NIADA 2021 Expo Hall

Alright guys, Expo Hall 2021 Naida. Luke, we're gonna walk talk to some vendors that we find interesting. We started here in the back corner where all the action's happening.

A lot of action back here.

A lot of action. Okay, so we're with Rohan with flickvision video marketing. Flickfusion video marketing.com Rohan, tell the dealers what do you do? How can you help us?

We help with doing video marketing and advertising to help you get more engagement for your site and also increase time on site as a better over experience for your customers and get more traffic.

Cool. So is it a. It's a software. What else is it? Is it. Do you show us how to use it? Do you show us how best to to integrate it into our site? What is it?

So our software is an opportunity where we can do one of many things. One, we create a 360 with a video with a video sitemap with a meta tag and token to get your top search results organically. The other thing we do is a live streaming with a vid mill. So it doesn't matter if you have an iPhone. I have an Android. I can actually literally put that customer at your dealership virtually through either looking through our360 the video or also putting yourself in front of that customer like FaceTime. But once again, iPhone, Android don't communicate. Our system allows it where you don't have to download anything that calls in. They can answer, they can see you, you can see them one way or two way stream. If I'm having a bad hair day I can turn, turn that off. I can see you but you wouldn't see me. So literally putting your customer at your.

Dealership from wherever they are, that's, that's pretty neat. I guess a lot of this happened during COVID or were y' all pre Covid when having these type of systems.

So we had started prior to Covid and then it actually developed in more details from that because of COVID because of the way people are, you know, not actually going to the dealerships as they were priority.

Alright, Rohan with Flick Fusion Video Marketing. A link to their website will be in the show notes.

Thank you.

Thank you guys.

Thank you.

Okay guys, we are here with Mike with GSFS Group. Mike, what do you do? How can you help independent dealers?

Actually what I do, I'm the national sales manager for Gulf State Financial Services and what we do with the independent dealers, we work directly as the administrator for the NIADA CPO program. The NIDA CPO program. Right now it's why not why would you not certify vehicles in our current climate and market? When you look at the adversary of used cars right now versus new cars, the used car is the new new car right now. And by certifying them it gives you the profitability and gain to basically get the gross profit that you're looking for with your used car. Everybody is paying more, inventory is low. So why not maximize your growth probability with certifying them? And who other better than certified with is Niada? There's only two entities, there's nada and then Niada for the independent dealers. And from that standpoint, why not, why not be a part of it?

And so the company you represent, how does the independent dealer work that into the CPO program? What exactly do you do for the CPO part of the program?

We do the training, we do the marketing. We actually are the administrators behind the program. Right. Niada is their program and we're the administrators being Gulf State Financial Service Group. So that's our portion in and it's the same level of service that you would see across the board. But even at a higher state. What we are Gulf State you might know us for is Gulf State Toyota. We work directly with Toyota and you get the same level of service from a claims adjudication standpoint. That's where rubber meets the road. It's just a piece of paper until you call in and the level of service is what take its to the next level. And that's what Gulf State is about.

I think in South Carolina or in the Southeast we have Southeast Toyota. That's same as Gulf State Toyota. Type of, type of situation, one of those.

Okay, so it's only two entities left in the US It's Southeast Toyota and Gulf State. For Toyota in general. But not to talk so much about.

Toyota, I'm just trying to put all that together. Yeah, okay.

But what we do from an administration standpoint, we hold a high standard of quality and service. Right. There's no really gray areas. SLAs are, I mean at an all time high. Meaning we reach the goal in which the customers look for and what they need and that's service.

So if I sell a CPO car with the warranty and the customer needs something done to that CPO car, they contact your group and y' all handle all that.

They're contacting gov State and we're doing the claims adjudication and that's where it makes the difference. Right. Claims adjudication is what it's about. Everybody have service products. But how you service them is what makes the difference.

Yeah, yeah, we got a guy with Car Capital and they're at the same booth. So what's going on with Car capital and all this too?

Well, my name is Guy Cesario. I'm the VP of National Dealer Relations for Car Capital. And what we do is provide independent dealers with the technology and the tools to instantly approve any one of their customers on every vehicle they have on their lot. After they do it, they're able to underwrite and structure their own loan and then send the customer a completely digital experience for contracting. And there is no paper submission from the dealer at all. It's all done electronically. Most of the time it's same day funding. And then we service the loan for the, for the dealer. And unlike some other of our competitors in the market, we don't require the dealer to have a certain amount of units in their portfolio before we start paying out their residual finance income.

So y' all are, you are a finance company?

We're a loan servicing company.

A loan servicing company. So the dealer is still financing the paper or.

No, it's not. It's our capital. We provide the capital and the technology and the servicing. So we're like a one solute, one stop solution for all of it. Okay.

Yeah.

Cool.

That's awesome.

There's tons of dealers out there that need that.

An indirect lender, you would call it.

Maybe, or we're similar to an indirect. We do everything that an indirect lender does for a dealer except for that they're not paying big hedge fees or bank fees for the deals. They're actually able to participate that in their portfolio as the loans perform.

Right, right, right. Similar to that C Company.

That C Company, but maybe a little differently structured and maybe a little easier to work with.

We're very dealer friendly when it comes to that.

None of these, none of these pools don't have to have a big deep pool before you start swimming. Okay.

Exactly.

Thank you.

Have a great day.

All right, here we are with Philip from Prodigy. Philip, what is your product? How can it help independent dealers?

Yeah, absolutely. So what we do is we are a digital retail provider. What we do is we'll put an online store integrated inside of your current website. We can also drive all your third party leads to your website as well and to your online store. So if you're using Cargurus or Autotrader or Facebook Marketplace, we'll go and we'll send a link out to those customers when that lead gets submitted from them and then we're Going to drop them inside of the custom built store that we provide for you. And by doing that, what we do is we'll catch the trade for you. We can do soft credit pools, hard credit pools, we can do F and I products for you. But really it's just letting. We're gathering as much information as we possibly can from your customers so when they actually do show up into your showroom floor, you've got enough information to help you close that deal a lot.

Easier does is this, can my customers actually do everything they need to do to buy this car in your product?

Great question.

Except for sign.

Great question. Well, they can actually go from A to Z with our product as well. So if they want to do, if you're using what dealer track or if you're using Route 1, what we can do is once that credit app is done, it's filled out, we can shoot it's off through, let's say Route 1 for example. And then we can have real time loan approvals show up on that customer screen. Usually takes what, 30 seconds, 60 seconds to do that. Your customer can choose which payment option that they want to go with and we can do E cig so they can complete the sale, the transaction from A to Z with us as well. That's an optional feature. A lot of stores that I talk to, you know, independent stores, what they'll do is they'll hold it, we can hold it at that Route 1 gate and not push it off because they want their desking manager to touch every single pencil before it goes out. So we can, we can complete it for you or we can go ahead and hold it there. But that's definitely a feature that we can do for you as well.

That's, I mean that kind of solves our problem of trying to be like Carvana. We could use your product to get us closer to that situation.

I'm actually glad you mentioned that. So we are giving you that Carvana like experience. Right. But the difference that you have is you've got a brick and mortar store. So the majority of the time these customers still want to finish in store. They can do that at yours. They can't do that at Carvana. Right. If they want to test drive that car, they can do that with you. They can't do that at Carvana. So we're giving you that experience, that Carvana like experience in case those customers want that type of, you know, transaction. But the majority still customers still want to finish up in store. Right. Another good point. Or a good feature that We've got is, I sort of mentioned it where when we re engage those third party leads and we drive them to this store or to your, your online store that we're building for you, we're capturing more trades for you. So that means we're getting you access to more inventory. Right? So this, this inventory that we're getting, it's huge for independence, you know, because they're getting all their inventory mainly from auctions. You're not having to outbid anybody with these because these are guys are coming directly to you. There's no transportation fees, there's no auction fees. Right. So they're going to drive those units directly to your lot. Go walk that unit, say hey, I'll make, you know, give you, I don't know, 8,000 for that 2012 F150. But we're getting you access to more inventory.

Can I get some of those 8,000 $12.

You know what I'm referring to.

It's a great looking product.

So to sum this up, you're saying we're replacing our website?

No, no sir.

This sits inside of our website.

We integrate this and build this and we put it inside of your website.

So this is the digital store inside your digital retailing, that whole situation A to Z.

Right. So think about your inventory. Think about your inventory sheet that you have on your website. If I'm a customer, I can scroll to find whatever unit pops out at me and then you'll always, there's always CTAs, those call to action buttons that say value your trade or hey, here's your credit app or get best E price that you can. So we take over those CTAs for you. So if a customer clicks on one of those buttons, then we drop them right into that store that's integrated inside of your website.

You're doing what my website should be doing.

And we consolidate all of those systems and all of those features into one store and we capture as much information as we possibly can. I mean you can upload steps, you know, so if you get someone that says hey or they scheduled a test drive for you, you can your salespeople, when they reach out to those customers, Hey, I saw you. What did you say? I saw you, you know, scheduled a test drive. You don't mind going back online and uploading your driver's license, upload your registration, upload your liability insurance. So when you come into the store, you know, the transaction is a lot faster. You come test drive it, sign and you're good, you're done. So we're shaving about 90 minutes off of the sales time.

Well, thank you Philip, we appreciate it.

Okay guys, here we are with Kevin of FileCenter, a Utah based company. Most great businesses are based out of Utah.

Really? I don't know any, I don't even know any good people in Utah.

Funny note, we have more vendors from Utah here than we have dealers.

Yeah, what is the deal there that I don't. Every startup is in Utah.

Maybe it sounds the good ones. So Kevin is going to tell us what FileCenter is and how it can help independent dealers.

So File center basically helps manage all of the documents that come in from deal jackets to repair orders. It can be just about anything that they get, paper wise invoices and everything like that from their vendors. And then from there we actually make it so that we can automate that process so that when an employee is actually going in and grabbing like a service record, they can literally just drop it into the scanner. They just push the button on the scanner and then the system does the rest and it routes it and stores it away.

It puts it wherever it needs to.

Go, wherever they want it to go, then we send it there.

So do I have to tell this thing where it should go? Is that the case?

Just the very first time. As soon as I get everything set up, all you have to literally do is just scan the document and then what it does is it reads the information that's on a document. So if it's a repair order, for instance, like we're, we might look for the word work order in page one and maybe the VIN number and things like that. And so then it will literally read all that information and then just drop it and route it where you wanted it to go. So you just specify that to us when we first get you set up.

So it's a smart scanner. Didn't even know it existed. Cool.

It's not just a scanner, right? Obviously the scanner does all the real hard work in the sense of scanning it and making a good image. But when, when you really look at it with the File center software, what it's doing is it's doing all the processing. So we're going to read all the OCR data on it. So like when you take a picture of a scan, a scanner takes a picture of a document. And so then our system converts it so that it's text searchable, so it can see that these are letters and numbers. And then from there we look at it and we say, okay, follow this if, then statement. If it says workflow and page one, then this or work order and page one. Then we know that it's a service record, it's a repair order. And so it just automatically says, oh, okay, you're going to put that into the service file cabinet. And then depending on how they want to do it, whether it's by year or by VIN number or whatever, we say, okay, here's the VIN number or here's the year that this repair order had been done. And then it says, oh, okay, so create a 2021 folder if it's not already there, and then create an 08 August folder if it's not there, if it is. And it just drops the repair order in and names the repair order with the repair order number.

Wow.

Very neat.

Yeah, it's all the scanning, all the. All the paperless document storage without any of the nonsensical sorting and naming and all this stuff. The reason I don't do it is because it would just create a bunch of scanned files that would just be a mess.

Well, thank you, Kevin. That's awesome.

Well, the nice part is that staff then gets to eliminate a lot of time wasted. So instead of having to go search through 40 file cabinets in the service bay, they can literally just type in some keywords and be able to find it very easily. And then they get to get rid of all those file cabinets in the service bay and create more workstations for people to be able to manage the cars that are coming in.

Cool. Thanks, Kevin.

Appreciate it.

Hey, you're welcome.

All right, we are here with Josh of HHM Safe CPAs Memphis, Tennessee.

Yeah, I think there you've got Knoxville. Not Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, and then some other spots around the country. Right.

We're starting to get in Cleveland. That's our next office. And then we're looking into Alabama as well.

Great.

Josh, what do you do?

How can you help independent dealers?

So one thing we can do is we can review your prior year tax returns, but we offer, you know, independent. We offer tax returns, any. All kind of advisory services, any kind of attestation work. So audits and reviews for your lenders generally. One thing that's been big, at least that we've noticed at this conference is related finance companies advice on that, how to set them up and what you have to do to stay in compliance with the irs.

Yeah, HHM is one of the top independent dealer, and I think y' all do a bunch of franchise work too, but top accountants, CPA firms in the country. And as we always say, Jeff, that you really need a dealer specific CPA doing your work. Joe down the street in your local town is not the person to do it. Right?

Josh, it goes miles to have a niche specific dealership professional.

Is this specific to state? If I'm not in your state where you're operating, can I still hire you guys?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

We're nationwide and it's more, you know, more federally than they know all the state laws when it comes to that. And your big taxes is at the federal level.

Yes.

Awesome. Josh, thanks so much.

So glad you joined us.

Please take a minute to leave us.

A review and share this podcast with a friend.

The Independent Dealer Podcast Dealers Helping Dealers.