Electrifying the Market: An Automotive Veteran's Guide to EV Resale

Welcome to another episode of the Word on the Street podcast! In this episode, we're joined by Karl and Grant from Priced Right Auto. Karl shares his fascinating journey from reading "The Greatest Life in the World" in the 1980s to owning his own dealership since 2001. He talks about the challenges and opportunities in the used car market, especially in the EV sector, and how Priced Right Auto has adapted to changing market conditions. Grant, a multimedia artist, discusses the creative marketing strategies that have helped drive their business, including innovative in-house content and targeted advertising campaigns.

Join us as we dive into the world of independent car dealerships, the rise of EV sales, and the unique marketing approaches that set Priced Right Auto apart. Whether you're in the automotive industry or just love cars, this episode is packed with valuable insights and tips.

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Transcript

[Sheila]

Okay. This is Sheila. I am the senior dealer consultant at Dealer OMG. Quick background, I spent over a decade in fixed stops predominantly at the dealership level, but I have worked in every single role from sales to a porter to parts to warranty, etcetera. And I am here with my colleague, Ashley.

[Ashley]

Hi there. I'm Ashley. Little background on me. I worked at the dealership level for 17 years as a social media director. I also worked in BDC operations before that, doing all kinds of things with marketing. So I've been around the block. 

[Sheila]

Nice. Yay. And we're here with the Word on the Street podcast to help provide some, value and some information to our automotive dealer clients. Okay.

[Sheila]

Thank you so much for joining me, guys.

I am here with the team at PriceRite. I've got Karl and Grant. I am going to introduce them and, actually let them introduce themselves a little bit. We have worked together, on their Facebook advertising for years. So without further ado, Karl, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you into the automotive industry and kind of about your journey so far.

[Karl]

Well, I I read the book, Greatest Life in the World by way back in 1980s, and I started selling in 1984. So it's been more than a year that I've been in this business. And but I've been I've had my own dealership since 2001 when I opened up a kind of a subprime small little gas station. You know, I've been selling for franchise storage for years, and pretty much October 1, 2001. So, you know, September 11, 2001 was a pretty transitional time period, and we're in that business planning to open a new business virtually 3 weeks after that event happened.

It was, it ended up being a good decision because we were to purchase inventory with fresh money, you know, at some really reduced prices, which helped us out from there. But we built that store up. I sold that store in 2012 to one of my employees. Spent 5 years working for Credit Acceptance, on the road, which was great to kinda see different dealerships, you know, in action. You know, I did it my way, but, yeah, they had different ways of thinking and different ideas like that.

Plus, it gave me this kind of podcast where we're getting to to be big in 2018, 17, 16. I always feel I got a whole marketing degree just by spending 4 hours in a car every day and listen to, you know, audiobooks and podcasts and different ideas like that. Then in 2018, purchased, Price Right Auto. I knew the owner had been around for a long time, and, he's still a partner, you know, when he's retired partner, I guess you'd say. But then I guess I'd met Andrew before that time period, and and we kinda worked together with some ideas and things like that.

And then when that's when I opened my new store, I hired Andrew to kinda help me out with the Facebook marketing even though I had a lot of experience myself. But it just was easier to have the agency handle their agency type items than me do to build the business at that time. So, yes, very much. CEO, Andrew Street, your buddy, and mine. Yes.

[Sheila]

Awesome. Grant, how long have you been working at Priced Right? Can you tell us a little bit about your journey? 

[Grant]

I sure can. Yeah.

My name is Grant Norman. I'm a a digital media multimedia artist. I do video, audio, photography, print layout, design work, which eventually turned into doing more just raw marketing work. I've been in this industry for about, oh, I guess, 8 or so years now. This is the 2nd dealership which I've worked, and and I have a lot of fun at this one.

I do some really cool projects. Basically, I'm I'm doing the assets and the creative that that ends up going into a lot of our campaigns and helps drive our business. 

[Sheila]

Awesome. Thank you for that. I do have a list of questions I wanna get to.

One of the things I wanted to to bring up real quick about that y'all are talking about how knowledgeable you've had to become kind of in the world of marketing and I did want to highlight you have a very unique business. This is a used independent car dealership. You're not a buy here pay here, you are not a bargain basement clearance, kind of inventory type of store, and you have, in my opinion, some of the most unique approaches to marketing for people that have to wear so many hats. One of the big reasons why we're doing this podcast, doing this series is to help our dealers that are specifically in that seat that are trying to move metal, They're trying to maintain their service bay and technicians. They're trying to make sure they have employees.

They're trying to check on inventory. They don't have time to also learn how to do in a completely different industry which is marketing their business and their brand and stuff like that. So I'm going to hop right into this list of questions that we had discussed earlier in the week. One of the things that I wanted to talk about was your partnership with DealerOMG. You know, since the the early days of Andrew helping you with your Facebook marketing and remarketing ads and and y'all kind of learning from each other in that way, How has your partnership with DealerOMG evolved over the years, and, what kind of benefits have you seen from working with us?

[Karl]

I've had I guess I met Andrew back. He was doing some some webinars, when he was brand new. And at the same time, after I left Credit Acceptance, I had some more time on noncompete before I could go back to the car business. I started my own Facebook ad agency. And my goal with that point this is back when the the Facebook was the wild west.

There were no rules for it. You could advertise. You could I mean, you could actually market to different races. You could not you know, different, age groups. You know, it was there's no rules.

You could do I mean, if you'd like, you could market against someone else's fans or someone else's pages even. So it was very easy to set up campaigns for dealerships. Okay. I wanna compete against x y z dealership. I'll set you up a campaign so you can compete directly with all their customers and people who like their page, you know, ideas like that.

But then, you know, things change. And my goal was to work with a small dealer. You know, the big franchise guys, you know, that that's not my world. I've always been a small independent type dealership type person. That's who I like to help with the best.

And so the basic retargeting is to set up a pixel on their Facebook page and then to understand how important it was to get people to your website to work from there. And so I guess Andrew and I you know, Andrew was, you know, going after the larger dealerships. You know, he cared about the small dealerships a lot, where I was going after the very small ones, and he just saw that was a great niche at that time. But then as Facebook changed the rules, and the extra work involved with, you know, getting the right proper campaigns put together, And that's where I I worked with Andrew when I had my own dealership. It's okay.

I can do it, but I'm starting my own I'm wearing too many hats. I need help. So it's like hiring a a independent contractor employee. You know, that's that's professional and they work from there. 

[Sheila]

100%.

Yes. You gotta you gotta have hands, you know, that you can lean on, that you can trust, trusted advisers in your team that you can kind of hand stuff off to and know that they're gonna take care of you. I love that you and Andrew built your trust over that period of time, and I think that really speaks to a, your your kind of experience and expertise in the field and also the partnership that we have that is, you know, truly special. We have, question number 2. Can you share some insights on how the used car market has changed in recent years, particularly in the relation to the rise of EV sales and our post pandemic kind of changes in the industry that we've seen?

[Karl]

That's been a pretty wild ride. We were selling Teslas back in 2016, 17, 18, to be honest, before it became a political issue. People were just excited about it. I mean, if you drove a Tesla or especially a model x at that time to a a group of kids or something something unique like that, everyone was attracted to it. I mean, it was, like, the coolest car, you know, a person could see.

I mean, the the way the doors open up the model x, the way you can make the the lights flash and music and different things like that. We take it to different, you know, family fun events, and it was the highlight of the event. And, of course, time's changed. You know, it's it's more of them are available now. This is back when it was rare to see one, you know, let alone be inside it and touch it and drive it and and work from there.

So we've always been on a EV first in the market from there. And then as the model 3 came out, it became more of a mainstream type car like a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry. And then, you know, as soon as the the politics got involved with the car, it polarized the market very much so. It's a love hate market. Most people who've never driven it have all their opinions on it.

The car themselves are a lot of fun to drive. So then COVID comes, the car market goes crazy. The electric cars, Teslas, were just as crazy, were flying high. But then when COVID ended, as fast as they went up, they went down fast. Now, luckily, I wasn't exposed to it.

I had another dealer friend here in town that kinda, you know, really got aggressive with that market, and they virtually lost 1,000,000 of dollars, you know, when that when the market went down. If you don't move fast enough in in this car market, especially at that time period, it was pretty brutal. It was nothing to lose 30, $40,000 per car because you're dealing with a $100,000 price range type cars. So that's that hurts. It doesn't take too many of those deals to ruin your month, you know, as a smaller dealership to there.

But, you know, now things have kinda settled. With it first this year, the 4,000 used EV tax credit came on board. We jumped on board with that program. And there again, being in the Midwest, we're not in the EV type market, but I don't need to sell every single person the EV. You know, it's a it's a choice.

You know? But if if you have a choice, we're the only game that's being played in the in the Midwest right now. So we're taking advantage of the few people that are interested. And here's the market that I think when Grant and I had our marketing meetings, we wanted that 25 year old male who is having some success with some income right now, who can afford a a 20,000 car after the tax credit, and that's who we're selling to. Because when they were 15 and starting to drive cars, the Tesla was the coolest car they could ever see, and now they actually have a chance to own 1.

And they're excited about that. So it changes from that part, but, yeah, it's a a 25 year old who grew up thinking that Tesla was the coolest car. So that's where we're having success some good success with that market. 

[Sheila]

Is that kind of what inspired, this EV push that you've done and kind of the marketing around that? This one's for both of y'all.

You've been really good about adapting your digital presence to kind of what's what's hip and new. Was this kind of along that same vein of what's top of mind in the market? 

[Grant]

Well, we were really just looking for an opportunity in June. You know, the the market was in a very strange place. The interest rates were higher than what people were used to.

A lot of folks are holding their breath. Of course, the the subprime market, they need a car, they need car, they're gonna get it. They they've never minded before. That's ever gonna change. But it kind of fell into our lap.

We we did the work to get the paperwork done, get the registration done at the IRS, and it just opened us up exactly what we needed. We we needed an opportunity. We needed something that was cool and fun and exciting for our customers. 

[Sheila]

When you made that that landing page and we started this campaign, were you surprised at, kind of how well it worked and how quickly? 

[Grant]

Yeah.

Yeah. Carl, what we were hoping to get, like, 5, 10 EV sales per month? What what what percentage of our marketing mix that it turned out to be? 

[Karl]

As I've just do the numbers for this last month, and we're not quite finished yet, we've done 21 EV sales, hybrid, plug in hybrid EV sales this month, which is yeah. And we're we're a 40 to 50 car a month type store.

So it's just shy of 50% of our numbers. But profit wise, it's probably close to 60, 70% of our actual profits. We we're able to make some good margins with them, and we bring them in from all over the country. You know, we're we're not local to the eve. When we buy an EV or a plug in hybrid car.

It's coming from New Jersey. It's coming from California. It's coming from, you know, different places. So it's it's transportation is the cost of it, but there as we say, we're also the only market, you know, they can choose from, but this we're gonna take care of them from there. 

[Sheila]

You've got all the inventory.

One of the things that we we discuss pretty frequently in our meetings is making hay while the sun shines. It's an old saying, but you know when you have these challenges in the market, you are a small independent store, you kind of have to get creative with where your revenue streams are, and having something kind of get blown out of the water like this is so cool. We've we've done a lot of really fun campaigns in the past before, lots of creative stuff like that. One of the things I wanted to talk to Grant about is your in house content which features Karl pretty regularly. We've done gas giveaways, we've done all kinds of like design graphics, stuff like that.

How has this strategy benefited your your business kind of leaning into that and prioritizing it? 

[Grant]

Well, I I look at it this way, Having nice, appealing, and fun creative, in fact, got some options or, examples of that I could show you, really helps drive the point home. So you mentioned our gas campaign. Mhmm. I love it.

Pardon the the craftiness of it if you guys would be, so kind. This is extend me some some understanding. But, you know, high gas prices suck. They really do. And we just kinda went with this kind of horror movie aesthetic.

And, because we're basically doing all of our creative in house, we kind of ran that through line all across the board. The the video marketing. Just all all the images, all the graphics. Perfect. We've also done other things where, like, say for this gas campaign specifically, for those times that we're not on the lot to educate people, we've a lot of these hanging from the, rearview mirror.

So people wanna understand what's going on. It sends them to a landing page. They can watch some videos, and just kinda get up to speed. But yeah. Yeah.

Just being able to kinda put our own message together in a way that's kind of fun and creative and kind of, like, eye catching. It it really draws people in. 

[Sheila]

That's the first time I've seen the hangers, and that's brilliant. That shows a lot of thoughtfulness and kind of sensitivity to your customer shopping experience. Like, you know what it's like to be out on that lot.

You see 3 guys when you walk in, but they're all talking to someone already. You can't, you know, you just wanna know something about the car. That's really cool. That's very cool. That one's a Karl idea.

He he's very sharp about maximizing every surface of our our our digital and our physical. 

[Karl]

But don't suck up to the boss that much. But no. I mean, the neat thing about it, we have a QR code on all of our cars, and this is I'll get grabbed the credit because I was not a QR code type person. And that is now what number 7 or 8 in our Google Analytics for traffic builders.

Well, no. No. 5 or 6. Traffic. And then I think we're going to be targeting some specific retargeting for that customer.

If you think about, the customer comes to your lot and scans a QR code as a much lower funnel customer than the one that's just looking at a car and CarGurus amongst, you know, 100 of thousands of other cars. Yeah. 

[Sheila]

They're all VIN specific? 

[Grant]

Well, basically, all it is is well, I mean yeah. Yeah.

I guess you could say they are. It just I'm taking the the VDP page, and I'm putting a UTM code on it so that when people engage with it, we can watch it in GA. 

[Sheila]

I'm sorry I cut you off, Carl, but that's brilliant for leads. The remarketing opportunity that you were just talking about, really, really good idea. 

[Karl]

Right.

Well, no. It's it's I just looked at that. So, okay, this is a different class of shopper than the the typical Internet type shopper. Yeah. Of course, we retarget everybody, but we target them differently with, you know, different campaigns because they're they're gonna be a local person.

You know? It's gonna be someone who's actually knows where we're located at. We don't need to sell the location. We just need to say, hey. You know?

You you know, we have 3 months, 3,000 mile warranty. We don't sell them as is. We do things a little differently. Free carfax reports with everybody. Most dealerships have features like that, but we're gonna let them know that we we not have those things.

[Grant]

It's the dealership that puts themselves out there in front of the people. They're the ones that get the traffic. 

[Karl]

Right. Tell the story. 

[Sheila]

Absolutely huge.

One of the questions I had for you, Carl, was we've been discussing kind of inventory mix constraints with acquisition. You have a bunch of different sources that you get inventory from, what kind of innovations have you done in the past several years to kind of address constraints on inventory? 

[Karl]

We've I don't know if we've done anything really different that's not available to every dealer, but we're not afraid to try anything. Whether it's you know, we we tried to buy in center ideas and they can work, but, you know, they come and go. We were probably the first ones in the Midwest to really embrace the ACV auction way back in in 2018 buying cars, you know, having shipped in by just pictures, and, you know, not buying, you know, like new type cars.

You know, dealers been doing that forever, but if you're buying a 1, 2, 3 year old type car, that's pretty easy in most cases. But to buy one that's 10, 12, 15 years old, 150,000 miles on it, you're taking more chances through there. And, yes, we lost. Yeah. But we win more than we lose, and that's really what the the whole game is.

It's just to win more than you lose, but take some chances and and keep along with it from there. If you have good marketing, you can make mistakes and get out of it much better. That's probably the biggest thing when it comes to inventory. If you look at dealers who have a great inventory management or don't have a management problem, we we have old age cards, and we're not perfect of any means at all. We have plenty of cards that sit around.

You know, we try to reduce prices and things like that. But if you got a strong marketing program, you can you can win most of those inventory problems that we have no marketing at all or very limited marketing. Yeah. Bring them to public. 

[Grant]

They'll they'll they'll get it eventually.

Yeah. 

[Sheila]

Yes. And you've always been pretty aggressive. I know with the EV campaign specifically, we talked about how you have applied certain filters. So you can you can really drill down to the age of the unit you're looking for, what the cost is on it, what the, you know, resale, margin that you're looking at is, and kind of flag that way.

And I think that that's the biggest the biggest kind of point is use every every tool available to you. Learn how to use it, use them all, you're gonna get an influx we had talked about fleets coming in, fleet units coming in, auction houses, like use every venue available because some of them are gonna have better different kinds, you know different years available to you depending on kind of customer you're trying to to serve. So I think that that's really smart. 

[Grant]

And would you say, Carl, that the the whole COVID season experience really taught us to source inventory from whatever source we can get? Just have many, many streams just to guarantee that we have something that month?

[Karl]

Well, the good thing about it was we were using those streams before COVID, so it wasn't a learning curve for us. But, like, what I do, if I'm if I've got an open lane or ACV or or Manheim or or Stockwave, I've got filters, like you said, filters for for for all the cars that qualify for the $4,000 tax credit. I get a email every day of what's available coming in the market. So I need to click that email real quick, and I don't spend a whole lot of time. It's just real quick.

Hey. What's what's available today? What's newly listed? Yeah. What we need to pay attention to?

So we can find that, you know, car that works. We're we're doing fantastic with Ford Fusion Energies. You know, people love the Ford Fusions. Great cars. You know, this is the plug in hybrid, which is very rare.

They've got some extra mechanical problems, but we're learning our mechanics are learning those how to fix those problems. And they're besides the Tesla's, they're our our 2nd best selling car, and they're much more affordable. You know? They're they're at a price point where you're close to that 10 to 15,000 net price range. So they work for school cars, college cars, and different markets from there.

Fusion. Got it. Absolutely. 

[Sheila]

Okay. So we all know rates have been all over place this year, they're exceptionally high.

A lot of my new dealers are really struggling with moving trucks specifically, but any you know higher dollar units that they have on the lot. Have y'all been adjusting your sales strategy to keep attracting customers right now? Is it a race to the bottom kind of thing? Are you sourcing more banks? What's going on?

[Karl]

We have yes. So at first, the rates were big obstacle get over. But when you explain to customers, it says the car that you're buying at 6.9, you know, a year ago, 2 years, 18 months ago was a $60,000 car, and now you're paying 40,000 for it. You know, that makes up for a lot of rate. You know, you got 1.9 before, but you paid 60,000 for it.

It's our relationship to the price that you're paying for the car. Now they have a hard time, you know, still getting past that. They want the low price and the low rate. But I think over the last 6 months, I've seen less rate objections. I think people have now finally figured out just like if you're buying a house.

You know what? You're not gonna get 2 a half percent mortgage. It's not gonna happen, so get over it and pay the 6, 7%. And, hopefully, as the rates come back down, you know, you can refinance, you know, improve your position there. So I think we've we've seen less resistance lately.

[Sheila]

Those prices will float right back up along with the the lowering rates. So it's a fun game that we play. Yes. 

[Grant]

I wish there's some way I could get in front of the public and be like, hey. Look.

As the boomer generation retires, you know, that that money supply is gonna come out of the market, which means it's gonna cost more money to to to get that money. So that that that 7% is gonna look pretty good in in a few years from now. Buy now if you can. 

[Sheila]

We I mean, it's the same in marketing. We've talked about, cost per clicks and other metrics that most people do digital marketing measurements on, and when there's increases such as an election year there are higher competition, so your price is going to continue to go up.

You have some choices like you could just not advertise which is really a very poor decision to make, while everyone else is trying to pump money into this, or you can try to ride it out and you know put put in invest what you can and kind of let it let it keep cooking during the tough time. So I think that applies to any any business and any goal really. I think that applies to any any business and any goal really. Don't freak out and don't don't panic, don't make emotional decisions and change everything and try to reinvent the wheel. That's hard to do.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's a scary time for a lot of people. We we've had some very serious conversations this year about these constraints and what are we gonna do and let's try this and, oh, that didn't work. Let's try something else. You you have to you have to be on top of it.

You have to pivot. You have to be willing to try new stuff. Karl, you're one of the, I would say, one of the biggest risk takers when it comes to you always use data to drive your decision making, but you are unafraid. I could tell you, you know, there's this new digital marketing platform that we're working with and it goes and it actually sends a hologram to the person's house and talks to them about cars. And you'd be like, okay.

How much is it? Like, let's let's talk about, like, what kind of campaign that would look like. You you're very unafraid, compared to some of the other people I've seen in the space that are kind of intimidated by new technology and stuff like that. Makes it really fun. 

[Karl]

Oh, yeah.

We've got a young gentleman from the university here in in Nebraska, and he's working on a Grant's probably I can talk more about it. He's working on a new AI type tool where you can, like, be sitting in the car in your living room. And Grant's been doing a lot of work with young gentlemen. He's very dynamic, working with university, and he's trying to put this together in the car dealership. So it's kind of fun to see from scratch, you know, a new technology come together that could help our business possibly.

[Grant]

So Yeah. On that note, a quick pitch for it. This gentleman named, Yamen, he's working on a product he's calling PrimeRig. And the idea behind it is this one, gonna allow customers to engage with newer forms of media like augmented reality, but 2, it's gonna provide a better smoother, more more unified kind of buyer seller experience where it's kind of like half selling profile, like platform and half kind of social media. 

[Sheila]

That sounds really cool.

I definitely want circle back on our next meeting because I wanna hear about that. I definitely wanna talk more about that. This is I mean, this is a great lead up into our next point. You know, we we saw those hangers. Y'all have talked to me about mailing campaigns, direct mail that we've done in the past.

Like, what are, what results and kind of balance do y'all see between traditional and digital advertising, and do you have any tips of of kind of maintaining that and measuring the results? 

[Karl]

We try naturally, digital, you can measure things easier. But at the same time as we've we've have studied, you know, a person go to AutoTrader, look at a car, then the kids need something so they get interrupted. They come back. So, okay, I'm looking for a truck or whatever time we have been looking for, and then car cars.com gets a picture.

If they see you in all the different sites, it'd be like, okay. They may go your website. Of course, when we ask the customers, is how'd you find us? Well, the Internet. Okay.

Great. How'd you get on the Internet? Well, with my computer, my phone, or things like that. So it's hard to really I mean, even though you can measure things better, we're doing a TV. We've never done TV for a long time.

I mean, with this dealership, I've never done TV. So with this being a little different product, summertime's been good for us to get good rates in TV. 2 things. People aren't watching TV as much, but we're getting some good, you know, exposure, a more visual type thing. And we're making the same YouTube I don't know.

The same YouTube and Facebook ad. So is is is that brand what do you call it, Grant? 

[Grant]

Connected Marketing. 

[Karl]

Connected Marketing. God, what a hard name that is, to figure out.

So we're we're getting that message across. So if they see it on TV and TV does validate your message more too. We did get one of the TV stations that I do a sit down interview with their, you know, one of the reporters and talk about it more as, you know, something new and different. And this Saturday, you know, we had 2 people come in and says, we saw you on TV, and we're here. You know, this seemed pretty cool.

Now granted, as we talk about EV, when they post on social media, you know, it's all negative comments and and different things. But the more comments you get on social media posts, the better that post performs. And then it got reach. It wasn't us that had to respond to it. It was our customers and our other EV owners that said, wait a second.

You're you're making ignorant comments about something you don't know about. You know? Just because you don't wanna drive it, it's a choice, and take advantage of this deal. I mean, this won't last forever. 

[Grant]

It it's just weird that there's there's something for everybody to get behind with this.

[Sheila]

It's a huge opportunity for sure, and y'all have really cornered it. One of the, let's see, one of the other questions that I had was, do you have a success story that exemplifies the value of our partnership together and how it's helped you overcome a specific challenge, like maybe selling golf carts or electric vehicles? 

[Karl]

That's probably the the golf carts we did the golf carts last summer, and be able to tackle different markets with it. You know, like like I said, back in the the old days of Facebook, you know, 5, 10 years ago, you could do things with it. You could target it was simple to go into your ad, you know, place, target wherever you wanna target.

You can do all kinds of crazy things with it. And with the benefit of having and working with the agency, you guys have the tools where you can go on and target things that we can't anymore. Plus, all the the rules that Facebook has, if you don't make a a proper ad, it does goes against their terms and conditions or their, you know, neighborhood, whatever they call it, the rules, and you get shut down, there's no one that we can talk to at Facebook that's gonna help us. Where you guys have that connection with Facebook and with Andrew's connection with Facebook, you were able to work whatever situation we have and get it figured out and get us back in the market right away with no delays. That's a big difference there.

[Grant]

Plus with your API being able to take inventory, put it into a carousel, and be narrowly target like, hey. You wanna get in front of truck shoppers? Here you go. Fan shoppers. Yep.

It's done. And then as things get sold, they automatically come off. So that's just one less thing we have to pay attention to, manage, and work on. 

[Karl]

Because we're in a position with the knowledge that Grant has, we could probably figure it out, but or we could spend time doing that, or we could spend time creating something new, you know, find different ideas and and attack a different market if we need to. 

[Grant]

That just being able to have somebody to assume ownership of of that Facebook dimension, do it well, and and have a bag of tricks that that we really don't have ourselves.

That's big. 

[Sheila]

There there's a reason why it's our main bread and butter. It's not a it's not a super user friendly platform, I'll put it that way, but it does have really tremendous capabilities if you can dive deep and and that's the only thing you can do. That's pretty much get really good at it to become an expert. Which brings me to our last question today.

Looking ahead, what do you believe is going to be the biggest opportunities and challenges for used car dealerships specifically, and what are y'all doing to kind of 

[Grant]

What do you think about that,KCarl? 

[Karl]

That's gonna be a good one. It's truly gonna be a challenge for for dealers. As I'm in a lot of different Facebook groups and different dealers, I still love the subprime market. We do a fair amount of subprime.

We don't ask for it like we used to. We don't market towards it. We let them know that's available. We are in a in a location in our town where, you know, we're surrounded by buy here, pay here, and subprime dealers. We're we're gonna get it, the natural, you know, market from there.

I still believe for independent dealers, that's something you need to understand, learn, and you can make a successful, dealership, you know, just doing sub prime type business. Buy here pay here can work with this expensive, and I always hate collecting payments. It's hard to be the nice salesperson, and then 30 days later says, okay. You need a payment. Well, I can't make it.

Now you gotta be that mean collection type person. You can't be too it's hard to be 2 at one time from there. You know? So so yes. And managing the and and understand the market.

Even if this most simple thing you do is just put Facebook marketing, be consistent with it. You know? I mean, make your it doesn't cost anything to make changes to your website. You know, call your website, you know, company. You know, I have Grant who can do that work for me.

You know, we're we're large enough where it's it works for us. But at the same time, you know, to understand that, how it works, and to be relevant in the market there and pay attention to trends from there. 

[Grant]

Yeah. With that, I would say, yeah. Get get your organic game squared away.

You know, do you do the business placement things like Apple placement, Bing, places, Google My Business? You you can get mountains of organic traffic out of that. Your website, you know, how how's the SEO going? You know, is is it are you playing that game so that people can find you and what it is you're you're looking to sell? You can get mountains of free business just for playing that game and winning that game.

[Karl]

If you do a search, wherever this if you're listening to this podcast, you just search for best used car dealership in Lincoln, Nebraska, you know, and we don't come up number 1, you know, let us know because, you know, for almost every time I've challenged myself on this across the country, when I've been different you know, being different dealers, our vendors, especially, who try and sell us SEO, it's like, okay. Google best used car dealership, Lincoln, Nebraska, and we'll come up in that free pack almost in fact, I think every single time I've challenged it. And the crazy thing was that one of those number 2 was my old ship that I sold years ago. It was still showing up number 2. So you have all the tools, chat g p t, and all the different things you can do.

But you're right. Our Google Business page is spot on. Grant's done so much work for that. He's an expert with that. That is a huge part of that.

And we learned something just what about 2 months ago? Our citations because we had moved, you know, a couple years ago to different location. Well, 5 years almost. Well, we saw a lot of you know, our our old address was still in a lot of different search sites. Not the main ones, but main ones were covered.

But, you know, we spent a couple $100, you know, making sure those were all corrected. And we're still working on that. It's something we're following up with and making sure that our, you know, that you know, all those listings in different places, you know, the yellow pages that no one goes to. You know, you still gotta make sure you have accurate information that's consistent with Google. So Yeah.

[Grant]

Those are those are backlinks. Google looks at that and says, yeah. They had the more of those you have, the more, traffic and references. You know, it it's you're you're, you're an important site. I better get you in front of people.

[Sheila]

Absolutely. And you've continued to learn about that, the entire time. You'll very much have an obvious and apparent growth mindset. We have, you know, kind of dive deep into topics over the years that we've worked together. We've talked about, you know, you were just talking about Google, Google My Business.

We talked about Google Search Console and how you can check indexing and make sure that everything is kinda squared away there, that you're doing all of this in house and it seems like you know quarter after quarter kind of expanding your skill set and tightening and becoming even more expert is really impressive to watch and I think that that is a critical component of being successful in anything that you do but especially in this market for automotive and I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us. That's kind of the name of the game, we we learn from each other a lot. I actually used one of your tips. We kind of talked about the EV thing, and I have another, used dealer client of mine, and I actually shared some tips that you gave from one of our meetings with them, which they very much appreciated and said thank you by the way. That's kind of the name of the game.

We're all here, we can all win, you know, we're all in our in our lane and just hoping to share and and kind of succeed and help the industry as a whole. So I really very much appreciate your time today. Do you have, any closing thoughts that you would like to add about price right in Lake Nebraska or anything else you wanna say? 

[Grant]

Karl, I'll let you go first. 

[Karl]

Okay.

I think the most important thing we do, the most valuable thing that we do is every day at 1 o'clock, Grant and I meet for an hour from 1 to 2 o'clock. And at 2 o'clock, we try to cut it off. Grant is very super organized. I am not. He has a list of different agenda items that we need to cover.

We cover our our either whether it's a it's Google Analytics, you know, process. We're covering whether it's a CarGurus performance. We we dig into those things during that time period. And it is rare that we miss that meeting 5 days a week. We set up all of our vendor calls during this time period.

So that way, we're not, you know, sprinting out through the whole day. It's pretty much from 1 to 2 o'clock is when we're available. I've been going except for me because for you, Sheila, because you're we're over 2:30 instead of 1 o'clock. But we actually what we do is we somebody take a half hour break. So, okay, let's go get some stuff done and come back.

But that discipline for myself and it it gives me we gotta lock ourselves into this room. I'm sitting in here, and we get to work on some things. We got big screen TV and monitor. We can dig into things. And we really dig into a lot of stuff.

And we just talk about word tracks or different ideas. You know, it's kind of our our brainstorming parts through there. And that's been huge for us. 

[Grant]

Well and I also appreciate that there's somebody kind of just doing that leadership role of kind of, like, you know, getting off the firing line, looking out, looking up, seeing what's going on at, like, you know, 30,000 feet so that the the guys who were down here in the weeds can set themselves in the right patch of weeds. And it it's hard to do both those things at once, so appreciate it.

[Sheila]

Y'all are a great team, and I very much appreciate your partnership. I love working with you, and I appreciate you giving me your coveted slot of time today.