've seen it, there are times where a customer has paid out their account and everything is exactly as it should be inside of your dms. And for Some reason there's a disconnect between your DMS and Equifax or Experian and you have to fix those things. And we have many a times. But it's just, it's weird how you're right. How is the soup made? Because we don't know, but it sounds like we've gotta, we've gotta somehow audit this. Steve, how's the best way to audit it?

Honestly, the best auto. We could teach you how to do it. You know, it's not like you have to have us do it, but we could teach you how to do it and give you some steps to take. And it doesn't have to be be, you know, an invasive 10 hour thing for a small guy. It could be, okay, let's look at five or ten accounts in a month. Let's look at two bankruptcies and two of this and two of this. And, and you know, that's a check. And if we find any anomalies that then let's look a little bit deeper. I'll let you in on a little dirty secret when it comes to this industry. You mentioned those letters. There's a lot of law firms that actually have separate companies that are in the business of these credit disputes and they're setting creditors up, they send these letters, they send them week after week, they wind up just going in the garbage. They have these little traps in them and if you don't respond adequately, next thing you know you're in a lawsuit. And those are really hard lawsuits to wriggle out of. So training is very important when it comes to this. Most of the training that we see in this area is, you know, somebody teaches somebody else and it's 10 minutes and that's all the training they ever get. That's why at our conference we actually spend, we've got a four hour workshop dedicated only to this subject because it's that important and we see so many people get trapped in it. We did it last year and we actually weren't going to do it again. We were going to change it up and so many people told us, no, please do it again, do it again. But because that really made an impact on my business.

Yeah, that's, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a scary thing. But I mean it's, I think my opinion, if you're doing buy here, pay here the right way, you should be reporting credit. That is my.

Should be.

Yes, should be.

Yes, you should be. I think so anyway. Hey everyone, another conference we're going to Talk about today, Jeff. Buy here, Pay here, United States, BHPH, United.com. i'm pretty sure Steve and Ignite are one of the feature sponsors there. And it's going to be great, I can tell you that.

Yeah, I know we always tell you guys, get out of your dealership, work on your dealership, not in your dealership. And so, yes, I get, you've got to decide which of these conferences you're going to go to, when you're going to be out of the office. But I guarantee you, I've had. How many, how many conferences do you think you've been to, Luke? 50. 50, right. And how many of you come home and said, man, that was a waste of time?

Maybe one or two. Maybe, but not many.

And percentage, you don't bring home enough to cover your cost. And to say that was totally worth being out of the dealership. I learned enough. I brought stuff home. So buy here, Pay here, United is definitely one of those where you're going to bring home enough ideas that you can completely justify being out of the office.

April 30 through May 2 at the Bellagio in Vegas. Jeff and I will be there, we'll be rolling some film and we will be asking you guys to talk to us. So if you see us there, let us grab you and put you on camera for a bit.

Steve, you had.

You'd also mentioned that ancillary products were getting. We're getting a lot of scrutiny by regulators. What should we look for there?

I think, number one, don't assume that all vendors are created equal and that their products are all the same. You really have to do due diligence on the vendor and make sure that the product makes sense for you, your business model. What we do, then you really have to make sure the big one that we're seeing, and this is great example of something that CFPB brought attention to it. And now you have states that never examined for this before. They're looking at the post repossession letters, they're looking at deficiency balance letters. They want to see that you're considering any refunds that should have been provided. So I'm actually telling folks, you know, you should have a line, if you do GAP or extended service contracts or any product that has a refund provision, you should actually put that on your letters. And if it's zero, it's zero. But show the regulator that you're aware of that issue and that you're doing something about it. That's come up all over the country. Multiple states Continues to gain steam. And that's a great example. You said earlier we've always done it this way. This is something that's gotten a lot of energy lately. And if you're using letters that are years old that didn't include this information, you're behind, you need to spruce it up.

If you're doing a strict foreclosure, would that come into effect?

Strict foreclosures are a little bit different and it's pretty much the same every place. Uniform commercial code is supposed to be uniform, that there's little state variances. But in that situation, when you're taking it back in full satisfaction of the account, my position is it shouldn't come into effect. But, but I've actually dealt with one regulator that, that still wanted to see that, that the math was being done, which to me makes no sense because customer doesn't know anything anyway. But, but they actually wanted to see it.

I mean, is it doing that, doing what you're speaking of, that takes a lot of manpower because for one, you've got to, you know, make sure you have the miles got, you know, you've got to prorate everything. I mean that could be really time consuming.

Yeah. You know what I see a lot of though is the folks on the ground doing the work don't even have any familiarity with what the product is and what the language on the back of the back of the contract that talks about refunds. They've never even read it. So the first thing you have to do is educate and train your people and make sure they understand the issue here and aren't just running through the motions. The folks that I think really struggle with this are the companies that do business in several states, finance companies that maybe they accept several different products because then it's really hard to keep track of them.

Yeah, yeah, you're tracking them all down individually and just knowing who gets what especially I mean again comes back to like us with the buy here, pay here situation. Like after a repo, you don't even think, I don't even think to look at those ancillary products and credit the refunds back to the deficiency balance.

Yeah, so. So I helped somebody with one recently and they had a mess because in a two year period they had three different products. They just kept on changing products. They kept on thinking they were getting a better deal and unfortunately each product had its own way of doing refunds. So. So the poor folks that were asked to do that job, their heads were spinning.

Everybody, one more break in here. Primaland Great sponsor of the podcast. A great place to go for your.

Capital needs and capital is needed. Jeff, I've bought a bunch of. I bought a bunch of cars today and capital is definitely needed and we've got to make sure that we're getting things done. Primal and also is a sponsor of Buy Here, Pay Here, United and Compliance Unleashed. Those guys there, not only do they lend you money, do they freaking stand behind you? They also are making sure, helping make sure that their dealers are compliant by being involved in things like this.

And an interesting side note, guys, for those of you that watch the podcast on YouTube, you always know when Luke is buying cars during an interview because he's looking this direction, he's looking to the side. And you know if I'm buying cars during the interview because I'm looking up here at my second screen watching ove to see what's popped up.

So I would never do that. But Prominent will help you buy more cars because they will make sure you have the line of credit to do.

So.

Back to the episode.

My head spinning right now.

Let's talk about that too. While we're talking about repos and the Buy Here, Pay here, our post repo process, right. Like when we take the car in on repo, we send out the letters depending on state laws and things like that. What do you see dealers missing in that process that they're not maybe, you know, following everything letter of the law.

Quite frankly, a lot of times the letters are wrong because they're not following the statute. They try to get cute and say other things that aren't in the statute. So that's a problem. Allowing their tow companies to charge other sorts of fees, fees to get personal property back. That. That's a big one. Regulators really don't like to see that depending on the state, you may not be allowed to apply a storage charge. I see that one tripped on a lot, not waiting long enough before the car is disposed of. You know, a lot of folks have a really bad habit and I say bad because it's not legally sufficient. It's good for their business, but it's not sufficient that they, okay, we repossessed it on Tuesday. On Wednesday, we're going to have the RFC sell it back to the dealership and we're going to put it back on the lot and can't do that.

Yes, that's something.

There's a lot of little traps and unfortunately it's become a heavily targeted area both for the regulators and for the plaintiff's lawyers. And it's One of the reasons that I tell everybody, please use arbitration agreements, because the lawyers know if you're doing it wrong once, you're doing it wrong a thousand times, and they're going to try to turn it into a class action.

Yeah, don't want that.

Do you see any. Are any buy here, pay here? Dealers still taking people to collections after for deficiency balances?

Oh, God, yeah.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah, I see it a lot. And, you know, my advice to folks is understand the climate that you're in. Understand how your local judges look at that. You have some states you could. You could do it, and it's robust that they have a strong judicial precedent for, you know, whether it's garnishing wages or whatever. And you could do that. You have to make sure your paperwork is in order. You're not subject to a counterclaim, but you could do that. You have other jurisdictions like Texas, where I'm at, it's really not a good state for any sort of deficiency balance activity. So. So it depends on a lot of factors. My fear for folks is a lot of times that they just rely on their local lawyers, you know, and their local lawyers are trying to bank on this stuff. And then as soon as a counter claim comes, it wipes out any profit that we're going to make.

Yeah.

My fear is that they're relying on dealers in Facebook groups to give them legal advice. There was another post to bring that up again, and someone was talking about, oh, well, this customer did this, this, and this. And everyone's like, well, you can. You can go do this and this and this. And I was like, oh, my gosh, please don't do that. Whatever this person is telling you, do not do that.

Like, stop while you're ahead.

It's so funny, man. Like, yeah, the amount of bad slash illegal advice out there is definitely endless.

Well, and it's funny because. Because I follow those groups and sometimes I'll see client post things and, you know, I'll share my name. I'll call them and say, hey, just pick up.

I never talked to that.

Where did that come from?

Have a discussion if you've been doing it like this. So, Steve, talk to us. Where do we get the good advice from? Where do we go? Possibly some sort of a convention where we can get all sorts of education and get our ducks in a row.

Yes. Okay. Compliance Unleashed is our conference. This is our fifth year doing. Has grown each and every year. We do it in DFW. It's May 22nd to 24th. I know a lot of dealers are thinking to myself, oh, hell no, I'm not going to spend two days at a compliance conference. This isn't boring. Compliance. This. I tell folks that every other conference that you go to is all about how to put money in your pocket. Our conference is all about how to keep money in your pocket. We teach you a lot of strategies how to keep money in your pocket from the type of insurance you should have to how to deal with these identity theft and fraud scams, to collections practices and sales and advertising. Everything you could think of. And the great thing, what we've been able to do, it's not only we give great information, but a lot of folks that are responsible for protecting your business. They don't know anybody else that's asked to do what they do. And they come to our conference and they meet other folks that have the same job. And you know, you don't always have to call ignite. A lot of times you call another dealer and say, hey, you know, I met you at that conference and we talked about that issue. What do you do about this? So it's really. We built a network. We built a lot of peer to peer to where folks now have tremendous resources to where they can get answers.

We've always. That's what we just hark on when it comes to conventions. You go there to, to, to build relationships at conventions. And, and that's pretty awesome because this is hard stuff. And, and it's sometimes it's a little easier for us to listen to what other dealers did than to listen to Ignite tell us what to do. But, and also, I mean, I just think about this while we were talking. There's probably some, some ways this compliance can actually make you money because there might be something you can charge for that you currently aren't charging for for. So I'm sure that that falls in there too, doesn't it? See? Oh, yeah.

We, we've had folks tell us over the years, you know, I learned things at that conference and it opened up a whole new area for me that I never thought about. And we try to get the best speakers, people that really have good ideas, people that have a different way of looking at things. And so it's a great opportunity for folks to learn about things that, that they maybe never saw before.

Yeah, yeah, it's so true. I'm. There's so many areas that I'm just scared to even go into because I don't know what they are. You know, like, I don't even want to. I don't mess with that. I don't want to add that fee. I don't want to charge that. Maybe it's legal, maybe it's not. I just don't want to mess with it. So, yeah, finding out and being like, no, no, no, this is. This is completely legal. If I do X, Y and Z and it will make me money, that. That's huge.

Yeah.

Steve, we're going to see you May 22nd through the 24th.

It's really a great event. I mean, it's. It's a. It's almost like a giant 20 group for protecting your business. Lots of good ideas. And, you know, we know to get people out of the office is a struggle, so we feed you good open bars, we have a big party, and we make it fun.

That's all.

Good bar. I'm favorite. Steve, thank you and thanks for keeping all of us safe.

Thank you, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you and speak to your audience. Love what you guys are doing and what you guys have built.

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