The Secret Sauce Of A High-Performing Dealership

In this episode of Word on the Street, Andrew Street sits down with Jim Wilkinson, a sales director running a dealership that moves over 1,000 cars monthly. Jim shares his insights on building a standout dealership, from fostering team loyalty and creating exceptional customer experiences to engaging with the community and leveraging innovative management strategies. Whether you're in automotive sales or just curious about what drives success in the industry, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiring stories. Listen now to uncover the secrets of high-performing dealerships!

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Transcript

[Andrew]

If you're looking to build a dealership that stands out, drives massive sales and fosters a culture where employees and customers stick around, you're in the right place. Hey there, this is Word on the Street. I'm Andrew Street and today we're gonna learn from Jim Wilkinson. He's a sales director of a powerhouse dealer, Red House Toyota World out of Houston that does roughly a thousand cars a month. And he's here to share what separates A good dealership from a great dealership and how to create this culture that keeps your team thriving and your customers coming back. Let's get started.

[Andrew]

I met you. And it was- Yeah, it was like twenty seventeen, maybe sixteen, maybe earlier. Was it the grand opening? 

[Jim]

Yeah. OK, that was seventeen. 

[Andrew]

Seventeen. And you had gone to lunch with me a couple of times. And it was really when I was first sinking our teeth into automotive and figuring out what systems to integrate and what's meaningful to dealerships. And you were kind enough to come to lunch. Let me buy you a moderately priced lunch and you'd share with me your experiences. And then you invited me to a grand opening at Cedar Park, Nissan, where it really kind of said, okay, this is the industry. This is interesting. The way that you were able to bring in not only the staff and the media, but get in the community from high schools and things. Could you, I guess, just quickly introduce what that event was? 

[Jim]

We can do that. So in two thousand seventeen, I opened Group one's first new dealership from scratch. They were on acquisitions where they were purchasing dealerships. But this is the first one that they built from dirt and quite many years. So I was tasked with going to do that, build that store, build the market, build a team and general manager of the store. When I first got there, one of the things that I noticed was one, we had two competing Nissan stores that we own both of those that were on both sides of us. I drove around the community, which was a growing community of Cedar Park, and I noticed that every Saturday, Every field that had a blade of grass on it was packed with families. And I made the decision then to make Saturdays our social day and service and then be open for sales on Sunday because in Texas, You have to be closed one of the two days. So I was open for service on Saturdays and open for sales on Sunday. And then we started using the service day on Saturday to drive different social engagements like adopt-a-pet and food drives and a couple of other things. We did the Big Pink Bus, which was the... mobile mammogram unit for Texas, for Austin actually. And so we did lots of different drives and just about every month we had, and sometimes twice a month, we had some event on a Saturday. 

[Andrew]

And that's just a way to tap into the community. And like when I noticed you had like the cheerleaders, the band, the football team, it was a huge bash. And then what did you cook? 

[Jim]

Well, I was already known a little bit for cooking these big giant gumbos from New Orleans. And, you know, over the years when you live around the country outside of Louisiana, people bring you a turnip or an onion or a stalk of celery and ask, can you make gumbo with this? So I got pretty good at making gumbo. And so I cooked a gigantic gumbos. gumbo for the grand opening. I also had a catering friend that catered it and everybody ate the garnish all the way down to the garnish. 

[Andrew]

It was awesome. And I feel like it had your fingerprints all over it. 

[Jim]

Yeah, we had twelve hundred people show up for a little Nissan store in Cedar Park, Texas for a grand opening. Twelve hundred people at a car dealership grand opening. 

[Andrew]

It was cool. It was a big day for me to see the car business and what it's capable of doing to the community. after you helped me kind of kick things towards automotive with our marketing company. But can you share what first drew you into the auto industry? 

[Jim]

Oh, it's a long story. So my dad, I have it on my LinkedIn article that I wrote about it. And my dad, when I was in college, told me, Hey, son, if something happens in your life, don't walk, run to the car business. It is full of cash and it's pretty simple to get your foot in the door and it'll help you right yourself till you figure out what you're going to do. And if you're half ass at it, you may want to stick around and make a career out of it. Now, my dad told me that when I was seventeen years old. And I didn't take it up until I was thirty two, thirty three years old. So it was a long time after that I had left the company and went to move back to Louisiana where my I'm from, my family's from and started a business kind of from scratch and a marketing company. But it just kind of wasn't paying the bills. And I'd already quit my long term career. And I had to scramble and do something to feed the family. And so I walked over to a car dealership, remembering my dad's, my dad already passed at that time, his words, and nervous as can be. And I was pleasantly surprised at one, how welcoming, at two, how little training, and three, how much I liked it after, say, the first week. 

[Andrew]

That explains so much of why you have deeper marketing chops than most people that are on your side of the desk. 

[Jim]

So, yeah. So this is my twenty second year of waiting for something better to come along. 

[Andrw]

Congrats. So it sounds like your dad was very influential on you making this decision. 

[Jim]

He was. His words kind of echoed in my head, and I resisted. I resisted for a little while. As you know, most people don't go to college or what have you to get into the car business. I mean, unless daddy's name is on the building or something like that, you don't think about it prior to showing up there and having a need. And I had gotten a little forewarning from my dad that that's available to you. 

[Andrew]

My dad was kind of the opposite. He's like, why are you, why auto? It's the game. It's the purest form of capitalism. People want a car. It is. Let's connect the dot. 

[Jim]

And if you show up with a smile and a great attitude, sometimes you need a pen sometimes they supply them for you and that is all that is asked of you to start a second career or a third career or a fourth career and feed your family and take care of and provide for your responsibilities without a doubt 

[Andrew]

and besides like besides your dad was there somebody that you met in the dealerships that was really influential on your growth? 

[Jim]

um you know, early, so early on the, the first dealership that I went to go work for was because of some people that I knew growing up that were friends with, I have older uncles that are only, um, Twins are six months older than me. And then the next uncle's four years older than me. And the next uncle after that is six years older than me. And the one that's four and six years older than me, their friends were all in the car business and I knew them all and they all did very well. And I knew their houses and their houses were very nice in our community. So when I was going to go to the car business, I decided I would reach out to Kevin, and he was the finance director of a store. And he said, you know, hey, I think you'd be pretty good at it. And I thought I was going to go get in finance. And I was on my way to be a finance guy. And they put me in the shed in the parking lot of the used car lot and said, there's your desk, there's your chair, there's your phone. The cars are outside. The customers come to look at them. go get them tiger. And, um, and I, um, you know, that was it. And off to the races you went. 

[Andrew]

So now, um, you know, something I've, I've heard about you, like just from experiencing being, being around you and also just like through reputation is like, you've got a unique approach, uh, to managing and now you're running Texas's biggest Toyota store. One of the biggest in the country consistently like top five. Is that right? 

[Jim]

That's correct. We're balanced between five, four and three up and down from there. 

[Andrew]

What do you feel like has been effective for managing, for recruiting, for retention? Those are totally different. 

[Jim]

So this store is totally different than, say, my prior experience in the car business. So I'll start with here. people I have, most of my friends are not in a car business and they always ask me, especially the store that I'm at, that has such a great reputation in Texas and in Houston. And they'll ask me, you know, Hey, what's the secret sauce of, you know, Fred Haas, you know, what's the secret sauce? What makes them so, you know, how do y'all sell so many cars? You almost give them all the way or, you know, all of these different things. And, um, I tell them all the same thing, the secret sauce. Um, and it was well before I became the work here. Trust me. I'm just, um, the steward of what was already set in place. The secret sauce is the people that work here. That's the secret sauce that Fred Haas Toyota. Years ago, Mr. Fred told people, hey, you can work for me as a career, not as a sales job, and you will have customers for life, and I will be loyal to you when you're loyal to me. And I have so many people that work here, even outside of sales in different departments, but that are... Twenty year, twenty five year, twenty seven year, thirty, thirty two, thirty three years tenure at the same at this dealership, not in the car business at this dealership. So that makes my job a little easy on the same. The I'm going on the sales floor, I would say the average tenure of my eighty nine salespeople is probably about ten years. So I have very few people that are less than three years. Very few. I have a big group, mostly because of covid that are in a three to seven year. And then it jumps to fifteen, twenty, twenty two, twenty five. And, you know, I probably have twenty people over that have twenty years tenure or more. And it's like having twenty extra managers. 

[Andrew]

Which is cool, and especially in like such a big market that's pretty cutthroat in Houston with a zillion competitors trying to poach good staff. And like there's rural stores that have that kind of longevity where it's second generation receptionist that's daughter works there now, but it's insanely rare. I feel like in a big market. Has that been your experience? 

[Jim]

No, I agree. I definitely agree with that. And over the years, I always felt that I was the junior college of car sales people training, that I would take people who are not in the car business, because most of the people that I like to recruit were in the service industry, bartenders, wait staff, people from real estate, those type of things. I like people that can multitask, that smile, that can articulate their thoughts, who are not afraid to engage with people. I like those type of people. And then I would convince them to come to the auto dealership. And then since there wasn't a set training back then, I just created training. And I would put them through my little boot camp. And then once they became really good salespeople, they would go find a Fred Haas to pay them more like free agency. And I would just training groups of people over the years. I have people that stick with me. I'm very proud of that in the Houston market. And actually, when I get my start in New Orleans, that some of those people that I initially hired years ago. are now managers, general managers, sales managers, service managers, finance directors that are still in the car business these years later and have moved up the ranks that I trained them. Not always with the same store that they started with me, but still in the business and have moved up the ranks. 

[Andrew]

Yeah, and they remember their time with you. They point their finger back at you being like, no, this was very formative when I was working with Jim. Yeah, I am. I'm thinking of Apollo. He had mentioned you. Who? Apollo. 

[Jim]

Oh, I love Apollo. Absolutely. Apollo's the best. I had one person from Group One who, maybe more than one, but one person from Group One looked at me one day and he said, you're the only person I know that fires people. and still communicates with them after the fact. Still coaches them, still gives them a reference, and you fired them. And I said, yeah, because sometimes they come back home after they learn a lesson and they may get rehired. 

[Andrew]

So. You leave the front porch light on. Yes. Yeah, I can relate to being like the junior college. Like for a long time, we'd hire people fresh out of college with our marketing firm. give them a front row education, train them and train them and train them. And then they're worth more money to somebody else. And we were, I would always be like, we're like the John Stewart for people's careers. You like work for us for a couple of years and you've got chops and somebody is going to pay you twice as much. We've got that figured out. I think finally. 

[Jim]

You know, that's definitely it. The thing that we do and, you know, whether depending on, I'm sorry, not depending on, but throughout the auto industry on different layers and different avenues, you know, whether you're in a vendor side, you're in the retail side, maybe you're in a finance side. There's no real formal, maybe just in finance, but there's no real formal training that's consistent across our industry. There are good trainers. There are some training programs. But there's not a train. You don't go to college to be a car salesman. You don't go to college to be one of our vendors with car research or true car or what have you. I know that you don't have a curriculum in some college, Andrew, for OMG. There's not the OMG degree that people go and get. They get it from you. 

[Andrew]

Yeah. I'm finding if somebody can speak digital and speak automotive, like they've worked at a dealership, they've clowned around with some digital marketing and analytics. It's like, okay, you speak the two languages. Now, if you speak English too, you're a good fit. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's time behind the wheel and school of hard knocks. 

[Jim]

I agree. And, you know, the same thing people always ask, well, we didn't have training programs and so forth. And the reality is, is I could give you an encyclopedia set of the auto industry. And as soon as the customer says no or yes, or I'll think about it, everything that you just read pretty much goes out the window. And so then, you know, what's next and what next only comes from experience. 

[Andrew]

And can you think like, Can you think of a moment in the car business where you're like, this is it, this is why I do this? 

[Jim]

Oh, yes. Yes, I can. There's been a few instances. None of them have anything to do with a sale. Most of them come with a hire and or promotion or it's really watching people's growth. Apollo happens to be one of those people. I tell his story often watching people's growth as a person, as a human, as a friend, as a coworker. watching all of those things happen, people having their first child, people buying their first home, people buying their first new car and being in the car business. Those things mean more to me these days than just about anything. I happen to have a career prior to being in the car business that I was afforded a lot of life experiences, you know, the trips, the travel, the house, the cars, the, you know, all of those things that people, you know, try and ring the bell on and reach up the ladder. So I had some of those prior to, and so it was not a situation where it was, impressed, I don't want to say impressed me, but it wasn't my focus. Watching others being able to achieve those things became my joy. It became my driver. And till this day, there's nothing when people come to me and tell me, you know, hey, we're getting married. I love it. I just tell them, hey, you can't get married at the end of the month. You can't have children at the end of the month. That doesn't work in the car business. And it seems that everybody's kid is born on the 30th, 29th or 31st. And or they want to have, you know, their honeymoon every year on the thirtieth. And, you know, there's a car business. I try and tell them, you know, hey, don't die on the thirtieth. You know, try and die somewhere on the tenth of the month where, you know, everybody can go. So it's that's my my little thing. those zingers that I like to give people. But outside of that, I really enjoy the fact that watching people grow as a productive member of society and our industry and their community and their church. their family that is my driver that's that lights me up i don't know if you can tell in my voice right now i just enjoy it i love it i'm as i'm telling you this i'm thinking about all the people that have had kids and some of them now have grandkids or their kids that i knew you know as kids like two years old and now they're graduating high school and you know or you know seniors i mean sophomores in college it's like wow one i'm getting old but two i remember when They were biting their nails. I'm going to afford a child. And now they're sending them to college. Still in the industry. That's amazing. 

[Andrew]

Yeah. It seems like what creates culture. And it's not super easy to put your finger on, but it's just having that... You know, and caring about the staff and knowing their family and knowing, you know, what matters to them and seeing their development and helping to foster it and being a shepherd into, you know, the growth in the company. 

[Jim]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And part of that, again, comes from most people that we have here didn't come here with the intention of I'm going to make a career out of this. You know, this is my dream job. You know, this is what I aspired since I was seven years old. I told everyone I was going to be a car salesman, but we don't, we don't have those stories. So now what was done with it when they landed here, what did you do with it when you landed here? That's an, you know, that's, what's important to me. 

[Andrew]

Um, And like, I don't, I, you can tell all the secret sauce that you've got because I think there's people that are interested, but like, what do you feel like in your experience and your observation has like separated the good dealerships? You've worked at good dealerships, a lot of them. Oh, absolutely. And what separates the great dealership from the good dealership? 

[Jim]

So there's, I can only speak to my experience. Okay. And how I go about it. and what I believe and not everyone I've worked for, owners and or companies share in that. So I have to make decisions, hard decisions, whether I curb what I, the way I operate, manage and or find someone that allows it. So one of the things is I'm extremely flexible when it comes to the way people operate their day to day. That's one of the things. But before I can be flexible with that, they have to earn and I give people the authority to. So here at Fred Haas and at other stores, I had done away with internet departments. I didn't have internet managers. Everybody got leads. I mean, if you can't answer the email, then we have some other problems going on here. I mean, it's two thousand seventeen, it's two thousand nineteen, it's two thousand twenty four. If you can't respond to someone on text and email and fix your grammar and all those things with all the tools that our phones have or our computers have, then maybe the other things might be a problem also. So let's start with that. But I give people the full authority. Once they kind of prove themselves, go through the process, and so forth, I give them the peek behind the curtain. They have costs. They have access to inventory. They have the ability to pencil their own deals to a certain degree in a Mendoza line that I give them or a price sheet that I give them. I give them the authority to to not have to say, I got to go talk to the manager, every decision and every step of the way. And that one, when people aspire to that on the staff, they grow. And when they grow, you know, then they're invested. And when they invest, they're invested and their success, our success, the team success, I'm able to be more flexible. And when I say flexible, when they text me and say, Hey, I'm gonna be two hours late today because I'm a blah, blah, blah. It's never, we have a sale today. We got, we got to get you. It's like, okay. You know, take care of that. Hey, I gotta bring my mom to the hospital, her checkups, I hope mom's doing okay. Take your time. We'll be here. I'm sure you got to where you're at within my organization and within my staff and my team, that if you had a customer, you had some leads, you're probably taken care of. You probably have some partners, you probably have some access on your phone. You probably are taken care of it. Or else you wouldn't be at this level that I've given you the access to be able to do this. By doing that, it takes a burden off of the sales managers from desking, and now they get to start working on managing and leading and improving the experience for the customer, improving the experience for the staff, And then it's a whole different ballgame. It's not, you know, we have to make twenty appointments and twenty five calls and, you know, fifteen. All of those metrics aren't so hard in the line. Now, there's going to be a whole bunch of people that hear this and watch this and they're like, yeah, that guy's not working for me. But I can tell you what, I've been successful at every place that I've been and I haven't deviated that much from this for a very long time. And I'll tell you why. Going back to pre-car business, when I bought cars, I didn't buy cars, I guess, like everybody else. I built a few homes for people that were in the car business or I knew some people in the car business. And if we said, you know, hey, we would like that silver Camry, we'd call and I'd say, hey, if I give you a two thousand dollars and five hundred dollars a month, you know, my wife likes that silver Camry. And, you know, Mickey or what have you would say, you're out of your mind. come back another day when you get your math right, or, you know, that's not going to work for them. Or they would say, when are you coming? I'll see you then. And I've been in the car business a long time, and I don't know if they made a million dollars on my exchanges, on my sales, or they lost a million dollars. What I do know was that I went to the car dealership for twenty minutes max, you know, ten minutes of it, saying hello to the person I talked with on the phone, then finance, then home and a new car. So when I got into the car business and it was all this checklist and this and that and the other, and I just was like, why is it so difficult for people to give their money to me? Why are we making it so difficult for people to spend their hard earned money with us? I just didn't get it. And I said, I came from a housing, real estate, retail kind of background. It was like, why don't we just roll up the red carpet so that they don't want to go anyplace else. And at some point, price is always an issue, whether the price is too low, which is rare, or the price is too high. But at some point, they'll always get to the price. So let's not rush to it too quick because most of us aren't even that good at math. Let's work on some of the other things and get the right experience in the right car and the right, you know, the, you know, the experience so that they don't want to go anyplace else. And then the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one is that much easier for them. And my customer only needs to be here for twenty minutes because I have a lot of this out of the way prior to them getting here. So. I'm trying to duplicate that like seventy nine times here at Fred Haas Toyota. 

[Andrew]

And to this day, there's no BDC Internet or there's no Internet department. 

[Jim]

There's no Internet department. There's no Internet manager at our store. And we sell a thousand cars a month. Every year, every manager on the desk. should know how to look at the internet leads coming through the CRM. And if they're sitting there for five minutes and that person's at lunch or off of the day or whatever is with a customer and can't break free to answer it, to either answer and or reassign or look at the history and see if there's interaction or that they sold them three cars prior it's a new it's everybody should be able to do it we don't need one person dedicated for eighteen hundred leads a month and one person's gonna look at them all and dole them out and grade them and you know check underneath to make sure that there's not you know a good deal versus a bad deal and this is a good lead that's a bad lead we put them on a round robin we let the system do its thing and then we have humans you know, use their noggin and, you know, manage it from there. 

[Andrew]

Sounds like you've got a pretty well oiled machine at this point, or with a lot of other stores, we're constantly recruiting, especially techs, but sales, sales managers, it helps to be in Toyota too, but it helps to have somebody like you, I think behind the wheel. 

[Jim]

Well, you know, say the part with salespeople, salespeople are inquisitive by nature. uh, pessimistic by nature. Um, you know, they don't, they don't want to know how to do something. They want to know why to do something. And, um, so when you take the why away, they have all the why it makes it a little easier for them. You know, they're not going down a dark hall. They get, they get it, they understand it and they have a little bit of control in it. We, again, take salespeople and focus on sales and not people, but they're salespeople. They're not just sales machines. They're sales people. 

[Andrew]

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you have to get belly to belly with the customer and help them get into the vehicle and ask them the right questions and make them feel heard. I imagine. Um, You talked about the customer experience outside of just being inventory and price, which is a lot of what third-party marketplaces and just running ads that show your inventory and price are kind of commoditizing the dealership as the best inventory and the best price. You guys have done a lot to separate yourself with the experience. Um, like even that thing that you guys do with new customers coming in and getting a tour of the facilities. Can you talk a little bit about what makes you guys unique with the experience? 

[Jim]

Well, um, I'll go back to that, but we have a new owner's clinic tomorrow night, actually here at the dealership. We do it once a quarter and we invite the folks that purchased a vehicle from us, um, over the prior quarter. Now at our store, we have great retention. So the, um, the show rate might be lower than maybe some other store that would be doing it because so many of our customers are repeat customers, and don't need a tour of the store. And they know they have their favorite, just like they have their favorite salesperson, they have their favorite service advisor, and some of them even have their favorite technician, and favorite parts person. But we do a clinic, we bring people in, you know, do some Easter eggs, if you will, some of the tips and tricks that they may not know about their car that Toyota has, you know, in their cars. People get a little tour of the store because, you know, you come here you get you know this much information and this much time and it's not always retained by the customer and um this is a good refresher and the pressure's off so they're open you know they're walking around the dealership with wider eyes and taking in all the things that are that are offered to them and or we can make available and we listen and we listen to their input as well so We like it. The customers have great questions. Sometimes we have to go on the back and get a tech that speaks the language to answer a question that someone might have. But it's an experience for the customer. It helps build brand and dealership loyalty. They get to see maybe their salesperson and or meet a service advisor outside of the time of need. and more of a, you know, casual setting. And we feed them and do some things like that. Fabulous gifts and prizes. 

[Andrew]

And that helps, I think, like unique numbers like CSI score, things like that. But stuff that like I'm interested in measuring from the digital marketing side, it's clicks and all this stuff and leads. But it's like, what is the retention rate from sales going into service and what can we do to impact that? And what is this store doing that's so much different than this store where this store has fifty seven percent of customers going from sales into service? And this one's at twenty five percent. And it's like finding out things like, OK, we're helping to advertise the past customers and little tricks that we're doing from our desks. But it's like this store is doing something unique. Let's put it under a microscope for a second. Just so well, we don't take all the credit. 

[Jim]

No. So, so I got to see some of that, what I consider, you know, real customer loyalty and customer for life. And it's not a cliche or a, or a, you know, a code word or what have you. We have two salespeople that have retired. over the past five years and customers still come to their office. Their offices were up front, the main two front offices of the dealership right behind reception and the elevator. And people will come to their offices to their day and ask, where's, where's my guy? Where's, where's, you know, Where's Jimmy? And the fact is, is that the reason why they do that is when they were in service, they know they can pass by and shoot the breeze. And, you know, Jimmy was outstanding at this. He would tell you, you know, they bought the first car in nineteen seventy nine. They bought the second car when they had junior in, in, they bought the third car when they had Kathy, they, you know, then they went to go play baseball and travel in baseball and, you know, in, and they had to buy a Sienna van, you know, like he, for one, he remembered everything, but mostly he remembered it because he had real conversations with people. It wasn't a, Hey, how you doing? You gotta go. I've got customer. It was real. So we see a lot of customers come out of service, wander around the dealership, go visit their sales person. You know, they have interactions. They, you know, they bypass the reception a lot because they know where they sit. They know what their office is. And there's a customer for life because there is a relationship that's ongoing. And yes, sure, we advertise. I'm sure we spend money. But the reality is, is that how are you going to buy that? How are you going to put a dollar amount on their interactions every five thousand miles? You can't. That comes from the tenure and the quality of sales personnel that has developed at a place like this and that everybody should be developing. Every store should be developing. Usually most dealerships have that one guy who's been there a long time. But outside of that, everybody should be developing. And it's a relationship it's, you know, they're not, I mean, yeah, they're a salesperson, but they're really a relationship builder and driver and maintainer. And, um, that's one of the beauties of the store. So our sales, I mean, I'm service to sales. If we really recorded it would be astronomical, but you can't really record it because a lot of times they're just coming over to say hello and oh, by the way, you know, I need a set of tires. You know, let's look at the new Camry. So I don't have to buy tires. 

[Andrew]

I love it. This is why I like talking to you, Jim. There's humans. There's a lot of humans. Um, but enough about humans. Is there any like technology that has kind of like hit your radar? That's, that's changing the way you're looking at dealerships. 

[Jim]

Um, We're probably on the precipice of that right now. You and I talked about this maybe last year. You asked me, hey, are you going to NADA? I think maybe you asked me seven or eight months ago, are you going to NADA? You know, it's in New Orleans. And I said, yes, the last NADA that I went to was in New Orleans. I remember that. It was cold and rainy and sleeting. But I'm not going to NADA this year. I told you that I really usually like to go to NADA or SEMA or those type of things when there's something really groundbreaking, really a mover in our industry that I have to go get. you know varying opinions and varying you know demonstrations on not just one person pitching something new um and the last one was digital retailing it's been a while so digital retailing was was that key that that component and you know and the best thing that happened to digital retailing was covid but uh because then people really started using it until then i really just had it um And then we discovered we don't need paper apps anymore because we can do them all digitally. But AI, so everybody has their new AI. product whatever it may be uh you know most of them are still chat chat technically was an ai is an ai product they're just rebranding it so i'm not ready to go to nada for ai until there's like real ai uh i think one of them is i've only seen one product that could do it and i think within the next year or two there'll be many products that could do it a customer chats or texts with us okay so they're texting and they send a picture of say a buyer's order from another dealership or the take a picture of a window sticker that they saw on our lot on saturday when we were closed or at night when we weren't here they send a picture none of the ais can read that picture and talk back to it and say, oh, I see that you're looking at the sticker of a twenty twenty five Camry XSE. I noticed that it has panel roof and the upgrade package and the floor mats and windshield pearl. Is that the color of the car that you want? None of them can read the picture yet. They know there's a picture, but they can't decipher it. They can't look at the buyer's order and say, you know, oh, that's a good price. I see that you're getting, you know, thirty eight thousand dollars out the door. Let me see if our people can do a better, better deal than that. Nobody can read the picture yet. So I think there's one person that says that they can and still haven't. I think they can read it, but they can't. The AI can't respond back to it intelligently enough. But when it can get to that point, I'm going to use only one example of what I think AI should do in a car business. Until it can get to that point that I can know what a picture is, read a picture, read the text on a picture, that's real AI to me. The rest is we're just doing chat. 

[Andrew]

Yeah, the chat, I feel like, is just kind of grabbing the lightning and saying, hey, we have AI, and here's what it's doing. It's a chat bot. And it can hallucinate, and it's responsive, but it's AI. And I think some folks are messing around with having it quickly crunch a ton of data, like all the DMS data, and popping a few things up to the surface that weren't already obvious. of our most profitable customers. What do they have in common? Who else has these things in common, but they're not our most profitable customer yet? Now it's kind of like helping to prioritize sales and marketing efforts, I think. But I don't think anybody has licked it really yet. People like us are trying. 

[Jim]

Yeah, I agree. And I think that there's some context system. So again, I think that there's a lot of new technology that's coming to our industry um i think that it's still very cloudy because of the fact that people are trying to just take their existing products and rebrand it as the new the new ai the new what have you so i think that once the dust settles on that a little bit and uh people start to recognize it and or it learns, which it's learning fast, um, and creates a new product out of the learning process, then I think that that's when, that's when we'll see some real changes when, you know, real, real changes. And I'm looking forward to, I think it's coming quick. I think in the next two to three years, what we call AI today, we're going to laugh at, we're going to call it Atari or, you know, it's going to be Pong versus, you know, Quake. So. Versus Quake. Um, 

[Andrew]

Man, and something cool that I wanted to touch on is like you guys, you personally do a good job of continually coming out with content, but so does the dealership. Have you been a part of like helping to foster that attitude of like getting good content for social? 

[Jim]

Yes and no. I was going to make a joke, but my, you know, one of the problems is my humor sometimes doesn't translate for corporate social media. I don't think anybody listens to this really. So you're probably safe. Well, we just had our quarterly ad meeting right before this. So anyways, so we like our social media and, you know, one of the only, the only real input that I give on our social media is that it's social first and Media second, you know, let's not have so many ads and let's have some more social interaction. And then I hired someone that handles in-house social media so that, you know, on all different platforms from LinkedIn to Facebook that will respond. You know, so many people put up a post or a video or what have you, and then people comment on it and no one from the dealership checks it. Like, it just runs amok. People ask, you know, hey, can I come by a blue one today? And no one says anything. They're just comments on a post that people have long forgot about because they're working on tomorrow's post. So we have someone that actually pays attention to the engagement and answers as the dealership. So that's the social aspect that everybody forgets about the social media. 

[Ash]

Being social on social media

[Jim]

Correct. 

[Andrew]

Yeah. Is that somebody that you moved from internally or that you hired from outside the dealership? 

[Jim]

So his name's Isaac. I know Sheila and Lindsay all knew Isaac. So Isaac was a pre-owned salesperson who decided that he wanted to come to the new car side. And he was on the new car dealership. And then we hired someone to do this social. And the person we hired after a year parlayed that into a better gig. But he and Isaac became friends in his year here. And on the way out, he said, if you're thinking about hiring someone, Isaac really helps me a lot and he does okay. And I would even be available to him afterwards because we're friends to help him along. And the guy who left didn't go to another car dealership. He went back to more corporate type of digital advertising and less social. And so we said, Isaac, we'll give you a run. We'll give you a try. And he's been with us now in that position now for over two years. That's great. Yes. So he knew the sales. He knew new car, new cars. He understood the car business, how the dealership works. He knows all those things. He'd been here four or five years, knew people, knew all of those things, knew the hiring process, all of that. So a lot of times when you hire people for social media, they don't know anything about the car business. It's a foreign world to them. And the people that are in the car business usually don't have that non pessimistic personality that could be a good social media engagement type person. So they're always looking to sell something, you know, or, or, you know, a lot of times. So usually those two don't mix. It's hard to find someone in the car business to be able to do that. And we are so fortunate that we had one right under our noses and we're able to, you know, him to take that, that position. 

[Andrew]

Yeah. And set the tone. Well, Jim, thank you. 

[Jim]

You're welcome, always. 

[Andrew]

A couple quick and really important questions. What's the coolest car of all time? 

[Jim]

I'm a I'm a sixty eight Camaro lover. But I also recently drove a Cybertruck and I thought it was the best car I ever drove. I drove it through the through the mountains of Colorado. We'll go into a Colorado Buffaloes game. We rented one for the day and went through the mountains and were blown away by the vehicle. But I also like the rumble and the rev of a sixty eight Camaro. So I'm kind of very torn in between. I've owned five Toyota Tundras, but I've customized each and every one of them. So You know, cars, I don't really drool over them, but there's a few out there. 

[Andrew]

So is the Tundra your favorite vehicle on the lot right now? Favorite vehicle on the lot? 

[Jim]

The favorite vehicle on the lot that I had was actually the hybrid Avalon. That's what I drove, a limited hybrid Avalon. They're no longer around. But second would be the Tundra, absolutely. 

[Andrew]

You guys nailed it with hybrids. Yes, without a doubt. Yeah. 

[Jim]

Yeah. I remember going to a dealer meeting back in two thousand two, three or four somewhere in that ballpark. And it had to be maybe four because Akio Toyota was on the stage. And I think he came about that time and him saying, you know, a room full of dealers, general managers and so forth. And Toyota in Vegas said in twenty years we will have at least twenty hybrid models. And at the time, we really only had the not-so-appealing Prius. And I think the Highlander was now out, but it was really the Prius. And you didn't think of, we're going to get twenty of these, We're going to get, no, and everybody, you know, you can hear all the murmurs and the laughs and the stickers and the grumblings and like, oh my goodness. And it's, and I think we have more than models of hybrids on the ground. So this isn't something new that they came up with because of the EV craze we're talking about, you know, they already had a hybrid out in two thousand four, two or three in the United States. And they were telling us that we're going to have twenty and twenty years. 

[Andrew]

They were right. 

[Jim]

A hundred percent. 

[Andrew]

Yeah. My in-laws have been driving Priuses since two thousand four. 

[Jim]

My son drives a Prius. Loves it. Yeah. 

[Andrew]

Bumper stickers and everything. If you weren't doing this, if you weren't in the car business, where would you be? You know, I don't know. I don't know either. That's something I want to answer because at my age, as I'm getting to this age, it's something that starts to creep in and you start to think about those things. And I'm resisting. hard to think about those things, because I love what I do. I love showing up. I'm usually the first person here every day, just because I want to see everybody come in, walk through the door. I want to see a smiling face, or if not, let's get a smiling face. I like what I do, so I don't think too much about the what ifs or what could I or what have you. I will tell you what I used before I was in the car business, what I used to joke about was that my retirement plan. Now, you got to remember, I'm a product of the love boat days. was that as my retirement plan, I would be one of those guys that dance with the ladies on cruise ships and I get to see the world and, you know, get to dance because I do like to dance. That used to be my retirement plan, not for a one K, not a Roth. It was, I was going to wear my blue brass button, double vested, double breasted jacket and dance on cruise ships. So that's maybe what I would do different. if i wasn't doing this i wouldn't have guessed oh i'm surprised yeah no but you'd see the planet and also work yeah absolutely on the road yeah 

[Andrew]

well brother um i i think i i'm in debt i mean you're i'm in debt to you for for jumping on with us right now and um Yeah. Anything, should people follow you somewhere on LinkedIn, on Facebook, Instagram? What's the best? 

[Jim]

I'm on all of those things. You know, a couple of things, you know, Jim's never too far or where's Jim or just plain old Jim Wilkinson, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, so forth. But I'm on all the social media platforms, even the ones that people wouldn't think that I'm on. And, you know, feel free to, you know, drop a follow, what have you. I engage with people. I, You know, I I get lots of referrals via social media in my personal social media. So I I'm always grateful for when people trust me with their friends and family as a referral. It's one of the greatest compliments. 

[Andrew]

I love it. All right, my friend. Well, let's keep in touch. And if I don't talk to you before, then have a great holidays, ma'am. 

[Jim]

Absolutely. Merry Christmas.