Dad in the Desk Chair: Greg Smith’s Path from Data to People Artwork

Word On The Street

With a mission to educate and empower automotive dealers across the United States, Andrew and his panel of industry thought leaders are the ultimate source of solution-driven insights for all things automotive marketing. From cutting-edge marketing techniques to proven sales strategies, they'll share their insights and expertise with you, giving you the tools you need to succeed. Auto dealers can get immediate and useful advice on increasing sales and service opportunities and drive their digital marketing strategies to the finish line. dealeromg.com info@dealeromg.com

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Word On The Street

Dad in the Desk Chair: Greg Smith’s Path from Data to People

September 22, 2025 • Andrew Street • Episode 34

From MBA courses to dealership leadership, Greg Smith has built a career on analytics—then discovered the power of people. In this episode of Word on the Street, Greg shares how his “Dad in the Desk Chair” newsletter took shape, the leadership lessons that reshaped his management style, and the data-driven strategies helping dealerships grow market share, boost service retention, and create winning cultures. Whether you’re in automotive retail or just love a good leadership journey, Greg’s insights blend hard numbers with human connection.

Topics We Cover:

The story behind Greg’s Dad in the Desk Chair newsletter and how he built an engaged audience on LinkedIn
Lessons from “The Quest” leadership program and transforming a numbers-first mindset into people-first leadership
Using market share and overlooked KPIs to uncover hidden dealership growth opportunities
Service department video strategies that drive higher approvals and retention
Building a culture of accountability and buy-in across sales, service, and management teams
What really moves the needle in marketing and digital retailing for automotive groups

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What happens when an analytics obsessed general manager discovers that people not the profits fuel real growth for a car dealership group what happens when an analytics obsessed gm finds out that people not necessarily just profits help a dealership's growth We're talking with Greg Smith. He's a VP of a dealer group in Canada, and he's a leader. He's a writer of the Dad in the Desk Chair newsletter on LinkedIn. And we're gonna talk with him about the overlooked power of market share, a small service drive tweak that added tens of thousands of dollars in profit per month, and a LinkedIn post that he had made that went viral and blew up unexpectedly. Here's some quick practical insights I think a lot of dealerships can learn from. I'm Andrew Street. Welcome to Word on the Street, where we dig into the people and the things that are helping innovate the automotive industry. Enjoy.

Hey, um, and thanks Sheila for connecting the dots. This is super cool. Like, and it's, it's, uh, interesting to talk with people like you that have like a unique perspective in our industry of automotive. Um, and it seems like you're, you're growing a assortment of cheerleaders on the sidelines, you know, rooting on what you guys are up to. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. and sheila i saw you put some questions down which is cool it's usually what i do i wasn't sure what the first one was about with getting your dad in the desk chair newsletter yeah uh greg has a newsletter he actually just posted one an hour or so ago two hours ago I was interested what inspired that. yeah okay so let me tell you about data in the desk chair so it is um it started off as me just trying to remember things that people were telling me or life lessons as i was going through different scenarios in the workplace it started really when i became a general manager because i'd never managed this many people and this many high performers and i'd never managed uh managers really this was the first time where i was having department heads reported to me and there's a lot of things that they were seeing on a day-to-day basis so i had a lot of interactions with coaches and just different thought leaders and people within the industry. And I would write down their feedback and I would often go back and revisit it. So it was start, it started really as a notebook. Then it moved on to my, my computer. And then one day I was leafing through it and I had like, twenty-five scenarios and stories in there of just stuff that I had written down and I was like, this stuff's pretty cool. And it was really raw. And it was just, very honest uh i when i went back to publish this stuff i had to um armchair it a little bit and so because i had people's names and things they said and like it was really just verbatim of what happened and um i was reading through it and i was like this is really cool someone would probably want to read this stuff um so I started it as a blog I didn't even really know how to write a blog I just kind of Googled how do you write a blog and it was through WordPress I did it and then as I started to get more familiar with LinkedIn I was seeing a lot of um people posting on their newsletters so then I just Googled what's LinkedIn newsletter like how do you start one of those and I switched the blog over to a newsletter and I wanted wanted it to be focused on um, kind of my life. So dad in the desk chair, you'll see the icon. It's an image of a, of a kind of ginger guy like me with a bit of a beard and he's got three kids kind of tugging on, on all his arms. And, uh, he's in a car dealership and I write like today I wrote about, um, your retirement plan being focusing on your health. um and that was sparked i was listening to kevin o'leary anytime i need a little bit of you know pep in my step i listen to kevin o'leary i don't know if you know who he is but good canadian entrepreneur he's yeah he's a canadian like me and um we share the same uh business school he's an iv graduate from Richard Ivey Business School, which is where my undergraduates from. So I like listening to him. I don't always agree with everything he has to say, but he was talking about investing in his health. I think he's just dropped forty pounds within the last little bit, and he's really into making sure he's eating high quality foods and not drinking too much alcohol. And his first hour of his day is spent, I think, biking. And then he hits the weights and stuff like that. So I wanted to just write a little bit about that. And all of my newsletters are really quick reads. They're not anything that... you have to sit and read and read and read and read it's just a quick um you know scroll on your phone you can read it in probably under ninety seconds sort of thing maybe two to five minutes for the longer ones um but that's that's where it came from and it's it keeps me sharp because i'm committing to doing it every week so and i'm not really at the point yet where I have to come up with content because I'm just going back and reworking everything I've written. I think I'm on edition number six, so I've got like, nineteen more that I can roll out before I have to start actually sweating. Learning new stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And what's neat about that stuff is like, I've got a bunch of notes about just stuff that I've learned or things that people have taught me or their experiences that they shared that have kind of like shaped the way I'm doing things. But once you start, once you know something or you've learned something and you're kind of implemented that with your job or with your family, or you think it's intuitive, it's easy to be like, well, everybody knows this. They've already probably figured it out, but they haven't. And to have to find that platform and that kind of, you know, megaphone to be able to let people know like, Hey, here's what we've unlocked. Yeah. Here's what kind of made that transition. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like, it seems like you're really into like, uh, continuing education, which I'm insane about, but from going to, uh, working in sales while you're in university to, um, going to the OEM side, getting an MBA, Then you were a general manager at the Volkswagen store where you are. And then you went to like a leadership academy before you got into the operations side. Did I just do the whole line graph? Yeah, almost. I started in the group role as a vice president before I did the leadership academy. So the leadership academy was something I did because I was noticing some gaps in my day-to-day managing general managers. And I wanted to get better at that. And I like to think I'm a good people manager, but I think if you asked people about me, they would say I'm very data oriented and I'm probably more analytical than I am people focused. But I don't like that. I understand that people and processes how we carry out our business on a day to day, but it's really the people and connecting with those people. And I got some hard feedback at this leadership course. And I've done leadership work before, but it was intense. I mean, the very first night I was sitting up or standing in front of a room of people I had just met within the last couple of minutes and talking to them about what my challenges were in the workplace and then just having them kind of pick it apart. But it was hugely transformational. I was just looking through my notes actually the other day and I was reading this line that one of the coaches said and it was, if you assume what someone knows or what they're thinking, that's very arrogant. And how many times do we sit there and put words in people's mouths and say, what I hear you saying is this, right? How about just saying, tell me a bit more about that and getting curious with them and getting shoulder to shoulder with them. And the way I was before, I was really trying to control the situation and control the outcome and control the thoughts and the feelings and everything. And I find now I'm a lot more relaxed going into those situations and working with where they're at to get the outcome that we all want to get together. So that was huge for me because all my schooling up to that point had been know a business degree an mba even my automotive schooling was all fairly technical i would say so this was i went into it going oh this is going to be just kind of soft and fluffy and it wasn't it was pretty good really good actually you feel like that was a place did you go with any of the other uh members of like the leadership team at the dealer group or was just you no yeah it was just me so what what was actually interesting about it is my wife had done another version of their leadership training and i noticed when she came home she spoke really highly of it but also her her thought process and her language really changed And she said to me, I want you to do this course. It's important to me for our marriage, for our partnership, because another Kevin O'Leary comment is the biggest decision or the most important decision you'll ever make is who you marry, who you spend the rest of your life with. Yeah. And I'm very fortunate, very lucky to have a partner that's very supportive and and is on the same page as me and supports me with what I want to accomplish and what I want to do and vice versa. So that was kind of how it started. And then I started researching the program and they put you through a series of, I can't remember if it's one or two calls that they really screen you to make sure that you're right for the program. Because they don't want anyone coming in that's just going to sit there and say, you know, well, I don't know. I don't know what to think. Or I, I don't really have an opinion on that. That's they want people who are hungry and have grit and want to transform and get better. Yeah. Did that feel like harsh feedback too from your wife when she was like, I need you to do this? Yeah. Yeah. I maybe painted the picture. Like it wasn't like you need to do that. It wasn't like the ultimatum or anything like that, but it was, um, she got a lot out of it and it really, she, she's also in business, um, you know, high pace career as well. Um, and I I think just the way we approach decisions in our family and the language we use when we're problem solving together is different too. And I noticed when I came back, a lot of people said to me, your language has changed, your thought process has changed, you've grown, there's something different. So I didn't want that to evaporate. So that's why I'm always writing about it. And I wanted to get it out there even on LinkedIn or wherever, just so I can keep it going. It's tough. It's easy to go to like a seminar or a workshop or a conference and feel like you're getting a lot and then get back into the dealership and be like, okay, now I'm back in the grind and lose it after a year. And it sounds like you guys have created a dynamic power couple at the house. it was this so your background is analytics it sounds like you're very yeah um focused on metrics and is this more focused on human leadership management totally yeah um because a lot of the feedback they gave me was people aren't widgets like people are people and you need to connect with them and um oftentimes the biggest connection can come out of uh conflict so um yeah they they were really big on getting shoulder to shoulder with your people um and kind of just waking up and realizing that it's not all about the profits it's not all about um you know, the revenue, driving growth, like all of those things will come as a side effect of focusing on the people and growing the people. So, and I think it was something I've been good at in the past. It just kind of took it to that next level. And it really taught me to get curious because you're being coached on a stage and then you're also being coached when you go home one-on-one. with your coach from the program, and then you're coaching somebody one week after doing the same program. So I had a client, a client, so to speak, that I was coaching through the program. The program's called The Quest, and it's taking a really hard look at what you've been up to and your behaviors and moving into a direction that you want to go in and making promises and commitments to yourself to get there. It's really, it's all about discipline. And the top leaders, that's the difference is, you know, they can go to that leadership course, go rah-rah and drink the Kool-Aid, come back, forget everything and go back to their old ways. Or they can commit and be disciplined about it. And maybe they slide a couple steps back, but then they get right back on track again and keep pushing, pushing forward. What do you feel like was more formative for your career and your growth and the person like you are in your conversations and things between the NBA and the Quest? That's a great question. The NBA was... I was actually just... a little bit bored at the time in my work life. And I've been doing the same job for four years, I think at that point. And my girlfriend at the time was studying for her CPA exam. So every night it was just like, we lived in this like, five hundred square foot apartment in Toronto. And I'm like, can't watch TV because she's studying. So I studied for my GMAT to go into, to do my MBA. And the MBA was, was very technical. I took courses on things that I never would have taken in my undergrad just to sharpen kind of my, my pencils and add more tools to my toolkit. So I took things like mergers and acquisition. I took social media marketing. I didn't even have Instagram at the time. So I had to get an Instagram account. So that was, that was transformative for sure. But I think the, I would have to, to answer your question, it would be the Intrepid Leadership course because it really got me out of my shell and it got me really uncomfortable. The MBA didn't. it was kind of the same old stuff I'd always been used to and, you know, doing your assignments and going to class and participating and, you know, being the really good business student that I thought I was. But the leadership course was like, they called you out on your shit. Like if they, if you were kind of beating around the bush, that was it. Like you weren't, they wouldn't let you. Do you feel like you use any of the marketing stuff that you learned? Say it again. Did I use any of them? I feel like you're using any of the marketing stuff that you learned with your MBA. Not really. That's fair. No, not really. The MBA was more so just it was it was a great it was a great networking opportunity. I met a lot of great people that were really smart in different industries and challenged me to think about why things were the way they were and why we were doing things. And I think it also really enhanced my group work skills or my teamwork. because we had to do this big project, consulting project. And we all had like some of us had kids, some of us were married, some of us had demanding careers. I was at the time going to Germany for work. So I remember logging on to calls from airports and when I was like six hours ahead in Germany. So that that was, I think, more so gave you a new skill set of how to think and how to work with people. which was, which was needed. I was a little bit out of school and I was into my, my work life at that time and just kind of needed a little brush up on, on that skillset. And I think it also brushed up my writing skills too. Okay. That's important. Like all that stuff's important. And like my experience with college marketing is, uh, It's overrated, I guess. So I used to go teach at a university near my home, my home called St. Ed's university. And I would do like, I would go in and be a guest lecturer in their marketing class, like for each class once a semester. And I'd go into HubSpot quickly, go into Facebook ads manager, go into Google analytics and Google ads. And it was like, You know, there'd be three kids asleep in the back, but then there'd be like ten kids super engaged in the very front and then some people in the middle that are like, why aren't we learning this stuff? Because it's like career academia of people who get out of college, go to more college, go to more college, and then eventually start teaching. And after talking with a handful of the people that were the teachers, they'd never been out there. And yeah. You know, trying to come up with a more logical way for a dealership to get a better loyalty out of their customers and get them to come back and do their trades, come back and do their services versus here's what college teaches you about advertising and turn around and teach that to the next generation versus like thinking about the system and what can we do from our desks as marketers to help. was yeah yeah i would agree with that i some of most of my best university instructors um were practitioners ones that had been in the field and had come back to the classroom um that said i think you need a good mix of it because the p i have a lot of respect for the phd professor too because they've done the the analytics and they they have done the research they understand you know um the methodology and everything involved in that. And they bring a whole different element of thinking to it. So in the business school, they actually have a good mix of both business school. I went to, it was practitioner and PhD professors. So, but I agree. There's gotta be, there's gotta be that practical element of it for sure. It sounds like, okay, let's talk about the analytics part. Cause yeah, From the first time I met you and now I listened to the last interview you're on with a car dealership guy, you're very much like the Billy Bean of the car business from Moneyball that looks at these like not super typically looked at metrics and these KPIs, like he's the guy who was looking at the bat swing speed and the slugger speed to timeout, you know, people base hit getting on base. And stuff that like allowed him to like find other metrics that nobody else was following to drive results. And it seems like that's what you've kind of been able to do with a lot of your stores is just find money that's being left on the table. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience about just kind of unearthing some of these numbers to follow? Yeah. so you're right that's where i that's where my brain always goes is to is to the facts versus the story so i'm not super interested in um anecdotal feedback so if someone comes to me and says you know our uh i'll give you a real life example someone comes to me and says ceramic sales um in our business office is going is going down Okay, well, how much? How many less ceramic sales have you sold year over year? What is that as a product penetration percentage? Like, I want to know what does that mean? And where I've started to go with this now is I want the numbers to tell a story. I know I just said I don't like stories, but I want the facts to tell a story. So yesterday we had all our GMs in a room and we did an exclusive new car meeting. So it was only new car that we were talking about because we spend a lot of time talking about our service department, how we can grow our CPROs year over year, month over month. We spend a lot of time on used cars. How can we buy more used cars, how can we get them reconditioned even faster, get them photoed, sell them quickly, you know, trade appraisal process, all that stuff is what we are always kind of just beating into our heads. But what we don't really focus a lot on, and I shouldn't say we don't focus on it, but maybe not as much. We don't dedicate as much time to it as new car sales because it's one of those things where the inventory comes in and we sell it and it's manufacturer driven a lot of times. But we took a look at market share, which a lot of people look at from the OEM level, but you don't get too granular. It's not really a sexy term to talk about. You don't really hear a sales manager being like, yeah, we got four point two percent market share. They're talking about how many cars they sold, what their gross profit was, you know, all those other things. KPIs that maybe that they're paid on. So we took a look at we have seven stores and we have five brands and we pulled all the market share and we got we got our general managers to do a little bit of a scavenger hunt before they came to this meeting because we wanted them we wanted to be glaring in their face of what is going on in their new car departments. So how many new cars did they sell this year versus last year? What's the gross profit? How many rights? Because that's going to tell us how many deals are falling off. So are you having trouble getting your deals bought? And then we wanted them to outline their market share at their dealer level, regional and national. And then how many on average vehicles are their salespeople selling on a monthly basis? Because if you don't have the sales force to do it, that's kind of step one, right? But the whole point of the exercise was, here's where you've sold and here's your market share. And if you can at least get your market share to be regional, not even above, just at, say you're below, how many more cars does that mean for your store? Because you can't argue with that. If you're not selling to the average market share, what are you doing? There's obviously some issues there. So in some stores, we're above the market share and it was not an issue. In other stores, it was a big number. It was like, two hundred cars for the year. So the stores where they were above market share, we said to them, how much harder would it be if every sales rep sold just one or two more new cars per month? Yeah, we can do that, no problem. Okay, so then what does that mean in terms of profitability f and i like what what does you get a potential trade on that then what's the gross profit on that trade because you know fifty percent of your new cars come at the trade then what's the f and i on that trade what's the reconditioning so it's just you can build this big story and a growth plan just on one little number called market share so I I don't even remember what your question was I started going down a rabbit hole of what we did yesterday but the I guess I think you asked me something about analytics and uh how how we use that in in the dealership to to grow and that's that's really what we do is we'll say like what's our aim of this meeting our aim is that we want everyone in that room feeling just so jazzed up, empowered to sell more new cars. And we want to show them the path there with the numbers and the proof. And then have them build a plan in their heads. And then basically what I'm going to be doing over the next two weeks is sitting down with all of them and saying, okay, what's your, what's your actual action plan and your commitments and your promises. And that's the language I learned from the leadership course. And then what, yeah. And then what, what's, what's the consequence here if we don't do it or, you know, at what point are we going to, you know, say to ourselves, this isn't working and we have to pivot again. So that's kind of how we work. We blend the analytics with the storytelling to build a growth path. Yeah, and energize the team. And energize not just the salesperson to try to do one more sale, but get the sales manager, get the general manager, get the marketing department, get the BDC, get whatever moving pieces you have to kind of have a vision in the telescope of where you're going. And then from looking at the microscope of the stuff right in front of you, what can we do from, from our department to make this happen? Yeah. Yeah. And you're just, you're removing the objections as well, right? If somebody is at three and a half percent market share and the, you know, their, their benchmarks four and a half, That's really hard to argue with, right? So you better hope you're making a plan to get it there. And I'm not saying you need to be at four and a half tomorrow, but I'd like to see, you know, point one growth over the next X amount of months. So outside of like growth with sales, what things are you really pushing? I know certified pre-owned has been a big push, like anything with like service retention parts. yeah um so sales is a big obviously something we're pushing certified pre-owned now new car sales um service yes we are trying to work on a way to really measure retention and loyalty um getting into some of it's really just the basics now which is booking the person's next appointment as if they're at the dentist for routine maintenance, so doing that activity. We also adopted videos in our service departments. um so that we did that about a year and a half ago and we had external consultants come in and train everyone on the whole process it's a group called mtn or maybe it's mountain mtn is what i call them and we signed up for true video which is the provider i think i talked a little bit about them on the car dealership podcast um but basically it is a technician. Um, they've all got, you know, one of these and they're doing a video, um, of what is kind of going on with the car and their multipoint inspection. And, um, the overall repair is getting a video from the technician to the customer. And we've found, again, the stats don't lie. The analytics are there. I can show you the hour per hour difference for somebody who views a video and doesn't view a video. Because if I call you up and say, you know, your car needs brakes. Okay, yeah, how much is it? going to be i don't know fifteen hundred dollars um yeah you know what i'll i'll i'll do that next time or i'll shop it around versus a technician sending a video saying here's what your break should look like right here and here's what your breaks look like and here's all the things that can happen if we don't replace this today and i'm going to go ahead and mark these in the red We mark things on a green, yellow, red scale. Yours are in the red, meaning that they need to be replaced today or there's a safety concern here. And I'm going to go ahead and put that on the quote. And when that comes through to you, you can approve that and we'll go move ahead with that and have that done for you today. And then... The top track on that is if they still say no, you're saying to them, I noticed that you paused on doing the break job. It's not declined. You paused. Is it because you don't have the time or you need more information? I don't even bring up costs. They might say it's because of the costs and then you can handle that objection. But a lot of the times it's. They think it's the time. A lot of the customer, they want to value their time. They're like, my car's been in there for an hour and a half, two hours already. I need to get my kids picked up or whatever. And it could be just as simple as that's only going to take us an extra forty five minutes to get that done. Oh, OK, no problem. Let's go ahead and do that. So we're really on that activity and we measure by tech how many videos they create. So they have to be at a ninety percent minimum for every RO that's created. Ninety percent have to have a video. We measure how many videos get sent by the advisor. That has to be a hundred percent. We measure how the percentage that are viewed by the customer. So that has to be seventy five percent. And then we measure how many go with an estimate. So that's a digital estimate where they can actually approve it on their phone. And that has to be at fifty percent. um and then everybody gets ranked and we make these little podiums and we send it out so it's we're really creating a performance culture in our service department as well and is it you working with like the service managers on those sound bites and kind of expectations of how to handle their objections that all of that i can't take credit for any of that it came from mtn which was the consulting company so it's all of their scripts and it's their their playbook basically and they it's all verbatim how you go through it um so they came in and did that and then it would be me working with our service managers to uphold all of that all of those standards. We also just invested in another person, a director of fixed operations, who's working directly with the service managers on improving all this stuff as well. When you instituted that, did you find any pushback from your technicians where you had to explain, like, this is how you're going to have more flags? Or to your service writers, this is how you're going to sell more services to kind of bridge that gap and get them to adopt it? A hundred percent. It was extremely difficult. and i was a general manager at the time i wasn't in this role so i was in the trenches like all the other gms are right now doing this and they had pushback but they handled it really really well and they got the buy-in i did not um i had pushback from the text and it wasn't they weren't like right like you know we're not doing this you know this this is stupid. We don't see the value. It was coming from a place of uncertainty and questioning it on, on, you know, uncertain how this was going to make sense in their day. Like they, they weren't saying we're, we're out, we're not doing it. They just had a lot of pushback in terms of the process, the procedure and how it was going to work. And it, So for that, we just had to take baby steps with them. And we ended up paying them for the videos in the beginning. We don't anymore because they saw the videos result in getting a better work. Yeah. So there wasn't when we did tech raises, we ended up phasing that out because it's such a crucial part of what they do now. but that's how we got their buy-in. We ended up paying them for it. Cause they would say things like, well, it's going to take me time to raise the car, get my phone, get it all set up, lower the car, get out those red, yellow, green things. Yeah. Everything they were saying was right. Like these guys are, are very, very, proficient, productive guys that value their time. So it was kind of hard to argue with them, but you just had to kind of get again to their level and work with them and implement a plan that they were going to buy into in order to move forward. And I like to think that buy-in can help obviously with the average RO ticket, but also with retention of techs. Like, I don't know if, are you guys having the same issue in Canada where we have way too few techs and it's really competitive between dealerships and just independent service centers to get those techs and keep those techs? Yes, yes and no. We definitely have a tech shortage in Canada. People are crying for techs. I would say We're fairly fortunate in our group. We've attracted some good talent recently. We had two stores that were in dire need of text and we've gotten them staffed up now. And we continue to build our bench strength as well. I can speak for Levin's Volkswagen here because that's the store that I was GMing and had to implement the true video process in. The techs here have been, we've got techs that have been here for years and years and years and they're so loyal. And it's because of the inflow of work as well. They're treated well. You know, we listen to them. I'm sure there's days when they, you know, not everyone loves every day at work, but for the most part, they enjoy coming into work and they've got a really good group of guys back there that they work with and, you know, a good support team and our dealer principal here and our executive team is really supportive and very open-minded, open door. So I think that helps keep them retained and then also the fact that these videos like we one of the lines we use when we introduce it is we don't want to be the blockbuster of the dealership world like we don't want to be behind the eight ball let's let's be the best in class and best in class doing videos so um i think they like being part of that culture kind of a winning culture so to speak Do you have a feel for like these new things that you've been a part of implementing and, you know, new metrics that you guys have been tracking? Is there something that's been like the least amount of heavy lifting and work and expense to generating the best return on the bottom line? I would say the service drive process was relatively easy to get everyone's buy-in with and measuring it is really easy. And we didn't make a lot of investment in it from a financial standpoint, just time and energy. but the results are there. And do you know what I mean when I say service drive? Yeah. Yeah. Prospecting and having, you know, really monitoring the activities and the dialogue that's happening between the sales department and customers coming in for service. And that's one where I remember we were having like an executive meeting and I made a GOA for one of our dealerships to be improving their service drive activities and commitments and getting everyone on board. I want them to track it. I want them to send me the stats and we're going to beat it to death until we really get this going. And one of the executives was like, really, that's a GOA. Like it's, it seems kind of, it seems kind of basic and like, there's not much value there. And I said, I agree. It seems basic a hundred percent. Like, why can't they just do it? But a lot of people don't know how to navigate that conversation. They let it evaporate if they're not held accountable and they don't understand that the financial impact to the dealership of not doing it so if you have then they set their goal for three cars a month which seems ridiculous but three cars a month for them um they were they they are selling cars up a lot of times fullness because they've got a really good process and really loyal clientele and they're offering a really good um service to their clients so they can do that and they've got a really strong fni department and they're reconditioning their trades at a strong level for CPO. So those three cars was resulting in thirty five, forty thousand dollars a month in full cycle gross. Right. So it seems like laughable when you think about we're writing an action plan for three cars. But what I was really hoping and it is kind of what happened is you know get to three but it's really going to be four and then five and six and seven and then you know you're going to be doing consistently ten a month and then boom we're we're making the money we want to make on those cars and is this part of the system that helps like you guys led or are leading the at least with volkswagen certified pre-owned sales is that correct Not anymore. We did for thirteen months in a row. And then we took our foot off the gas a little bit with the volume and got more focused on really having tight inventory and turning it and really focusing on the profitability. I will say we had some leadership changes there as well. That's when I stepped into the VP role. Because when I was GM, I was really driving the volume. And we have a GM that started a couple months ago who was actually my GSM. His name's Clinton Smith. Give him a big shout out. He was the GSM behind that. No relationship. No, we're not brothers. We're just the same last name. But he was the guy that really drove that strategy at the time and was leading the sales team to be the volume leader. Thirteen months in a row. That was him. What allowed you to get all that inventory? How do you keep getting all the certified? That's a good question. So we want to do this again. And now that he stepped into the GMC, we had a meeting about two weeks ago and I think they had like sixty five cars in stock and he's now to one hundred and eight cars as of yesterday. So they are all over their service drive, like fifteen deals a month out of their service drive. They've got a sales manager that is tracking that and watching it like a hawk. They have a sales manager who's extremely proficient in buying at the auction and has the stamina to do that and is very experienced to spend time on the auction and knows very, very, very strong at knowing what like reconditioning and models and knows V auto metrics very, very well too. Market day supply can understand which cars are fast movers. What should I be stocking? So it's almost a matter of just giving them the leash to do it because they have the bandwidth and the intelligence to carry out the strategy. So that's really what it is. Because I know a lot of people are trying to really unlock that right now. yeah i don't want to talk too much about it because i'll give away all the secrets but yeah it's it'll be harder and harder yeah yeah yeah but once you get it to that level you you can keep it there it doesn't mean you have to keep buying and buying and buying and buying you got to keep your buying at a certain pace but once you keep growing the the inventory or once you've grown the inventory And he's also focused too on bringing in cars that are going to bring him a trade. Right. Because we know we can control that process. It's smart. I imagine you have a seat at the table looking at marketing once a month or something. Is there specific metrics that you guys drill in on? Yeah. I'm not as focused on marketing as I probably should be, to be honest. And this came up yesterday in our meeting when we were talking about new car advertising. Because we do fly a little blind with it. We really rely on our vendors. We use AutoTrader. You know, I do sit through all of that stuff and understanding, like, what, you know... mobile boosts, for example, or provincial listings, like how are those working for us? Should we be doing more of that? When we carried out the used car strategy back when we were the thirteen months in a row of number one CPO volume dealer, I will say I was very close with my auto trader rep because if I have one insecurity it's marketing and understanding digital marketing. So he and I would sit down a lot and just talk about if I'm going to stock all this inventory, what's the best thing I should be doing to get SRPs and VDPs? And can you show me with graphs and charts and numbers and placements of where I'm at versus my peer group. What kind of voice do I have out there in the digital world? So I'm not as strong at it as I should be. And I'm dancing a little bit at this question because it's not my wheelhouse. It's not something I'm really, really strong at. You talked a lot about trusting your people, and that seems to be a theme. You pick vendors carefully that you can trust and kind of rely on. Same with your managers, like let them go and do their thing. That's a sign of a great leader, in my opinion. yeah it it is i mean and our relationship with trader is is really strong um they're they're a very expensive vendor to have if anyone obviously listening to this that has trader will know that they uh in canada specifically i don't think they're quite as expensive in the us because your your digital marketing or your um your digital uh marketplace is CarGurus, I think is the number one. I don't know. I don't think it's Trader. Yeah. Someone was just telling me that recently that in the US, I'm pretty sure it's Gurus is the one that's like the Trader in Canada. Trader is very, very, very expensive in Canada. You pay a lot of money to have your cars online. um so from a group perspective the the investment is massive so for me to not be involved in negotiating those contracts and understanding exactly what i'm paying for and what the result is would would be silly um but we do know that the majority of our our leads come from trader and then What we do a lot of time, what we spend a lot of time on is perfecting how we answer those leads, what we're saying, monitoring the followup, sending a video every single time. Like all of that activity is what, what we get really focused on. It's just cause like digital marketing has become so metrics driven with so many things that you can follow from cost per click to impressions, to VDP views, SRP views, form fills. And then it's like to push back and think about the strategy that's not going to be impacting those metrics too of let's go after everybody who's driving a Volkswagen in our backyard that's between two years old and five years old and let them know all during the month of September, we're doing a big push to buy those vehicles because of market conditions, blah, blah, blah, come in for the five minute appraisal and do what we can from the marketing end to try to stimulate those certified pre-owned vehicles on the lot and hopefully the trades it's not going to hit the vdps or the srps but we're going to try to make vehicle appraisal submissions and then let's all agree with the dealer and the advertiser like that's the goal let's measure it quickly and see in a couple of weeks what it looks like and pivot you know make an adjustment if it's not working well But it's interesting. Yeah, it's really tough to know how people are going to respond to things. And I will use my LinkedIn as an example here. So I put a lot of time and thought into the content that I post because I want it to be meaningful and I want to connect with people that are kind of like-minded and are resonating with what I write. so i put stuff out that i think is just bomb it's gonna be amazing people are gonna like engage they're gonna love it there's gonna be good discussion and i'll get like two thousand impressions on something i think is gonna go viral and then i think i was sharing this with you last time and i just posted it like the day before we talked but i wrote a little thing on ford um on how they didn't take the bailout and spoke about their president at the time who was hired from Boeing that came in and there's books about him and whatnot. And it was really just a quick little thing. I wrote at the breakfast table, you know, put a little picture of Al Malali up there, who was their president at the time. Didn't think anything of it. Went to a couple of meetings, went about my day and I had like twenty five thousand impressions. In a couple of hours. That post, if I check today, I think it's at like a hundred and seventy five thousand impressions. And it was like a nothing post. I was just making a parallel between a guy that I thought made some bold moves, didn't take the bailout, leveraged the blue oval and completely turned around that company. and made a relation to taking bold bets in a leadership role can really pay off. Like that was the point of the post. And it, like, I think you've seen it, Sheila. Like it's, people were engaging, people were like writing crazy stuff that wasn't even, didn't have anything to do with what I even posted about. It sparked a lot of emotion and I can't tell you why. So that's how I- Well, you can't trade the manufacturer and they've got a million, you know, And if I was Ford, I would market the hell out of that. You did mention the dashboard tool that you made going viral as well. And that, I think, is part of it. People are on there looking for value. They also want to connect with like-minded people. You've been there. You've had success coming from the OEM side, going to retail. There's tips that we need. And automotive's kind of hodgepodge learning adventure. Yeah. So anyone that can provide value in that way is important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that one was that one was just wild to me because I do kind of relate it to the marketing because you just don't know what's going to work a lot of times and you think something's ironclad and it's not. So anyway, that's kind of my two cents on that. But yeah, but fortunately, you found a platform that's like a low stakes testing ground. put things out and see what people gravitate towards and so where can people follow you now i imagine follow greg smith on linkedin yeah yeah i'm just on linkedin that's all i've got i've got um I've got other socials, but nothing. I'm really not active on there. I'm very active on LinkedIn every day. I'm posting something and love connecting with people. If you write me in a DM, I write you back. That's how we met. That's as well how I got connected with the car dealership guys and was on that podcast. So that's where you can find me. And yeah, I love it. It's I would love to. talk with anyone and set up calls who reach out to me on there. Well, Greg, it's been a pleasure talking with you, my friend. And it's good to know you. It's good to meet you, man. I like hearing what people with unique backgrounds and experiences are able to bring to the industry. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks, Greg.