#53 - Work On It, Not In It

That is a huge revenue stream.

Huge and huge example of, like, what are you missing out on because you're so busy with your head down working, you know, you're not seeing the opportunities going right past you.

Welcome to the Independent Dealer Podcast, the.

Podcast for auto dealers to learn and grow together.

Here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

All right, welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Today, Luke, let's talk a little bit about the motivation that you've had coming off your vacation last week, right? Both of us were out. You had a great 20 group meeting. I missed it. We came back from NABD. It sounds like you had some good conversations there at your dealership, right?

Yeah. You know, every time I guess I go away, I get reminded that sometimes as a. As a dealer who started out as a, you know, mom and pop, you do every thing type of dealership that a lot of times you get. You get locked into that and you. And you do so many things that you're accustomed to doing, as in buying cars or, you know, working in the shop or. I mean, I don't wash or detail cars, but, you know, you make it, get involved in that or actually, you know, doing some of the collection cues yourself. So you get locked into doing those things and. And it's really, as your business grows, not what you need to be doing. And I get reminded of those things when I have other, bigger dealers stop by and talk with me, or when I go to 20 group and we have some fairly large dealers in our 20 group, and they remind me, luke, you need to be working on your business and not in your business. And it gets me re motivated to do the things I need to be doing.

Yeah, that's perfect. And that's what we want to focus in on, guys, today, working on your business and not in it. So, Luke, let me give you a scenario. You come back from a long vacation, you roll on the lot, and you see a whole bunch of holes in your front line. You got a bunch of empty spaces. Good news, the guys have sold cars, but you realize that you've got 10 cars sitting at detail. What is your instant reaction as a business owner, entrepreneur, go getter? What's your gut reaction?

My gut reaction is just to go raise Cain with everybody at the dealership. Right. And say, what have y' all been doing? I don't understand, but that's honestly not what you should be doing. You know, number one, if you come back and see that, Jeff, the first thing I would. I would question is, well, what Is the process. If someone sells a car about getting a new. A new car in that hole. Right. That would be my first. Well, not necessarily my first instinct, but that's what you should be doing. You should be saying, hey, well, okay, there was a. There was a failure in communication somewhere. Let's figure that out. So I'd go and I'd sit everybody down, and I would say, okay, we have 15 cars waiting for detail. Why weren't they detailed? I would get with the sales staff who sold the car and say, hey, why did a new car not get put in the front line? And I would probably get with my internal inventory manager and go, what all happened here? We would sit everybody down. A room is what we should be doing, and figure out where the process, you know, fell apart. And then I would update my process manual to fix that problem in the future is what I should be doing as a. As a person working on my business and not working in my business. Now, if I was working in my business, I'd probably. Working in my business, I would get mad. I'd go grab some keys, and I'd put those cars on front line. Right?

And that's what I was getting at. I'll tell you what, my gut instinct, Luke. And where I fall flat, I'm even behind you. I go back there, and I say, well, I got to help these guys detail cars.

No, I'm not doing that.

They got 10 waiting. We got to go. Come on, guys. And I jump in with them, and I'd be out there detailing cars, and I get about a half hour into it, and then I'd pop my head up and be like, what in the crap am I doing out here? What is going on? So I think, as instinctive. We are firefighters, right?

Right.

When we see a fire, we want to go run and put it out. We don't always stop and say, wait, why is the fire there in the first place? And instead of me just running over and trying to put that thing out, I need to figure out why it even started 100%.

And you're right. I mean, I've used that terminology so much when, you know, somebody would ask me, you know, a friend of mine would call me, what you been doing all day? I've been fighting fires, you know, and that's not where we need to be. And. And as small, independent dealers, that's what we're accustomed to being. But as you grow, you can't be that guy. Right?

Right.

How do we get out of that?

Yeah, let's talk about A couple of things, Luke, what as dealer principals. Now, I know we're all different sizes, so we're speaking to guys who are probably one or two man shops. There's guys listening that I know have 30 to 40 employees. And then you've got some of us who are maybe, you know, maybe middle management or some of the guys out here maybe, you know, they're kind of in between. Where does this apply to us? Regardless of the size of operation that we're.

Well, so as you. As you grow, and I think there's. There's probably not many dealers out there who. Who aren't thinking about growing, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think in general, most people, you know, you may talk to someone who's been. Been big before and is maybe sold that and maybe starting over, maybe they. They don't want to be big anymore. But, you know, a lot of play, a lot of people do want to grow their business.

And let me caveat that, Luke. I would say grow both ways. You're either growing by volume, you're growing by net profit, or you're growing by having more freedom and less headaches. Right. I mean, there's kind of. You can grow in a bunch of different directions. So I think we can cover all the bases by saying you're either trying to grow and make more money, make more money with less headache, right?

Yeah. And then both of them are growth, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, if. I guess if you had to start over in. And do it as a small operation, what I would encourage people to do would be to write down processes to start with. You know, as soon as you get kind of a handle on how you like to buy cars and the cars you like to buy, write a manual on how to do that. I have not done that yet, which is funny. First thing I come to, we have manuals for all kinds of things, but I really like to buy cars, so that's probably not something that I'm gonna give up very readily. Right. So. But I can, you know, I can save money on. On having to not have someone buy my cars. And I can buy cars anywhere in the world. So that's, you know, that's easy. But there, you know, there may be a time when. When I've grown past just me buying cars, and I'll need to train buyers. So if that's something. And that's. Honestly, probably most dealers, when they first get in the business, that's what they like to do most. And that's what kind of got them into the business is Buying the cars. So I would encourage someone, if they're new to the business, is to. The first thing develop is probably the process of how to buy a car, right? And when you have that written down, that would kind of give you an outline of how to build a process for everything else. So, you know, you need a sales manual process, you need a nightly deposit process, you need all these type processes that will help you grow when the time comes. And even if it's just you and a salesperson and a lot Porter, if you have the process written down for those three people, well, that's a start. And if you have to hire another Lot Porter, then you already have that written down. So I think no matter the size, starting even that, starting small and developing the processes then can surely help you grow when the time comes.

One thing that really helped me was charting the flow of my processes. You know, when I get a new piece of inventory, where does it go? Where did the keys go? Where does the paperwork go? Who gets it next? After recon's done with it, where does it go? And just, even just charting that on a piece of paper or on a Word document to kind of understand how the workflow happens. And then it's easy. From there I can start dissecting that into smaller sections and say, okay, when the keys show up on the office manager's desk or when they show up as new inventory, what does she do with that title and that paperwork and that key, you know, and then get more and more and more specific and detailed about each step of the process.

That's funny you bring that up because, you know, in my session at NABD, we talked about that, developing that process because I think if you can develop the process of getting a car from purchase to frontline, it's so important because if you've got that process down, anyone can jump into that position, right? You could buy cars on vacation. And as soon as, you know, if you've got the, the process setting in place that I buy the car, I ship it, when it hits my dealership, if I'm there or not, people should know what to do, right? So it's, that is an extremely smart way to start a process building, you know, system.

I think the charts. Now one thing I've used lately, I found a little web based software called Trainual. I think it's the mixture of training and manual put together. And I'm kind of halfway into this, so it's half hatched, but it's a web based program that helps you build manuals policy and procedures. And so whether you're using a software, this is a service, I think it's like 50 bucks a month or something. But you can build out all your manuals, everyone can jump in and see them, they can take tests at the end of each section. You can assign them to different roles in the dealership. Anyways, use that or a Google Drive or a Word document. I would recommend probably a Google Drive over a Word document because everyone can have it and it's continually updated and you can share it and you can access it from anywhere. Those are all really important things.

My bride, who tries to keep me on point is very specific about things like that. And we use Google Docs, Google Drive and I think Microsoft360, same type of situation, whatever it is you use. But whenever you see that there's a breakdown in a system, open up your Google Docs and let's go. Let's write down what we're doing in that system. That way we can look back at it, we can edit it and move forward. So the next time we have that problem, we can look, well, was the system followed? Yes or no? If the system was followed and there's still a breakdown, what do we need to add to the system to fix the system? Right.

Mm, yeah. Such a great point. Because so many people think they can put this on paper and I do this, I'm horrible at it. I get excited, I get it all on paper, I write it all down and then I forget about it for six months. And it's. I'm not seeing that it's a, it's a continual document, it's living. You've got to always be updating and looking at it or it's just pointless.

And yeah, like, like I was talking about since I've been back, well, this week primarily, I've really been working on phone call scripts for our sales staff. We looked at our sales training manual because we had hired a new salesperson and realized it was really dated and there were pieces missing. And when Marshall was here last week, we talked about how to actually, our original sales training manual actually came from him, from a 20 group years ago. And it was a lot more scripted to retail and not necessarily to our business. But I don't think at the time I was really. I wasn't, I wasn't as good of a manager maybe as I am now. So I didn't understand the word, the way you have to phrase things to get, to get the customer to tell you what you need to tell what I Need to tell you.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we've gone back and I've started rewriting all the scripts based more to the buy here, pay here model than the retail model. And don't get me wrong, there's still a bunch of. There's a bunch of similarities when you're. When you're car now a person then compared to. Compared if you're selling fish to cars. But you know, it's still the same. But you need to make sure what your core business is. You're writing your manual to that core business. So that's what we've been developing is a new, new way to speak to our customers, make sure we are doing things that are beneficial to us and to them at the same time. And sometimes you have to rewrite.

And it always changes, of course, because the market changes, your inventory makeup changes, the consumer changes. They've got a different attitude. Maybe things that worked in the past don't work now, or you've come up with new ways or new strategies that you like that work for you and your dealership. So, yeah, you got to be continually updating these things.

You know, the thing that's really important when it comes to working on your business and not in your business is, you know, figuring out if you over manage. That's something that I have struggled with and finally maybe have figured out a little different way to do it. And the way I figured that out was by going over the processes we have in place. So if you don't have processes in place, you will over manage. I'm just going to tell you that because you're afraid that people aren't doing their job well. It's very easy not to do your job if you don't know what your job is. Right. So as an owner, I think it's very important to develop each position and to make sure that they have a written down, this is what my day should look like, then you can manage their day, right?

Mm.

If you're working queues, if you've got collectors that are working queues at the end of the day or once a week, you can sit down with a collector and say, hey, at this time today, once you finish your queue, we're gonna go over everything that you were supposed to do in that queue. And hopefully, you know, if you continue to train that way, that the collectors will understand that, okay, every, you know, this is what my, my job expects of me. That's what my boss expects for me. And he's going to inspect what's going on and if that's the case, then, you know, after a while, after a while of inspecting what you expect, you'll get that straight, right?

Absolutely. Okay, Luke, so take me along the process here. So we've identified our basic processes or all of our processes at the dealership. We've written down manuals and procedures. We've done task lists for our employees. So once we've kind of charted out our whole dealership, how do we keep ourselves from getting bogged down in the weeds? How do we identify what our three core competencies are as the dealer or as the manager, the leader of the dealership, and maybe give us some practical tips to not get sucked in to being a firefighter.

Well, I think number one is training your employees. We really, we harp on that a lot. But number one is to set up a weekly training with each branch of your dealership. So I have sales, I have service, I have collections, and I have a comptroller, right? So the financial portion of my dealership. So in theory, I would need to have four meetings a week to train those people, what we need to be doing. Right? And some of them may at first be a daily training session. If you've hired a new salesperson, maybe you need to train them daily. If you've hired a new collector, you need to develop their queue and train that queue with them daily. Because most collectors that you hire probably are not going to have buy here, pay here, collection experience, right? And especially comptrollers, you could hire any accountant to come in and work for you, but an accountant that worked at Foodline or whatever, insert grocery store here, Safeway, whatever it is, they were used to dealing with groceries. Well, now they're going to start dealing with cars and payments. So we've got to train them on that. And you can expect them to know what they're doing when they come in. So you need to train weekly, at worst, and sometimes daily to start with. So that's number one.

And I think on a broad spectrum, you've got to ask yourself, you know, what can I do to help my people do their job better? You know, what can I do to help them be better instead of, you know, what can I do to sell more cars? Or what can I do to recondition more cars? It's like, how can I help my people sell more cars? How can I help my people recondition? Do I need to revisit the process? Do I need to train more? Well, of course we know those answers, but do I need to get some obstacle out of their way or sit them down and say, hey, guys, what is keeping you from getting to this goal? Where is the pain point in this process? Or where is the breakdown? Luke noticed that maybe he had a fall off from phone calls to lot ups or appointments. Hey, man, I got a big fall off here. I need to retrain on this thing or my process is broken here.

That's so funny you say that is because if you're working in your business a lot of times, Jeff, you don't have a chance to step back and look at your numbers.

Right?

You can't see it, and you may not even know what numbers to look at. So last week we started looking at our Internet ups compared to our close rate, right? And on a bad month, we're sitting at 9 or 10%. And on good month, we're at like 17%. So I said, marshall, where do we need to be? He's like, well, you need to be at 20%. I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm so far off. What. What is the issue here? And I said, well, Marshall, maybe it's just the difference in your retail operation compared to a subprime operation. And he says, well, our closing rates up to 40%. So then I go, oh, well, okay, prime closing rate, probably anywhere from 35 to 40%. So buy here, pay here, or subprime is gonna probably be somewhere around 20%. So I looked and said, well, we don't need any more Internet ups. We're getting 200 plus Internet ups a month. We've got to learn to close that better, Right? So where's the breakdown from my Internet lead to my appointment set? Because my appointment set to appointment show to a sold is right. So I can look at that and say, okay, that's right. What we need to train on is our Internet up to our appointment set. So how am I going to make that better? So that's where writing the scripts, developing emails that work comes into play. And if I'm. If I'm just selling cars all day long, I'm never going to see that.

Mm. And that's what I was getting. Yeah. And that's what I would say when we talk about how do we keep ourselves from getting caught up in the weeds? And we gotta identify what are the real core competencies that we're not only maybe we're good at, but maybe we enjoy. You know, Luke has decided that he really enjoys buying cars. That's something he's gonna continue to do at his dealership. Cause that's what really Moves the needle for his dealership. He knows that if he buys a better car at a better price, it starts the whole process off on the right foot. You know, for me, I don't enjoy buying cars. I don't want to be at the auction, so I have someone else do that. But what I look at is, what am I good at, what do I enjoy? And how do I stay focused on the main things that are really going to move the dealership? I could get bogged down in all sorts of things. I mean, I'm a. I'm a neat freak, so I like things to be clean and organized. I could be out sweeping the car lot every single day, you know, and straightening tires. But you got to check yourself, right, Luke? And you got to say what is really going to make the difference at my dealership today.

But one thing, I may enjoy buying cars, and I may think I'm great at buying cars, but I've got to get out of my comfort zone as an owner as well, though. So if I know that that's what I like to do, and I don't really need help training there, what I need to be doing is figuring out what's more important to my dealership than buying cars that I need to be working at. So I'm going to figure out a way to, you know, read more books or go to trainings that's going to help me be a better owner or manager. So, you know, even though you enjoy doing something, doesn't mean that's what you should be doing. I may enjoy being a technician as well, but me turning wrenches out there to save $60 an hour shouldn't be what I'm doing, right?

Yeah. Yeah. You got to look at, what is that payoff? What is the, you know, the opportunity cost of me out turning wrenches when I should be steering the ship and not down there rowing the ship, you know what I'm saying?

Right. And there's ways to, you know, if. If that turning wrenches is what you feel like makes you money. There's a way to train your technicians that still keep you involved so you don't have to leave it. You just have to figure out a different way that's gonna be better for you. Maybe it's, you know, training your technicians on problem solving or training your technicians on how to use a certain web based identifix or whatever that's gonna help them repair the cars better. So there's still ways to stay involved without doing the manual labor. And I think that's where you need to get to as a business owner.

Mm. And one technique that I've kind of used is every time I get. Every time I have a process or I have some task in front of me, I just ask myself, is this something that is one of my core competencies? Is this something that really makes a difference? Or can I write a process for this and assign it to someone else in the dealership? You know, so I'm continually looking for things that I can shed and I can get rid of. Hey, for some reason, I've always been the person that signs titles or I've always been the person that like, assigns repossessions. Like, no, I can authorize the repossession, but I don't have to go through the whole process of assigning it and sending out the release and all that kind of nonsense. Like, I taught that to someone else. And now that's just the way it goes. So we got to continually be asking ourselves, like, is this a $10 an hour task?

So I've got a challenge for everybody out there that I think will help move the needle here, Jeff. And that's for one solid week. Write down everything you do in your dealership and just write it down. You know, if you go in and sweep the floors, I want you to write down that I swept the floors today from 10 to 1015. If. If you're buying cars, write that down. I bought cars from, you know, 10:00am to 3:00pm today. I spent all that time. Or if it's collecting, I spent, you know, three hours collecting today. If it was detailing a car, I spent this amount. Do that for a week. When you do that, look back at your week and see what is something that you could hire someone that should be making less money than you to do that. And can you develop a process for that? Because I really think it would open your eyes up to what you're actually doing.

Yeah, yeah. It's so smart too. And you say that. Luke, what I'm surprised at is what we don't realize the opportunity cost and what we could unload to a part time, 10 or $12 an hour person to do these tasks. It's only going to cost you $1,000 or $1,200 a month to hire a full time person to take all of these tasks off your shoulder. And how easy is it going to be to make up that $1,200, Luke, that's one car sale. If you can free up your time to get one more car, either get one additional sale or buy A car a little bit cheaper or get it reconditioned a little bit cheaper because you fixed your processes, you fixed your time to line, you fixed some inefficiency in your dealership, you freed yourself up or one less repossession. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. That's $5,000 a copy. So we know how that works. But you're so right. Let's look at the things we can hire people to do better. You know, one of the things, whenever we would send a car, let's say, to a new car store to get a problem solved or a recall fix or something to that effect, I used to drive over there and bring the person back. Right. Well, I figured out it's so much easier to use Uber. Right?

Yeah.

So, you know, it cost me an hour to go over there and back or something to that effect. It's going to cost me however much money after you feel like I'm worth an hour or is it going to cost me $15 to call an Uber. So there's so many different ways you could either hire somebody or use technology to benefit yourself rather than you taking the time to do that.

Yeah. People get. You think it's an expense, but what happens when that Uber bill starts getting around $500 a month? Guess what? Now you can hire an employee to do it.

You know, Exactly. And you have to look at that. You know, that's another thing owners should be doing. You should be looking at your P and L every day. If you don't know what that is out there, boys and girls, that's your profit and loss statement. And you should be looking at your balance sheet. Those things are so important. You spending time working on cars might end up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars because you know, the person you trusted to look at your balance sheet and to do your P and L weren't doing their job or they were stealing from you at worst. So these little things that you aren't doing need to be fixed so that you will be doing them.

Yeah. And overall, it's sad to me when I hear dealers and I've tried to make a better focus the last couple of years to take time off to train myself. And you mentioned that, Luke, that when we're so busy in the dealership, we feel like there's a million fires. We feel like we can't leave or everything's gonna fall apart or we're gonna miss sales and we can't go to trainings, we can't go to convention, we can't go to 20 group. We can't sit down and read some articles or do some studying or do our own training. It's just pointless. Right? If you're just gonna keep doing what you've always been doing and you're not gonna educate yourself to get better, then you're just. You're stuck in this continual spiral.

Oh, yeah, Another thing that I was thinking about as well, Jeff, and I don't know, maybe. Maybe you see this some, but. So if we are a middle to larger size dealership, when you have employees that go on vacation for a week, fill into their role, because you may find things that you don't see going on. And if you're continually working in your business and not own your business, so you can fill into those roles. You know, if you've got a manager that goes on vacation for a week, well, do their job for a week or, you know, do their job for half the week so you can figure out what's going on. Because you may find something is broken in that process that the manager or that a salesperson hadn't told you about work in your service department as a, you know, as a service manager, whatever it is. But I think doing that will also point out new ways to fix the problems that you don't see that are arising in your process.

Oh, yeah, great, Great example. I did that with the shop just yesterday. I sat down with my service writer and I said, okay, what is your flow? You know, help me out here with the process. And it had gotten so skewed and ski wampusy and sideways and there's job jackets everywhere and tickets. And I was like, how? No, no, no, no. So I just cleaned everything out. Cleaned out his whole space, took his whole desk apart and just said this, you know, let's look at these processes. I didn't know that it was so off and the inefficiencies that were in it. And to your point, Luke, learn their job or see their processes, but also cross train other employees. Because, man, maybe you don't want to be the one that has to step in there every time your office manager takes a vacation or goes on maternity leave. But someone in the dealership should be able to step in. If your sales manager got hit by a bus tomorrow.

Oh, yeah, you need, you need to know everybody's position because at some point, someone's not gonna show up for work, right? And somebody's gonna have to fill in. But also you need to make sure that the process you developed originally, number one, does it work? Number two, is the person follow that process, because your process may work perfectly, but if they have developed their own process, it may be better or worse. So, you know, we need to figure out if someone has changed the process and it works better. Well, you need to change your manual, right?

Yeah.

So these are things you've got to see. And you can't see it if you're buried in the shop or you're buried on the sales lot every day.

Yep. And guaranteed you might have some step in the process, you know, is crucial. But human nature, we will take the shortest route, we will take the laziest route, and, and we will stop doing dotting the I's and crossing the T's, and you won't know it for two or three years. And all of a sudden you find out, you know, you've been missing this form or this signature or the GPS haven't been assigned. Right. Or your spare keys aren't even tagged, you know, because someone just decided to short circuit a process.

And that happens all the time. You just got to be aware of that. You know, the other benefit of working on your business instead of working in your business is it allows you to find other revenue streams. You know, if we just sit there all day and we sell cars, we wash cars, or we work in the shop or whatever we're doing inside of our. Are we getting cars through recon? It doesn't allow us to look at our business and say, okay, well, you know, a customer keeps coming in asking for this type of car that we don't have. Maybe I should start stocking that car. Or maybe it's. It's a piece of property that all of a sudden popped up in your case that you didn't identify or you couldn't have identified if you were working all day long. And it's networking as well. Join a chamber event or join a BNI group or something like this. That kind of gets you out of the office to grab some more revenue streams. Because if you can work on your business, your business should be working pretty seamlessly without you in it, day to day. So it's costing you money by not having the other advantages that are out there.

That's a great example. I think only recently did I feel like I got things to the point where towards the end of the month, I had some free time once I kind of got my first in the month accounting and bills paid and those core things that I still do here at the dealership. So now I'm tackling my reinsurance company. I know we talked about that months ago, and I just have not got around to it. I've been staring at Tim's number for months and months and months and haven't bit the bullet. And so I'm doing that now. You know, that's my goal this month, is to get that thing up and running.

That is. That is a huge revenue stream, Hugh.

And huge example of like, what are you missing out on because you're so busy with your head down working, you know, in the opportunities going right past you.

That's right. And maybe, you know, maybe during, you know, your lunch break a day, you. You're reading a book or you're. You're watching some YouTube videos on how to be a better manager, a better leader. And so there's so many things that you need to be doing beside, you know, whatever it is you're doing in your dealership. You know, I guess the question that everybody has on the mind after listening all this, Jeff, is, you know, how do we get there? How do we. How do we do it? You. You have any suggestions?

Yeah, I think, like I said, we identify those processes first. We write policy and procedures manuals, and then we decide what are the least priority items that I can shed. And that's one thing we're going to do this week, Luke. All of us are going to document. We've all got a little calendar sitting right on our desk or somewhere nearby, and we're going to. On our iPhone, we're going to make a separate little calendar that says my tasks. And we're going to document every hour of each day, by the hour, by the half hour, what we did and what took up our time. And every time we sit down to do a task and we document it, we're going to look back and say, is this something that I can systematize? Can I write a process for this and can I delegate it to someone else?

And once you have all that down, you got to hire great people, number one. And if you don't have great people, then you need to fire some people, right?

Yeah. If you think, I don't trust anybody here to do my, you know, deposits or to do my repo assignments. And then you got a problem, you.

Know, if it's the wrong person on the bus, you got to get them off the bus.

And I get. I bet. I guarantee you what that problem was, Luke. You were too busy working in your business to hire the right person, so you just grabbed the first application that came across your desk, and now you're too scared to fire them because you know that that's all going to fall on you and you're gonna have to start the hiring process or.

They were a family member.

Yeah, yeah, they're a family member. Yeah. So. So you're stuck in this trap because you aren't freeing up your time to focus on the more important things like hiring the right people, training, having the right culture, those types of things.

Yeah. And you know, the last thing, and this is, this is something that I don't know any of us out there have done this, but I was reading a book this week, Excellence Wins. And I've talked about this to a couple different people, but, you know, there's so many different things between, you know, leadership and managers and there's so many different ways we can go. And something that I've read over and over again that great leaders do is that, you know, they look at their business and they figure out a vision. And the vision is not what you're going to do today, but the vision is what is your business going to be. So, you know, I encourage people out there to write down that vision. If that vision is to have 10 dealerships and sell a thousand cars a month or whatever it is, write it down. If your vision is to have one dealership and it be the best darn dealership in your town, then that's a vision. And I want you to write it down. And I want you to write a plan on how to get there. And it may be a five year plan, it may be a ten year plan, but you need to have benchmarks set in place. It may be a year plan, so you may need to have benchmarks for every month to get there. You know, we have some friends, you know, that I've seen on the Facebook group, independent Facebook group that says, hey, we're opening up new stores in the next six months. Well, you know, if that is your plan, you should have benchmarks to reach every month during that plan. That might be hiring 10 people in the next six months. I need to hire two people a month, whatever it is, if it's to have construction done by X date, everybody needs to write these things down and you need to make sure you're hitting those. That is vision. Vision is not going, I need to, you know, buy two cars tomorrow. That's not vision, that's a plan of action. So make sure you have vision. Make sure you write that down. And you know, it also includes the people you need to hire and what you need to train them for. So all these things need to be part of your vision statement. And if you can do that, I really think you can see how it all goes together.

Awesome. Awesome. Look, this has been great. I think, you know, for me even I've got a ton of notes here. Things that I'm going to start with today. Not tomorrow, not the next day, not next week. I'm going to start today by writing these things down, making sure I'm following up on my processes. Luke's challenges. We're going to write down every single task that we do this week. We're also going to write down a vision. So get on your calendar, write down your tasks, sit down with some quiet time, sketch out your vision for your dealership where you want to see it go. Luke, any parting words for us?

Let's just get it done. Let's do those things. Let's commit to do those things.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. We appreciate everyone listening. We really appreciate you sharing this with your friends and your reviews that you leave us on itunes. That's what pushes us out there. As you know, we're just a couple of dealers helping educate other dealers. We love the community. We love getting it out there. So we really appreciate your guys support. That's right. All right, talk to you next week.

Sam.