ASOTU CON Sessions Episode 14: Jim Cook

Paul Daly: 0:03You're listening to the ASOTU CON Sessions by Effectv recorded live in Philly.Kyle Mountsier: 0:10

So we're here on ASOTU CON Sessions by Effectv and I'm here with my good friend Jim Cook who actually I took over his role at a dealership years ago any man and and now we're working together both outside of that dealership, this is a kind of a full circle. So just a second ago he goes, he just looks at me and we're just sitting here kind of chopping it up and we weren't going to record a podcast and he goes, robot should just take over. And, and I think I like my my thought to that is is agree as for all of the tasks that require decision making of which should be wrote, if everything that a human was required for was the empathetic level of things, the relational level of things, and clearing the air on decisions that we should be able to leave to, yes, no answers based on processes and understanding of the dial that should

Jim Cook: 1:07

have an if then statement for almost most of your like use car buying, you know, if this, then we should do this, I would think you know, like you should have built in it. So you take the emotion out of all of it, if you can take the emotion out of you know, it would just be like hedge fund managers, we heard

Kyle Mountsier: 1:25

this conversation this morning and all things use cars, that was essentially, okay. There are some dealers out there that still consider a car that could be purchased something that they just quote unquote, don't want. Yet. There are other dealers that are struggling to find inventory at every cost. And so what you're saying is have you just leave that up to the decision making process have that to some sort of if then statement, then all the human has to do is interact is finalized things, right? Yeah. So Jim was also telling me that you wrote a business plan in what 2000s 2006

Jim Cook: 2:00

I spelled that while I was working at the dealership, and we were, you know, it was back in the days of five pictures, you know, crappy pictures on a thing. And then you would just, you know, and then the, like, 3% of your business was like, probably online. It was like 97% walk in the door. And we all know in 2008, like, when the market hit fell out, just boom, I was actually sitting in like the General Sales Manager position. And I wrote out this Jerry Maguire letter to our general manager, this big, like mission statement saying, I'm firing myself and making myself the internet manager. And I was like, I'm gonna do it. Because here's the deal. If I don't do this, and we don't put it we always we always back in the day put an internet manager was like a guy who could sell a lot of cars, right ish. And then we're like, oh, you could sell a lot of cars. Let's put you as the internet manager. You're probably good. Probably could compute this. Sure. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it makes sense. You have an AOL account. Right. Okay, cool. You're good. So that was the internet manager back then. And then so they think like, why would you demote yourself down to internet manager back then like you because it's the only front door moving forward? You idiots it was like, if you don't understand and so they put my pay plan based on thinking that like this small percentage, right? And you we had to have like four conversations over the next few months of like you're making more than owners now we need to talk right yeah, he's talking about your play cuz if you put a type of attention to it and creativity to to it in the bar was salam we all know that. Like, dealers they're so slow to change. It's littered with there are some that will dent now. Yeah, but on that if you went down to 2006 now 2006 Nobody was changing. There was, you know, Carmax was kind of like, Oh, that's cute. But the but so I wrote this big thing. I'm like, what if we just didn't ever have to go to a dealership anymore? What if we could just if we had that mindset of retailing things of just, and then all of a sudden I saw like, later on when I was out of the industry, I saw Carvana show up and I'm like mother Effers like you

Kyle Mountsier: 4:01

did how you put that though? What if we didn't have to? Yeah, we but we could but would have wouldn't have Yeah. What if there was a way Yeah, we could just transact do anything you were like the originator of omni channel. You just didn't know it?

Jim Cook: 4:14

Well, here's the deal. Here's the full 360 I'm on a flight from Italy to Hawaii. It's a long way to go Italy, Atlanta, Hawaii went the whole thing. And I was in the process. I own to see it Corvette. And I was wanting to because the markets been hot. I would sell it and then get a defender. Yeah, those are two cars that you can kind of make money on right now. So I was I've been playing the game. So I we literally did the whole entire transaction on a 30,000 foot flight Delta flight with new Wi Fi completely did all the negotiating through iMessage completely signed contracts in the air sent back everything completed finished. Between that's Atlanta to Hawaii I had took about three hours because there's a lot of it's slow a little we're doing all iMessage negotiated everything out and then when I can came back the week later, I drove up there swap cars came back. Easy. Unbelievable. They gave me 20,000 over what I paid for a car. I mean, let's make it happen.

Kyle Mountsier: 5:09

Businesses right now. So there I think there is a role of technology and a role of human and you've, you've seen it across the world, both inside and outside of the automotive industry. If you had an encouragement for like the next phase of auto, where would you say, then like, in your perception of I've been in auto and I've been outside of auto I've seen the way a companies like Clorox and stuff like that. I would

Jim Cook: 5:31

say right now, it feels like an even in this conference, not from you guys. But it feels like the Tesla's and the Carvana has in some of these big box, things that are figuring out it feels a little still us in them. And it feels like it needs to be we and I feel like you guys need to bring it into we because like, they're obviously figuring something out because you guys live or not you guys, but the auto industry has left the door open for innovation. Yeah. And because they're like, hey, there's money in this space. So why not? Why not accept them, accept them and bring them in and become like, they've got things to learn from you guys like, Tesla can build a car that is like, feels like a Mitsubishi Eclipse with an iPad. I mean, right? Like it's a terrible car with this overpriced, but I mean, it is for what they charged for it. And like they have things to learn on driving dynamics, and they have things learned from BMW and things like how to build a great car. Yeah. And but then they've got some processes. They just they didn't know what to do, just like the innovation talk from Jim. Like, they just innovated they're like well, because they had to had to like you can't we need to sell things seems more efficient than the way this old way. Yeah. So they I feel like they both could learn from each other. And then from that, I think just the consumer would benefit as soon as I mean, whatever is benefiting this consumers is the right way to

Kyle Mountsier: 6:46

go. Hey, love, you couldn't have ended that on a more perfect note, Jim. Well, thanks for turning on the mic with me. I was fun being videotaping all their sessions right now. This is pretty nice guy. Thanks, Jenna.

Paul Daly: 6:59

Thank you for listening to this ASOTU CON Session by Effectv. If you want more content like this, you can check out our other podcasts we have a daily show called The automotive troublemaker Monday through Friday, here on podcasts also live streamed on YouTube, and LinkedIn and Facebook. We also have a long form podcast called Auto collabs, auto collabs. And if you just want to go a little deeper into this community, you should sign up for our regular email we put our heart and soul into it. You can get it for free by going to asotu.com. We'll see you next time.

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