#327 - Luke's Notes From 20 Group

This is the Independent Dealer Podcast, Education by Dealers for Dealers. Now here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

Hello and welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, brought to you by Buckeye Dealership Consulting and Luke Godwin.

Hey, buddy. How are you doing?

Good, man, good. Hanging in there. So I missed out on a great, great 20 group. You guys were up there in the. The Great White North. Was that what you call like our friends to the north?

Oh, no, Canada.

Did they just shake you down when you got there? Did they make you, The Canadians, Health care and all that stuff?

They do not like their president, by the way. They do not like him, and I don't blame them.

Yeah, we don't want to offend the one Canadian listener we have.

But.

Anyways, so 20 group was great for those of you that don't know, and we talk about this a lot, but Luke, how long you been in a 20 group program?

Since 2016, I think.

Okay, so you're pushing. Good, good.

Eight years.

Yeah. Do you still bring home notes? Do you still learn stuff?

I always learn things. I'm not the best note taker in the world. I try to absorb what. What's going on and, and what I find at this point is that it's more about the associations that. That are made there and just the little bits somebody says that I can pick up on and go, oh, well, that makes sense. I'm not doing it exactly that way. Let's. Let's tune it a little bit and get a little better. But do I bring things away? I bring a lot away. I don't bring away a lot of notes that I put into action. Right. Then I have to kind of absorb and then remember as I go to. To get it into place.

Yeah. You know, I would really think, obviously there's a handful of dealers out there. If you. If you've never been in a 20 group, obviously you're on one side of the spectrum. You need to join one. Go get educated. It's worth the cost. Very few people, I think, have ever not gotten a lot of value out of their first two to three to four to five years of it. Then you get to a point, and I don't think a lot of those dealers will be listening to us. The dealers that already know it. All right, you kind of. You've been around the block, you've been in it maybe 20 years. You feel like you got your operation where you want it, and you might feel like you go to these things and you just don't bring anything home. There's no value left for you, right? Yeah.

But you know, even that, like usually one a year will fix a problem because what will happen is you'll start going over the composite like happened at the last meeting. They're like, look, your expenses are out of control. Now luckily I knew they were out of control before I got there. But for all my fellow dealers to go, hey dummy, what are you doing here? And I go, yeah, y' all right? And so it spurred me to make the decision that I already knew I had to make. Right. So that, that's very helpful. And then, then what's great is you come back to the next 20 group and you made all those decisions and all your expenses are back in order, you hit all your goals and you feel good.

Yeah, yeah. And you've got that, that a group of peers or the board of directors to bounce that idea off that you knew you should have pulled the trigger on. But maybe you didn't have the guts to do it or it wasn't quite so blaring. But when you have a room full of 15 dealers, say, yeah buddy, you got to pull that band aid off. Here's the other thing. I think a lot of dealers that think they have their operations fine tuned, I mean if you went to a meeting and you even picked up something that changed your charge off by 1 or 2% or changed your collateral recovery by 1 or 2%, I mean for, for a dealer of your size, how many dollars does that put in your pocket? If you had a 2% less charge off rate because of something you Learned.

At a 20gr, 2% would put tens of thousands of dollars in your pocket.

Yeah, yeah.

And some people, a hundred thousand, you know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would argue it'd probably be closer to the hundred thousand area. So it's really funny how it's, it's. There are some blatant obvious things, right? You go to a 20 group and you're like, oh my goodness, I should have been selling red cars and not white cars. Like there's some obvious stuff you might go and learn, but there's a lot of like little incremental fine tune, you know, it's all those little teeny things after you've been in the industry for 10, 15, 20 years that still matter, Right. And you still tune in.

Yeah, they're exponential, especially the bigger you get. Just those little percentages here or there really helps. Really helps. The bottom line. Yeah.

A big thing too we talk about all the time. But the CPI program, right. I've heard of it for years and years and years. But it wasn't until going to a 20 group and actually seeing another dealer's numbers of the that they had with their CPI product that really just slaps you in the face and says, oh, that's what you can do with this CPI product. Right?

Yeah. What was funny is that wasn't tracked for a long time in the composite and so you never actually saw the real numbers. Everybody's like, well, I make all this money in cpi. And you're like, yeah, whatever. And then, then you see in the composite you're like, oh my. What, What I do what I miss. Right? Yeah.

So anyway, yeah, and that's a good. Obviously reach out to the guys at Buckeye, sponsors of the podcast if you want to get that set up, if you want to learn more. I know we've seen it in the forums. A lot of people talking about, oh, insurance is so expensive and I can't get my guys payment with their insurance is out of control. This is the opportunity CPI will just become more and more important to your dealership. Insurance is getting more expensive and the insurance companies are getting more and more stingy on their payouts. So why put them in control of your collateral? It's absolutely ridiculous there.

Yeah, there's some states here in the southeast East, Jeff, that insurance rates have gone up 40% in the past year. And if you don't think that's a big deal for your customers, it is a huge deal for your customers. It's. It's a huge deal for your customers. On the retail side, if you're a retail dealer, listen to it to us or on the buyer pay here side because that car payment that they can afford is dependent on how much that insurance payment is. So it's a really big deal. Something we did last week and I don't know who out there, out there is doing this, but car insurance rates went up 26% in South Carolina. So we decided to try a text campaign, which I know that seems like old school marketing, right? But we use a text campaign to target the customers we sold cars to this year that might be paying too much for car insurance. We decided to text out a graphic saying, hey, let us try to save you money in your car insurance. And man, the response we got was overwhelming, Jeff. We couldn't even get to all the leads we got. So, you know, rethink your marketing is probably what I'm going down this rabbit hole about is rethink your marketing. Text campaigns were kind of big maybe eight years ago. And maybe people forgot about them. But it's something that I'm really going to start to investigate over the next 90 days because I think we're missing, we're missing some referral opportunities. We're missing, we're missing trading our customers out properly. So I think these are good ways to with customers that are already relating to you. Using text to market to them, I think can really help our, help expand our sales and help expand our service department.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know. It's pretty much the only type of messaging I respond to is text messages. Right. I mean I don't see email campaigns, I don't see a lot of those things. Guaranteed your salesmen are not making the phone calls they should be making. But when you have a platform that integrates with your current customer base and you can send them a blast text and include a photo like that. Right. Smart. Something funny, a meme, something that gets their attention. Hey, you need to get on our cpi. Hey, it's time to trade in. Hey, we have this, you know, special, you know, service, you know, going on right now in our service department. Super smart. What else did you take home from your, the meeting out there? Because again, I wasn't there and I feel like I missed out. So I need your notes.

Operations is still such and service operations have really gotten people sideways still. And I felt like we were running pretty smoothly through most of 20 and, and then all of a sudden the rug got pulled out from under us and I believe we've gotten our straightened back out. But there's a lot of dealers out there that's still having problem with time to line there. And you know, we talk about, we used to talk about that a lot. Still having problems with time to line and, and it really is a big deal when your bar in rate goes up. So when you're sitting at, you know, Prime's 4%, who cares if you have extra inventory that's sitting for 30 more days than it should? But when you have to really start paying outrageous amounts for floor plans and things like that, you know, having an extra 50 cars sit another 30 days in recon, it's real money. And we're, you know, five extra grand a month or something like that. Maybe more, maybe, maybe an extra 10 or $15,000 a month because your recon is bad is really hurting dealers.

Yeah. So, so funny that we don't, I, I, I'd be surprised how many dealers have actually sat down and done the math on what your actual day carrying cost is. Right. Per dollar. And say, okay, so for every ten thousand or twenty thousand or a hundred thousand dollars that I carry each day, it costs me X amount. So if I am heavy in my recon center by a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars because it's so slow to get stuff to the front line, what is that costing me daily? If I could just bring that turn time down from 30 days to 20 to 15, you know, and I can save myself 14 days worth of interest. You need to know what that number is, and then you need to go post it in the shop. A big old fricking sign that says, this is our daily carrying cost. We have got to get from here down to here. Right. And speed up this process. Because I need 60 cars up front. Right. I have to have 60 cars up front to try to reach my goal. I think I do. Right. And probably another argument to have about that, but 60 cars up front, I don't need 60 cars in the back. How many cars do I need in the back? I need as many cars as I'm going to sell next week. Right. That's as many as you need.

A quarter to a half of your monthly sales in the recon process, in my opinion.

Yeah. Right.

And so let's just say, am I a lot? I need 50 cars is what I typically would like to have. 50 cars ready to go at any time in my, my AC, let's call it 13 grand. That's $650,000 in ready to go inventory that I need to sell. Right. And then let's, let's say that I'm going to need another 12 to 15 cars, you know, sitting there. So anything, anything I have over 65 cars is, is, Is dead money. Right. So anything over $780,000 that I have in inventory is dead capital. So I need to see what that, that number is, and I need to see what my, my interest expense on that money is and then figure out, hey, how can we get these cars ready faster and how can I shrink my inventory to only carry that amount of cars?

Yeah, but, but, but Luke, it was a good buy. I mean, it's not going to depreciate. Had to buy it.

Yeah, there's some arguments about that. And every time I think I get a good buy because it's, you know, I've got to do extra work. I end up having, in my opinion, the same amount in that car that I do in a car that I may have paid too much for but didn't need all that work.

Frontline ready. Right. And it went straight, you skip detail because it was already frontline ready. Um, and you, you don't again calculate in that carrying cost. And if you don't have a flooring line, you still have a capital cost, right? You still have an opportunity cost of, hey, I got an extra $200,000 tied up in inventory in the back. Well, it's my own cash. It doesn't matter. Well, no, it does matter because again, that's money that can be used elsewhere either if you're buy here, pay here in your portfolio or, you know, other investment opportunities.

Well, just, just sitting money in treasury bonds right now is going to get you about 5% our money market. So it's costing you 5% and that's really how, I mean, that's the minimum it's costing you. So, so keep that in mind. And, and what leads to that? Another thing, and this is something retail dealers and buy here, pay here, dealers need to, need to think about what are we paying our technicians. And, and you hear people go, man, I, you know, I can't hire a tech. And we go, well, how much you paying? And they'll, they'll tell us a number. And I go, yeah, you're not going to hire a tech for that.

Yeah, 25.

They're not going to hire, not going to hire a tech for that.

Of course you can't hire a tech, you know.

Yeah, they say that. And then they go, well, why not? I said, well, how much is the average, you know, repair shop charging for repairs in, per hour in your town? You know, a lot of them are going to be in that 160 to 240 range per hour. And you start backing into that number and you see that these people are probably paying their text, you know, $40 hours, maybe $50 hour for these outstanding texts. And you're wondering why you can't hire. Well, you can't hire because you're not paying enough. And you got to offer training to these techs. You got to try to get them better. You can't worry about them leaving, Jeff. Gotta, you gotta get them better. If they want, if they want a certain tool that's gonna help them get the job done, you gotta buy that tool. Sometimes you gotta air condition your shops. There's a lot of things that go into hiring good techs and keeping good techs. And if you have them, if you have them set up properly and their flow is good, you can hire a really good tech and they can be somewhat inefficient and you can still be Way ahead of what it's costing you to sub that workout.

Yeah. What's this saying, you know, what if I. What if I send him to these classes and pay for all this training and he leaves me? Which is really funny because I just had a tech who put in his two weeks notice and we'd actually sent him to a training like literally the week before and paid for it. But, you know, the counter side of the joke is, you know, what if you don't send him to training and he stays with you? Right? Like, so when you look at your outside labor rate and I, and I know I have a lot of overflow, right? Because my shop can't handle all the work that I need to do. So when I look at my outside labor rate and I say, okay, I'm getting charged maybe on a good deal, I'm getting charged 80 bucks an hour, right. From another shop or something. Maybe I'm at 60. If I'm going to, you know, some little shop down the street.

I don't think that. I don't think that happens anymore, by the way.

Yeah, not. Yeah, no one competent. So you say, okay, if I'm paying 60 outside, then what does it really cost me to bring that guy internally? Right? You got payroll tax, you got some. Hopefully you have the space. Hopefully you have some benefits, things like that. Well, man, I could pay this guy 40 bucks an hour, you know, all in flag clock. However you want to put up your compensation plan for him. That changes it when you, when you, instead of just trying to, what's the minimum I can pay the guy? Start looking at, well, wait, what's the max I can pay the guy? And now I control him. He works on my clock, under my roof, under my quality control, and not down the street.

That was one of the things that came up. And, and I said, well, how much are you paying a labor hour outside? And the guy said, 120 an hour. I go, man, you can pay your tech a lot, you can pay him a lot. You can pay $60 an hour. You know, if he's that good, that's what you have to do sometimes.

And especially if you're consistently using it. You know, the only hesitation I'd say is, guys, if you're fluctuating with your load, then, yeah, I get it. You have overflow at a certain time of year. You might not want to bring that guy in house because you can't keep him busy all the time, right? So you're. Yeah, so there's some times. But if you see that that's consistent month after month after month, then, then, yeah. And obviously, if you don't love having a shop and it's strategic and you say, I just want to outsource everything and not deal with the hassle, headache, whatever. We know we have a lot of dealers who have big operations and they don't have their own service centers. It's. Yeah, it blows my mind. But it's their philosophy, their headache. They decide that, hey, I don't, I don't want to have to deal with this. I don't want to have to buy the tools. I don't have to deal with the headache, the tax, the drama, the nonsense. I'll just outsource to 10 different shops and, and pay a little bit more.

And there's still headache in that too. But, you know, you pick your poison. You pick your poison.

What else, Luke? Any other big takeaways you got on your notes?

You know, everybody's always wondering about marketing and, and I think that it's something we're about to look at. I think we're gonna possibly sit. Switch website providers, first time we've done that in a while. And, and start to, to narrow in on something. I've been looking at our applications and we're not, in my opinion, closing enough approved applications. I'd like to see us close 50% of approved applications. And we're really in that mid-30s range. And something that Scott from Neo brought up was talking about Facebook leads compared to Google leads, and that Facebook leads are high funnel, funnel leads. And everybody out there understands what a high funnel lead is, is it's people that are shopping, not people that are buying. Right. So high funnel leads are people that are just beginning to shop sometimes, or maybe they don't even know they're in the market for something until they see it. So it takes them a while to get them closed. And, and then we talked about Google leads and Google leads are in general low funnel leads that are going to close really quickly. And so we've been battling this, not, not getting 50 of these approved leads done. And I go, and it just dawned on me, well, maybe it's because we are focusing all of our advertising in, in the Facebook bucket. And, and, and we're not doing really anything beside our normal SEO in the Google, in the Google Google sphere, I'll call it. So we're thinking about maybe trying a little more Google spend moving forward and see if that changes our, our approved applications to sold percentage. And, and I say all this to, to remind people you Got to understand your numbers of, of your advertising dollars and your numbers and your percentages of leads to sales, leads to application applications, to sold approved applications, not approved applications. You got to know all these things to spend your marketing dollars in the right place.

Yeah. Do you remember offhand what is, what's our, what's the typical dollar spend per sale? Do we still have that in the. I know we have that in the composite. Do you remember what that was for our group?

I, you know, I didn't even look at that number. I wish I would have because I would love to spit it out and I don't have my composite here, but.

Typically the 200 range or something wasn't a 250 or something.

Well, that wasn't for lead. That'd be like Apple.

No per sale.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's typically in that 200 to, to 400 range. I remember somebody was way out of whack last time. I like 350 a sale. So. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's in that range somewhere.

So the reason I say that is I think that's the first place to look, right? Because they talk about all this leads, my cost per lead. And it's like, dude, leads are junk, right? I could give you a million leads tomorrow. They're all going to be garbage. So I like to work at it backwards, right? I say, okay, what's my cost per sale? What's my advertising spend cost per sale? And then from there, once you know that number is either out of whack, then you got an emergency, figure it out. If it's close, then you could kind of start dialing in and say, okay, then, okay, where are these sales coming from? Right? And what is the channel that's bringing me the best sales per dollar? Okay, what's the channel that's bringing me the most closes, right. Per lead? So like you said, a lot of Facebook leads, not a lot of closes. I bet your Google lead closing percentage is probably closer to the 80%. Right? Like you said, high intent. Now I think you need a mix of all of those, right? I don't know that my opinion is I couldn't just only spend on Google, but, but there's other ones, right? And, and then you kind of look at the quality of the advertising source, you know, from Google to Facebook to probably Instagram or TikTok. And I guess even before Google would be like repeat referral, right? And that kind of brand marketing or brand advertising that you would say, you know, kind of the Direct in through your referral program. Those are probably highest closes percentage.

Yeah. You know something that we, Marshall and I always said that referrals and repeats close at over 70%. There's no other lead that closes like that. A lot of us forget those referrals and those repeats. You've got to keep them in the CRM. You got to keep marketing to them. If you got a service department, you got to bring them in. If you've got somebody that does service in your, in your service department, the likelihood of you selling them their next car is probably 100%. I mean, it's not 100%, but it's really close to 100%. So make sure that even those people you don't sell cars to, if you're a service department, can handle it. You got to get them into your service department because if you did the.

Math on that, it's probably one of your lowest categories for spend as well. You know, if you look at the money you spend on repeat referral, either through goodwill or marketing or whatever you want to attribute to that channel, it's your highest close. It's probably one of your best customers, and you probably spend the least amount on it. We're willing to throw thousands of dollars at Facebook and Google to get people that don't know us and we don't know them, but we're not going to spend a hundred dollars to pay someone a bird dog or referral close fee or something.

And even better, the gross on those are way higher too. They cost less to sell and the gross is way higher because they trust everything you tell them.

Yeah, that's probably true. You know what? I saw something interesting too. As far as the Google goes, a lot of people are using AI to create articles for their website to help rank with SEO. And I don't know that Google has figured out a way to shut that down. And it was huge 10 years ago. Right. You had to have so many pages and backlinks and content on your website in order to get Google to rank you better through natural rankings outside of the paid stuff. But I think there's still that opportunity exists for you to use your chat, GPT or whatever AI you're using to generate unique, you know, customized articles that you can post through your website and then help Google kind of rank you a little bit better based on that content.

Yeah, you know, so the rage has been AI. We've been talking about it for weeks here. And there's so many different ways to use it. You know, it was so funny I was asked to speak on a conference conference in August about it. And I still. I'm a novice and don't know anything, so I declined to speak. But what I'm getting to here is, is we got to get up to speed. And I'm not up to speed. But the thing is, when you're talking about the SEO that's still huge on websites and then using a tool like Chat chatgpt to do that is big. It's big because it'll make your dollar spend go down when it comes to making your website bigger. But you still have to know what you're talking about to put the information in, to get the information out properly. Through ChatGPT, one of our busiest pages on our website is about squeaky breaks. And it continually. It's been that way forever. So there are, there are some really good ways to get people to your website to get your Google ranking better. And one of the best ways, and I, you know, we talk about this all the time. Reviews. Reviews are so, so important. Just as you have a sales goal in your dealership, you need a goal for Google Reviews Monthly. It brings people to your Google page first off, and then it brings them to your website. And there's no better way to earn trust than those Google reviews. And we talked about that when we talked about that as well.

Yeah, we don't. So we don't spend a lot on Google for ads, but we do have great reviews. We have a ton of them. And I've gone through many different iterations to get reviews. We've done the, you know, hey, leave us a review and you get to spin this wheel to get a prize. We've done the part where we bonus salesmen for getting reviews that mention their name in it. And we've gone to the text, you know, the automated text after, you know, the day after you sell the car to get the review back to this point, the best one is still bonus senior salesman to get a review at the time of sale. That to me, is still hands down worth the 5, 10, or $20, whatever you want to pay the employee to get that review. Hands down the best marketing dollars you can spend, in my opinion.

I agree. And a key here. And y', all, y' all write this down. Rewind the podcast if you need to. Whatever you need to do. The best time to get a review is before they sign the documents. Okay. This is huge. If you wait till the next day to send that link, the chances of them doing it fall off probably 75%. So what we do is we send the link before they sign documents. And it is, it really works well. So timing is everything. And timing for the review is you need to get them when they are their most happiest. You don't. It's just that's the way the reviews will be better, period. And the chances of them doing it is going to be higher.

Perfect time. Hey, I'm gonna get this, this paperwork printed out or I'm gonna get the car pulled around and washed off while I do that. And before we get to the paperwork, here's this. Yeah, it's, it's hands down the other thing we're using. And I mentioned this before, but I use chat GPT to respond to all my reviews. So if you guys aren't doing that, set up one chat GPT conversation, tell it that it is a, you know, it is the review responder for a used car lot with this, this, this, this, and then you just copy and paste the reviews into ChatGPT and it will respond in however you want it to respond. Either funny or professional or add emojis or do it in the voice of Donald Trump or Donald Duck. Like it's pretty, pretty great because again, you get the review. It's important to respond to the good ones and the bad ones. Right. It just continues to push that up. The other AI thing that we're using right now, I've been having it help me fill out my policies and procedures manual, which is interesting. You know, I need to run all this past an attorney afterwards. But man, if you jump into chat and ask it to write you a red flags rule, it does a really, really good job. If you ask it to write a cell phone policy for your employees or an absentee policy or a uniform policy or you know, food in the refrigerator policy, like it's pretty wild how much it can produce. And then it gives you a great starting point and you can go in and fine tune it from there, right? Put it in your own voice, make it legal, add your name, all that stuff. But man, it's crazy the kind of heavy lifting this thing can do so.

Fast, I tell you. And we were watching it. If anybody was at the Neo user a couple weeks ago, we're watching it respond to real time customer interacting with it. Jeff it would. The customers said, I make 15 hour. And Chad GBT said, great, how many hours do you work on a normal pay period? And the person told him and it calculated it stuck it in the freaking application. It is mind blowing what it can do. And the potential that that's coming now. It's not cheap to use it in a, in an aspect like that. You know, it'll come down over time but it might be something if you're running chat on your website, might be something you need to set up after hours or on the weekend when you're not there because you know it's as good as a salesperson is when it comes to asking the right question after you train it properly.

Yeah, yeah. I imagine when it's trained well and then it becomes cheaper than a BDC agent. So even if it's expensive, it might still be cheap. The other interesting part is when it gets integrated into my collections platform. Right. And that's something that you know, we use Blitzpay obviously we Recommend Everyone use BlitzPay because the automation is so great right now with bulk texting, mass texting, the ease of payment when that, when that chat CPT agent gets integrated into that thing, you know, which I think is on their roadmap at some point. I'm sure it's on every oh yeah app. That to me is also a game changer, right to have, have an agent just doing the heavy lifting for your collector. Right. And just responding to the basic stuff and keeping in communication. Right. That's one thing that I've noticed as my collector's been gone a couple days, it's just, hey, where's the daily communication, right? Why, why isn't there daily texts to people that are not in contact with us? Maybe she's not getting to all of them. And it's really quite silly because it's like the most mundane dumb thing but it's just kind of brain dead work, you know, just constantly reaching out, trying to engage them at the right time when they will respond to you. Right. Because they're going to ignore your texts all day at work or when they're out with their friends, but if you happen to hit them at the right time, you might actually get a response.

Yeah. Biggest thing about collections is, is the touch. It's just you got to touch them. If you continue to touch and touch and touch, they will respond. And to have an automated system to do that is so helpful. Blitzbay has been been great for us. We've been on it for over a year. And while we're on the the topic of credit card payments, found this out at the 20 group. There's a website, paymentcardsettlement.com and this is a class action lawsuit because Visa Massacre were charging interchange fees that were out of whack with, with what they should have been. And I think this, if you process payments from 2014 to 2019, they set aside $5.5 billion in, in funds that can be collected. So I went on there this morning and it's paymentcard settlement.com went on there this morning and put all three of my companies into this database and start. And I'm starting to submit a claim to, to try to get some money back. I mean I don't know how much I'm gonna get back but I mean it's a thousand bucks. I'll be happy.

Yeah, yeah. It is actually a really easy process from what I've seen so far. Just submit your ein and of course it's going to be a long drawn out process before they actually get back to you with what your prorated portion of this settlement will be. It'll be 20 frickin 30 or something before we hear back on this thing. But if you were charging credit cards during that period, it just makes sense, man. It's such an easy process. Get in line, get some of those fees back.

Yeah. If not, the attorney's going to take it also. Let's get it.

Yeah, it's one of those great avenues of being in a 20 group. Is someone brought that up, right?

Yeah, yeah, Michael did. So I've never heard about it.

Right. I had neither. But then when we did the research, it came from cla. Yeah, cla had actually vetted it and sent it out. I didn't see the email. I didn't know anything about it. There you go. You know, that might pay for an entire 20 group meeting right there. Just having that one idea, that would freaking.

That'd be awesome. And that's what we're hoping.

So if you're listening to this point guys, hopefully you are signed up for convention this year. So niada, our national convention for all dealers buy here, pay here retail is happening in Las Vegas June 17th through the 20th.

Yeah. Monday morning through Thursday afternoon. There's going to be a lot of, a lot of stuff going on, Jeff. There is going to be. The quality dealer is going to be announced, which is great. I've got a session. Jeff. I think you've got a session. We'll be there all week. You've got to support the association. There's been, there's been a lot of turmoil there in the, in the past year, maybe two years. But you know, Jeff's got it going in the right direction and we're going to support him as much as we can and we really really hope everybody here does as well.

Yeah. So it was funny. I had some people in my office the other day, and I was going over stuff for the convention, and they're like, well, why are you involved? Is it just credibility or what? Like, you just like this. And I was like, you know, that's a really good question because we. We get involved, but why are you involved? You know, And I just said, look, this is the industry that I make my livelihood on. Right? So for me to think that I don't need to care about what it's doing or what our association and our voice in D.C. and our voice here, and. And to think that I don't want to go get better and learn and just seem silly, man. I mean, I don't. I don't. I don't know that there's any other industry that doesn't fight for their industry's rights. Right? And the most successful industries with the biggest lobbyist groups and the biggest associations also seem to be the most successful. Right? I mean, look at, like, the Trial Attorneys Association. I mean, the realtors just got slapped in the face. So you kind of laugh at them. Oil and gas. Like, the groups that have these huge associations with massive involvement and very, very high penetration of member involvement are very, very successful associations, and they have the ability to help their members who make their livelihood on that business stay in business. Right?

Yeah. There's plenty of businesses out there that are successful without being involved. Okay. I'm not going to say you have to be involved to be successful, but what I'm telling you is most of the dealers that I know that are involved are successful. And so look at it that way. Get involved. If you can't make it to Vegas this year, that's fine. We want you to be there. We want to see you. But you can make it to your state association convention because you may not even have to take a whole day off work to do that. And if you're not a member of your state, do it today. Get involved, become a member and. And, you know, figure out a great way to run your business and meet great friends. Some of my best friends right now are people I've met because I became a member of the. Of our association.

The. The case in point of that is this law that just got passed in Minnesota, and I hadn't heard anything about it until our association texted out something. And Minnesota, I don't think they even have an association, from what I understand. So the legislators, probably some legislator that got taken advantage of or screwed by some used car dealer came in and said that all used cars have to come with a warranty. So for cars with more than 75, 000 miles, you have to give a 15 day or 500 mile warranty. It's required on all used car sales. Right. So I don't know what that warranty includes. I don't know if they're saying bumper to bumper or 15 day return policy or. I haven't seen the details on that. But that's just a great example of if.

I mean it's government overreach. I mean that's all it is.

Well, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. Right. And so if you don't have a good association to stand up and talk common sense into these legislators, they might think they're doing a good thing or they might know they're not doing a good thing but they just don't care.

Because you're going to pick on.

So anyways, that's a good rant, Luke. That's plenty. Let's wrap it up. Hope to see you guys June 17th through the 20th, but we'll definitely talk to you next week.

Thank you for listening. Please leave us a review. We'll catch you in the next episode.