Unlocking Auto Marketing Success with Industry Pro Shaun Kniffin

In this episode of Word on the Street, host Andrew Street sits down with Shaun Kniffin, a seasoned automotive marketing leader, to discuss key strategies for driving success in dealership marketing. Shaun shares his expertise on the importance of team collaboration, enhancing the customer experience, and utilizing digital tools to stay ahead in the competitive auto industry. Whether you're looking for actionable insights or fresh perspectives on marketing, this conversation delivers valuable takeaways for anyone in the automotive space.

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Transcript

All right. Well, if you are interested in outside-the-box ideas to help grow your dealership's bottom line, you're in the right place. I'm joined with the industry legend, Niff, who has his finger on the pulse and is constantly pushing the envelope with creative ideas, and we're fortunate to have him. This is Word on the Street. I'm Andrew Street. Niff, how are you? Awesome. Thank you for asking. You really set the table well there, like the legend. I don't feel like I'm that old, but thank you for those kind kudos. That's awesome. The up and coming legend. Well, tell me, could you do just, we're familiar with you, but before we started officially recording, I think we have been recording, but you had mentioned a couple of things about just like your background with the auto industry that kind of led you into this position. Yeah. Could you just give us the quick tour up to how you got to where you are? Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know this, but I actually sold cars. I got into the automotive business. I followed my brother who was bringing home these big checks back in the back in the nineties. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, how are you making so much money? And my brother's still in the business, sells cars in Florida and does an amazing job. He's just he's a master at it. But I followed him into the business, sold retail cars, sold fleet and commercial, and then actually left the business for a couple of years to where I pursued a career in recruiting. And that experience actually took me down a path of. really sort of building on a BDC principle and landed back in the automobile business in two thousand right at the start of when things really got crazy with digital. And from there, I've spent a few years at a dealer group. And then if you look on my LinkedIn profile, you'll see I spent nineteen years with Germain Motor Company. Great experience where I met your partner and associate, Ashley, and she worked with me for like fifteen years. We had a really good run there, but it's one of those things where in the beginning we were doing things so differently than we were in. In twenty twenty three in twenty twenty four. So I've had a very blessed career working with our dealerships with Jermaine from Florida to Arizona to Ohio and Michigan. So we feel like I've gotten a really good experience across the board and it's been an amazing, amazing journey. Yeah. And OK, so in two thousands, there was a digital crazy transformation, at least. So it's no longer crazy. It's different kind of crazy now. I mean, with the with the cyber attacks, the hurricane closures, the election uncertainty with inventory levels, it's. It's quite a bear to keep your arms wrapped around in my observation. It is. But I think that's what makes the automobile business so fantastic. It's so resilient. It figures out how to change and adapt. And sometimes we have people kicking, dragging, and just being resistant to change. But eventually everybody gets on board with that. But that's what you got to love about the car business is that it's just resilient. Yeah, and I'm finding there's so many different creative ways to approach headwinds that are coming in, whether it's inventory levels or recruiting staff and getting techs and keeping loyal customers. It's like, okay, we've got some cool problems that I think we can test stuff out and quickly and solve. So now you are working with twenty groups, is that right? It is correct. I made a really long, went through a long decision process about making a career move and a career change to NCM. And it fit so well with what I wanted to do next. And that was ultimately being able to influence the industry in a really broad way. Not that there was anything wrong with Jermaine. It was a great, great experience, great ride, and wouldn't trade those years of experience for anything. But the ability to sort of impact twenty groups, which in two of the twenty groups that my friend David Kane and I started, who's with NCM as well, We have about five hundred rooftops just in the last two groups that we started together. So the ability to sort of influence more dealerships and the industry as a whole is now become very apparent. And that's that's the exciting part is being able to sort of influence, if you will, the industry, not just one one dealership group. How long have you been doing it now with MCM? uh not even a month have you sat down with the twinning group though now as officially in your role yeah we've actually already done two twenty group meetings uh two weeks ago so yeah they just threw me right into the fire can you share a little bit about what the experience has been like so far Yeah, the first meeting was with actually the very first twenty group that I was a part of with David that I had started back in like two thousand eight, two thousand nine time frame. and then the next group was a group that david and i had started back in and that group has uh some about three hundred rooftops in it as well but it's it's one of those things where it's like it was coming back it was like going home you know meeting people that i had started the group with meeting new people so it's been it's been fantastic so far And I know like every dealership's really different. I imagine they always are. But with, you know, Toyota and Stellantis being down and Honda and Ford are up and every dealership has different needs and some common threads with recruiting. But is there like anything specific that you're hearing from your twenty groups that is keeping them up at night? Well, the slowdown doesn't help. I mean, yeah, we've had, I mean, I think I've had, what, five election cycles in automotive, and that's going to play havoc on things anyways, because people are, half the country is going to be happy on November sixth, and half of them are not. But the point is, is that half the country is, the whole country is sort of wrapped up in this thing right now, not knowing what to do. election jitters, they do play havoc in the business. I think interest rates are definitely still a concern. Floor plan interests are massively concerned. That used to be a profit center. Now it's a pretty big expense. And then how do you reach customers on a continual basis, which eventually I think we'll get into some conversations about CDPs and things like that. But You know, reaching the customer in a very, very efficient way is what every marketer in automotive is challenged with. It's like, how do I do more with less? And how do I get rid of the expense of things that are just not necessary anymore? You know, when do you draw the line? And I think there's some really cool technology that's helping us drive those decisions. But at the same time, there's things that just need to change, you know? What do you see that dealers are really starting to leverage to get in front of customers? Is it CDPs? Is it social? Is it email? Is it SMS? Is it AI? Or is it all the above? Yeah, there's a lot of all of that going on. I think the very first thing that, you know, back in two thousand nineteen, the guy who hired me at Germain, John Moleshenko, who retired last year. But he and I got our heads together because we were trying to find a way to figure out how do we talk to customers when we're not trying to sell them something? And we came up with the idea. We went to our partners with Outsell and says, hey, would you build us a CDP? And they took two hours and came back and says, we're absolutely going to do this for you. our friend John Clavidager basically said, hey, we think you guys were sort of the precursor to everybody else jumping on board with this. And that's very humbling when you think about one decision that impacted an industry, right? And now since then, a lot of dealer groups that have less than owning your data is one of the most important things to do. And it's really hard to work with dirty data out of the DMS or CRM. So you needed a place to sort of bring it all together. And that's what we did. So I think data, getting your arms around data is one of the most important things that a dealer group can do right now. And it's not gonna go away. I mean, it's just you have to you have to be able to figure out how to talk to customers without trying to sell them something all the time. And that's the bad thing that happens is like you whenever you do a social media post, for example, you don't you don't expect immediate return on that. You're just building a relationship. And Ashley knows this very well, is that we always treated social media inside the dealer groups in the beginning. A lot of it was just CRM related. We were just building relationships. We were trying to create connectivity with the customer. And then eventually we got into things like ads and campaigns and things like that. But in the very, very beginning, which was like, what, two thousand eight, two thousand nine, I think when we jumped into that role. Yeah, it was one of the things we were like, OK, let's build relationships, you know, build. How many followers do we have? That was our first primary focus. Right. So the automobile business is trying to do something that the customer is not used to, and that is building relationships. And are you finding, are you finding like dealer groups of a certain size, like call it over twenty stores or twenty five stores are getting better quickly at being able to, for one, like own their data, segment their data and then start to take action to get in front of those customers? Yeah, I think they are. I think they're realizing too that it's not just about collecting the flat files of name, address, telephone number, email address, things like that. It's also about augmenting that data and saying, okay, what's their shopping behavior like? And we had a great partner, still do, and that is with Clairvoy. just being able to give them clean data that give us identity resolution and things like that so when you have when you have your data and you know what to do with it you're going to collect the data get the data right use the data correctly then you got to learn from the data and then as as we mentioned i mean how do you how do you add other data points to your strategy. In other words, like I said, mentioning, adding a shopping behavior to that, dividing the data into things like called mosaics, where you're like, okay, what does our customer really look like? And doing it by brand and doing it by geography. There's a lot of things you can do with the data, You know, we live in Columbus, Ohio. We have thirty two data centers here in Columbus, Ohio. Right. Isn't that amazing? It's like, oh, my gosh. And Facebook's installation here was a billion dollar facility. So I always remind my wife, like when we're driving down Beach Road and we're saying I look over and I said, if you think Facebook's free, look at what it just paid for. You know, it's a massive data center, but We need to own our data as dealers. And I can't emphasize that enough is like, if you don't own it, then you're just going to be sort of working through the vendors. You're going to try to sort of clean it up, but. You got to be able to communicate to customers without having to try to sell them something. And that's the fault of the industry. I remember when we first started down this path, we would have stores that would say, send this to everybody in forty thousand emails later. And they're like, oh, my gosh, that's not a strategy. The email blast is not a strategy. And then as like the proxy to look at the results, it's like, OK, let's look at open rates or let's look at Google analytics and okay, we got some people that have that UTM and they bounce quickly. Sales are still whatever it's, it's really tough to kind of pinpoint back all that, you know, starting over every month where we're just scraping in new customers from outside of our orbit and trying to get new customers each month versus we have this really meaningful group of people who already know about our dealership because they purchased from us in the past. Now let's have a conversation around what can we do to really maximize this group of people? And it's simply having that conversation of here's what I found. Here's their top hundred most profitable customers. Here's our top hundred most loyal customers. There's going to be some overlap. And what do they look like? What are we doing with them? Can we find more of those types of customers in our plumbing and start to nurture that relationship a little bit better? Whether it's just personal outreach, handwritten letters, or the feeling of a handwritten letter, or is it SMS? Is it WhatsApp? Is it saying thank you through their social feeds? There's a lot of different directions, but it just starts out with... being able to look at that information and, and acknowledge that every month we're going to continue to need to get new customers who probably haven't shopped with us before. But let's like, in my experience, let's just start with the people who've already stopped shopped with us before and leverage their connections, their relationships, and their, hopefully their, their fealty or their, at least their familiarity with this dealership and make sure they're doing routine services and make sure, they're happy with their purchase and that we're appreciative and that we employ a lot of people that live in our city. Yeah. No, you bring up a really great point that was part of our overall strategy and that was the customer value proposition. And what do your top one hundred customers look like by store, by brand, by market? You know, what would they look like? Why are they high value customers? Is it because of how much money they spent with you? I think if you were to ask a general manager, like what would be your top one hundred customers? And they were able to figure that out. Then you ask a salesperson what his top one hundred customers are, especially ones that have been in at the organization for a while. Their value proposition might be a little bit different. A salesperson might say, oh, they buy cars for me, but they also send me a lots of customers. And the referral basis is huge. And we have a friendship. We have a relationship. I go to the kids birthday parties, that kind of thing. A general manager might be looking at it just specifically from a dollar amount. But either way, I mean, eventually a customer, to your point, you have to find new customers because eventually customers outgrow their brands. In other words, if you're driving a Honda Odyssey and all of a sudden you find yourself with five kids, you probably got to get something a little bit bigger. Now at the Honda line, that's the top of the food chain is Odyssey. Now you're talking about Suburban and other large SUVs. So that's the other part too that we found out is let's market to customers based on the car they're driving and the life events they're going through versus just the store they bought it from. And we had plenty of customers who bought, used Honda at the Toyota store or used Toyotas at the Honda store. Either way, can we market to those customers based on the car they're driving and their lifestyle versus just getting a communication from a store they happen to do business with? God, you're speaking my language. I was hoping this would be more confrontational. But that's something that, in our experience, is something that's pretty identifiable based on just buying insurance records to know what people drive. Opposed to being like, I think these people are in market. They're high-end tenders for luxury. But we can see if people have had a baby. We can see if people drive a specific vehicle by buying that data from third-party data warehouses. Or we can use the dealership's data that they already have, they already own. There shouldn't be a whole lot of fees associated with being able to access that data because they earned it. Right? Yeah. I think that's where you, uh, where I can plug Clairvoy again is like just being able to identify customers who have doing business with us, allowed us to see what they were doing behind the curtain. We weren't allowed to look behind the curtain, but we knew that there was a curtain there and saying, Hey, this customer is back in market. This customer is shopping on a third party. This customer is on our own website. We got companies using AI to help do that done. I mean, Outsal is using, um, AI got four eyes doing a great job of using AI. Of course, Outsell is now owned by Impel, which is AI driven. And we've got AI answering the phones in some dealerships now too, which is pretty impressive. But I still think AI in automotive is six months behind the rest of the world. That's pretty fast for auto. We're not, we're not years behind, you know, I like to see the applications that AI is taking right now, instead of it just being like copywriting or making imagery, which is cool, making videos even cooler, but for it to be able to analyze this mountain of data and make actionable data of, and then I think that's sure the dealership can do it, but it's also on the vendor that's helping them with their marketing. to be able to have a seat in the front seat next to the dealer while we're coming up with a strategy. And it's not clicks and click through rates, but it's, We've been pushing new Tundras for the last two months. I see that we have a shortage, but your market has a lot of Tundras at your competitors. What we're going to do this month is move most of that budget into a Tundra acquisition campaign and go after everybody who bought from us over three years ago, as well as everybody else. If we have the budget, let's go after everybody else who drives an older model Tundra saying all during the month of October, we're doing a Tundra buy. You know, for AI to help rise that to the top potentially when we're thinking about clicks and all this old stuff, but for the vendor to have the responsibility to see it, especially if they have that information and they're a steward of the dealership's ad budget and to make sure that what they're doing from their desks is aligned with what the store actually needs, even if the marketing manager is not completely sure because they just need more sales and it's a new month and here's the incentives. But based on what I'm looking at at the dealership, service department slammed. Let's not try to push anything into the service department. Would you guys like help with recruiting techs? Okay, let's put a little bit in there. Okay, pre-owned inventory levels, new car sales, you know, to help really tune the dials based on what stores need with that data. I think my whole point was just like, AI is starting to help us arrive at those suggestions faster versus, hey, it just wrote down this cool copy with some emojis in it. It's helping us sort and come up with ideas. I think it gives us a better starting point in some cases. I mean, I've done very minimal when it comes to that sort of thing. But I have used it and it does give me a thought starter, but it's not a finisher. In other words, I wouldn't trust it completely. And I think that's another thing that's impacting industries. You've got digital marketers within automotive landscape who are not necessarily completely dependent upon AI, but we are seeing things like AI that answers the phone and I've seen some of the emerging tech with answering the phones, but I've also heard some things outside of automotive that make me say, oh, my gosh, that's amazing. And I overheard one of my twenty group members a couple of weeks ago when we were in Boston and he was having a conversation with an HVAC company. And I thought he was talking to a real person. it was all ai driven like it was amazing to me like oh my gosh man that's that's where the industry is going but that's going to impact the industry that's going to impact dealer grips immensely like if you can if we can get that let's give it a couple years to mature but imagine just having ai who can take a thousand phone calls at one time you got no no one hold time You got transferability, those things. And look, that's been a problem with automotive forever. It's like, just answer the phone. But we're so busy with face to face. Sometimes we're not ignoring the phone. We just can't get to the phone. So I think those are the things that are going to end up helping dealers do a better job with their customer so they can focus on that human interaction that we so desperately need. We call that the high touch behind the high tech. is if we can get to that point where we're not covered up by the technology but actually it's it's really supporting us technology is a great servant it's a horrible master i mean it sounds like we can agree the world's becoming a better place the dealership ecosystem can be is moving into a more uh forward-thinking industry with like do you feel like it's changing who you how was dealerships in like the last especially like twenty years like since you've really had uh a lens into the industry how has it changed with like who dealers are hiring and what positions are like new key positions that didn't exist twenty years ago or that weren't as like looked at that that's a really good question because it certainly has changed um you know when i remember we hired ashley social media didn't even exist when she graduated college and it became a thing, right? I was blessed to have a organization that allowed me to write my own job description. And that's always advice that I give people is like, you know, do the job before you get the job. Because sometimes I think you have to find people who have an entrepreneurial bent with them that says, look, I want to I want to figure out how to make this better. And one of the things I can tell you that I was blessed to have was a COO who really never asked me what I did. He just knew I'd get it done. I mean, that makes it so much easier if you can have that sort of opportunity to run an organization, to hire people that have initiative and they don't need a checklist. They don't they just want to get the work done. They want to figure it out. And that's where, again, we're sort of back on the twenty group. bent as well as saying, where do you learn this? Where do you learn to hire? Where do you learn your career when you get into automotive? Because you don't go to college and learn how to be an automotive marketer. You have to get inside automotive. And if you come from a marketing background, for example, And let's say you come from an agency and you step into the world of automotive, you realize like, oh my gosh, they're playing football. I've been playing hockey, you know? And it's two different kinds of contact sports, but it becomes very apparent that automotive has its own language. It has its own ideas and thoughts and our metrics are different. And we can't necessarily apply everything that's in marketing or digital marketing strategies outside of automotive to be applicable inside without there being some sort of flavor if you will, like it's all ice cream, but you know, this is chocolate and they've been playing with vanilla forever. So it is for dealers, they're having to figure out, can I bring people in who have a background that is adaptive, you know? And if you ask Ashley what her career, her college career dream was that she was gonna go into fashion merchandising, has nothing to do with automotive. But there were some really strong applications on things like when social media became apparent that it was going to stick around on automotive, she jumped right in there and says, I'll handle this. I'll take care of it. And that was what, twenty years ago when you guys started working together? Probably sixteen back in the two thousand eight, two thousand nine when she's jumped into the social media realm. I think before that I hired her to help me do spreadsheets part time. You help me with my spreadsheets. And I had these massive data spreadsheets and she's like, these are stupid. So there was so much data on those things, but she did them. Oh, yeah. Lots of data is a lot of time consuming for sure. I think you've mentioned hiring us, hiring Ashley a couple of times, and I want to say thank you. And I hope there wasn't too many headaches and loneliness and all the things that are associated with losing somebody on the staff. I did. I think I wrote you a handwritten letter though. I hope you received it. Okay, good. That brings up a really good point. I think that as leaders in the industry, we have to understand something is that we can't just keep people around because we think that, well, I'm going to create a gap in my staff. Ashley came to me a year before and she says, this is what I want to do. And I said, I don't think we're going to be able to fulfill that desire or need inside our organization, but go out and explore the market, knowing that I knew that, right? And when she came back to me literally a year later, she's like, I think I've landed someplace that I really want to go. And I'm like, and we were happy for her. You want that. You want to help people grow. with their careers. You want to help them. If they've, if they've expanded themselves as much as they possibly could within the dealer world, and it's time for them to go maybe on the vendor side or even to another dealer group, you got to help them do that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, but that's what good leadership does. It helps their people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm actually, I'm sorry. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, I agree. Ashley's on this call too. I don't know if we've, Made it clear. Yeah, and we've had a lot of staff go and present at conferences and grow their career from a recent college grad with no experience with marketing agencies or platform side or vendor side or any of that to grow in their skill set within automotive and marketing and digital and pixel customization or whatever they do with us. get them to become an expert, subject matter expert, get on stage, and they often get poached. And I think that's just a price we're going to pay for valuing the growth of our team. You know, it sucks, but it's part of, I guess the opposite would be like, let's keep them off the website in a dark room. Yeah, it's completely... Well, that brings up a really good point. And that is, look, one of the safest environments within helping people develop their skills and learning their trade is twenty group environments, because there is there's an explicit rule that says you're not allowed to poach from other dealers. You're not allowed to you know, they're off limits. Right. And so it's a very safe environment to share ideas and everything's confidential. So it's just a, it's a great environment to share ideas, but at the same time, build relationships with other people. And we always made it a practice to bring in to our twenty group meetings, vendors slash partners who would, could educate us, could share with us, like here's some emerging tech or here's what we've done. Cause it wasn't a pitch environment. It was more of an education environment. So, you know, that's, that's a plug for twenty groups is learning how to get your people involved. And there is a lot of twenty groups at NCM. Last time I heard, I think they have four hundred twenty groups and there's different kinds of twenty groups, too. So that's that's an amazing amount of of education and moderation that has to happen. But what a great environment to learn how to learn your trade. from inside, you know, an organization that's built just for that. Yeah. I mean, we have the same on the vendor side too, where we have vendor, twenty groups that, that David Cain and Dave Spanicki put together. Yeah. There's agency groups and it's just looking over the fence at other people like, hey, here's some struggles that we're seeing. What have you guys seen from, what, what's your experience been? Yeah. Whether it's recruiting or, you know, growth and all the same, the same issues just to have a network of folks that have had similar experiences. Or maybe they did in the past and they tried different solutions that didn't work and can save a lot of time and money. I think we could maybe start winding this down. I didn't get into really any of the questions that I think Ashley prepared. I'm trying to read them. I'm like, okay, that's a little off topic. I guess if dealerships are interested in you and MCM, what's the next step that they could take? I love that question because I never really thought about going to work for NCM until it became apparent that that's where I needed to go because I spent, like I said, fifteen years in twenty groups. And that's where I met so many different vendor partners. I got speaking opportunities, webinars. I met other digital marketers from other dealerships and dealer groups who shared their great ideas with us. And collaboratively, we have great friendships, but we share ideas all the time. But that is our classroom. And I think you're going to continue to see more coming from NCM when it comes to education, because there's so many things that we can pull together. There's new twenty groups that are being formed right now that will bring common or same thinking opportunities for people who have different types of roles within dealerships that weren't there, let's say, ten years ago. We have emerging departments within dealerships that how do you train people to be in these new departments? But that is our classroom. There isn't a formal education, as we mentioned before, in the college curriculums. But where are you going to go get ideas and thoughts on emerging technology? And perhaps somebody is going to share an idea or a vendor that you were like, I was thinking about that. I literally had a GM call me last week and says, hey, have you heard about this company? I'm like, no, I haven't heard about that company. And I was like, so I investigated. I took a demo and I'm like, now I know something about that company. But the NCM platform is going to, like I said, it's going to continue to rapidly expand because the industry is hungry for educating people and teaching people on how to progressively become more and more successful. It's the key to our industry because we have to change. Growth doesn't happen without change. You can have change without growth, but you're never going to have growth without change. And that means you've got to help your people change. You've got to grow. And this is one of the best education established platforms I've ever seen. And when I got inside the company, oh my gosh, I came from a dealer group where I used to do everything. And now I've got all these people that are like, we'll help you. I'm like, oh, this is a blessing. It's awesome. So yeah, it's exciting. I mean, if you can tell, I'm super pumped about being able to do some things in the industry and just to build upon the career and the relationships and everything we've done together for these past, you know, Lots of years. I'll just say it that way. It sounds like you hit the fourth phase of your career in my observation. I've got a neighbor who's a business school professor at McCombs Business School at University of Texas. And he was talking to me recently about what I'm up to with my job, my career. And he's like, you know, here's where you are. But he described it as like the first phase is typically your twenties. You kind of scramble around and try to get a foothold on something. And then in your thirties, hopefully you've kind of found something and you get good at it. The third phase is typically in your forties, like you start to make money doing that thing that you got good at. But then the fourth phase is when you start looking for a way to give back. And I feel like, I don't wanna typecast you, but it's like, you're in that fourth phase of like, I've really got a well-rounded understanding of this industry and the growth and ideas about the direction and I'm ready to start giving back. And it sounds like you found the perfect seat for that. Yeah, the affirmations that I got after I landed, because I left without really having everything finalized, but I knew what I kind of wanted to do. But the affirmations I got from my peers in the industry afterwards were just so positive and to that point of like saying that's the perfect fit for you. And, you know, sometimes you have to make a move not based on money, but you just you make it based on what are you going to do? What's your impact going to be? But I will warn against people who have gotten to that point in their career where maybe they're coasting or things like that. You got to be continuously growing. You can't just stop growing, you know, because if you're green and growing, you're great. If you're red and rotten, that's not great. But keep growing, keep figuring out ways to impact the industry. It's a target rich environment when it comes to this. And there's a tremendously amount of smart people that work for NCM. And I'm slowly being introduced to these individuals who have years of expertise. the things that I can learn from them regarding operations that I wasn't so intimately involved with has been so far just an amazing experience so far. So that's cool. When you feel like you got to grasp on the industry, you're like, Oh, this is probably, this is over. This is how this, this department works better with the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Sean, Niff, Niffin, S-H-A-U-N, Niffin. You're on LinkedIn. People can maybe plug in with you there. It's been a pleasure. I'm really complimented that you elected to come on here with us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. And I'm honored that you would ask me. And, you know, we don't have to do a podcast for something we can do. I know you are part of David Cain's Vendor Twenty group. And I spoke with you guys. Remember the day of the eclipse? That was my that was my first speaking engagement with V-Twenty. So that's another cool group that, like you said, vendors coming together to share ideas. I think the last thing I want to say about that is that when partners come together on your behalf, amazing things happen. And that's one thing we found out. with our dealer group experience was that partners were working together for us, not just working for us one-to-one. And I think that's what the vendor point group allows us a lot of, a lot of people to do too. So there's going to be some great things that come out of that. It's cool. I think it seems like it's a lot of specialist puzzle pieces that work well together with some overlap, but it's like, wow, you guys have the conduit that we need to get this real-time data. And you guys are a great yin to the yang for what we're doing over here. Oh, we already share some dealerships. Let's make sure that we know where the guardrail is. Yeah, it's been beneficial for sure. Yeah, and very few industries actually have that, that chemistry, right? You know, you can go to a cane event, for example, and there's some intimacy there with the leaders that show up at those events. And there's magic when that comes together, when vendors can say, hey, here's what we do. And you can share common ideas. I think it's such a brilliant idea. We're on the same wavelength. And I think... My wife would love this conversation because like I'm good at saying bye and then like hanging out for another twenty five minutes and talking. We already said bye. The car's on. It's in the valet. Let's stop. Man, well, thank you. And let me know if there's ever anything that that I can do or we can do from our desks to help you. Absolutely. I will take you up on that offer,