The Dealership Doctor, Free Streaming, Apple Back To Work, BestBuy Lays Off

SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly

Paul Daly  00:24

What's up? Oh, you got your book cars on his future of automotive retail book? I didn't get mine yet. But today we're talking about a dealership doctor. Yes. free streaming and Walmart plus and Apple getting back to work at the place at the big spaceship place. Oh really?

Kyle Mountsier  00:40

That's that's the sound that I get. It's

Paul Daly  00:44

kind of like the sound that Tesla makes when it's backing up that that weird alien sound. Yeah, I mean, I really want to go to that Apple spaceship office.

Kyle Mountsier  00:54

It's really really cool.

Paul Daly  00:56

It's so weird to think that things been like so empty for so long.

Kyle Mountsier  00:59

It really has it Yeah. Can you imagine like having all of that wonderful park space in the middle and it's just like out there in the middle of nowhere

Paul Daly  01:07

maintenance staff was loving life for the last two years. Like everything's so clean just driving around and probably pretty freaking awesome Apple go karts. Like the main races in the hallways like whatever was going on in there. It was awesome. Yeah, it was awesome. Well, it's an awesome Tuesday. We're getting geared up tomorrow's pack up day. So we can go to Philly on Thursday to make sure everything's buttoned up ready to go for a soda con. Checking the venue. Check in the AV and the signage. We're gonna record a bunch more podcasts our boy Michael Cirilo, flying in the Phillies, so we can sit and record more episodes of our auto clubs, podcasts. We've been releasing literally a 30 minute episode every day for like the last two weeks, and we have like 50 more.

Kyle Mountsier  01:51

We might we might start going to two to three a day. So watch out

Paul Daly  01:55

on break, break that internet break that internet. Oh, what else is going on? Today's episode is who? Brian Kramer.

Kyle Mountsier  02:00

Yes, yeah. Ah, always good. And the title of it is one of my favorites. Hello from the other side. Because every once in a while, you just gotta drop a song lyric as a podcast.

Paul Daly  02:14

It is. Well, I mean, Brian Kramer recently made the switch from dealer side vendor side, which gives him this very slim window. And he's still in it. of objectivity. Right? That's what I tell anyone when they start a new job somewhere. I'm like you have a gift you're bringing to us right now. And that's objectivity. It's going to be gone in like 90 days, right? So tell us everything as you see it. Right now. It's the most valuable time. Yeah, amazing, amazing interview, it's going to livestream noon, live streaming on LinkedIn, live, YouTube live Facebook Live. And by the way, if you haven't followed our page on LinkedIn, you should follow the asoto page on LinkedIn, more and more great content and conversation more than anything happening there. And also, it's easy to catch live streams in the morning show. And that's kind of the center point of where the community is getting together on social but we've tried to make it easy everywhere else as well because we love all of our platform friends.

Kyle Mountsier  03:06

There we go. Speaking of LinkedIn real quick and and this isn't in the show notes but showing the show news

Paul Daly  03:13

that was like that was like real Southern California this isn't in like the show notes, dude.

Kyle Mountsier  03:19

What caught my throat there. Yeah, in the show notes, but I really encourage everyone to head to Steve greenfields LinkedIn profile right now, if you get a daily email, it's linked up in there. If you don't get the daily email, you can find it on the website. Just find your way to Steve greenfields profile, because he did a bit of a recap and looked through all of if you don't know, the FTC has proposed a bunch of new guidelines that massively impact dealers coming in December. And there's a comment period that allows for people to comment on what is necessary, what is necessary, whether they agree completely, or whether there should be some pushback and some some, some more time thought about these things. And it kind of blew my mind. And I was convicted as well as I want to just call dealers to putting in your comments on what should or should not happen with these FTC guidelines. Because if there's only 1600 comments right now, only 12 of them have any level of reservation a 12 out

Paul Daly  04:25

of 1600. So

Kyle Mountsier  04:29

like 5000, dealers should be out there. We've got a couple of reservations.

Paul Daly  04:33

Yeah, yeah. And just even from a consumer standpoint, like do you really think that that's going to make it better when all of a sudden the FTC is determining what brings value to a customer contract and like, how are they going to be the arbiter of value like even talk? I saw a few things mentioned in that even they they mentioned like, like nitrogen in your tires. Now, let's face it, nitrogen in your tires doesn't have a substantial end. massive impact on your driving experience. But it does have an impact on your driving experience. Because you're tired, especially up here in the cold weather climates, I'll just share this for people who don't understand what that's like. In the wintertime, your tires lose air, because just the what happens, the air compression and nitrogen is bigger than oxygen and doesn't get out. So that's a value to me when my tires are the proper air pressure in winter, but either way them deciding what has value to someone. Look, sometimes Vin etching brings someone value just because it brings you peace of mind, how many things do you buy that just bring you peace of mind. So

Kyle Mountsier  05:32

I don't want if you're in the marketing ecosystem, or the data ecosystem, there are things in there like keeping all customer communications for two years on file, keeping every single marketing piece that is attached to the dealership, including salesperson communications on social media that are attached to Vehicle Advertising well as to be on record, I didn't know that. And you're so like, if a salesperson posts a car with a price in it, you have to know about that. And keep record of it in a digital file system. Blah. Oh,

Paul Daly  06:10

wow. So look, we're not saying that some of the things we're proposing the bills are all bad, right? We need accountability, we need transparency. We're pro all of those things. But what we're saying is like, slow your roll, like we need more discussion, we need more feedback, we need to make sure it's right as can be the first time through, not jamming it through. So all that say I don't think we have I don't see a link in the show notes right now. We're gonna have

Kyle Mountsier  06:33

I don't think we'll get it in the show notes. If you if you get the podcast, we'll probably share it out on on our social profiles today. So keep an eye out. Yes. We just went to

Paul Daly  06:42

LinkedIn. Right? If you're not only following LinkedIn, we're definitely gonna post there, Kyle and I after the show's done, we're gonna go to the website, post our comments in there. So that 11 will become 13. And then hopefully, like 10,000 of you will follow and then we'll have 10,000 comments that are be like, hold the phone, just slow it down for a second. Yeah. So that kind of like got in front of everything. I was like, Yo, I just saw this, we need to put this at the beginning of the show today. So it's there. Let's go a soda community, Kyle said to me on the phone. This is exactly why we do what we do. Right now, right exactly why we do what we do. So let's band together. Right let's band together and push back a little bit on this. And just let's get a little bit more measured about the way we're moving forward with this. But again, don't be confused. We're pro accountability, or pro transparency because there are some bad practices out there that give all of us a really bad name. And we need to cut those off the knees. All right, let's get to some news that we had planned to talk about. One Florida dealership is providing some very special health care services, including a doctor who actually sees patients in the dealership twice a week at the store is so good. I love this after a 35% rate increase in health insurance premiums in 2019. Greg Greg Blasco owner of Lakeland Auto Mall they sell Hyundai Ford, and Genesis, they had enough and began looking for other solutions. You know, here's a quote from him from the great automotive news article. He said there were sheer frustration over lack of quality health care and continual increase in expenses for me and our employees every year, can we get an amen from anyone who has health insurance, he said, Now we're managing our own healthcare ourselves, instead of allowing big companies to do it. And we're also taking advantage of the employee employer relationship. Just so beautiful.

Kyle Mountsier  08:25

It's so smart. Well, here's here's what I love about this is that, you know, when you do if you've known if you know anything about healthcare, the first thing that happens is there's a census taken and in that census includes a lot about just the general health of the population of your employees. And so even just the fact that there's a proactivity, toward general health, right, if even if you're not sick, that a doctor is available for you to make sure that general health is taken care of, can actually reduce expenses over time, because you have a more healthy population. This is why a lot of employers do things like gym memberships, or, you know, incentivize walking and like that, you know, there's been people that have like linked up to Fitbit apps and things like that in in this and so bringing that even closer to home and saying, Hey, look, if we if we get everything closer to you, then it means that you can say healthier, that we can provide better access to health care to you. It's just it's so smart. And then and then it's branded and things stay sticky. And and it's another thing that increases retention, because it's you know that your employer cares. There's like, the list goes on and on. I love what's happening. And also I used to live like five minutes from Lakeland and know exactly where this is my sister,

Paul Daly  09:44

my sister literally just moved to Lakeland really like last month that we're all up in there. I mean, it's super cool. One of the things that I love is that it just makes the healthcare real accessible. Like this is their doctor, right I can call text, you know, see him like no appointments, no waiting. And also a lot of the things because they work with the Oh, who was the name of their consult Health Rosetta, to find a Self Managed Health Care Plan and kind of consult them through that. They are like no deductibles for these visits, no premium for medical, like durable medical equipment. Like there's so many price and cost savings. It's ridiculous. And the dealership logo is on their health card, which is so badass. I love that. Even the doctor is happy. They call them the dealership Doctor doctors, Dr. Christopher salud said in an interview with ABC in Tampa that he enjoys spending more quality time with few patients because it gets back to practicing medicine, the way he envisioned it when he got into the practice. So it's fulfilling for him to you know, there's one word that's coming to mind, Kyle, it's gonna be a buzzword, but community, there it is. It's real community happening. And if you want a little, you know, insight into the size of the store, they do sell, they sold 5200 cars last year. So you can kind of do the math and realize about where they are. So hey, if they did it in your that same size, high chance you could do some of them that too. But I bet I bet that also is something that little something to do with their turnover rate probably had better than average, I

Kyle Mountsier  11:10

believe run a story adjacent to this that talked exactly about how that was working for them.

Paul Daly  11:15

Absolutely. We should reach out to them. Maybe we will maybe we'll reach out see how it's going. All right. What else we got what else we got?

Kyle Mountsier  11:21

We got Walmart, Walmart. Walmart, it's like a sleeper to me every time I see or hear something about them. It's like, wait, they

Paul Daly  11:34

do what? Yeah, don't count them out.

Kyle Mountsier  11:36

You just got a couple of cases. So now they've taken and gone. Okay, so we have Walmart plus, which is a $98 per year subscription, slightly less than Amazon Prime. Although it's you know, Amazon Prime used to be that same price point, Walmart just hasn't changed since they initiated. It comes with things like free shipping, gas discounts, six months of Spotify Premium, so they're having to aggregate resources from other places like Spotify. And the recent aggregation is a deal with Paramount plus. So if you know about that, it's a streaming platform that has a whole bunch of, you know, interesting content on it.

Paul Daly  12:14

Right? I mean, I did go look at the restaurant what's on Paramount plus these days, right? And they do have like a lot of kids content. I did see a new show that they created with Owen Wilson as a superhero, which was like, ah, yeah, oh, Wilson superhero movie, okay. I mean, if you're in the Beavis and Butthead, Paramount's, got your back, but also, like, if you got kids got Paw Patrol. So interesting mix, I think you use the

Kyle Mountsier  12:36

right word. Yeah, it's an interesting mix. And and I think it just, it adds to their overall, you know, what they can provide people and we're starting to see this, you know, it's interesting, like, even even your your, like your Comcast has now free offerings to streaming platforms, like Comcast gives you Peacock, right? Which is a really weird thing to me, where, where your subscription to One to One thing gives you access to a subscription level of another thing, and it's trying to squat up, right? Like, exactly. Amazon is like, we're going to own the ecosystem. Everyone else is going. No, we see that ecosystem is important, but we don't have the leverage or the resources or, you know, or the people to go create an ecosystem as well as I think a brand right? If Walmart was like, we have a streaming service. Yeah, everyone would be like, Ah, I don't know about that. Right? But if you bring Pyrmont plus on maybe there's a value add there. So

Paul Daly  13:36

maybe like some of the movies or at least there's something right, there's something you know, today in two different places apple and they're they're one subscription, they're pushing hard Yes, I was on Wall Street Journal this morning, full header ad and then I opened an email newsletter Walmart was like, trying to band together all of their like unique offerings like iCloud including like iCloud Apple Music, Apple fitness, Apple video, arcade, apple plus TV plus or whatever it is, you know, it's crazy. So

Kyle Mountsier  14:04

I moved to Apple one when they first initiated it, and it's weird because I just I you know, I think everyone has a ton of these like seven to 15 to $20 things floating around and I use we use iCloud for our family so all of our stuff from our phones go up and and we also like Apple TV. Well, I don't use Apple fitness, arcade books, news, any of those, but the other two had enough work for you and me to do all of them. And I think a lot of people are are getting a lot of fatigue out of that. So I wonder how much Walmart is getting from a value perspective for their for the people because, like I it's it's just impossible to go and assume all of that value as a user on each of these different platforms starting

Paul Daly  14:56

to feel you notice starting to feel like a cable bundle. Whoa,

Kyle Mountsier  15:01

where you get your own cable bundle?

Paul Daly  15:03

You get all this stuff or you're like, look, I don't want all this crap. I'm never gonna watch that channel. I'm never going to do that. But I guess if I have to have it right.

Kyle Mountsier  15:13

The cable companies we're on to something's going

Paul Daly  15:15

going right back. It's like it's unavoidable. It's unavoidable disruptors come in. So we'll see where that goes. It's, I think a nice little part of the story is that paramount and Walmart have had a long standing relationship. Paramount has a dedicated office in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart's headquartered because Walmart was the biggest distributor of their remember when you have to like buy a DVD if you want it. And it would come out like 10 months after the movie dropped. Right? I might try to explain that to my kids. No, you'd see it in the movies. And then you would like have another surprise like a year later. Right when you can pay 2495 and get it on DVD. Man speak. Speaking of things coming back. Oh, segue. Oh, is one. We're gonna upset some people here. Yeah, well, I mean, I think some people are already upset. Apple has told its employees in a letter from CEO Tim Cook that they need to return to in person work at least three days a week starting on September 5, the employees will be required to be in the office Tuesdays Thursdays and one other day, that will be determined by whatever team there is on the right, they'll kind of make a group decision about that. It was originally planned, everyone was planned to return in July of 2021. But obviously, it's after July 2022. So it was shelved due to activist employees and protests from the CEO Tim Cook, he says we're excited to move forward with the pilot. He's a brand. He's a, he's a brand guy.

Kyle Mountsier  16:40

He's a pilot, I get in the beta. I get in the pilot phase.

Paul Daly  16:45

We believe that this revives framework will enhance our ability to work flexibly, flexibly, while preserving the in person collaboration so essential to our culture, we also know that we still have a lot to learn, and we're committed to listening, adapting and growing together. In the weeks and months ahead. He didn't say in there to that as we navigate this pandemic, I was pretty sure from everything I've heard from every agency with every acronym that they said, the pandemic is over,

Kyle Mountsier  17:10

you know, to the side, I'm gonna go back to this in person collaboration that is so essential to our culture, I'm going to argue this, that the reason why dealers have been so innovative, taking initiative and be able to navigate the pandemic and the chip shortage faster. Yeah, and, and with more ease than the majority of businesses out there is because there is an in person culture that never left that. And I think I think that more people are starting, I mean, I've recognized the difficulty over the past year of not being in person with a ton of like, it is it is essential for me to fly and be with people or be with people in within our company in other aspects. Because the speed of innovation, of thought of creativity that comes from being in person with people is second to none. And so I think that some companies are recognizing that maybe they got more like core work task work done. But the speed of innovation and creativity started to leave. And for a company company like Apple, that's absolutely not an option

Paul Daly  18:14

is another word, community. That word again, if it's not a buzzword, I'm gonna make it a buzzword. It's gonna, I'm gonna own the word community, just like I own the word clarity. But I think it is just a great reminder of the gift we were given as retail automotive being deemed essential, because we are because they nobody complained and that Apple is not around at the office, right. But a lot of people would be literally paralyzed in life if there were no auto dealers to sell and service vehicles. So it's complete blessing that our industry was essential and all the surrounding industries, which means every industry partner was deemed essential to support the essential industry. It's a gift. And I think we're seeing firsthand the benefit of that as we innovate faster than ever in the history of retail automotive. But that's what's going on over at Apple.

Kyle Mountsier  19:04

There you go. Hey, we got one more quick. Let's get it and let's get one more important and all we're telling you is we found Yes, some people, okay? So BestBuy is announcing layoffs, that that are including a hundreds of jobs at the store level. So if you've ever had a training where you're like, talking about Best Buy employees and their ability to communicate with customers and walk them through a sales process, and you're like, if we could operate more like them, then here's your opportunity to go find some of those people, because they're laying off a bunch of people citing that winning demand and sales are down 11%, which is over double their initial estimate, initially estimated sales retraction that they're having to lay off a bunch of these employees. So go on LinkedIn, Facebook, anywhere where you can find it in search for those Best Buy employees around you. Maybe ask some friends and see if anyone needs a role. Maybe

Paul Daly  19:58

Maybe Let's do a little geo targeting campaign you know where the Best Buy stores are, circle the store with a little tool and run ads. If you're a Best Buy employee and you want to make more money and have job security, come work with us. I think it's an exceptional fit. For anyone who has a one price model two, I just want to put that out there. Because Best Buy employees

Kyle Mountsier  20:22

one of my best one of the best employees went in like within six months into management sold more cars came right out of BestBuy. That's right in the car business today and crushing it.

Paul Daly  20:33

They understand merchandising they understand communicating product features, they understand actually some more contract language than you think because they deal with warranties and things like that. And while you're at it, just circle the Verizon store. That's right in the same Mall. Same deal. Because, because funny thing about that one price model, they understand contracts they know about products, features and benefits, and they can handle the crying kid in the store that's been in the mall too long. So there you go. Get out there, get there. We're trying to find all the people we can so there are some people for you. Hey, it's only Tuesday, man. We got a whole week in front of us, shall we give me some tips and tricks but hey, no doubt go to the LinkedIn page. Follow us so do and we're going to start making a lobbying effort of our own

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