#268 - How I Built This w/ Josh Sellers

You are listening to the Independent Dealer podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Absolutely appreciate the opportunity to be on the program. Excited. Love talking about the industry. Love talking about cars and anything anywhere involving anything in that field. Josh Sellers. We are Auto Express of Hamilton. I grew up in Cincinnati. Our dealership is just north of Cincinnati. For reference, if I take my son to a Bengals game, it's probably a 25 minute drive south. So we definitely pull a lot of customers from the Cincinnati area. We've been in business for 18 years. This summer we are 100% buyer payer.

Very nice. And what's your ACV, Josh?

Last week or this week?

What's the last 12 month average? How about that?

I'm a CID guy, so I don't know my ACV and we do sales tax up front and that greatly impacts.

We do too.

We're a little south of 8,000 bucks.

Okay. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, that's really a good sweet spot. I wish I could be there, but I get in. How many accounts do you have, Josh?

I work 1800 this morning.

That's slow growth. Slow, slow growth.

Freaking out, Josh.

I want to, I want you to.

Rewind us all the way back to the beginning because we're going to talk about the slow growth thing because I've been at it for 18 years and I am nowhere near that. So I thought I was slow growth, you know. How did you get started, man? Where did you come up with the idea? Why buy here, pay here? Like, give us the origins, your first car, the kind of, the birth of, of this whole situation.

It's almost unbelievable. And I'll try to give you the Cliff Notes version. I have.

We got, we got all day, buddy. We got all that.

I have a really dear family friend. I call him Uncle Tony, but he's not, he's not really a blood relative. And he owned and operated, still does down in Cincinnati. He has a pretty large piece of property that he lives on, has a big pole barn outback that he's now expanded. But he's a body shop guy. So I've been in and around his store and he would put together cars sometimes that mainly he'd get stuck with from insurance companies or customers that just didn't want to repair them. And I would see him or help him sell a car. This is back taking soap and writing a phone number and parking them at, you know, Taco Bell down the street. So I always knew a little bit about how the transaction of basically selling a car Went late high school, early college years. And he also owned and operated a limousine company. I went to college sporadically and never, never graduated. And I was back and forth, started running his limousine company. Started pin hooking some cars on the side and just really, really liked it. I knew a buddy in Hamilton that was doing same thing. I was pin hooking cars and I had a friend down in Cincinnati that had a car lot. He also had a body shop. Friend of my uncles. I put a couple cars down there and I made twenty five hundred dollars. And all he wanted was a hundred dollars every time. I sold like three cars, made 2500. And I said, man, I didn't have any children. I wasn't married at this time. There was a lot to rent. Hamilton's fifteen hundred dollars a month, which was a lot of money to me at that time. My house, I had a small house. I won't say like 900, 900amonth for my house payment. I started a car lot in Hamilton, Ohio. My landlord was an old legendary Ralph Ford car guy. And I didn't know this at the time, but he's your prototypical gold chain, hairy chest, you know, the stay away from type guy. But he's a legend to me. I still talk to him this day. Big influence on my life. So when I first started, I had six or seven cars. I think two were mine, two were my uncle's. Two or three were just neighbors that co signed their car to me that I talked to and two or three weeks in the business. I had only sold a couple cars. My landlord comes out to me and he says, josh. And he's got old raspy, what you need to start selling these cars? I'm like, what's time? You're selling them too cheap. And I'm buying parts like a thousand twelve hundred bucks. Because I don't, I don't have a whole lot of money. And he says, instead of put the price of the car on the window, why don't you put, you know, 50 bucks a week or 300 down. So I had a couple league of town cars that I had like a grand in. I don't have any employees at this time. I have one of those plastic suction cup things that when you put the window, you move. Be back in an hour. So if I went to the auctioner or the bank or the title office, I would, you know, be back in an hour. No, I don't have a computer system. I'm doing everything on hand. And so I put. The only thing I hear was you can charge more. It's basically the only thing I've heard. So I take one of my Lincolns that I got a thousand in. I think I mark it up 2, 900 bucks, and I get somebody to give me 200 bucks down and 50 bucks a week. I start a note card system in a box in the corner that's, you know, Weekly, BI Weekly, etc. I'm doing deals by hand.

I mean, that was Josh, come on. That was 18 years ago. We had computers, right?

He's like, I didn't go anything about desktop computers.

I didn't go into business to. I didn't go into business to do buy here, pay here. So when I started out, I just, you know, I got my stickers from the guy at the auction that would be, you know, have his, his truck with stickers and the balloons, and I got just basically a simple buyer's guide as is. You know, I only had six cars when I looked at these computer systems, and they were, you know, $2,000 a month or some type of inventory system. I'm like, I don't need that right now. So if you're just going to sell, you know, 5, 10, 12 cars a month cash, you didn't really need anything more. I just started out, only been a business for three weeks at a time. I want to say somewhere around the three or four month mark, I'm doing buy here, pay here, and I literally have no money. Like, I can't go. So I didn't even understand that when I went and bought a car for $1000 or $1200 and took one or $200 down, how I was going to replace said vehicle. So I think I started selling 15 or 20 cars a month pretty much immediately. Yeah, money and I can go.

That's what it gets. Well, that's when it gets interesting. So.

And I still have that problem.

We, we all do, Josh. But that's, I mean, that. What you're talking about is, I mean, Jeff, you and I have heard this so many times that someone starts as a curbstoner or a pin hooker, which. That's an old car saying, I love that. And, and it evolves into this massive business that runs you and you just don't know what to do. And so Josh here is a couple months in and he's out of cash. I mean, that is the story of the buy here, pay here, dealer. So, Josh, you're out of cash and you're sitting there and what do you do?

I went and got a floor plan. I've always had pretty good credit and even though I wasn't, didn't have any money or, or any business experience, I had good credit. I went to Mannheim, got up, I don't even remember 150, $200,000 line of credit. And I got a flyer in the mail from a place called Canton Financial which is no longer in business. And they funded note dealers only in Ohio and they gave me a line as well. And their, the way their line worked was they would fund me back after my point of sale up to 100% of what I paid for the vehicle. So I used to use them, I'd back my down payment out. So I buy a car for three grand, I get $1,000 down, they'd fund me two grand, I'd pay them. I was paying I think 18% interest. I used to pay them twice a month the same as my customer paid me. And I started, I got Fraser which was, I don't. 750 bucks, 750 bucks a year. I think we're up to 10 grand a month. We pay for all the different software we had. I don't know how to use half the software we have now but we got so many acronyms. I don't CRMs and BDCs and FBI's. I'm like do we need all this stuff? But anyway, back in the day I got a really good high school buddy of mine that came to work, work for me and he was much more computer savvy than I, than I was. There was a gentleman that I sold a car to, he was either my first or second customer. His son in law, Hispanic guy came and started changing some oil and doing little knickknacks on cars for us. I used to pay him $50 a day and I wouldn't let him come every day because I didn't have the 50 sometimes pay him. We didn't have a garage, we had a lean to out back that was basically four post and a shingle roof. And we're northern Ohio or Northern Cincinnati, we get all four seasons. So that's kind of how I started. So I use that line of credit, I use my floor plan. I would sell cash cars to basically pay my bills. I'd sell a cash car to pay my mortgage at my house. I'd sell a cash car to pay my lot. So cash car to pay the guy that was helping me out in my office. So year one, don't quote me on these numbers but we're, I don't even remember 7, $800,000 worth of accounts receivable, some somewhere in that neighborhood. By the end of year one, my landlord comes to me and there's a buy here, pay here dealership next door and his brother's got one down the street. They're like big timers back in the day. And they didn't like my 15, 25 cars a month, whatever we were doing by the end of year one. And they made a cash offer on my lot. So my landlord comes to me, says, hey, you can buy it. And I'm like, I don't have any money. You know, I've never got a commercial real estate loan. I don't have any money. And I mean, I was. I was in tears for days over that. I found a lot for rent right down the street that was $2,500 a month, which was crippling to me at the time. The worst part about it, which I didn't know a. I was able to secure the lot, which were. That's where we are now. And we've been here for the past 17 years. We've torn down, expand, bought the property, I don't know, 13 or 14 years ago. We have a really nice dealership on it now. But the day that I moved down here, we started selling 35 cars a month. So that was a whole new set of problems. As anybody in the note business understands how more sales can equate to much more problems.

Yeah. At what point did you. At what point did you go start really ramping up? I mean, was this always kind of slow, organic, like at a salesman, at a, you know, at a title clerk, at a receptionist? Or did you ever sit down and say, hey, I'm going to go get a line of credit, I'm going to borrow. I want to go from 30 cars a month to 80 cars a month, and this is how we're going to get there?

I've never, I've never done that. And now that I look back on it, one of the biggest saving graces to the little bit of success that we had is my lack of access to capital. In my infancy stage, I would have got $5 million. Year three, four, five, six, seven. I've been out of business because I didn't know how to use. I didn't. I didn't know how to forecast properly. I didn't know how to reinsure. I didn't know how to, you know, legally pay the least amount of tax I possibly could with any type of benefits the IRS provides our industry. I didn't understand cid. The way I do now, I didn't understand any of it. I would say the first several years, probably close to four, I bought every car, I sold every car, I repoed every car I worked six days a week. I did everything. I mean I still to this day will see somebody in Walmart and they'll come give me a hug and how you doing? And I'm like man, I sold you a 98 Durango and I remember I put a window regulator in the back right window for you because it was winter time and I sat there and did it on a lot with my lot tech, you know. But I was all, I didn't even realize I was working hard. I was working really, really, really really hard. But I didn't know a lot. I, I just was, was basically clueless and stumbled upon a flyer for a 20 group meeting is kind of how my education in the business has evolved up since then.

I tell you the story of getting too much capital too soon in this business is a cautionary tale because it happens a lot. Anybody out there that's, that's been in the business as long as us three sitting here know that the grind of trying to figure out where you're going to get cash to make that, that mortgage payment or whatever some somehow creates this thing in our mind. For one it'll, it makes us not go too crazy too fast because the worst thing about here pay here dealer can do is get over leveraged and, and then have a couple slow sales months and then they're out of business. Right. So Josh, when did you start? So you, you went from, from 20 cars a month to 35 cars a month almost immediately. It sounds like when you, when you moved, what was the next jump?

So I went to a 20 group. I, I want to say it might have been lead them at the time. Chuck, Chuck Bonanno was the moderator. I want to say it was my fourth or fifth year in business and I talked to Chuck a few times on the phone and he sent me all this stuff for the comp. I didn't, I didn't even know what a controller was. I knew I had an accountant that was down the street that I knew more about my hair payers than they did and they didn't know and I didn't know anything and he sent me this composite and I just, I can't figure out any of it. I, I mean I had way more blanks than I had answered but I went and I was by far the youngest person there. And not saying I'm mature Now, but I was the youngest, the least knowledgeable, the most immature person. But I was in my dealership every day working, and I think I had a million and a half, $2 million. I don't even remember what the number was. And a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt, and they wouldn't let me. There was a guy that voted me not to be in the group because of my lack of knowledge, and he wanted me to go to Fast Forward. I've never been. I got people that work for me that chair 20 group meetings now in different capacities, whether it be service finance groups, etc. Etc. So we've evolved a long way since then. But it kind of like, it crushed me. I was like, man, I met. I've never been in a room with people that understood what I did. And they were giving me a really hard time about selling cash cars. They couldn't believe that I was selling cash cars. And. And don't mix the two. And I ended up going to. In a buy here, pay here summit in Vegas, and I met Brent Carmichael. And Brent. You guys know Brent.

Yeah, great guy.

So Brent lives in Louisville, which is only 90 minutes from me, and Brent is major influence on my life.

He's been on the show several times. You can tell that that guy knows what he's talking about.

Yeah. So he's a. He's, I'm sorry, choked up about him. And he's. It's just. It's just. I don't know, it's crazy. I mean, I'm. I'm uneducated, you know, I'm not. I'm not scared of work. I'm. I'm just. I'm not a geniusly smart person and just, you know, put your nose down and kind of go to work. And you get around some people that are willing to, to share with you. It's just life changing. And I try to do that as much as I can. Now, being on the other side, where I'm still learning a lot too, but when I get around somebody that's in the infancy stage of the business, I try to give them anything I can to help them out, you know.

Hey, everybody, real quick. Want to make sure you guys are signed up for buy here, pay here, United. The clock is ticking. We're like, what, less than 30 days out from the 2023 convention in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. So get signed up.

Yeah, I mean, if you talk, if you listen to what Josh is talking about, it's. It's the dealers that are involved that make the Difference, right? Yeah. And being involved means being involved in your state association, being involved with going to conventions like this, it's going to make you a better dealer. And let me tell you, last year, Buy Here, Pay here, United was one of the best conferences I've ever been to, Jeff. It's inexpensive. The whole nine yards is inexpensive. And you're going to learn so much.

And you'll see us lifelong, lifelong friends, man, guys you will meet and you will talk to every month for the rest of your life about the car business.

I tell you, that is, yes, that's what we all do. And, and I tell you no. If anybody out there is not setting up 20 group and had another dealer or a moderator, someone change your life and put you in the right direction, it is humbling. I walked into a 20 group thinking I knew everything and realized really quickly that I didn't know anything, anything. And there was dealers in there who were, you know, netting $1.52 million a year.

Yeah.

And, and I'm just, you know, I'm nothing. And it's, it's a great, it's, it's a humbling feeling at the time, but when you look back, it's a great feeling. And luckily Jeff and I've been able to help, you know, some dealers along the way here lately. So that's, that's a fun thing.

I remember these guys were Talking about having $800,000 in a CD and building lake houses. And man, you know, I took, I'm just trying to take my girlfriend out and get a nice steak. I was in infatuated with the cash they had, the things they talked about it and I didn't even know that I was on the track to get those things. I had no, no idea. And, and with all Due respect, the first group of guys that I was in the 20 group with were all 3, 4, 5, $600 account guys. So a lot of really big dealers now kind of disrespect that class. But those guys taught me so much because when you have a dealership that size, it's only about one thing, cash flow. They know exactly what they're going to cash flow, exactly what their cash and deal is going to be. They know exactly what any IRS obligations are going to be. The bigger you get, the things get a little messy. They're not as neat and clean. So these guys weren't, most of them weren't involved in the day to day, and it was a nice, neat operation that they knew what kind of cash they were going to Take away from it. So as we surpass most, most of those guys, I still try to stick to a lot of principles that those guys taught me. My first 20 group that I got in after Chuck would let me in his, I still communicate with most of those guys and I haven't been in a group with them for, you know, over a decade. But a lot of really good guys and mentors personally and on the dealership side as well.

Mm.

It's super interesting to me that the humility that it takes that not all car dealers have, you know, as we go out and talk to dealers and even trying to get dealers to participate in things like, you know, the association, there's so many that either don't care, they think they know it all and they're just not interested in learning. And so they don't go out to these things. And you're like, well I see you doing this thing and it's completely wrong. Even though you believe it's completely right, go ahead. Because you don't have the humility to either know that someone's been down that road before. So for dealers that do step out of that comfort zone and say, hey, I don't know it all. I think I know it all, but I don't know it all. I'm going to go to 20 group, I'm going to go to convention, I'm going to go to learn. It's a huge, huge life changer when you can just kind of, you know, check your ego.

I was recently in a group with a guy that just similar age and came from a different industry and just uberly successful. Probably paid taxes on 50 times more in a year than I ever have. I mean just uberly successful. And for whatever reason, state and federal laws and different situations, he wanted to venture off into the note business. And he's extremely wealthy guy and I mean I pretty much begged him not to do it, you know.

Yeah. Dumb, dumb, dumb joker.

Even with the experience that I have, it is the hardest business in the world. Equally rewarding. But I, I mean I'm a. Not in a bragging way, but I, I probably discount some of the knowledge that I have. I'm a, I have a PhD in buying cars, note cars, selling them, dealing with upset customers, reconditioning, ordering parts, dealing with body shops, sublets, hiring mechanics.

I've.

It's pretty much the only thing I've ever done my whole entire adult life run running titles. You know, I'm, I'm in 20 groups of guys that you have a 40 $50 million portfolio and they're want to have a roundtable discussion about how, how to get a title back sooner than three weeks from the bnb. And I'm like, you know, just I, I did it all. I used to wait in line at the BNB and run my own titles. Not saying I'm better or worse, it's just my knowledge of certain things in the businesses. I have a, I have a lot of experience in pretty much every aspect of buyer payer and I'm still learning. And you can get 19 things right out of 20 in this business and get one thing wrong and be upside down and almost vice versa too. You could be really good at one thing and mediocre 19 things and be very profitable. It's just a, it's a very difficult business and I feel like the more capital you have, especially if your knowledge doesn't match the capital, it's a dangerous business to get into. Very dangerous.

Yeah.

If you got a big old engine and a lot of speed and you dump gas into that thing but you ain't got a steering wheel, that's a recipe for disaster. And we, we have definitely seen it a lot of times.

Absolutely.

When did. So Josh, when did you. So at first, I guess, you know, I think a lot of us, when we get into the business, our definition of recon is a lot different than our definition of recon at this moment. When did you, you know, I'm pretty sure you do have a recon facility now. How do you handle recon now and when did you go to this model that you have now? Because I assume you're selling 100 cars a month or so. It's hard to buy 100 cars a month.

Yeah, I'm ready. We have a really, we have a pretty high charge off rate. I'm not too happy with it. I honestly don't know how to control it as well as I need to. And we're probably will be over 100 cars, especially February, March, we do more than that. But on a month over month we should beat 100 cars every month. So getting them through recon is, it's definitely a big deal. We're not perfect at it, but my service manager knows that it's a big deal. We have an inventory manager that knows that it's a big deal. Everybody that works in my dealership knows that getting through cars to our lot is a big deal. And I feel like I'm involved in my business. I don't run a day to day, but I'm here every day when you make things a big deal. And I'm not a jerk about it. I don't walk around my business with a sledgehammer or a baseball bat. It's important to our success as a company to get cars through recon. The faster the better, the more organized. And we tweaked and continue to tweak that progress till we're not in the business anymore. So I'm always open to anything that helps us get a better car or a faster car to the front line. And that process to us is constantly evolving. I tell my staff all the time, if I don't have to compromise my morals or my ethics. I'm extremely flexible about any way that we're going to chase the finish line. It's not only Josh's way. I'm not hardcore about anything. I'm open minded. I think outside the box. I'm willing to do any and all things I can to make this a better place for my employees to work and a better place for my customers to do business. And I let everybody here know that all the time.

Yeah, it's such a hard balance when you give employees, managers the reins to kind of do what they think is is good or to try to improve a process or go down a road. And then you see it and you're like, oh, I've done that a couple of times in the past. Let me tell you how this is going to end if you start trying to do it this way because it's going to cause issues or confusion or we've done it before. So there is such a fine line between giving them the reins and letting them run and being a sledgehammer walking around and smashing down every idea that somebody comes up with.

This is a really hard thing. This is a slow growth story too. Now 18 years. So our serve. Our current service facility is caddy corn from our dealership. It's probably 100 yards from our front door of our dealership to walk over our service facility. We have 13 service bays over there. And then we have a standalone detail facility as well. That is five days. It's fenced in blacktop. We can probably hold 450 cars over there. We did not, we did not start that way. So we have a really nice service facility. It would rival a lot of new car dealership service facilities. Because I feel like we compete with those techs. We compete. I have to hire the same tech as the Toyota dealership. Why does he want to work for me? You know, so I got to have a facility that Matches. I can't hire. If a guy is going to go make whatever the dollar amount is in your, in your neck of woods, if it's $40 here or $40 at some dive shop with a, you know, I got to have a hubcap to go in and use the bathroom, I don't stand a chance. So we've done a ton over the past four or five years to our facility as we were able to. So we. I'm not a really, I'm not a cheap guy when it comes to anything involved in my business. I tell my peers in my 20 group all the time. I'm not saying my house is dirty. My wife is fantastic about keeping a house. But if your house is cleaner than your dealership, your priorities are messed up. If your bathroom at your house is cleaner than the bathroom at your store, your priorities are messed up. This is the bread and the butter for my life. This is, I don't mean this in my wife and children, but this place, with all due respect, is more important than that. I have to take care of this place. This is the lifeblood for everything that I do. We have 41 full time employees. I, I am at some part in some capacity responsible for their families as well. And I take that. I don't take that responsibility lightly.

Hey everybody, real quick. Primal Land sponsor the podcast. A great place to go and get capital for growing your buy here, pay your portfolio or buying the dealership and expanding your service center to 18 bays or whatever you need to do to make sure you provide good customer service like what Josh has been talking about.

I mean, Josh, Josh has hit the nail on the head in so many positions of this customer conversation. One, he got kicked off the property he was doing well at because he didn't buy it. Right. Primaland can help you there. He needed cash, which all of us buy here, pay here, dealers need at certain times. And Primalin can help you with that. So make sure you reach out to the guys over there. They will not only help you get the money you need, they will also help you make sure your books are in order when you get it. One second. I want, I want everybody to, to go on Google and look at Josh's recon facility. What he's telling you right now is right. This place is incredible. Josh, when did you build, when did you build this?

So we've actually done a couple. Our main service facility was built seven years ago and then about 12 months ago we added on the L to it to make it 13 bays and our actual new Detail facility just got done about six weeks ago. So we, when we, we've had four different service facilities as we. It's the new land that we built is it was an abandoned electrical company so we, we tore it down, built the nine bay service facility. Our detail was using the last two bays and it was six acres. We black topped and fenced off half of it since the original purchase. We've added a new detail facility. We added four new bays and then we knocked down the fence and added, we doubled the size of the parking lot.

This is.

You see all that on Google or not?

Yes. 2444 Bob Meyer Road in Hamilton, Ohio. Google that up real quick because 2401.

And it's still Cadillac converter. Stay out of there.

Yeah, if you're still in Cali converters we'll mess you up. But I mean this place is just immaculate and that's.

Thank you man. I love it.

I tell you but that is so important is we are hiring the same techs that the new car stores are hiring. And, and you and I talked before we came on air about you know, the last two years how everybody's had such issue with a year and a half. We've had such issues with retaining technicians and retaining just anybody. This is what you have to do to compete and you've done it. Man. This is amazing.

Jeff, you look our current dealership that we're in now. When I, when I moved down here, I told you my landlord sold the place. We moved down here. It was an old gas station, two, two bay garage. The bathroom was outside. So for over a decade, 14 years, probably even after remodel, we still had to go outside to the bathroom. We turned our garage into an office box place across the street. But our Original office was 7,800 square feet, 600 square feet with a garage right there. So you know, if I was on the phone with a customer and they lift the car up in there, I had to put my finger in my ear because the compress, you know that's, that's kind of, you know how we started and where we evolved from and when we, when we, we remodeled that place several times so the inside of it looked way nicer than the outside. But when we tore that place down I noticed our sales went up. But when we would hire the quality of individual that we got drastically changed. And that was my really reasoning behind doing it was I want a better place for my customers to come work. We also this year closed on Saturdays. So that's been maybe don't have a. We're almost the first quarter. Maybe the best thing we've ever done. Yeah.

Both Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday and Sunday.

Wow.

We did that. And we did that in the middle of COVID and we have started opening. I'm sorry, let me rephrase that. We have opened February and March just to key in on. On the tax money. But I'm telling you, it does make a difference. Makes a difference for your employees. It makes a difference for your psyche as well. So I agree, that's. But that's bold to have as many to sell as many cars as you need to sell. That's pretty bold to do that. Not many dealers are doing that.

I did it honestly, just because of the issues that we were having with turnover and, you know, trying to hire. Trying to staff anybody that runs a business. If you have whatever the number is, if you have 50 employees and you're. You're open six days a week, you have ebbs and flows of days off where key people are gone every single day. Because you can't have all 50 people work. Work six days a week. When you shrink down to five days a week, the scheduling is instantaneously easier.

And then it just fixes itself.

Absolutely, it fixes itself. So I went and told my wife, I said, hey, listen, we're in. We basically, we come from. She might be low middle class and I'm low. Low middle class of our upbringing. And I said, we might not be able to use the American Express every single day, all day long. I'm not saying build a poor house, but I don't know, we might go 1200. I don't know what this thing's gonna do, but I'm doing it for my staff. I think it's the best thing. And it's had the absolute opposite effect. I mean, we beat our sales projections in January, February and March. We've never. We've been here for 18 years. We've never been closed on Saturday. We're selling more cars. I knew the collections piece of it would kind of work itself out Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the following week. And then the better we get at pushing digital up front, but it's. It's just been overwhelming.

And you're only open 10 to 6, it looks like most days. So everyone's working bell to bell.

We're open Monday, Thursday and Friday, 10 to 7, and then Tuesday, Wednesday, 10 to 6. So our sales manager, our GM, our collections manager, and our warranty manager all work bell to bell, which I don't quote me on this. I Should probably know it's low 40s. I mean it's not, it's not 50 hours a week. And then a lot of our, you know, admin staff and some of our sales team, they kind of float in. Somebody comes in at 11, somebody comes in at 9, 30 or 10, they leave at 4 or 5 to, you know, bridge all gaps. But most people besides team leads are 38 to 40. And then we got some team leads that are 40 to 43.

Proximity assume your recon facility is the same way, same hours.

It's always been Monday through Friday. Those guys come in earlier and I'm, I'm open to four day work week, especially over at service. I tell my service manager, like I said, about the flexibility. I don't care what days they work. I just hired my first ever. He starts next Monday. Part time tech. If you would have asked me last year or two years ago, I would say I was never going to do that. I do think this guy has a great personality and he's an A plus tech. And the reason he wants part time is completely understandable and makes sense. And my service people, with all due respect, I love my service manager, I love my service team. And they are broke or not broke. There's no gray area. There's no square peg and a round hole. And I'm like, give me a sledgehammer, I'll get it. You know, I'm, I'm just, I'm not a technician. My mind doesn't work like a technician. So when I brought this to my service manager, he starts, what if a car breaks on Wednesday? And he how's it? We gotta leave it on the list for three days. And all these negatives about why we can't do it. And I said, what if it doesn't break on Wednesday? You know, what if this guy asked, what if this guy replaces somebody? What if he turns 100% and he replaces somebody that turns 70%? Look at the numbers. What does that do to your numbers? You know? So I said, I don't know if I'm gonna hire this guy. I don't know if I want guy. But one thing I am gonna do is I'm gonna talk to him. I'm gonna. There's no negative about me talking to a guy. The first thing I do when I talk to somebody is I take them to my service. If I like them, I take them to my service facility. Guess what if I don't hire him now he knows that this tiny little buy here, pay here on Route 4 has great benefits. They treat their employees great. And damn, they got a facility just nice as a 12 dealership down the street because they've never been to our facility. So all these things are positives. These are. This is what I can do versus what I can't do. I'm not a. My dad told me my whole life, excuse my language, can't never did a damn thing. And I say it all the time, all the time. So I tell my service manager, go find me some cans, find me some cans, find me some cans. I don't want to hear any more cans. So then, you know, we both agreed as soon as the guy left, we need to hire this guy. And I said, jason, I want to let you know I interviewed this guy thinking that there's no way I'm going to let somebody in my business part time in the recon center. And when the guy left, I'm like, we have to hire this guy. And he did the same thing. So just being as flexible as you possibly can, I try not to have any lines in the sand, so to speak.

Yeah, I think it's really cool that you. And we've seen some really, really smart dealers do this, invest in their fixed ops, their recon centers, to a large degree so that you have that kind of flexibility. Like, if you have enough bays that you can bring a guy in part time and he still has a place to put his tools or whatever the arrangement needs to be, and then you've got other folks where we're just, like, scrimping to get by, and we're not making the kind of capital investments into some of those really crucial areas, like our recon. We all know that it's going to get worse. We all know it's going to get harder. We all know that cars are harder to work on, techs are harder to find and keep happy, more expensive, blah, blah, blah. And yet, like you said earlier in the podcast, you expect them to work underneath a shade tree with a hose to drink out of, you know, like, and you also said, like, it's so it. I wouldn't let my boys treat my garage in my house the way I let the techs treat the shop, or the bathroom, for that matter. Like, I would wring my boy's neck if they treated the bathroom at my house the way my techs treat the bathroom here at the shop. It's like, that's such an interesting.

I've had that talk with my service manager every day for the past two weeks. We've let the inside of our Garage. It's never looked like it does now. And I can't even go over there. Like, I start, my skin starts crawling and he's like, hey, I know how you feel, and I agree. But look at the sales that we've done. Look at the customer service that we've done. I had to, I had to slow down on something over the course of tax time to try to meet the quotas that you asked for. And what I picked was the cleanliness of this garage. But I promise in the next week or so we're gonna have a, a reconciling of that. And I said, do your thing. I, you won't hear another word about it.

So I don't, I don't get, I don't get up to Ohio much, but I think I'm gonna try to make a trip up there to see, see your place, Josh. This is, yeah, pretty awesome.

Is this parts. Is the parts yard behind your building? Is that yours?

That is, that's a junkyard that we don't own. It's been there for a hundred years. I actually made the guy an offer that I thought was ridiculous last year and he turned me down. And I'm pretty, honestly now. I'm pretty excited about that. He turned me down. I just never, I never not have a project going on. And I have four kids. I, I got. I, I need to take a break. I need to take a break. I constantly am building or buying or expanding or. And I like it. That's kind of like stress and projects are almost like gas to my engine. I feel like. I'm not saying this is right. I just personally feel like a loser. I'm gonna, Somebody's gonna take everything I got if I'm not spinning 18 plates at one time and trying to conquer the world. And it's almost like it's not even financial. It's just. Yeah, that's what I like to do. I like to buy and sell and wheel and deal and build and.

True car dealer.

Real quick, guys. Talking about reinsurance. Now is the time. Tax time is through. The craziness is winding down. You have the energy to focus on building out your reinsurance program, whether that's adding your warranty or adding back end products or building out a better CPI program, which is what I really need to focus on. Building out a better CPI program.

Well, it's all about penetration when it comes to that CPI product. Jeff Buckeye will teach you how to do it, how to do it the right way. And, and, and Josh goes over this Again as well. Tax deferment is what it's all about because taxes will put you out of business if you don't handle in the right way.

Right?

Absolutely, absolutely. Back to episode.

Just to let you go without talking about reinsurance, when did you, I know you're a Buckeye guy. When did you get involved with reinsurance and what has it done for your business?

Well, I'm trying to think. This was probably, we were in our last house, this might have been seven, eight years ago. I've been doing CPI for north of a decade. Fantastic. It's life changing for us. But I wasn't doing any other reinsurance products. You know, CPI is pretty much 100%. It's 100% customer funded. I wasn't doing anything outside of that and I was getting egregious tax bills. I'm getting.

Yeah, we've been there.

It's a good word for it.

Yeah, I don't, I don't know who got that money, but it wasn't me.

What? Me?

I was going to get lines of credit and paying taxes. I mean, that's a, for anybody to, isn't in or around this business. I didn't stutter. I would go get lines of credit and put them in my bank account and then write a check to the irs.

I've done it, baby, I've done it.

And you know, I'm paying, I'm, I'm paying taxes on one and a half, two and a half, $3 million, which is fine if you're getting the money, but I'm not getting. So I had a lady one time leave a card in my mailbox from the IRS and I, I think I owed the IRS at the end of one year, $700,000 ten years ago. And I sent in a check for exactly half of it. And I started mailing them checks for $31,000. And they sent me, I was, every month I'm mailing them checks for $31,000. They sent me a letter in the mail. The phone number didn't work. And the address to this office out by my house there, there was no building there. This lady, a couple months later puts her card in my mailbox. I call her back right away, say, hey, Mr. Sellers, you have outstanding debt with iron. And I said, she's like, you got, you got really nice flowers. I'm like, you know, my wife loves flowers. Am I not allowed to have flowers? And I said, I've been paying. And she's like, well, I haven't got any of your Payments. So they were paint, they were taking my payments and applying to the year we were in instead of the previous year. So at this time the lady contacted me. I only owe like 40,000 bucks and I'm like, without you contacting me, I paid $680,000. I promise I'm going to pay another 20. She was being really abrasive and whatnot. And I called Brent and reached out to some, some of my other dealers and I said, hey, the taxes are going to put me out of business. Like I either have to not sell cars or figure out a way to try to get around some of this or park some money somewhere. And that led me to doing reinsurance. So reinsurance has a, it's great too because we offer a warranty to our customer included with every vehicle that where we're at is second to none. It's two year 24,000. We sell 150,000 mile car. It comes with a two year powertrain, plus it covers tons of stuff. Basically if we don't fix the car, we get it back and then we fix it. So why not fix it when it's in Jane Doe's driveway and she owes you $8,500. Once again, we're sales tax up front. We'll have to recon the car. So we offer a warranty that is phenomenal. It has a, we have a full time, full time employee that manages that, that part of our business. From the initial breakdown updates through service and then getting the car back to the customer. It's just a part of our business that we couldn't live without. And then it also has some great tax benefits on the side as well.

So that's, that's amazing. And congratulations. Congratulations will be in Ohio Quality deal of the year. I mean doing things like this is the way you get there, right Jeff?

Yeah, yeah. Having that long term focus, you know, that's, that's one of the biggest things and it's, it's definitely a thread we see amongst the dealers that are involved. And oh yeah, it's, I don't know if that's the chicken or the egg. If you just find high integrity dealers that want to get involved because that's who they are or if dealers start getting exposed to it and then they're like, oh yeah, I'm always going to run above the level. Of course I'm going to get my customers a warranty. Of course I'm going to stand behind my cars. Of course I'm going to, you know, but that's what it takes to change that. The overall negative image that some people might have of the industry, you know.

In infancy stages of our business and, you know, just life and adulthood. And I was single with no children and no knowledge, and now I'm married with four children and a little bit more knowledge. It's. And my morals and ethics have changed drastically since day one. We're intimately involved in our neighborhoods, our communities. We try to give back, and we do as much as we can to support the community around us because it treats us so good. And that's something I never want to change. We all sell used cars. They're not. We're not different than any other dealer on the street. When something happens, we're way different. And basically, that's what customers. These cars are going to break down or you're going to have a life issue. We got a department for both of those.

Yeah.

So true.

That's great.

Josh. Thank you so much for your time, man. We really appreciate it. What a great inspirational story, man. I look at this and I'm like, you know, we both opened our doors back in, you know, 2005, 2004. We are both in completely different places. Josh. Josh has got a lead foot on the accelerator, and I have just been sniffing roses, and he's.

He's slowly, slowly, slowly has a lead foot. Slowly has a lead foot on.

Oh, gas. All gas.

All right, buddy. Well, thanks for being with me. I appreciate it.

All right. Hey, it was an honor, gentlemen. Have a great, great rest of the week.

Okay?

You too, buddy.

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