What To Do w/ Three Weeks Left, Rental’s Role in EV, Why These Christmas Colors?

‍SPEAKERS

Kyle Mountsier, Paul Daly

Paul Daly  00:00

Hello yo, Monday, Monday, Monday, we got three weeks left. We're already sideways. I don't know what happened today, but I think it's gonna spill over into the show. So if you're in the auto industry, it's coming at you

Kyle Mountsier  00:38

to come to Monday. It's tough to stay when they see me on Monday and Monday is wild Monday

Paul Daly  00:45

is wild Monday. Today we're gonna talk about what to do and there's only three weeks left in the year which happens to be today is kind of the marker for that. Three weeks, three weeks. We're gonna talk about round car companies rolling Evie adoption and why Christmas colors the way they are. Has to do with something. Oh, man, cow, are you am I am I lagging up for you?

Kyle Mountsier  01:07

No, you're just lagging for you. That's that's that's your excuse. Internet,

Paul Daly  01:12

sir Houston. I love it. Well, what did snow so, you know, the internet's figuring out what it's going to do with its life today. Oh, man, it was really weird to see snow on the ground. Actually, it's been a long time. Usually this happens like mid October.

Kyle Mountsier  01:31

Is this not too bad? But you know, we're gonna take a look at this guy. Get him into the chat. Get him in there.

Paul Daly  01:37

He's all the way out in Cali. That's a serious face he has on his profile picture is that that AI generated art that he's looking at? It has to because he's just not that good looking. Callie. Oh, my. That's cold blooded. I can only do that for him. Only for him. Only for him. Hey, um, you know, speaking of cold weather. It's gonna be cold in Nashville next weekend, when I'm gonna be there. I think I'm just bringing it with me. But next week. It's appropriate. The urine extravaganza is happening on Tuesday, December 28. From two to 4pm. Eastern Time, we hope you can join us for the live stream. Just go to a soda.com Scroll down just a tad, you'll see all the links or so to.com backslash y or forward slash y e year and extravaganza, you can get all the details on it there. We have a two hour program coming up. It's a Tonight Show style program. It's going to be fast moving, we have a live band Michael Cirillo is going to be the voice in the sky in his little booth. We have live guests, we have giveaways, we have a little game show we're going to do we're going to talk about 20 I did say that talking about what happened in 2020 to like your interview, and then give it looking ahead to 2023 It's gonna be a ton of fun. So whether you're at home, or at the store, or wherever, just turn that sucker on and join in and ask some questions. Have fun with the rest of the community in the chat. It really is going to be something special in

Kyle Mountsier  02:58

the chat. The chat will be something special. I will say that the chat will be it was last year there were over 500 comments just in the chat in our live stream. So I'm sure that'll be a lot of fun. We're also going to be announcing the winner of the I need a true car sweepstakes by true car. And if you haven't checked that out, you can check the link in the show notes. It's the I need a true car hashtag I need a true car sweepstakes. True cars giving away 10 $5,000 gifts to people that need a car this winter. So if you're a dealership, I would lean in and tell people about it. Give them the option to give you your customers the opportunity to win some cash coming around this this

Paul Daly  03:35

holiday season. hashtagging the comments, fix it we all fix that everybody on the team effects it, it autocorrected to I need a true care. I mean that to that too. But I need a true car ticket out. It's a lot of fun. And it's got a little catchy hook that every time you say it, the hook goes back into my head and now I can't get it out of my head. So thank you. Thank you very much. Let's talk about a little bit of news ish. We'll talk about news ish today. Because Kyle, you and I were texting back and forth as we're putting together the show this morning. And you're like, all I see is China. Elon Musk. Right. There's one other thing that you said an inflation rates interest rates are likely Shouta not start on Monday. Let's go with it. Buddy knows all that stuff going on? Like what are we going to tell you that's not going to do so instead, we decided to turn the conversation back inward into the retail audit community from all the people and practitioners we know who are actually doing productive things with their time and emotions. So it's three weeks left in the year. What are dealers around the country focusing on well on clubhouse on Friday, which is an audio audio only social media platform we had 100 and like 70 of some of the savviest operators and industry partners in the room talking about this. What are dealers focusing on for the remaining three weeks of the year because there's only three weeks left and that topic of that room very appropriately used cars and we know used car prices are down right the whole Well, market is changing. They're down over 16% What they were in January, still falling, right? So we're figuring out where they're going to land. And one of the biggest conversations around us cars is like, what do you do with your inventory? How do you manage it properly? And so I've got a couple of tips Kyle didn't

Kyle Mountsier  05:14

we were Yeah, we're seeing a little bit more age, we're understanding that pricing is is much more dynamic and important than it has been over this over this whole year. So we walked through, I think it was like 16 or 17 just encouragement from practitioners, operators, even even industry partners or consultants and coaches that were just talking through Hey, what are some of the things that you can do right now to think about your your inventory, and what was really interesting to me is the majority of the conversation wasn't actually focused on your old age units. It was actually focused on your new age your newest Yes. Oh, you know, the reality is is like the way you start is always the way that you finish it doesn't matter what what you're doing. And so the the idea being hey, look, if you've gotten to your oldest cars, then you're probably too late. So a couple of those things, creating a solid appraisal process, increasing your speed of the retail so getting it from, you know, the the acquisition to retail as quick as possible. Thinking of a two week supply times two instead of a 30 day supply, just so you can see how the market is moving right now. Focusing on your 10 most expensive vehicles, leveraging partnerships outside of your dealership to kind of understand what's going on. And I think the the highest most talked about thing in the whole part was protecting the daily trade walk really understanding getting into your cars, and not just

Paul Daly  06:40

yeah, I'll tell tell for the people that don't understand anything what you just said, because this is not just us car audience. Right? Well, I guess this English is this thing is listen, if you're not in the used car department, these are things that your used car department is are focusing on intently every day to keep those keep the world spinning throughout the dealership and fix stops, especially generating work generating vehicles, retail sales, tell people what the trade walk is, well, good trade walk.

Kyle Mountsier  07:07

Historically, a trade walk looks like this. Typically the night before or the day before all the trades end up in the same kind of row or line before they head into service. And so what would happen is kind of an entire team, typically your whole sales team used car manager and a lot of times the service manager and detail manager just to kind of wrap around the whole process from getting to retail ready, would walk those trades, kind of pick them apart, maybe the person that traded for that car would tell a little bit of a story about the customer understand the history of that car, maybe we already know something about it, because we did an inspection. So it's just a way to really really know your inventory, know what you have, why you have it, be able to offer that car up quickly to people that might be interested in it, as well as kind of understand like, oh, that's something that we need to focus on. Maybe I didn't see that yesterday, someone else saw that chip, or that scratch or that bump. But it also allows you, it's not just a trade walk, it's actually a whole block walk. So the idea is paying attention to your mentor. And maybe it's something that someone didn't notice before, that's now getting noticed. And then, you know, Jason Rice was talking about how doing a digital lat walk. So actually getting on your website and doing that same type of inspection process every day is really important.

Paul Daly  08:22

That's called focused intent. Right? Another thing that that has kind of been coming up wasn't in that room, but around is the slow return of warranty and parts work into the service department. So if you think about it, when you have a lot of new car business coming through, that generates warranty work, right things break, things need to be replaced. And so all that money comes from the OEM under warranty, right, and that feeds your fixed ops department and feed your parts department that hasn't been happening, obviously, very limited new car supply. So a co worker group is one of the groups that's killing this was on site with them. And they were just talking about how they've used this opportunity, right? The change, actually, they saw it as opportunity. And they've really dialed in and focused on how to sell customer pay work and customer pay parts properly. And so now, as the warranty work does come back, right, you've now built another leg for your department to stand on. So that's another another area of focus in 2023 is continuing to develop the as warranty comes back but it's still not back not even close to where it will be in a year or two from now leaning into the customer experience and the processes that lead to properly selling your work in your fixed ops department and properly selling parts. So a world of opportunity in 2023 is what I'm taking away from this. And you know, as the things come back that we know we're going to come back like new cars. We should all be in a better place. Speaking of getting to a better place, segue qualify that. I got Oh, we all agree that a better place is a healthier environment. Really stretch. Well, that was actually his message. In an article we talked about this probably six months ago, when hertz announced some major Evie purchases. But basically, there's been increased a commitment to buy EVs, which is really going to be a big trajectory or a big part of consumer adoption of EVs because like, look, when you rent a car, everybody knows when you drive it like you've rented it, right? You get to test it out, you get so

Kyle Mountsier  10:24

I'm telling you, just anecdotally, and really not even anecdotally, from my 12 years in the retail side of the business, the number of times that customers came in and said, I rented this car on an island and I like it and I'm buying it is absolutely unbelievable.

Paul Daly  10:39

Lots of nodding heads out there. Yeah, that's anecdotal. But everybody knows that they've had that exact experience. Did you know One in 10 vehicles sold in the US are purchased by rental companies, it's

Kyle Mountsier  10:50

wild. That's one in 10%. So business to rentals. Hertz alone

Paul Daly  10:55

has committed to buying 375,000 EVs over the next five years as 175,000 from GM 100,000, Tesla's 65,000 from Pollstar. A quarter of their fleet, one quarter of their fleet will be evey by the year, not 2030 2024.

Kyle Mountsier  11:12

That's quick, major, major, major major, It's so wild because like the last two times that I've rented cars, you know, how many charging stations are in that are in the parking lot? Yes, zero. Now, it hasn't been from Hertz, but like, there's a hertz, literally right down the street, there's not a single charging station in there. So that place is going to take take some major change of it's going to want to see 2008. And

Paul Daly  11:37

then you think of the airport infrastructure and think of all that, yeah, but I mean, literally, when you rent a car, right, a lot of times, you're not driving more than 300 miles, right, a lot of its local travel, which is a great time to test out driving or riding in an Eevee. You know, when you're on Uber, right? It's always like, Do you want an electric Eevee? Or ideally want an Eevee? Right, another opportunity to get an experience in them. But hey, limited supply, not a lot of vehicles to test drive. So like think of like running an Eevee for a day will give you a much better feel, or even for a couple of days to see if you actually like it. I mean, hertz is think think of the way hertz is turned, like the pandemic panic where like, they just liquidated all their stuff. It's sell everything on location. Yeah, the whole sell everything. But now they go complete backup stuff, you build it back up, and they get to reconstruct it in the way that they want to do it. I mean, we'll ignore the fact that about the bankruptcy and all that, but hey, look, turning, turning some lemons into lemonade, repositioning for the future, and also partnering with BP to build out some more charging infrastructure. So this is like the third charging infrastructure story we've talked about in the last few weeks. So I mean, it's good to see a lot of we know the charging infrastructure is a major hesitancy so is that builds up, EVS will build up so 2023 Looking ahead bore of that. I don't think there's anything anybody arguing that? I wish I could

Kyle Mountsier  12:54

thinking of restructuring for the future. Oh, sure. Segway Well, the past future, you know that the restructuring, one company did a long time ago to literally shift an entire culture worldwide in the way that we perceive Christmas and the colors that surround it. So, you know, I had every once in a while, your kid just asked a question that she got to go research. And this morning, one of my son said, Hey, why are Christmas colors red and green? I didn't know this was spurred on by a question from your kid. And I was like, I don't know. Because they're, they've always been red and green. Well, those trees are great. Find out that back in the 14th century. Celtic peoples revered red and green colored Holly plants, just as signs of staying through the winter a vibrance of life keeping the earth beautiful. And early in medieval medieval churches, colors like red, green, gold, purple, all had a very they were very very available and had a vibrance that was that was able to be captured in like the visibility of it right so it like set apart from other colors popped out from from other colors. So it created this vibrance around the holidays. Now, the most interesting thing about this is that those colors actually were not like mainstays throughout the world actually, when you look back at like Santa Claus, even in many cultures, he was a thin robed person that that had maybe like a purple robe or a gold robe or different colored robes. It wasn't until one of the greatest brand plays of all time that you didn't even know that you didn't even know happen to you. Coca Cola hired a gentleman named let me get his let me get his name real quick because this is this will be on you'll have to answer some Jeopardy

Paul Daly  14:57

Jeopardy questions. Remember

Kyle Mountsier  15:01

But yeah, I cannot find his name for the couldn't find his name there. Yeah, it's it's somewhere in one of these articles but you can click through it. No, it's definitely not Bob Smith, but he was hired to create a Santa Claus for for an advertising campaign and that was the very first time that a jolly heavyset, red and white robed Santa Claus came into existence for a coke commercial. And it actually highlights similar features to his own. It's almost like a a, what do you call it when you paint yourself? I just can't I just lost the dang words. But it's like a profile of him of the actual artists. So

Paul Daly  15:45

self portrait,

Kyle Mountsier  15:47

and this was only this is yeah, self portrait. This is only like 60 years ago. How crazy is that? Well, it's

Paul Daly  15:54

just moderate. It's like, oh, man, I would love to ask some like grandparents or great grandparents about what it was like before that. Yeah, right. Because they could probably tell you, but now it's indistinguishable, right? And then coke leaned in on that the polar bears the trucks with the Christmas lights on them. And now just I mean, when you think of Coca Cola, it's just inherently Christmas. Like you don't think of Pepsi that way at all. Right now. Oh, wait, wait, what good pop culture brands like that. Just a major V major holiday. Just a major holiday in a culture. Hey, look, we hope that you can own the major holiday in your culture. I don't even know what that means. But the bottom line is you can own today, on this Monday, only these last three weeks of the year and we can own 2023 together.

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