The EV Professor with Alex Lawrence

Kyle Mountsier: 0:07

I turned the hat forward. Okay

‍Unknown: 0:14

this is Auto Collabs

Kyle Mountsier: 0:16

when you're doing Auto Collabs

Paul J Daly: 0:18

you gotta have to be fancy. Now, Kyle, if you're just listening yet his hat backwards when we hit the record button and he all of a sudden had this look like he just forgot to put on underwear and he flipped his hat around.

Michael Cirillo: 0:28

Like I need something. wintry. Oh, what do you know?

Paul J Daly: 0:32

Okay, so Mike just put on our heart.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:34

Eenie, hold on next.

Paul J Daly: 0:35

So no, no, no put Well, if it's going to be in Texas that the Carhart one makes the most sense, in my opinion. It's like not a burden one like, were you skiing? Yeah. And that's

Kyle Mountsier: 0:45

he's wearing it more California though. Just kind of like sitting on top. Like, it's like, like you want it to keep you warm, but you don't really meet but he really just likes Coldplay, right.

Paul J Daly: 1:00

So let's settle something really quickly, because Kyle called it a beanie, right? I've called it a beanie before or a Ski hat. What do you call those in Canada?

Michael Cirillo: 1:10

A tuk? A tuk. tuk? I don't even know.

Paul J Daly: 1:15

I knew it was something qu E. A tune sounds like a very Canadian spelling of a tuk. I've heard it called a toboggan. Have you ever heard that? Well, a toboggan is this is the sled. I know. It was some Midwest person that was like, oh, no, that's

Michael Cirillo: 1:30

my games. But I gotta say Never trust them book. I know. I can't

Kyle Mountsier: 1:35

trust someone that calls a hat to bargain. But doesn't.

Paul J Daly: 1:39

i Hey, it just sounds

Michael Cirillo: 1:40

like there's all sorts of weird things like this. I mean, speaking of how are you gonna

Paul J Daly: 1:46

get into the game? Guys? Navigate that real quick. See, I can see today's guests like rocking a Ski hat or a beanie or a tuk or whatever you want to call it. And California style ask

Michael Cirillo: 1:57

him how his vehicles fare in the winter? Because that's always a question we get. Yeah.

Paul J Daly: 2:04

It is when it comes to EVs for sure. And you know, Alex is just, I don't know, he's just kind of like a cool guy. If you could just see it from his media and the energy of the brand that like it's not just an Eevee play. He's also a professor so we'll figure out that and he's just got kind of got a vibe in and energy to him so he could wear a hat like that Michael, so unintentional, but well placement. Well place the took today. Well, we hope you enjoy this conversation that we're about to have with our guests today, founder of evey cars, and Evie auto, Alex. I just don't want to save Hey, Alex, thank you so much for joining us today. This is this is a real treat. It's kind of outside our usual circle of guests. So it's got us all excited. Yeah. Thanks

Alex Lawrence: 2:53

guys. Good. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Paul J Daly: 2:55

I have to compliment you first. If you're just listening to this I'm going to describe it for you Alex's wearing a beautiful white hat flat it's not quite flat brim skirt curved brim nice looking at and it's got bright pink stylized letters Evie on it. Tell us about that. Yeah,

Alex Lawrence: 3:12

I mean we're proud of our merch so you know Evie, Evie autos the brand the business and the logo feels like something that people are okay to support even if they're not like huge EV people sometimes just because it's kind of cool looking it's kind of different but yeah we spent quite a bit of time you know building something that we think is wearable and that sir are good example that we got probably a half a dozen different color combos and styles and stuff and they they go fast man close

Paul J Daly: 3:39

to our hearts. So close to our hearts. Yeah, I knew you are our people the moment I laid eyes

Kyle Mountsier: 3:48

that's it. So you've you've had like a rich history. Not all in auto. What created it? Well, I guess like give us the give us the bullet points. And maybe we'll dig into them in a second. Give us the bullet points outside of auto and then what was the reason for jumping into the Eevee auto retailing space? Yeah,

Alex Lawrence: 4:10

so I mean, my first real business was detailing cars actually. So I've always loved cars. I knew I liked

Kyle Mountsier: 4:16

C now you and Bob Michael and I will see ourselves out

Paul J Daly: 4:20

now. You know your favorite smells in the whole world are I already know? Because

Alex Lawrence: 4:25

I just made that connection in a podcast interview a couple weeks ago like wait a minute my first like real business you know it was called perfection on wheels detailing pretty creative. And I printed out flyers my dad's computer and I went to the neighborhood on the east bench above where I lived and just went door to door and was just like, hey, I'll detail your car to the rich people you know, and so I've always loved cars. You know I put every dime I had into my first car like way too much money into it. That's all I spent my money on. You know, but I'm not a car guy. There's a difference here. I should tell you this. I love cars, but this is a quick story. I I have this insane stereo on my car. And you know that sound dampening material. That's like saying, Thank you. So I ripped everything out of my car all the way down to the metal and dynamited the whole thing. And then put the whole car back and had like two handfuls of bolts left over.

Paul J Daly: 5:17

Or they was cut the weight of this vehicle by another six.

Alex Lawrence: 5:21

Because I didn't know you know, I'm not so I'm not good at fixing cars or working on cars and that stuff

Paul J Daly: 5:26

didn't rattle more after you put the dynamite Oh, it

Alex Lawrence: 5:30

totally worked. But there was definitely some stuff missing that I have no idea where it went. So I just kind of check those. So yeah, so lifelong entrepreneur. You know, my first half of my career, I was just opportunistic, got involved in some franchises, food franchises, didn't have any particular affinity for him or experience, no family connection, nothing like that. But they were successful as a young guy. And so I just kept doing that, right, you just kind of parlay one into the next, went to college had an okay experience, but didn't love it. It stayed with franchising until we had sold enough of the franchises to recognize, hey, I can I can do other things. Now I have a choice. And I've always been a very early adopter tech geek gadgets, hardware, software. And so chose tech and built one of the very first third party apps for Twitter started an agency that built websites for small businesses back when when they were a lot of small businesses didn't have websites. And so both of those grew really fast. You know, went back to school during that period of time, got another degree, started teaching a little bit just because I love that environment. I love you know, being around that stuff. Even though I didn't have a great educational experience historically built some some tech businesses that ended up being pretty, pretty decent size with some friends ran another one. Still, you know, enjoying cars along the way. Eventually got a PhD from Oklahoma State and became a tenured college professor Weaver State where we've got some some connectivity there some some alum, family alarm in the house, still kind of starting and investing in businesses along the way. Weaver's really supportive of me being an entrepreneur and a professor, which is super amazing.

Paul J Daly: 7:19

He doesn't look a day over 93 I'll be 50

Alex Lawrence: 7:23

I'll be 50 next year. And so which is another funny story, a friend of mine is interviewing at this startup event. And he's like, and here's Alex. Alex is 50 years old, and he started a business I'm like, Dude, I'm not 90.

Unknown: 7:40

Here, he, if he can do it, you can do it too, you know, business at his old age.

Alex Lawrence: 7:47

Yep. Seriously, I was like, kind of flattered. kind of embarrassed. But so so the car business, you know, never intended to own a car dealership or be a car dealer saw an opportunity with my co founder, four years ago, little longer than that, in four years, in December next month. To to create a marketplace, we were thinking for other people to buy and sell used electric vehicles, because we were kind of whining about how difficult that was. And so acquired, Evey cars.com and evey trucks.com and a bunch of other good domains, started building this marketplace. But with my previous experience building software, and other stuff, you know, I was either the customer myself, like, deeply ingrained as the customer, myself or I was heavily involved with who my customer would be. And in this case, the paying customer for the marketplace would be car dealers, that's who would pay to list their cars. And so my co founder had an old dealer's license, we dusted it off. Yeah, in Utah,

Paul J Daly: 8:53

how long are they good for?

Alex Lawrence: 8:55

As long as you renew and take the test every year? You know, and

Paul J Daly: 8:59

okay, so he was maintaining, I didn't know if it was just, once you have one in New York, it's like every 30 minutes, you need to renew it. No, yeah.

Alex Lawrence: 9:08

Yeah, no, it's not like the taxi coin or whatever. You know, it's not that high value item, but bought a car at an auction, bought a Tesla at an auction, sold it on the local classifieds, made a few bucks, you know, and replicated that several times as we were building the software marketplace until it went one point about two years ago. It's like, Wait a minute. We've got this pretty awesome business over here. And it feels like we're being disrespectful. Not to give it more attention. So anyway, that was a long answer to the last 35 years in a relatively I mean, 35 years

Kyle Mountsier: 9:39

and four minutes is pretty cool. Yeah, that wasn't too bad. That wasn't too bad. I love that. I love like entrepreneurialism feels like creating a space for people to buy and, and and service or buy and sell cars because historically, people from maybe outside people inside the auto auto industry I look at people outside of the audit and auto industry is like, we have to, we have to get you to come over here. But there's this kind of like new attraction into auto, from a tech or entrepreneur side of things. It's like people outside of auto are looking at it going, Hey, there's an opportunity there that I could potentially take advantage of. I may never have done anything in that business sector, but it's exciting for me. What are those things that that created excitement for you about the industry? Like right now? What were what were the trigger things that said, this is exciting outside of just the pain of shopping? Yeah,

Alex Lawrence: 10:38

I mean, EVs are so fun. I mean, you know, I, I think, you know, certainly there's

Paul J Daly: 10:44

what's fun? Yeah. What, what when you say that, right? Because a lot of people maybe listening have never driven one. To hear mixed signals about like, it's good. It's bad. It's easy. It's difficult. Like, why are UV so fun?

Alex Lawrence: 10:56

And listen, they're not for everybody. I think I'm kind of countered as some of the big proponents of this industry. But they're fun because they're, they're like, super computers on wheels that are faster than a Ferrari. It's so it's, you know, you get to just a

Paul J Daly: 11:10

good value prop. Yeah, super cute computer on wheels. It's faster than a Ferrari. Yeah, I

Alex Lawrence: 11:14

mean, and I still love Harley's, that's the thing you don't have to choose, you don't have to be on Team A or Team B, it doesn't have to be polarizing. And so you know, they're the most obvious obviously, the acceleration, you know, I mean, there's, I was listening to a podcast, a CEO of a very large chain, he's like, I'll never my daily drivers and Evie and never won't be and it's, for one reasons, the acceleration, you just can't, if you love cars, and love going fast, once you experience that, it's kind of it's addicting. You know,

Kyle Mountsier: 11:46

I love actually, if people haven't been, you've got to beta sign up for evey cars, I was looking around it. And like, if you scroll down enough, there's this little section that says just how fast you want to go. And you've got these filters that are like under five. And the last filter is just slow.

Paul J Daly: 12:07

Then it bounces about to Carvana.

Alex Lawrence: 12:15

Just yesterday I gave so so we keep a company, we've got a Model S plan that we actually just got wrapped in a pretty ridiculous way. It's got Elon space on the side of it. Very, very kind of polarizing to get attention, you know, off to show you guys a picture of it actually turned out pretty well. I just gave a family of five, we have a road right next to us. It's long, straight and empty. I mean, it couldn't be more perfect. And I and all five of them jumped in and I and I hit it, you know, and they all freak out. We've all

Paul J Daly: 12:43

touched the dashboard. When I say through the I

Alex Lawrence: 12:46

do I say put your head against the head breast, you know, and that happens all the time. So so but not just the speed. I mean, I also the self driving is I think every car I get into it doesn't have a now feels like the dumbest car ever made. You know, I just have to Oh my gosh, I gotta steer. I

Michael Cirillo: 13:01

gotta, I gotta tell you my experience with this. So my wife says, I want I want a Tesla. So I'm like, Are you sure? Did I just hear you say you want an F 150? She's like, yes, as long as it's a Tesla. So we buy this Tesla. I'm on a business trip in San Antonio with with one of my partners. And he's like, Have you put on the full self driving it? I'm like, No, I haven't yet. He's like, dude, just let's try it. So I go in, I tap the thing. I swipe and now I've got full self driving. I immediately notice how much more information it's visualizing right? And we are freaked out the first three and a half minutes of this ride of self driving. We're going through town. I look at him. He looks at me. We're clenched onto our seatbelts like this. Alex, I'm not I'm not. I'm not kidding you. When I say 15 minutes later, I realize I haven't looked at the road in about 10 minutes. Who boy like that's how quickly I was like, I had my experience

Paul J Daly: 14:01

was not like that. I don't know what what

Michael Cirillo: 14:04

we were on the 35 freeway. Okay, and I was learning No, I was sitting guys like I was sitting like this and we were just having conversation. So it's not like I was looking down or anything. In fact, I think the car actually signals you to look back cut to Michael Cirillo just out. But I was I was like sitting like this and I realized I wasn't paying attention to like, that's how quickly we both got comfortable with this self driving. And then the second thing I will say to your point about speed, when my wife and I first took delivery of this vehicle, and the guy's like go find an open road and just floor it for a minute. We anybody who's driven an Eevee especially a Tesla are the few living people on this planet that knows what resurrection feels like because our souls left our body and reentered our body. It's funny. Like I leave my body like it freaked me out how much power That thing Yeah, it's nuts.

Alex Lawrence: 15:01

Well, you know, it's not just, it's also there's so many new ones coming out all the time. And so so it feels like Christmas Eve for cars. You know, every month or two, there's something new coming out that I get to see it's the cybertruck right now. It's the Hummer SUV that we just picked up. I've got a Fisker that we have, you know, there's just seems like there's a lot of new stuff. And if you're if you're into tech, and you're into gadgets, and you're into software and hardware and cars, it's like this perfect combination of all that. And again, I just, it's our tagline to we make buying cars fun again. It's just it's just fun, you know, and so I don't know how else to say it. Other than that, even though I still like driving a car too. And I still like engine noise too. So I'm like this weird.

Michael Cirillo: 15:42

Like, all of us combat a lot of skepticism, though, like maybe that people are interested, but then they go, but Utah winters, like, what does that gonna look like? Because I know we hear a lot about that. Are you seeing a lot of that as well?

Alex Lawrence: 15:55

Yeah, I mean, the crazy thing, these cars really, I mean, I would say that moto s plaid is probably the most incredible car ever built, if you think about it objectively from all the checkpoints so. So you've got all the hypercar supercar stats in terms of horsepower and acceleration, and top speed and all those kinds of things, right. But then you also say, fits four sets of golf clubs, and five adults, that all those performance rates and gets incredible efficient energy efficiency, and doesn't require you know, $700 oil changes and, and all these things that are out of the super fast, super high performance cars. So there's that, but then you go over here into like the safety, super safe, you know, really quiet, really comfortable. But then you look at performance in whether that's because they're so heavy. And because the weight is so evenly distributed with the battery being the full base of the body, and being all wheel drive and an often cases multi motor all wheel drive. They literally are the best cars in the snow, you can ask for probably

Paul J Daly: 16:59

for starting, I would say stopping because they're heavy might be a little squirrely, you

Alex Lawrence: 17:04

know, I've driven now and have hardcore Utah winners for you know, five, six years straight my whole family. Yep. And I've never driven a better car in the snow objectively. We don't get stuck, they don't have problems they get around easy. I mean, I've just never driven a better car in the snow.

Kyle Mountsier: 17:20

So so let's

Paul J Daly: 17:22

talk, let's talk about I want to make sure we talk about the business, because we don't have a ton of time left. So you're building this, and I think a lot of our audience will be introduced to you on this podcast for the first time. And like we'd love to connect dealers with resources and things that are you know, like, connect all the dots. So tell us about the business side of what you're building. And why you think it's a good place for dealers to potentially list inventory. Yeah, so

Alex Lawrence: 17:47

Well, let me be clear, so evey cars.com is not the business anymore. So evey cars.com has actually gone now close to dealers, we've changed. And so evey cars.com Is, is closed beta is not going to be servicing dealer inventory anymore, it's only going to be private sellers that can post their their inventory for sale. And it's going to be completely free no upsells no credit card. If you want a CARFAX you can get one and it'll be a fair price to offer on your listing but it's only going to be a private seller marketplace relaunched so there's a massive pivot there. And the reason is because Evie auto exists. Evie Auto is is my soon to be chain of national car dealerships that sell only electric vehicles, all brands exclusively used. And so I don't know if that changes the nature of your question, but it definitely is. Uh oh, it helps out. Yeah,

Paul J Daly: 18:38

it cleared up a lot in that last 60 seconds.

Alex Lawrence: 18:41

Sorry. I mean, it we haven't said yet actually, the first time I've said publicly what evey cars new destination is going to be. And so Evie auto, I've been real public about that, you know, we built I would argue, you know, maybe what not the one of the very best experiences for buying an electric vehicle in America. And one of the few places where you can try a bunch of different brands and talk to people that are real experts. And I think it's an interesting discussion about the car industry and why there's so much information out there about how terrible is and sales are bad and dealers don't want to carry them and I understand all those things. And I've got some opinions on that. But, but I think my business is a little different than maybe.

Paul J Daly: 19:22

Gotcha so so basically evey cars, private party listing site, Evie, auto chain of used car use evey dealerships across the country. That's right. How many do you have any open right now? Do you have several open in multiple states? Yeah, no, it's

Alex Lawrence: 19:39

Yeah, so like I said, dealerships been in business for four years in December, we acquired a piece of ground empty piece of ground last year, designed and built the brand and the building and opened in July of last year, excuse me of this year, and have had just record breaking sales and profits. We've been profitable for We're here straight. And, and we're real close to announcing our second location and are in talks for others. And so that's

Kyle Mountsier: 20:11

awesome. We got some other people we got to introduce you may or may not be listened to this, but we got some people we got it. I

Alex Lawrence: 20:16

know you guys know. Yeah, you

Kyle Mountsier: 20:19

down? No, that's so cool. I'm excited to see what happens, we're going to have to like, I think it's going to be one of these things where we're just going to have to have you back every six months on the pod, just to give us the update, because this is just going to be a rapidly moving thing. But this one we've run out of time we've gotten, I feel like there's so many more things that we have to ask easy about your history and how that's played into this. But we'll get to that at some point. So Alex, on behalf of all of us, really appreciate you joining us here.

Alex Lawrence: 20:49

Yeah, fun to meet you guys. Thanks for having me.

Paul J Daly: 20:54

Okay, on a scale of one to 10. How if I've sorry? How likely is Kyle to be successful in life? You didn't let me finish the question. Unbelievable. I couldn't see that one of you know, but on a scale of one to 10. How cool is Alex Lawrence? Very cool,

Kyle Mountsier: 21:13

dude. Just real cool, dude. Like, he's got so much random history. And he's entering this auto industry in kind of a roundabout way, but got his real head about him. And I wish everybody could have heard all of the side conversations we had afterwards. Because you're like, you get in, you're like, Oh, you're really thinking about this thing.

Paul J Daly: 21:34

I think I see what He's tying it. He's tying his like, the expertise with the EVS and the education needed. And, you know, just the kind of the business savvy, but his, his attention to brand and customer experience is definitely on playing on a different level. And I know a lot of people talk about, like, can you scale that level of customer experience and brand as you, you know, scale into more locations? And that's the big question. But I think that always comes down to how well you can systematize it because you look at places like Zappos, who did an amazing job at customer service. And they were able to scale it because they put it into a system and they built a culture around it. So I mean, I'm always cheering for the people that do it that way. One of

Michael Cirillo: 22:11

the things that stood out to me is, you know, relatively new in this aspect of business, right, new as a dealer, we got we got a bit of his story. But how quickly also in that timeframe, he's pivoted, and he's adjusting his strategy, and that his demeanor and cadence around it was like, Yeah, big deal. Where when you contrast that against, you know, what we typically see in a traditional setting, it's like we have to

Unknown: 22:41

Bini came back,

Michael Cirillo: 22:43

reading some handles, but you don't I mean, oh, my gosh. They'll turn into Seinfeld, like pivoting

Unknown: 22:52

really good.

Michael Cirillo: 22:55

Why would you pivot and I don't even want to pat, you know, but it's like, he was just like, yeah, because why not? I saw an opening. That's what pivoting is. Yep. And he's going after it. And I just loved kind of how nonchalant he was whereas, you know, a lot of the industry tends to kind of lean in to pivot as a bad thing. But it's like, no, we're moving a couch up a stairwell, it's going to be okay, pivot column.

Paul J Daly: 23:22

And I have done that for a year an extravaganza last year. I

Kyle Mountsier: 23:26

remember it done very directly. Well, hey, on behalf of Paul J. Daly, Michael Cirillo, and myself, Kyle Mountsier. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. And thanks for joining us on Auto Collabs. Sign

Unknown: 23:38

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