#323 - We Are At BHPH United 2024

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

Hey, everybody. Here we are at Buy Here, pay here, United 2024 in sunny Las Vegas.

Yeah, you just get here?

I just rolled in right in time. Luke forgot to go to the barbershop and get his hair cut.

You got your hair cut, didn't it?

I got both my hairs cut and Luke looks like a homeless beach bum.

Well, I figured before I look like you, I should grow it out again.

While you got it, use it. We're gonna have a great couple of days here in Las Vegas learning about the buy here, pay your industry from all dealers.

It's amazing. Sat through a couple sessions already and it's just dealers teaching dealers something that we're advocates of and met so many of y' all already and we're so thankful. We're going to bring you all some really good insight from other dealers.

We hope so.

We hope so.

Yeah. So stay tuned. Here's a couple of dealers that we chatted with. We're going to get some. What are their pain points and how are they solving them and how do they hope to find solutions here these next couple of days? So stay tuned. Hey, here we are with Gavin from Arrowhead Auto out of Riverton, Wyoming.

Yes, sir.

Awesome.

Hey, man, I don't think we've ever done any interview with somebody from Wyoming.

I don't know anyone from Wyoming.

He's the first one. There you go.

So tell us this, Gavin, why are you here at Buy Here, Pay Here, United? What are you hoping to learn? Like, what's the biggest headache in your dealership right now?

Probably our biggest, biggest headache is our service department. Just keeping a constant flow. We have bottlenecks all the time.

I think that's everybody's problem when it comes to. I was talking to someone earlier today, another, another dealer. And it's like, you know, we have all these different businesses and we've talked about this before. Recon's the artist, right?

Absolutely.

Wyoming, y' all sell a bunch of trucks.

Quite a few. Everybody wants a four wheel drive, so.

Sure.

Much more costly to.

If you could, if you could take and drill down onto the service department problems and the bottlenecks. What do you think it is?

Probably management.

So is that you?

Yes, but I also.

Same here. I get it.

I mean, it's very tough to stay on top of them. I mean, nothing's cut and dry when it comes to mechanics.

It's like an art. It's not a science. It's an art. What Are you hoping to learn here this couple days in Vegas?

Well, I guess on that topic, yeah, just making it, making our service department flow and that keeps our customers happy. That keeps cars for sale on their.

Lot, that's for sure. When you look at buy here, pay here, or retail in general, typically if you don't have cars to sell, you don't sell cars, right? No.

You notice it?

Yeah. Right. So have you learned anything yet that you believe will help your dealership in your service department?

Probably just working with the rest of the other departments or sales and our collection department, we just talked about it in there. Because a customer breakdown can bottleneck your recon process as bad as anything.

I think that's the one thing, especially if you have vehicle service contracts or warranties that you're selling on top of that and all of a sudden you, you think you're good to go and you're, you're turning along with the, with the recon and then all of a sudden you have two motor jobs in your shop. What do you do? Yeah, I mean, what have you, what have you done and what, what are you past done and what do you think you'll do in the future to make that better?

Well, it's tough. Well, if it's a motor job for a customer, you know, it goes front of line, right? What's that?

It goes to the front of the line.

Yeah, yeah, it does because you got to keep them paying. I mean, what's, you're going to lose a customer, what's the point of getting another one ready to sell?

Just.

Yeah, I mean, do you, do you see a solution to that?

Not a, not 100%, no. I don't, I don't think there's a true good answer for it unless you had, you know, enough manpower where you could flip flop where you need needed to in your service department, make exceptions.

More manpower, more manpower. It's always the answer. Gavin. Hey, thank you so much for your time. Look forward to chatting with you this week.

Dragging me in.

So we couldn't find a Buckeye sign, so we, we just found the Buckeye people.

The poster children.

Yeah.

Reinsurance.

Yeah.

Does it matter, Jeff?

It is huge and I'll be honest with you guys. So you. We're going to bring you some sessions of dealers that have pain points. One of the number one solutions and one of the biggest things I've already learned here is just how important it is to have your reinsurance company, your CPI program going quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. We say it all the time. Every single dealer that has done it is sad they didn't do it earlier.

Just imagine you were giving another, you know, warranty company money every month, and then all of a sudden, they didn't pay a claim, and it caused another pain point for you. Just take it in house, set up a reinsurance company, and when you have that claim, you know that it's going to be handled. It won't be a pain point, right?

Yep, absolutely. And the guys at Buckeye, obviously great sponsors of the podcast, the Place to Go. They also give back. They want dealers to do better. Hence this whole week that we're here in Vegas put together by Buckeye.

So.

And they're friends.

They're their friends.

Right. But they are the ones that. They're trying to make the industry better. They're trying to make dealers more profitable and take away our pain.

Yeah. And so now we're going to give out their personal phone numbers. Jason Gosnell and Rob Fox. Just kidding. We're not going to do that. But there's plenty of people you can call at Buckeye that will take good care of you. Yep, that's it.

Okay, here we are with Mr. Greg Barrett. Now, you're going to recognize this face.

Part of. Part of his face.

Part of his face. If you go Back to episode two.

Something, 290 something, probably.

Yeah. Greg, we did a great interview with him. He was in a vehicle, though, so now we've got him in real life. Greg, Buy Here, Pay Here, United. Great. Couple of days here with other Buy Here, Pay Here dealers. What are you hoping to learn, or what are you hoping to take away from these couple of days?

Man, I'm.

We're always. I think if you're not. I think my greatest asset is being teachable, and I want to learn something new every single day. And I think if I'm not learning something new, I'm dying. So I learned this morning that if someone's not challenging me to look at every aspect of my business model or something to do better, that's what I'm here. I just want to learn.

What's interesting about that. You were here teaching today as well, and people listening to podcasts, they're wanting to learn. You brought up something that is so simple, I don't understand why nobody's ever thought about it before. But it's called the red alert system that y' all have inside your dealership, and we all know that we all have major customer issues, and it doesn't get disseminated through the entire. Through your Entire dealership and it creates problems. Talk about your red alert system and what, what are the main uses you use it for?

So it is called the red alert system and it's. We have. I'll give you a different. So threat of a repossession, we're gonna send a red alert. The red alert goes out to everybody, every employee in the store, all regional managers and all ownership. So threat of a repo, an actual repo service alert that is going to be. Customer's gonna be in the service department for greater than 48 hours insurance loss. And you know, the goal is to create a bunch of urgency to get the person that has the best relationship with that, that guest to get involved in solving whatever problem it is.

And that's.

I'm not being disrespectful. I'm literally just writing this down right now.

Yeah, no, no, I mean it's super important.

It could be disrespectful.

And what's interesting is it's hard for all of us to understand, but there are people in our dealership that have really good relationships with most customers. Somebody may not like one of the customers and somebody else may be their best friend. And so if that email goes out and there's a problem, you can hop on it right.

Then I'll tell you. We joke about this all the time, but when I interview people, I always tell them none of my customers pay JD by Rider or cnac, which is our bank. They pay Mike, the service manager because at midnight Mike answered his phone, towed the car and got the kids off the side of the road. Or Monica, the finance person that, you know, made the concession because she missed three days of work and it was a couple kid's birthday party. You know, there are so many different reasons that our guests pay us.

Yeah.

So I think getting those same folks involved when there's problems has been the.

Only thing for us.

It's the only thing that sets us apart from the big banks. Right. I mean, it's the only thing that's going to set us apart from CAC and all these other guys. But that is such an obvious great tip. We all have internal communication tools, right. I mean, I don't know what you use to communicate that out to, whether it's an email or a text. But how easy for your client collector to send out, hey, here's potential repost this weekend.

Somebody call them.

Yeah, someone's gonna have their phone number and be able to text them or hey, I will talk to Susan. I got Susan's Phone number. Let me get her on the horn. Why wait till the weekend? Why wait till the end of the month when you already repoed it to do an autopsy? That's such a great idea.

Yeah, no, it works well and this.

Is gonna be something I'm gonna definitely implement our next managers meeting. I really appreciate you just bringing something so simple to light and, and seeing how your process works to do it.

Yeah, thanks.

Thank you.

Thanks guys.

Hey. Here we are with Jared Wynn, JD by rider consultant. This guy sees it all.

Yes, a lot of, a lot of stuff going on with a lot of dealers. A lot of data that you got to crunch to figure out where people's pain points are. And that's the reason people are here, is to talk about pain points. And I'm sure you're here to help the dealers you consult with, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

You said something about early delinquency of being a big pain point. I don't experience that a lot. What is early delinquency in your book and how do dealers look at it and what's a good way to deal with it?

Yeah, I mean something that Buy Rider really focuses on is their early delinquency with. What we track is our one to ten day delinquency. We're big believers that if we can originate the loan the right way, sell the car the right way and set good clear expectations early on, that we can cure a lot of charge off through that. So what we focus on at Buy Rider is having really good communication with the customer and setting clear expectations on them paying on time.

And that's done at the sales, at the time of the sales process, number one, right?

Yes.

And how does that communication from the day they buy it for the first 30 days of the loan, are your dealers calling them every day just to say, hey, how's everything going? I mean, how does that early communication work?

No, I mean something that Buyrade does extremely well is they actually meet the customers in person, do the loan closings themselves, CNAC does, and they have good follow up communication. So we try to set expectations like, you know, we're here to help you advance and you know, if you have problems with throughout the loan, just give us a call and we're gonna help problem solve you. So that's worked out really well with us. And you know, sometimes the customer will come in and talk to us and just try to figure out what their situation is, to try to overcome whatever life obstacle that they have.

The number one reason a repo happens, well, probably two reasons One is typically mechanical fail and the second one is lack of communication. And if we can train our customers to communicate properly with us, the loan usually works, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what our really good franchisees do, is they set good, clear expectations and the customers actually want to communicate with our cardinal acceptance team to where the customer knows that, hey, we're here to help you and not just, you know, be, you know, where's my money, stuff like that.

You're a solution provider, not just a heavy hand that's gonna yell at them.

Our customers are so often used to people being heavy hands and not being an asset for them to talk to. When you're reaching out to these customers, what is buy rider found out? Is it a text message to start a conversation or is it a phone call to start a conversation?

You know, when we close loans, we set the expectations that we, the best way that we can, we can problem solve and help you advance and pay this car off is through verbal communication. We do use, use text to, to confirm times of, hey, I get off work at 4:30, please give me a call at 5:15 once I get home. And that's a, that's a good time for me. So we try to use text to lead to a good, good phone conversation because you and, and we, we firmly believe that we can accomplish a lot.

More through the phone.

Agree.

Excellent, Jared. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Appreciate it.

Yeah.

Sorry, what?

Hey, Jeff.

Yo.

Guess what?

We are Buy Here, Pay Here United.

That's right.

And some of our sponsors are here.

Yeah, absolutely. When you talk about vendors that support the industry, Blitzpay is one that puts their money where their mouth is.

Yeah.

I've actually got some feedback from Blitzpay said you folks out there listening are calling them or talking about them. And I'm just telling you it's going to change the way you take payments. And guess what? I just got hooked up on the cash Blitzpay Cash today.

I'm excited to hear about that. Yeah, obviously they put their money where their mouth is. Then they put our money into our wallets, I guess into our bank accounts.

Into our bank accounts very quickly.

Which is a key, key conversation we've had this week about Buy here, Pay here is how to get your money faster and easier. Right. You don't want to have barriers for your customers, hard ways where they got to like run here and run there and bring you a check or a money order or even come to your office for that matter.

Right.

Let them pay the way they want to Pay. Let's pay. Makes it very easy through text message and this cash network. Yeah. And it's really cool.

And it's set up a convenience fee, and it doesn't cost you really very much at all to collect all these payments, get them in your bank. Bank account quickly and off you go. Blitzpay is the place to go.

Here we are with Maria from Express Auto in Texas.

Everybody's from Texas. Everything's bigger in Texas.

Everything's bigger in Texas, I guess.

So that's the reason I want to move there.

Maria, just real quick, we want to ask you about your biggest pain pain point of your dealership. But first off, where are you at, and what kind of a dealership do you run?

We're in Grand Prairie, Texas. We do buy here, pay here.

You're at the right place.

Yeah, sure. And how long y' all been in business?

We have been in business for 17 years.

Awesome. Yeah, that's. I mean, in Texas, that's a buy. Your pay here is hard, right? Yeah. And in Texas, there's a lot of competition, and especially in that Dallas Fort Worth metro area that's. To be in business for 17 years, you must be doing something right.

I hope so.

So you do everything right. But there's probably some stuff that is hard or tough or you're struggling with. What would you say is your biggest pain point right now as a dealer?

I mean, there's multiple factors that roll in. I think that one of the biggest issues. Well, my husband and I both run it. I think one of the biggest issues is that we both have a different point of view. However, after Covid, so many things changed. Keeping up with those changes are drastic, because what happens is any business that doesn't keep up with change obviously become extinct.

Yeah.

And so that's the biggest problem right now, is just having all these changes come into play and having to keep up with them and being able to, I think, create a process to be able to execute them properly.

Maria. I've been in a family business before, and I've also had my wife working for me before, and it can be really hard. Have y' all figured out a way to, when you get off work, to shut that off? Or is it something that just. That just keeps going? I mean, because I've been there. I get it. It's tough.

It is tough. I think that my husband and I, we've been married for 20 years. I think one of the good things that we do have is that when we go home, we understand our home life is Completely separate. He runs a certain part of the business. I run another part of the business. Basically he runs services and getting the vehicles to.

Oh, he runs the hard part, huh?

And I run everything else. We both run very difficult positions, I think. And when we get home, even though we work together, it's as if we didn't see each other all day because we don't discuss. Yeah, we don't. We don't have personal time at work. And so when we get home, we take advantage of that and take personal time and be able to be with our kids and so on and so forth. So it does separate a lot. I think that your mentality has to be able to be very strict with understanding that what's work is work and what your personal life with your relationship is. Your personal life with your relationship. It's a lot.

Yeah. And it's so smart. You know, we talk about this with every organization is to have your responsibilities. Right. And you know what your role is in the business. Right. And I'm sure you're not stepping into the service shop trying to do his job and hopefully he's not stepping in trying to do yours and that's, you know, but staying in your lane is really important as a partnership. You both know what you do and you're trying not to like.

You have to trust each other. We both have the intentions. Our intentions are the same. We both have. It's like any other employee. We all have our families to feed. We all have the same agendas to be successful and to be able to create a better work atmosphere and to be able to make sure that everything, every player plays their game at the end of the day, I think that it's a big contributing factor when you're working with multiple people, regardless if you're related to them or not, is being able to understand, to trust in them that they know their process and they're going to do their job well. Now, anytime that anyone needs help, obviously we all jump up and we scream help. But most of the time he trusts his process and he believes in me. And so that's the biggest portion is that we have to trust that we have both the best intentions for the company.

That's really valuable knowledge. So what did you come to buy here? Payer united to find? What did you do? Is there something that you wanted to try to figure out how to fix while you're here?

I think just knowing other people's processes. I've always been a person to dissect things that I learn and then be Able to implement it for the best of our ability and try new things. And you know, like I said, with technology changing as fast as it is, it's very interesting to understand all the technology and all the processes and all the new programs coming out and how people are actually communicating with their customers. When I first started this, I mean, on a daily basis, you'd have done tons of people walk the lot. That's no longer the case. You know, people want to come already pre approved and they want to know that they spoke with somebody and build a relationship prior to walking through your door. And I think that's the biggest challenge right now that I think most people are facing is being able to create that relationship with the customer so that they trust enough in you to come in and purchase with you. Because once you build that relationship, that trust with that person, it tends to be a lifetime situation.

Yeah, we were talking about that during the Neo Summit User Summit the day before. And it used to be when customers walked on your lot and they filled out an application on your lot, your chances of selling them were really good. Well, now the problem is, is they fill out the application online and it's hard. You can get them approved then. It's hard to get them to your office then because so many people are doing that. So finding a. Finding the secret sauce to getting them there after approved will go a long way to sell more cars.

Yeah, I think also time consuming. You have to be respectful. Everybody has a hard day nowadays. Everything since technology, I mean, back in the day, you used to have one phone at home. Everybody had to call that number. Your mom got to go through your phone list and who's calling, calling you. Now you go to the restroom and your phone's attached to your face. I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, people are very time crunched and we have to be respectful of the consumer's time. So the best that we do is possibly is try to get everything done beforehand and get them in and know exactly what it is that we're trying to help them with. So a customer comes in and we've been talking to them on the phone. If we don't exactly know what vehicle they're coming in for, I mean, you know, if you don't ask those questions like, hey, what's your family like life? And you know, do you have children? You have to transport every day, Are they in sports? Then you have a better idea when they come in. Okay, I have selective inventory specifically for that consumer versus, you know, hey, I'M a first time buyer. I don't have any kids and I'm just trying to get to school and work and then you know exactly what you're trying to offer them when they come through the door. So it saves a lot of time. And being respectful of the customer's time as well as their responsibilities is a big factor right now. People just don't have the time.

Yeah, yeah, everything's crunched all the way around. Speaking of time, we gotta go. Time to get to a session. But Maria, thank you so much for chatting with us today and hope to talk to you some more later in the week.

My pleasure. Thank you.

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