Running A Business Is Like Coaching An 8-Year-Old Baseball Team with John Fitzpatrick of Force Marketing

Paul J Daly: 0:00

Kyle has been eating pretzel sticks

‍Unknown: 0:09

This is Auto Collabs.

Paul J Daly: 0:11

And he's still still eating pretzels sticks with this whole conversation about dipping from stuff and pretzel sticks. And then Michael said it's his snack of choice when we're on the road or at NADA show.

Michael Cirillo: 0:22

Have you guys not seen my bingo arms? Of course, carbs are my snack.

Paul J Daly: 0:28

Yeah, right magic.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:29

It just makes you feel so happy.

Paul J Daly: 0:31

Right? Love them. It's

Kyle Mountsier: 0:32

a great amount of salt to carb. It's the right amount of crunch. Boy.

Michael Cirillo: 0:38

Oh, boy.

Paul J Daly: 0:39

I have no idea why we're talking about pretzel sticks.

Michael Cirillo: 0:42

Lunchtime. central time,

Kyle Mountsier: 0:45

maybe sometimes you just gotta know what we're getting into, you know what I mean? To our world,

Paul J Daly: 0:50

I do look forward to talking with John Fitzpatrick, today's guest, founder and CEO, co founder of force, or did Jim found force and John took it over? I don't know. I don't know. But John has been in charge for a long time. So John, President, CEO of force marketing, we're going to spend a little time with him been a longtime supporter of asoto and a longtime friend, we're gonna try to ask him a few questions and get them off. Get him off his game if we can. So hope you enjoy this interview. Hey, John, thank you so much for joining us here today. We have a lot of questions for you. So I hope you're ready. I'm

John Fitzpatrick: 1:25

ready, man. Thanks for having me.

Paul J Daly: 1:28

By firstly,

Kyle Mountsier: 1:28

what did you eat for breakfast? Oh,

Paul J Daly: 1:30

no, we're not gonna talk about we're talking about pretzel rods. pretzel sticks, pretzel rods? I don't know. Okay, so I recently heard that you are a travel baseball team coach. And I just when I read that, I was like, the shoe fits. Telling made

Kyle Mountsier: 1:45

sense. It does. Tell us about that. Absolutely.

John Fitzpatrick: 1:48

Man. I, my son is, you know, just one of these athletes, right? He loves whatever sport he's playing at the time. That's his favorite sport. And so coming out of spring ball, we had a great season. He He loves shortstop and really all the positions and he made travel ball. And and they asked me to head coach it and I and I've coached all of the league's so you know, of the code. I was already in the selection set. And so I said, Yeah, absolutely. Let's give it a run. And we're having a great, great summer, a lot of fun. On the sterile. Go ahead, a tournament every weekend and practice every single day.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:28

On a scale of every single day, every

John Fitzpatrick: 2:31

single day, sometimes. Sometimes we'll take Monday off

Paul J Daly: 2:36

serious business. a scale of one being really laid back to number 10 being insane with intensity. At what level do the parents usually come in at this level of baseball?

John Fitzpatrick: 2:50

Oh, it's It's insanity. I had to sit the parents down. When we when we when we when we put the team together. My first meeting was with the parents, because I had to set the tone right? Because the parents are the ones that can get out of control. We've got a great, we've got a great group of parents, they've sort of done everything that I've asked of them because that's all I can really do is ask and my big ask is and I think anybody that's got kids in sports, maybe this will resonate is B there's a double shot Shut up. I'm sorry No, well no, no cheer them on don't coach them from the stance they have enough coaches and oftentimes as parents we want to coach and head down and you know I got I've got a coaching staff of five coaches we do we do a lot of work. By the way if you want to coach them, you can coach them anytime, not during my practice and not during

Paul J Daly: 3:45

except these two hours. That's right.

John Fitzpatrick: 3:48

So but what they need are cheerleaders and they need you to to be mindful that the ride hour hour and a half into the tournament because they're all travel the ride home all of that small talk that you have that's so important in the hearts and minds of our kids that we're developing and if you're talking about the plays that they missed or you're you know doubling down on the stress, they've got enough stress they just want to get out there and play some ball and by the way when they get out there and just play ball that's when they're their best and so you know that anyways I your passions

Paul J Daly: 4:22

coming through man

Kyle Mountsier: 4:23

he's well look he's about to start a coaching podcast it's gonna be nuts

John Fitzpatrick: 4:27

here let's see if this comes through this is on we gave these out run off there's my eight year law you Longhorns and you know me I'm in marketing so right off the bat we got tag teamwork and grit a

Kyle Mountsier: 4:40

loving I'm noticing a color similarity to your shirt and the background and

Michael Cirillo: 4:48

force blue baby like I said of like just getting out there and playing the game though. Whether it's business sports, like the best experience is gonna come when you just get get out on the field.

John Fitzpatrick: 4:59

Michael there are so So many similarities between running a business of adults and running a team of eight year olds. It's unbelievable. And just

Kyle Mountsier: 5:08

almost a little creepy how it is is no, it is.

John Fitzpatrick: 5:12

It really is I'm I'm, every week I'm bringing things into our leadership meeting, that that I was reminded of in a huddle. And I'm bringing things into the huddle that we talked about in business, and you're saying it differently, and you're using different words, and it's, but it's some of the say, of teamwork, attitude and grit. Yeah, think about if you had a business that had teamwork, attitude and grit, would that be a good business or bad business? Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier: 5:37

to be a good business man a business for

Paul J Daly: 5:39

you need to be definitely what you need to be a lasting business. Sure,

Kyle Mountsier: 5:43

that's for sure. But I think a lot of times, I love how you're like, when they just play the game, they're at their best. And Michael was kind of keying in on this. But if we take that to the business side, what I've experienced is like, we need to get you trained up so perfectly, that you can't mess up your next step, right. And it doesn't matter whether you're an eight year old playing travel bar, you're playing professional bar, you're just learning business, or you've been doing business for a long time, there's something about like, hitting a foul ball, or missing a strike because they threw the perfect curveball that you can't like that imperfection actually drives a better result on the other side. And I think a lot of times we get that wrong in business where it's like, the repercussion for hitting the foul ball or swinging at a call at what would have been a call ball is, is basically demonized as like the wrong thing to do in business. Right? Yeah,

John Fitzpatrick: 6:49

instead of just going for it and trusting that if you miss the team is there to support you. And a big thing at this age is you know, sort of backing up each other right, every player on on the diamond or really on the field has another place to go to backup the other player. So you see this a lot in the outfield, right? You see a fly ball, get hit to left center, did the right center or left fielder back him up, right. If you know you have a backup, you're more likely to go for that maybe make the dive maybe make that extra play, by the way you make that extra play, that's a game changing play, that could be the difference that one play could be the difference of winning or losing the baseball game, or winning or losing the tournament. And it was all about understanding, I've got a backup. If I miss this, I'm gonna go for it. I know, we've been trained, I know how to set my feet, I know how to set the glove, I'm gonna go make it happen, and I'm gonna go make a play. I

Paul J Daly: 7:39

think that's really appropriate when you talked about like, the willingness to go for it, the understanding that like, you're not going to always do it, but it's about trying to do it. I think the AI conversation, which is very relevant to what you are putting your focus on, a lot of marketers are paying attention to and operations. And there are some people saying I'm not going to try, because it's new. And then there are some people saying like, I'm going to go in, I'm going to make sure I have some backups. And you know, so like, it just feels very similar to like how people are getting into the AI game, in the dealership across the board, from marketing to operations, etc. And what do you see in?

John Fitzpatrick: 8:19

Yeah, look, I think AI is the big fancy word. So it's customer data platform before that digital retailing. And we we've had a couple that float around in our industry.

Kyle Mountsier: 8:28

A few Yeah, every nine months. Yeah, and we

John Fitzpatrick: 8:32

but but look, it's a technology that's definitely here to stay. And it can be a game changer if we lean into it. And if you just put the marketing hat on at a dealership, the data that we're able to pull out of the dealers, DMS the CRM, to drive a more personalized engagement with these consumers, to have a more customer for life relationship with them, understanding that you don't just sell them a car, you also need to service that car, servicing that car well is going to create a higher trading value. Higher trading value gives you a second at bat if you will, to earn the second purchase or third, fourth, fifth depending on wife, household, kids, parents, community, all of those things. And so you know, if we can advance our industry in our own way with just allowing our technology to be built in a way that can allow less friction in the process, more personalization, so that the dealers can do what they've always done best, which is that hyperlocal extreme personalized, you know, eyeball to eyeball interaction. Whenever that takes place. Even under the delivery, if you're delivering the part of the transaction happened, let's say online and you deliver it to their home, that still has to come with a smile and a handshake. And so when it does, we've always seen dealers in the dealer environment and that's why I think the dealer environment in general will always be safe. If they do a really good job of that in their hyperlocal communities, and there's a need there for that, and the time and time again, and all the surveys, that consumers say that they want, you know, a dealer experience that's meaningful. And they've also shown that when the dealership takes care of them, it takes care of their family. They're going to bring their business back time and time again. And so anyways, go ahead.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:24

Well, okay, so I haven't we haven't really had this conversation on this podcaster. And I don't think it's being had Wholesale is over the last couple years because of like the CDP conversation, and because of the whose data is that conversation? We've had a lot more intentional focus on on customer lifetime value lifetime value, like lifetime customers. You know, bringing a customer back, what does it take to do that on the front end in the sales or the service environment, but also in the marketing lifecycle? Right, bringing that customer back through the flywheel. And I think that what's interesting to me, is it it's not like, we have not been in pursuit of this for a very long time. Right. OEMs pay attention to loyalty. We started introducing equity mining programs a long time ago, OEMs have been sending mailers and service mailers, and we as soon as we could get an email the industry was there. I'd love for you to talk to like, why you see, you know, integration of like, a CDP or something that extracts the data normalizes it resolves the identity AI built into that new communication opportunities. Why you see that as the reason why there's just a broader focus on this as an industry or is it? Or is it because we see the like disparity in it that we've never been able to hit it? Or is it because of the new technology that we now get to focus on it, because it's, it's more accessible? I

John Fitzpatrick: 12:01

think it's a lot of those things. So the customer data platform conversation that's being had across our industry is a needed one, we've been in search of like a term that we can all use, because we were a marketing automation platform, we were, you know, there has been a lot of different sort of naming rights of this. But here's what it is, at the end of the day, one of our core values of our six core values that forces outcome focused, we always want to be outcome focused. So what what is the dealer group looking for out of their search for the right CDP. My opinion is that they're looking to deepen their relationships with their customers in a meaningful, personalized way, with the very tremendous data rich first party data set that they sit on top of, and have historically tried to use, and have had some help to use, but really not done as well of a job as maybe some other categories have done with customer data. And there's been a lot of reasons why that might be the case. So one outcome is I want a better relationship with my customer, which will should give me a higher loyalty rate, right. And as these dealers have gone from five stores to 50 stores in these hyper local markets, and they now represent every brand, when 10 years ago, they only represented three or four brands, I now have an option for that customer as they've evolved throughout their own journey in life. And so I want to be able to offer them that even though I sold them the Toyota, I want to remind them that they're ready for a BMW, guess what, in the last 10 years, we've got to BMW stores inside of the Atlanta market that we're now under the, you know, ABC Family of Brands. And so that opportunity is more real. That's another reason. You know, I think too, and this is something that was really big for me, and still is from the beginning of force marketing. I got to see uniquely through my father's lens in retail, automotive running as a general manager for some of the biggest groups in the country. And then obviously, his time at AutoNation. Starting them up. What I saw most, most importantly, and hit through his lens was you worked really hard and dealership is scheduled was on the door, right? So that's one thing I saw. But here's what I realized. Right? He missed a lot of little league games, we'll talk yeah,

Paul J Daly: 14:16

he was not coaching. That's the eighth, you

John Fitzpatrick: 14:20

know, shot he talks about, we've talked about days, like man, you're putting a lot of time and this is like, if you worked on a retail you you probably would not be putting as much time it's just not there. But that's a different topic. The amount of ad waste still today. The amount of advertising dollars wasted is still something I'm inserting. It's what I started to solve out at 19 years ago when we started and still to this day, we are spending too much money in advertising and marketing and too much of its going to waste to get the results that we want at the dealership. Now you all know I make money off some of that spend so that might feel a little weird coming from me but but that's the reality of what we're trying to solve for is if I have a better relationship with the customers, and I'm using the data the right way, which means I'm cleaning the data often, every time we jump into a dealer group that says no, my data is cleaner than most, we still see 35% of their data is complete garbage.

Kyle Mountsier: 15:19

Oh, absolutely. Now lynda.com and

John Fitzpatrick: 15:23

Right, right, right. And like, right, they say trainings like bathing, right, you've got to do it frequently, you can't just train someone, once, you can't just bathe once and say I'm clean. Same thing with the data, you can't just clean it once I've got clean data. Because every day you're buying leads from cars.com and autotrader. Every day, someone's typing in into all of your stores information, fat fingering, not putting in the information correctly, whatever the case might be, that's happening every single day. Then, if you don't have a good, you know, advertising, marketing, customer centric, data centric company, right, you're gonna pull that data out and start marketing and every channel that you spend money on, you're going to have some degree of waste. I'm trying to eliminate that as much as possible. That's one of our core values is that how can we eliminate ad waste in this space? I think, by the way, I haven't even gotten into the conversation about the waste of overlap between tier three, tier two and tier one. Oh,

Kyle Mountsier: 16:21

ah, see, now you gotta make sense. No, you don't make some cities. And it's so true, though. Well, I you know, what I love is you said outcome based you were like, we're always outcome outcome focused, like, outcome focus, right. And I think a lot of people, their initial reaction to that would be like, Oh, great, cool. They care about service and sales, which I'm sure you do. Right, right. More Oh, some more cars without a doubt. But the first thing you said after outcome focused, was the outcome that the dealers want out of the CDP are this like this customer lifetime value is not more loyalty is not more sales is not more, the outcome is better relationship. Right? The residual impact of a better relationship with a customer is all of those things. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's that refocusing. Right there for me is like, if people could get tuned to that, as a refocusing. It's always

Paul J Daly: 17:27

a challenge, though, that's always a challenge. Because it's it's not 30 day thinking. It's not even 90 day thinking, right? Like we're talking about looking over the horizon and kind of believing something is true, I think most people would know that it's true, not just believe that it's true.

Michael Cirillo: 17:40

While you're playing an infinite game, right? Where there's also going to be a polar, we see the polar opposite in this industry. I mean, it's one of our missions to kind of eradicate this stigma with a soda, who is the polar opposite opinion is, oh, well, that's what vendors say, because they can't get you more sales right now, or that's what they say, because you, your marketing doesn't work. Or, you know what I mean? Like, there's gonna be that polar opposite view, where there's, there's companies that make enemies that way, because they think they're the best. How do you reconcile that to help? Because I mean, to Paul's point, we, we do need to break out of that 30 Day mindset, because we know customers don't think And third, you know, what's the first day of July, I think I will begin my process of purchasing a vehicle, approximately 45 days, I will come to terms. You know, like, nobody thinks like that. Now, how do you reconcile that? What you know, and believe is so right, that obviously resonates with us against an industry where there is that polar opposite point of view that pushes against it? To

John Fitzpatrick: 18:46

good question, and it's a work in progress constantly. The best way, look, we've built we've got great data partners, we bought pretty good technology, we continue to build great technology. But at the end of the day, the lever pullers that we have on our team, to help the dealer and the dealers team is some of how we showcase that relationship, and then hope that it waterfalls down and that they see that what we said in the pitch actually matches all the way through. And so it's sort of that, constantly reminding them that, yes, we're going to have a strategy to get sales and service today. And that will meet the needs of the service director and the general manager of the dealership. But Mr. Dealer, partner, Mr. You no publicly traded. We want to move the stock over a period of time, not just this quarter. And that's going to take a different approach where we're going to have to segment this out. And we've got to remind our, our consumers of our brand and why it's important to do business with us, and why it helps them in terms of unique selling propositions that a big group might have over a smaller group. Look, the little dealers know it right. If you've got five stores, you have you've done one of two things in the last three For years, you've raised capital to go get 15 stores or you've sold.

Kyle Mountsier: 20:06

Yep, that's right. That's right. Or, or you've lost out on a big bunch of cash if you didn't sell. Yeah, right.

John Fitzpatrick: 20:14

And you just want that. But But will you really be able to help the community the way that you once were across a very dynamic, you know, marketplace? It's gonna be very difficult with you know, it's very, very difficult. And so I think, as these groups get bigger, and you've seen that, yes, certainly the big seven have gotten big. But what's really, I think, interesting, are the 15 and 20. Store groups that are now 5060 store groups. And there's a lot of

Michael Cirillo: 20:45

there's this as the like, great, what do you call it the great consolidation? Yeah, what the industry is becoming a Yeah, but this good doll?

John Fitzpatrick: 20:56

And all? Is there's a small, yeah. Right. And the economies of scale that come with that, because right now it's been rolled up, roll up, roll up, go, go, go, go, go, go go. Right. But I think the next layer of that is, okay, who am I real partners, where I can leverage this data set that I now sit on, it was once 15 stores, now it's 50. And I can leverage the efficiencies, of running that operation with a better connected customer relationship. And let me give you one example of that. You buy a Toyota, that dealer also has a BMW dealership, you're the Toyota guy wants you to trade that Toyota and to the Toyota dealership, the BMW guy might reach out to you because of your shopping behavior, and saying that, Oh, you're interested in BMW come over here. But those two stores that are owned by the same person are not connected. Right? So the BMW guy, if he does a good job, he's going to earn your business, because you want the BMW and I've got the BMW for you. And I'm the only one that can sell a Toyota can't sell you a new BMW. I'm gonna take your trade, and I'm gonna give you a good value on it. It's ready to go. What's that trading? Are we pushing that over to the Toyota guy? Or are we wholesaling it to auction? That Toyota guy goes and buys that same car at auction?

Paul J Daly: 22:10

All right, for sure, when we

John Fitzpatrick: 22:12

figure when we figure out examples like that, and there are many of them on how data can be powerful to drive efficiencies and a dealer group. Watch out. Oh, it'd be and that's just in a hyperlocal market. I'm not even going outside yet. I'm not even saying oh, well, Oh, you're 500 miles away, no, no problem, we'll throw the car, you will pick the car up with digital retail at all, no big deal. You never have to come in, I'm not even going there yet. I'm just staying in the hyperlocal market. There's efficiencies to be had. And we can we can double down on them right now. And I think as these groups start to build, or continue to build up, I think the next phase is going to be who can really help me drive efficiencies in the business. And those that understand data, data segmentation, how to really have a conversation, not just on the marketing side, but in general, they stand to win in a big way. And look, we're out to figure out where we play in that space.

Michael Cirillo: 23:03

Man, we have covered some territory. Yeah, coaching, we went all the way through it. We went all the way through it, John, man, this has been so much fun, and we'd love to pick your brain more in the future. But for now, thanks so much for joining us here on Auto Collabs.

John Fitzpatrick: 23:18

Yeah, thanks for having me. Great. I just want to make sure I share some gratitude, what you guys are doing for the industry. You heard this time and time again. And I was at a soda con. So I heard it too is my own yours. It's different. And we love it and keep doing what you're doing. And we'll keep supporting

Michael Cirillo: 23:35

that we're blushing. Thank you. You know what I was thinking about during that episode, how

Paul J Daly: 23:45

you don't spend nearly as much time with your kids after work is John.

Michael Cirillo: 23:50

Oh, yes. I was thinking about so we brought up AI right. We talked a little bit about it. And what I what I thought was so interesting is this is like that once in every I don't know. I'm just gonna say 50 years as a placeholder, okay. Where a technology as a broad stroke has leveled the playing field in every industry. Yeah, it

Paul J Daly: 24:17

was like the internet. 50 years,

Kyle Mountsier: 24:19

every single one. Every one. When I asked someone whether or not they've used GPT, and they tell me no, my mind is literally

Paul J Daly: 24:26

I'm like, I'm about to seem like I'm from the future. Come over here. Let me show

Michael Cirillo: 24:31

you watch needle. It's that one rare moment where all companies are developing it right. Like I was even in Slack earlier and it's like, want to try to Slack AI. Every company is developing something with it. And we all simultaneously have no clue what we're doing. Yep. Right.

Paul J Daly: 24:48

Which is the bet which I mean, this is where the people that are willing to get it wrong. Like when back to Yeah, right. How do you learn you got like,

Kyle Mountsier: 24:59

swinging balls that That's right. It would have been I

Paul J Daly: 25:01

can't remember who said it. But be he said anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first. Right? And that is like, yes. A right for everybody. The yesterday or not yesterday last week, we were, my wife was working in the garden. I was working outside and she was like, I've never seen a spider like this before. Right. So I went over, I was like, watch this. I took a picture with TPT. I was like, Is this spider poisonous? I'm in Syracuse, New York. And it gave her the whole thing. And she's like, it can do that. Like, Oh, yeah.

Kyle Mountsier: 25:33

It's amazing. That's at, there's so there's so much opportunity with that. And I think that like I was trying to just talk through like the parallel between, you know, our desire as an industry and the net new technology that we have at our fingertips is going to bring us closer to and I love that his outcome was a better relationship with a customer, you go isn't that the actual? Yeah,

Paul J Daly: 25:57

actually, that is timeless, right that is timeless will never be replaced by technology? What are

Kyle Mountsier: 26:02

the like you asked the best salespeople in the whole country that people that are selling the most cars, the ones that have done it the longest, what do they have? They have incredible relationships with their customers and all of the outcomes that that flow out of that they never even have to worry about. So bring us home after that as an industry. Hey, if you aren't excited today, if you aren't, you know, if you've never coached a little league team, if you've never sat on the sideline of Little League, you might want you might want to check it out because it got a lot you got a lot to learn about business in that pay. On behalf of myself, Paul J. Daly and Michael Cirillo, thanks for joining us Auto Collabs

Unknown: 26:41

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