ASOTU CON is FINALLY HERE!

Unknown: 0:00Okay

‍Paul J Daly: 0:26

all right, if you know, you know, we do a morning show every single day, it starts with this music. It starts with some conversation around audio and maybe the music stopped. There's this really big like basic big drag drop.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:43

Apparently it's gone.

Paul J Daly: 0:45

I know, I know. We want to thank our breakfast sponsors guide point and juniper for everybody seems like, bring joy this is a breakfast on day one of an event and we were so excited to see that like a lot of people are really ready to go. There's another 50 people in the world can breakfasts that are really recognized on there. Yeah. And we're just happy to be here. Yeah, I

Kyle Mountsier: 1:18

think well, first of all, we do this podcast every single day. It's called the automotive troublemaker. If you don't listen, if you're listening, and you're not at ASOTU CON, it's a lot. Why aren't you at a soda con if you're at a soda con and you haven't listened before, welcome to the show. This is a show where every morning we kind of talk about what's going on in the world what's going on in news in the world of auto in the world of auto retail. And so today we actually kind of get to just talk about what and we have Michael Cirillo. Oh, hi

Michael Cirillo: 1:45

guys. How's it going? Hey, I got nothing. I was just gonna say who was already listening to the troublemaker you guys already subscribed.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:57

Like, subscribe. Alright, download it. Okay.

Michael Cirillo: 2:01

Usually, when I asked that my mom texts, she's like,

Paul J Daly: 2:07

Yeah, I know. Well, usually just so you know, it's usually 10 minutes 1015, maybe you get a little long in the tooth. And we will cover like two or three stories that are like the pressing, like the cover stories and automotive news or Reuters Wall Street Journal. And we also bring a little bit of retail news into it, right, because we pay attention to what retailers are doing. Because I don't know if you notice, but we are retailers. And so we want to keep that mindset dripping into the daily drip of not just you, but we made it. So you can share it with your staff, your management team, your service team, because we have something for everybody. And we believe that the more people are looking and listening to the same things, it gets us thinking in the same way in the same trajectory. And we can make some real change in the industry. Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 2:51

I think a lot of times, you know, when you're looking at and I sold cars for a long time, worked throughout a dealership, when you look at news, like rivian announces the RT one, you know, or Elon Musk decided to drop, you know, cars, eight grand or Toyota is building a new plant or even in retail, Walmart's extending education for employees and some of the stories that we've covered over the last five or six months, or even some of the UAW talks, it's hard to recognize, you know, how do I get the news that is more broadly in our industry, potentially available on auto networks or other networks? How do I get that to the ground? What's important for me day to day to make decisions about how I'm going to interact with customers or how I'm going to interact with my fellow employees. And like you said, I think it's this alignment of everybody going, we know that understanding the broader industry can bring something to our day to day. And if there's enough alignment across the store, and everybody's talking about and thinking about the same things, you start to you start to see those things impact the way that maybe you're doing your next product presentation, or maybe you see something about the way that retail is engaging consumers, and you integrate that into your service processes. I think that that's important for us as an industry. It's something we don't pay attention to enough. We're all consumers. We're all out there in the world, seeing these things, experiencing these things. And we don't recognize, oh, other consumers are experiencing seeing these things. And they would want to experience similar things in our businesses.

Michael Cirillo: 4:27

I mean, if you think about it, this is exactly why we do what we do. And we put people in a room like this, and everybody comes together to have meaningful conversations, not just to listen to the news, like the past generations might have like, I know my parents generation or just say you see what happened and then they complain about it over there. 79 cent cup of McDonald's coffee. Okay, maybe it's $1.50 now with inflation,

Paul J Daly: 4:51

Mike, Michael, we don't know Michael. He isn't. He is an old curmudgeon and a young man's body.

Kyle Mountsier: 4:57

What are you trying to say? And a Canadian all at the same time? I'm

Michael Cirillo: 5:00

not sure or Majan. So

Paul J Daly: 5:05

who I would love to understand what people think are the most what's at the top of your mind as far as pressing issues because we hear a lot of rhetoric. I think in the news, especially if you're not listening to things like Automotive News CBT you know, auto remarketing, if you're not reading like the automotive specific ones, it's pretty staggering what the rhetoric happens in the public and what's happening in your consumers minds, because they're watching CNBC, or Fox or Yahoo Finance and they're like hearing about the Evie market and they're hearing about finance rates, right? There's a different narrative being spun from your perspective. And if I don't know if we're gonna get anybody to shout it out. But like, what's at the top of the list? Like what do you think consumers care the most about right now? CVP someone? All right. How many of you know what a CD is amazing. It's amazing. I have no idea what to do. How many people would agree with that? That right now? A lot of hands. Yeah. What else? What else is top of mind for consumers? Educating salespeople, you think consumers are thinking oh, they want educated salespeople

Kyle Mountsier: 6:16

they want? They do especially with EVs?

Paul J Daly: 6:18

Yes, Nigel, you have to meet Nigel. He's got a glowing nametag back there and he has an Eevee expert.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:24

That's amazing. No, that's

Paul J Daly: 6:25

true. Because there's a lot of there's a lot especially in EVs, right? There's a lot of misconceptions about what they are and aren't. Should I get one should I not get one my sister asked me just the other day, she she's like, I want to get a new car. She's in a Highlander. Right now. She wants to give it to her son who just got his license. And and she's like, I only want to spend like $300 a month. Right? And your monthly payments, right? So we got payments. And then I was like, well, the cars that happened have $300 month payments right now are electric. That's why and she was like, Are they any good? Like she had no idea. Yeah. And we literally I talked her through all the pros and cons. And she happens to be a person who only drives like 70 miles a day. She's a teacher, she would be able to have a charger at home. And I was like, You know what? This Hyundai ionic five might be a really good fit for you. Yeah, but that just went to show me like education

Kyle Mountsier: 7:19

level needed to get to that point. Yeah, but it's what it was. It was like,

Paul J Daly: 7:23

and I knew, right, but I can imagine if she was around the table with the rest of my family. Right, my other siblings like it, would I the conversation would only go like, you mean the Tesla?

Michael Cirillo: 7:34

Yeah. Well, and if you think to the future, how quickly if we're not paying attention, the future will happen. We talked about this on the show, I can't remember on Auto Collabs podcast, and I'm like, Dude, my, my son's first experience driving a car will be an Eevee. Because he's not allowed to like my friends

Kyle Mountsier: 7:50

who are in the room. This, this was a crazy one. This is like just thinking about how people how people are perceiving gas, or what your tank has, like, kids. When I grew up, it was like, You got less than a quarter tank, you know, I'll go get gas, right? Nobody talks in quarter tanks these days. Am

Michael Cirillo: 8:09

I the only one that used to steal it from the lawnmower? And they said, Oh,

Kyle Mountsier: 8:13

my God, reverse siphon that. You

Michael Cirillo: 8:15

get $1.50 A gas out of that deal.

Kyle Mountsier: 8:19

But they think about how many miles are left, right. And so the transition between gas or electric is not, you know, like talking about how many miles you have left in your tank is actually different than talking about what percentage of your tank is left,

Paul J Daly: 8:34

right culture of vernacular, you understand the phone? Yep, we're charged a percentage. Yeah.

Kyle Mountsier: 8:39

And so that's important because a lot of us who've been in auto for so long, like even just our internal vernacular has not been as quick to change as the way that consumers are seeing the retail industry. And so I think paying attention to the way that consumers are perceiving our industry is extremely important.

Unknown: 8:55

Yeah. Well,

Michael Cirillo: 8:56

the whole the whole perception isn't reality. It's one's reality. Yeah. And that's kind of the point. If you look at teenagers who are going to learn to drive on EVs, with whatever the market rate adoption is for EVs right now, Fast forward seven years, when that was their only driving experience and what the adoption rate on EVs will be, then that's what we need to be looking to the future because similar to how my, my, my daughter when she was two and a half years old, could use my smartphone better than I could because she was born into this ecosystem, right? What is the driving ecosystem and consumer ecosystem going to look like when their first reference point was an electric vehicle? Well,

Paul J Daly: 9:36

one of the things I'm excited about as I know, we're gonna have a lot of these conversations for the next two days. And we always say at a soda con, like we don't finish conversations, we start conversations. And so that's what we try to do every morning on the show that we're doing right here at breakfast. Hopefully, it spurs a little thinking, a little, a little nugget, something that you can start to ask, explore a little bit on your own. Everyone has a different perspective. have in this room, which is great, because everybody's approaching the challenges and the problems from a different angle. Hold on. I have a sign. I brought a sign. Gotta sign. Okay, we went old school, we went print media for this one. If you have your phone right now your hand, you sit while you're trying to pick it up. I don't know where to look. Do I look in the middle? Oh, it's funny.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:20

It's better if you if you're not following us on LinkedIn, you can do that by putting your Can you get it? You got it. Okay,

Paul J Daly: 10:29

if everyone takes picture this, it'll bring you to our LinkedIn page. A lot of conversation has happened around the topic. So if you want a little drip feed, we would love for you to be a part of the LinkedIn page community that's kind of where everyone aggregates you can pull the sign down. You can roll the outro music. Oh, they're already ready. All right, we're really excited. We're gonna do this again. Tomorrow morning. If you come to breakfast, we're going to be the show but we have three field on fields with a smile. You know what to do?

Kyle Mountsier: 11:07

Another common quiz. Bigger money, bigger problems. Never worry because this restaurant gets into red

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