#281 - NIADA Convention 2023 Wrapup

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting. Luke, I know you weren't at convention two weeks ago in Vegas. Everyone missed you, everyone asked where you were. Where were you?

I was working, you know, unfortunately, some. Sometimes you just gotta, gotta keep your head down and you gotta get to work and you gotta get it done, you know, unlike what you're doing right now. Jeff, I hope everybody, everybody can see your background because it is beautiful.

It's not a green screen. Yeah, you're right. We gotta unwind sometimes and relax. So that's what I'm doing this weekend. We're up here at Bear Lake with my wife's family having a good time. But the show must go on. Luke, we must talk. You did miss out on a great, great convention. And I want to give you kind of my wrap up, my take for you and any other dealers that weren't able to make it out and didn't get to come enjoy the fun with us. And I'm gonna do this in the compliment sandwich. This is what we call it around the office, right? The compliment sandwich.

You got your bread, you're doing great, but you suck. And by the way, I love you.

But I like your shirt. So, so we're gonna start this off with the good layer of the association, right? The people, like, hands down, pulling off a convention of this scale to any kind of a decent magnitude is just mind boggling to me. Right?

It is. And I, you know, the, the current administration was put behind the eight ball by the pure ridiculousness of the last CEO. And so our friend Jeff Martin, of course, pulled together the best he could and man, I heard it was a lot of, a lot of dealers there, Jeff. I heard it's one of the biggest attendant ever.

Attendance was off the charts. There were so many people, so many faces I didn't recognize. And yes, you know, they were, they were behind the eight ball. The association came in having to pick up the pieces and throw stuff together. With the turnover that they've had, there's not a lot of consistency from, you know, how did we do it last year? Well, I don't know. There's nobody here that was doing it last year. So. Jeremy did a great, great job. Man, that guy is skilled. Just having him get up and talk was so great. Gordy, the new president of the board, did a great, great job presenting. And of course, Jeff Martin, like, they're. Very rarely does someone step into a position like that that is universally adored, universally appreciated. There was not a single person that was like, I don't know if he's the right pick.

You know.

You know, I'm gonna go off on a bit of a tangent when, when the board picked the last idiot for CEO, they had three choices. And I will put this squarely on the board. The financial issues that the association are currently facing, the then aptitude of two and a half years, it falls directly on them. They have three choices, Jeff, and they picked the one choice that could totally suck. And you know, thank goodness someone like Jeff Martin is running the place now and hopefully we can get everything back to normal.

Yeah, yeah, he, he's, he is universally adored. And it was, it was great to see the reaction from people when he got up and spoke and around the area and a lot of the stuff he's talked about and, and you know, the changes that'll happen over the next few months and years. Really, really excited. The venue was amazing. The Wynn is just a beautiful resort, world class everything, accommodations, venue. Interesting tidbit. Not sure who put the convention hall glass windows directly outside the topless pool area.

That seemed like that's a win. That's a win. That's good stuff.

Seemed like a bit of a distraction for the dealers. A lot of rubbernecking going on as you walked past those windows. So not sure that location was key for keeping people's attention.

But, but it, but it may have been planned. I mean, who, I mean, you know.

You might as well have the sessions out at the pool then in that case if you're trying to get attendance up. But anyways, so to that degree, wonderfully planned, wonderfully attended, a lot of great people. A couple of points that I would like to make and I'm sure the association guys don't listen to this and I've told most of the ones that matter, my opinions and input, but a couple of things right, the expo hall was great. It was packed, sold out, a lot of vendors we'd never seen before. And as a side note, guys, at the end of this we will tack on a couple of interviews. I did three or four interviews with some vendors that I didn't recognize. So we did kind of the 60 second elevator pitch that we're going to tack on at the end of this episode if you stick around long enough. Obviously the guys from Buckeye were there. Love them. Great sponsors of the podcast, always helping out. The guys from Primal End were there at the lender. So another great sponsor that we Always like to shout out and make sure you guys know they were there providing a lot of great, great information. The expo halls, it's, it's almost too short and that sounds dumb, but when you don't, when you don't open the expo hall until the end of the second day or whatever it was midday, second day, you don't have a lot of time to go and actually sit down with the vendors. Which is really leads me to my. One of my advice I would have for convention is you need, you need a vendor led pitch session. Like I want to see a demo of a software. I don't want to take 30 minutes of my afternoon to do a one on one demo with them, but I want to do it in a non threatening, don't take up all my time sort of way. Why not have a session that I can go sit in on?

Yeah, you and I discuss this. I think that's a amazing idea. But I tell you what, have you ever been to Nada to the convention hall?

No.

So what they do, their convention hall is massive.

I mean, right, right, right.

I can't even tell you how big it is anyway. It's big enough to have Prevost buses and Cirrus airplanes and all this inside of the hall. Anyway, what they do, they allow vendors to actually have a session at their booth throughout the, throughout the course of the day, the whole convention time. And I've sat in on a couple of those and it's really enlightening. I'd like to see that in the future. Yeah, that format, really neat.

Whether it's in and out, whether it's in a room separately, you know, 3 o' clock on Tuesday, come see our demo, ask all the questions you want, pitch, whatever. Or in the, I have seen it in the convention hall where you get little headphones, you know, and it's like a little a booth off section where they have a screen and you put on the headphones and you listen to them present. Anyways, I think that would be a great, a great session or a great thing to do when you want to meet these vendors and you want to chat with them but you don't really like, I don't know, you don't like being pitched cornered. You know, we obviously have spoken a bit in the Facebook page about how our personal contact information got shared with all the vendors and that's been a bit of a. I don't know how my cell phone got on that list, but I've learned my lesson not to provide accurate information to anyone. Even the association, because who knows whose hands it could fall in. And I got a text message today from a vendor saying, hey, we didn't meet up with you at niada. Love to chat about some random. Whatever they have going on. So not happy about that. Second idea I'd have, you know, I led a discussion. It was a dealer panel discussion on the entrepreneurial operating system, but a lot of it was a Q and A. So in the spirit of what Tracy and Troy are doing out there at the Carolinas, why could we not have a one room that every hour is just a mastermind group, a hot topics? And if you don't like what's going on during that session, that hour in the other rooms, you can drop into this session and just pitch in and ask ideas and help other dealers. And maybe it's led by one dealer or one vendor or somebody that just kind of the discussion or by a podcast.

I mean, you know, they could do.

That, whatever it is. But it just seems like, man, that's really the, that's really the value of these conventions is getting dealers into a room where we all can say, hey, how are you doing this? And one dealer says, actually, this is how I'm doing it. Let me tell you what I have found through years and decades of research and trial and error. Right.

I think that's a great idea. I like that. I think there's not enough of that. There's not enough of. I actually, we think about it. Didn't we have something like that the last year Jordan was, was CEO? It was a, like almost a lunchtime Q and A. And we did it every day or something like that. Remember that?

So buy her pay here. United does that.

Yeah.

Remember buyer payer United, at the end of the day, does their dealer wrap up, dealer roundup, whatever it is. But I, I think it's something maybe a small room you could do all day long or just during the afternoon. Yeah. Anyways, just. I think it'd be a great, great kind of serendipitous. You know, get in chit chat, meet with other dealers, have those conversations.

Agree.

The, the only other critique I would have of the convention was, you know, it comes down to that education. You know, it's like it's this. It's the same old issue that I'm sure they run into when they build out the agenda is best practices for gps. Well, who's going to lead it? Well, we're going to have this GPS provider lead it because they're the expert and they're going to tell you all the best practices are the things that specifically fit their program. Right. So it's just, it's hard to be a vendor and do an education session without naturally being a sales pitch. Right?

Yeah. And don't get me wrong, it's fine, but that's not what we need. And maybe it was this year just because everybody was so far behind that it just ended up being a lot of vendors. And I, you know, okay, that doesn't, that can't happen again. You can't have vendors selling. We've talked about this many times. Yeah, Vendors sometimes are the, are the premier, I guess, experts on a certain thing. But you don't. Yeah, you can't have 90% of your content coming from vendors, in my opinion.

Yeah, yeah, I really, I did struggle with the education sessions. I checked out after the first 10 minutes of quite a few, just mentally or sometimes physically checked out. Because you're right, it does, it does, it hurts. My third idea for them would be physical workshops. Right. I think sometimes we show up to these things and it's like, okay, they talk about these ideas and these things, but you never really actually get to dig into it and do it. You know, I think a lot of dealers would benefit by saying, hey, this is going to be a 90 minute session on how to actually set up your Google my business or how to actually set up a Facebook campaign. And we're going to walk through the whole process, screen share, they're going to walk around the room and help people to get stuck. Like literally a workshop session where you're leaving with something practical. You know, you're leaving with a red flags policy, you're leaving with a, you know, who knows what it is. It could be a million different things that you physically workshop.

So, you know, so interesting. So you know, we could talk about one of our sponsors, Neo, and so they had the user Summit, right. They could at one of these, you know, sessions have a workshop for their product. You know, all Neo users could come in here and we're going to teach you how to set up a task management for, for your salespeople and walk through it and do it because only Neo users would be in there. Now people who weren't Neo users could come in there and all of a sudden decide that they want to be Neo users or the same thing with idms. You want to set up, you know, scoreboards or what.

Yeah, Reports workshop.

Right. And it makes sense. And that's where vendors could really help people. So I don't understand why that's not something that they don't pitch to to Niada or why Niada doesn't go to certain vendors and say hey, we're going to have. You were going to have 150 of your users here. This, at this time. What you should do is this because it builds value to your users number one and number two, it will probably get you new users if you do it right. Anyway, that's, I don't think stuff that should be done.

I think the vendors would do it in a second. What, what my problem is and I can caveat the last three ideas I had with this. I don't see the business side of the convention. I'm only talking with my blinders on from the dealer side. Right. So from the business side I get it. If you have a vendor who is paying you $15,000 to have a booth there, you give them an education session. Right?

That's, this is it. But that is an education system.

Well, you get to present an education center because you're a top tier sponsor. Right, I know that's how that works. I'm sure that's how that works. Right. Because the people presenting were a lot of the biggest sponsors, the biggest boots. Right. So I get that there's kind of a pay to play type situation. I don't know how you resolve that. I get that the association is a business and has to make money, but I don't know. So, so let me, you know, classify all that to wrap this up. Luke, the other good we're putting on that bottom piece of the sandwich now. It was the dealers, it was the attendance, it was them getting out. I don't know what the association did differently this time but man they got a lot of first time attendees, a lot of new faces. The first timer reception was packed, a lot of new faces. So maybe it's the economy, maybe it's the awareness, maybe it's the marketing they did. I don't know. I think they did well.

I, I really recognize that their marketing as soon as Jeff took over for the convention was something we had never really seen for the convention which I thought was awesome. Jeff did a really good job there working with the staff he had from, from everybody I've talked to the convention was a success and it was really good. I'm glad that we're finally got things back together. So hopefully uh, hopefully next year's convention will be, will be even better than this year's.

Yeah, yeah. I think that you know, obviously we have buy here, pay here fall convention coming up. Assuming that happens. Or if they end up combining with buy here, pay here, United, or whatever, but sort of. Sort of wrap it up in closing, you know, the vendors, the dealers, the new faces, the fun friends that I got to run into and tell everyone why you weren't there. It gave me a lot of a. You know, I got to. I got to focus on all the attention. So obviously, shout out to some of those, you know, Leanne Godfrey, you know, and her kids, apparently.

I hear they're. They're big fans.

Yeah, they get. They get forced into listening. We met a really great dealer, YouTube guy. Lucky Lopez came out with us. So if you guys don't follow him on Instagram or YouTube, I'd highly recommend it. And. And what's interesting is he came out, I think, with a little bit of a preconceived notion that dealers are, you know, I don't want to say dumb, but kind of have ostrich syndrome. Right. He thinks a lot of dealers don't want to look at the writing on the wall. They don't want to be smart. They don't want to. And so I. I think that was his day one impression, that maybe the association was a bit of a dinosaur. And I think when he left at day three, he met a lot of really great dealers, and I think it changed his mind a little bit to be like, oh, yes, there is a whole group of dealers here that want to learn, get better, be educated. So that was a lot of fun.

Were you able to book him for a podcast interview?

Yeah, I think we'll get him on here. Yeah. So if you guys follow him, if you don't look him up on YouTube, pound pester him, tell him to come on here and give us an interview. He has some really, really good insights, some interesting industry insights. So, Luke. Yeah. I'm gonna go to the beach, man. We got the sailboats getting set up right now. I'm gonna go do some sailing.

Well, do some. Salem, be careful. I know you can't swim. Y' all make sure you check out our sponsors, Buckeye Dealership Consulting. If you don't have a reassurance, set it up today, Jeff. Actually, Primalim, another great sponsor. I'm needing cash because business has been really good.

You're needing cash? Yeah.

Oh, buddy, you remember about two years ago, nobody needed cash? Guess what? Yeah, I need cash now. Oh, goodness.

Anyway, well, you gotta be ready. That was the big talk of convention, was the coming Buy here, pay here, prime time, that it's going to be time for us to Buy here, pay here to really step it up. So, yes, we've. We've pounded it for a couple of months now. We've got to be cash ready. And I don't think that I am either. I thought that I was, and now I'm looking at things and I'm saying, whoa, no, if I want to grow, I got to be ready. And I don't. I don't know that I am. So.

Yeah, my banker asked me the other day, so, well, how much do you need? I said, I don't know, but I think it's gonna be a lot. So. So, so I'm excited inside where it's going.

So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. All right, guys, well, if you stick around, we're gonna add those expo interviews here to the end and we'll talk to you next week.

All right, guys. Car Ketta. I'm here with Jason Berry, co founder, Co founder. Co industry. Co. Somebody. Cobrain Karketta. If you don't know, you know Carquetta, if you listen to any association news at all, but these guys blowing up huge. Launched version 2.0 just recently, from what I understand, right?

Yep.

And you were just on the podcast, so everyone knows who you are.

Exactly. I've actually had a couple of people that said I saw you on the podcast. I was like, that's great.

I love it.

Yeah. So now Jason officially has his Karketta hat on. So, Jason, how is Carquetta here to help independent dealers?

Yeah, so we really feel like there's a really underserved market in terms of what do I buy a car for, how do I prep the vehicle, how do I stay efficient? In a software solution that's free to onboard, you have a free 30 day free trial. And really, that's where we live is we help a dealership purchase the vehicle, we give them real market data. So similar to like a V auto type solution or something like that, where it gives you real live market data on your rank, percentage to market and everything. And then once you purchase that car, a fully customizable reconditioning workflow totally tailored to your dealership. How big, how complex, how simple. However you want to help, move that car to the front line as fast as possible, man.

So you had me a 30 day free trial, guys. That's how you know the product was built by a car car dealer. Car dealers hate contracts. We hate being sold on software that promises this, that and the other. And then all of a sudden you're stuck in a contract and they don't deliver. So the fact that yeah, it just goes to show who built. Yes.

I mean we are literally month to month. If you hate it in 30 days, kick us out or whatever. But we're that confident in the value that we deliver to the dealership, we're willing to take that gamble. We're ready to go.

Cool man. Okay guys. Carquetta C a R K E T A dot com Guys, check them out. Okay, here we are back in the expo hall. Madge Car rack. Tell me what you are. How are you here to help independent dealers?

Awesome. So we are an online digital marketplace that help connect buyers and sellers with frontline ready inventory. The wholesale marketplace is so convoluted with so many different kinds of inventory. It is so difficult to find the right car. What we do, we are the boutique, if you will, because we are only focused on frontline ready inventory. And it's important because now you know as a buyer that this vehicle has been loved on, has been reconditioned, it's in retail ready condition. Basically all you would have to do as a buyer is pay transport and auction fees and the vehicle is ready to be sold. So if you have a buyer lined up but you can't find the inventory, instead of going to auctions looking at CR str, understand truly what's wrong with this car. You can buy this with a little extra level of trust knowing that this car is coming from a retail ready environment. So we're really trying to save dealers time, money and energy in, saving time in acquiring the inventory, saving time on not having to recondition the inventory and being able to flip the car quickly in the market.

So you guys are like, you have a standard for the car to, to make sure that like before it's even listed on there, before it comes to me, like of course I'm going to pay a premium. Right, like you pay a premium for frontline cars. But I'm not going to have surprises when it shows up. I could basically buy it from your marketplace and ship it directly to my buyer.

Potentially you could do that exactly 100%. But also knowing that we're an N AAA auction, so if anything goes wrong with the car, you still have arbitration, we still will hold you accountable, hold ourselves accountable, and protect you as a buyer as well. So we're not just a fly by the night kind of an auction. We are backed up by the Richmond auto auction in Virginia. It's been an auction that's been in business for 32 years. So you know you're buying from a reputable Marketplace that has the backing of you as a buyer and also buying reputable inventory.

So how do dealers get ahold you guys?

So you can go to carrack.com there's a dealer sign up page. Just sign up there and one of my account representatives will call you and get you set up and be able to connect you with the right inventory. We don't only help you buy cars, but if you have inventory you want to get rid of, we're also happy to help you with that. Again, it's got to be frontline ready inventory and that you're trusting that this car is ready to go. So we can not only help you buy, but we can also help dealers sell.

Cool.

Okay guys, carrack.com car-rac.com okay, I'm here with Scott from DealerSync. Scott, what is DealerSync and how is it here to help independent dealers?

Good question.

DealerSync is a comprehensive dealer management platform. We have created the fastest loading websites in the industry and we add the most premium data available on the market through, you know, different types of companies that we work with to get premium data to not only show on your website with optional packages, but we also send that premium data to all of your third party vendors as well. We have third party mapping to make sure that all of your same data that you're getting coming from your DMS is going all the way down to your third parties and then back to your back to your CRM and your lead sources.

Nice, man.

So I see stuff like intelligent market price tools. So it's just a really, really robust website, is that what I'm saying?

Yeah, I mean we have hundreds of features. We're not necessarily a website company, but we show all of our premium data on our websites. And yeah, we do pride ourselves on having the fastest loading websites in the industry. But if you were to ask us what our specialty is, it's really being able to generate a lot of premium data that nobody else can. So like for instance, we're able to show window stickers, dynamic window stickers embedded into a VDP and select optional packages and list all of those optional packages with the original MSRP in the vdp. You don't have to leave the website, you don't have to click on anything, it's all there. And all of that same information gets mapped to all of your third party advertising sources as well.

Man, that's really cool. So I see here, buy here, pay here tools. That's something that interests me.

What is that?

Yeah, we've come out with some new buy here payers because obviously there's a demand for it in the market. Right now you have the option to go through an SRP and select vehicles based off of payment, the terms, the down payment, and create, you know, some new filter options for buy here pay here customers. We also have features not just with the buy here pay here, but for lease and rent as well.

Oh, cool.

Okay, awesome man. Thanks so much. That is DealerSync dealers y n c dot com. Thanks man. Okay, guys, I'm here with Ali from Dealer xt. Ali, tell us what do you do? How are you here to help independent dealers?

Thanks, Jeff. I'm Ali. Dealer xt. What we do is really well put in three different things. We do better hiring, we better reviews and better disclosures. So primarily the number one thing we do is we do what's called remote dealer staffing. So we do is we help dealerships hire outside of the country as low as $12 an hour. They can fill in a lot of different roles that you could imagine, like administrative roles, personal assistant roles, bdc. A lot of different roles that you would normally pay a lot more money for. But in this case you pay only $12 an hour.

Hour.

Plus you don't have to worry about payroll tax or employment liability.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It also comes with maternity leave. All of these things, right. What's also cool about that is we offer an optional telepresence device. It's like a robot. I actually have him right over here. Frank's here. You guys can't see him, but you can see him on our website, dealer xc.com he's actually inside of a device that can move around. It's a screen. It's been a huge hit.

It's a little creepy, guys.

It's a little creepy, but it's fun. We also do a new version of a review system which is called auto review. It's different than what anybody else does. What's key about this is a text message gets sent out to the customer right after they purchase the car. And it gives them the ability to write a review without actually having to write the review because it's integrated with ChatGPT. And ChatGPT actually creates that review for the customer and then they can post it right on Yelp or Google Review as a Cargurus. Makes it a lot easier.

Yeah, I like that. I've been responding to my reviews with ChatGPT. Copy and Paste the review in. So this is a reverse of that. You provide the customer with the review and Then they just say, yes, exactly.

And it's actually connected to our other software, which is called SafeDeals AI. And SafeDeals AI has a system called FraudCam in it, which is the only system of its kind, which takes a photo of the customer at the moment that they sign the disclosures. So photo verification. So they can't come back later, you know, and say, that's not my signature. I didn't sign anything like that.

They'll still come back and say they didn't understand the document, but at least.

You'Ll have evidence this time. That's cool.

The remote staffing thing. So interesting because I just recently reached out to another company to try to get some staffing for this podcast actually. And dude, it's huge.

It's huge.

Like offshore, like remote staffing. Real people that have real skills, they just, they don't have to be American, man. Everything can be done over the Internet these days.

What it is that there's these huge giant companies like AT&T and Apple and all these companies that have been doing this for what, 20 years and hiring outside of the country. What remote dealer staffing is doing is giving the dealer industry an opportunity to take part in that, you know, this great pool of talent that exists outside of the country. And it ends up being a lot more affordable for the dealership. So it's ended up working up really, really well. One thing we've noticed about dealers that try to go and kind of hire on their own is, is unfortunately the people that they hire are not necessarily trained on the industry. They're not familiar with the industry. So what we do is we actually pre train them on the industry so that when they start working for you, they already have a foundation of the auto industry knowledge and it helps them more quickly be able to adapt and work with your dealership team.

That's awesome. Okay, guys, it's dealerxt.com dealers helping dealers.

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