More Car Sales: Less Waste w/Steve Fucile

“So, there we are in Poland. No cellphone, we don’t know the language, and we just got robbed by an 80-year-old man.” -Herb Anderson

Check out Herb’s interview on the Steve Fucile Show. Together they discuss the importance of digital marketing in the auto industry and the need for dealerships to control their own narrative in order to gain customer trust. Social media is a cost-effective way to drive traffic to a dealership’s website. Also, learn how Herb got robbed in Poland.

Connect with our friend Steve Fucile on his social media below.

Keywords: digital marketing, auto industry, customer trust, third-party sites, inventory management, social media, lead generation, branding, entertainment, education.

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📞 Connect:

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-fucile-8714b5168/

Instagram:

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Facebook:

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Tik Tok:

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YouTube:

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⏰ Highlights:

00:00 Introduction

07:30 The American Dream Still Exists

20:00 And Then He Stole My Car!

28:00 Understanding Where the Issues Are

46:30 Motivation to Get Off the Couch

01:08:00 You Can’t Sell What You Don’t Have

01:23:00 The Growth of Business

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Transcript:

Steve Fucile  00:16

Hey, welcome to the show there you go big guy it’s nice to have you on the show man a fellow podcaster a OG the car business as CEO. The man the myth the legend Mr. Herb Anderson, guys, welcome to the show, man. what up what up? What up, man? Thanks for the invite. A lot of fun. Yeah, man. Yeah, absolutely. I came across your show. And I’ll tell you I thought the show was awful. But your song your your shows great bad. You’re so great. What your songs dope, bro. You’re making me want to put lyrics to my intro. Man. You’re making me want to put lyrics?

Herb  00:53

You know if you need some, some writing inspiration, let me know.

Steve Fucile  00:59

Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Did you write the lyrics? I helped with a lot of Yeah, for sure. Okay. All right. I love that. Yeah, I love that. So I do a lot of fun stuff, man. You’re obviously a creative. That’s why you’re the podcast space, which is great. But I do a lot of I’ve got some I’ve got an alter ego that most people on this show don’t know that I might listeners. His name is Uncle savings. And so I love I’m gonna tell you I love 1980s 1990s car commercials. You know, shoot them up prices, slashing high prices, cutting mattresses in half breaking windows and tearing down high prices. There’s something about that, that just turns me on. So I’ve got an alter ego that I dress up in costumes, depending on the you know, depending on the holiday, I’ll do you know, it started with with a Veterans Day sale and I wouldn’t rent it out or bought rather a full Uncle Sam costume and I created this uncle savings alter ego. And it’s been it’s been fun, right?

Herb  02:00

What? What got you into podcast based man? How that how did so I was I was a rep right. So I used to work for Cox automotive for autotrader KBB. And then I went to work for GS marketing one of the Toyota distributors. And I’ve just been kind of studying the business man since I started. And I was having these amazing conversations with with decision makers. And I was like, do learning a bunch? And I was like, How can I like, you know, share this stuff. And so I thought at the time, the, the the platform that best suited that would was podcasting. I could just go with people that were open to it, record the conversations and share those. And that was kind of how I how I envisioned the beginning of it. And so we kind of got going, but then I started to learn a bunch by having people on the show and like doing the podcast with me. So I became sharing and it became a way for me to kind of accelerate my learning as well. So

Steve Fucile  03:01

yeah, know, it’s wild, how much of an education you get, and how quick it happens. Just by taking the conversations, be able to expand your network out. And that’s the thing, like, that’s why I encourage people to listen to my show your show car guy coffee, podcast, whatever it is that you know, whatever flavor you like, or whatever flavor you’re feeling like that day, and then take in multiple channels, because there’s lots of different points of view. And it’s an education, right? I mean, the conversations that we get to have on here, it’s hard to sit down with a, you know, a Ford OEM rep or it’s hard to get a hold of a dealer principal, if you’re a new salesperson, or trying to learn how to navigate your career, and you can’t figure out how to get to that next step or get out of retail into the vendor space. And how did you make that jump? Since we’re talking about it? How did you make because I know you were let’s back up, how did you get in the car business? And where in the world are you from?

Herb  03:54

Oh, all right. I don’t know if you have enough time for this man. So I let’s see, I started actually. So I started on the on the fixed up side of things. I was a lube tech tire technician. And so that’s kind of how I how I kicked it off. And I’m originally from Venezuela, I came to United States, late 90s. And, you know, started going to school and trying to you know, pay my way through that and, and that the job that I was offered. Just, you know, help me cover a lot of my expenses. And so I don’t know did somebody at the at the dealership that I was at, in the beginning saw something in me and they they told me to look like you know, keep on this path. And you may we don’t know what we’re gonna do with you. Yeah, and like they started asking me questions like what, what area of the business you want to get into? I really wanted to be a mechanic. I wanted to be a technician. And we’re Yeah, dude. And so because I love the camaraderie that you see, you know, those guys aren’t we’re back in those days anyway, they were joking a bunch, everybody’s having a good time. They’re making really good money. And I’ve always liked to fix things, you know what I mean? Like, repair things, it’s just something that that I enjoy. And so I made a deal with, with my, with my manager at the time and I was like, Hey, if you if you, you know, if you if you put me on this apprenticeship program, I’ll I’ll listen, I’ll do whatever you told me to do. I’ll be one of your top tax. And he’s like, Okay, I’m gonna put you in this program. It’s gonna take a year, but you got to do everything I say, Never question it, just do it. And I was like, Okay, well, let’s Raul did the day before the year was up this guy, you know, throws me a shirt. And he’s like, Man, I think you’d be really good with people. Why don’t you give that a month and see how that works? And so I went up to the counter. Really? Yeah, dude. And then I got my first check. And it was like, five G’s or something like that. I was like, Oh, shit. Yeah, I’m gonna do this. Just like anything in the carbon, you get that first check, man. And you’re like, oh, man, what? Like I remember talking to him and be like, Hey, dude, I think payroll made a mistake with my check. And he’s like, calculating everything and you’d like to know your text fine. Well, as a

Steve Fucile  06:16

matter of fact, we owe you an extra 60 bucks. Yeah, we owe you 60 more

Herb  06:19

to show me his check. And I was like, what?

Steve Fucile  06:27

When do you when did you come to

Herb  06:29

America from Minnesota? Oh, 1998. There. It’s funny. Yeah, because there was a change in the in the in the government there. And I just kind of knew what was coming down the pipe. And I needed to get out of there as fast as possible. So

Steve Fucile  06:44

And how old were you when you left?

Herb  06:45

So I was 17. Right. As soon as I finished high school. I

Steve Fucile  06:51

left Wow. What what’s wild about that? What I what I have a great appreciation for stories of immigration people that come here like, I listen to a PBD podcast and and if you listen to Patrick, but David, but also, yeah, I mean, what a story right from Iran with the Shah, living in refugee camps, literally, with his father to the military, the only one of the you know, most successful companies, great podcast. But but but they have this hunger and this different desire, and this still idea that the American Dream exists, right? Like you don’t you didn’t run to Russia, you didn’t run to Africa, you didn’t run to Europe. You know, you’re like, hey, I need to go to a place. That’s good. And you came here and you found success. I just think it’s amazing. What’s it like coming from and and this is a car sales podcast, or whatever it is, but like, I care about people and what makes them run? So like, what was the idea that you had, as a young person in Venezuela, you see what’s coming down the pipe and you’re thinking and need to make a change? Why not another country? Like what why did you choose America? Right?

Herb  07:57

Well, I have some ties here. Like, my father is my Well, my dad is Swedish, but he pretty much was raised here in the US. And so, you know, I had some ties here. I had the opportunity to come here and, you know, go to school and all that stuff with him. But so that’s the that’s the main reason why. But then he died, like four months after I got there. And it was like, I remember living every, every month, thinking like, Okay, well, if I don’t make it this month, this is the month I go back. And I did that for like two or three years, you know, so, and then I was here, and I was like, I know, this is gonna sound super cliche, but I was like, dude, like, I have an opportunity in this country that people back home would kill for right. And so I just was like, you know, I gotta, I’m here, man. I’m not gonna give up. I’m gonna ride this thing, all the way through

Steve Fucile  08:50

how awesome you know, I mean, I don’t know what your life looks like outside this camera. But, I mean, you know, you don’t build a podcast if you’re not doing okay. And you know, you don’t spend 20 years in the automobile industry doing what you’re doing and not be okay. So I mean, what a what a success, man, congratulations on grinding yourself all the way from, you know, literally coming here with probably not much I would imagine. I mean, right. I mean, even if you had some kind of started with saying you walked here, whatever, like, but obviously you didn’t come here with a, you know, half a million dollar house and you know, 10 million in the bank account. I mean, you came over here and you earned your way and that’s amazing, man.

Herb  09:24

Yeah, I mean, it would have been nice what your that alternative would have been great.

Steve Fucile  09:30

Let’s let’s make that a reality. So you find your way to the car business. You know, your work. How did you move from the sales side to the to the vendor side, right. How did that how did that switch

Herb  09:47

from service? I never I never just say service. Yeah, for service. So that was interesting, too. I had an opportunity to do something that was a little bit unique when I left the dealership and that was export management. So I would go to manufactures like body shops and things like that, and they and sell their products, right. So it sell their products internationally so that people that manufacture stuff here in the in the auto body space, yeah, we would take their products internationally and sell them in other countries. And so I thought that was pretty unique, I got to kind of stay in the realm of the of the automotive business. And at the same time I got exposure to do business in other countries and develop markets. And you know, I was kind of like, I was now going to college and in my I was trying to get a degree in International Business and all those things kind of tied together. And it was a perfect opportunity to put all the things that I liked business, the car, the car, aspect, the automotive industry, traveling all these all these things together. Yeah. And then from there,

Steve Fucile  10:54

no, I was gonna say how much influence did did the travel have on what you did in the future? Like, I mean, just the exposure to the international business. And I mean, he cut you off. I’m sorry, I thought there was a break. But

Herb  11:03

no, no, it’s fine. I mean, it was it was good. Because when you’re now when you’re when you think about it, like if you’re in the that’s changed a little bit now with Kohler. But if you if you were wrapped back in the time when I started, you’re pretty much a road warrior, right? You’re gone. Monday through Thursday, at least typically, most of these companies give you Friday or Monday as your office day and the rest of the time you’re gone. And I’m never I’m not a guy. I don’t believe in the even today, I don’t believe which is ironic, because we’re doing this digitally, but I’m not I don’t believe in zooms. I don’t believe in meetings like that. Right? You dude, you have to be there, man. You have to dealers appreciate that to think about it. Those people are busy. You think they’re gonna take 2030 minutes to sit on a camera? Do they don’t care? They have so much going on. Right? And so I always wanted to be at the store. And I wanted this dealers to see me physically at their store walking their lats touching their car, they wanted to see that I cared and I was invested in their business. You know what I mean? Yep. And so because of the International thing traveling locally was That was easy. You know what I mean? Yeah, for

Steve Fucile  12:09

sure. Even even now. You know, I’m still in retail. I do this I’m still in retail. But I was a vendor for a lead CRM. So I worked for Ely back in the old days when way when it was fresh beginnings. And when Q and Judy on that. And I was on the desk team as they rolled that out. So oh, gee, lead, right? Oh, gee, beginning and we were road warriors, you know, get on a plane Monday morning at 5am. And get get home Friday night, you know, at 6:37pm. And sell cars every single minute of the day in between there and teach these guys what we’re doing. And so I get it. When you’re in those stores to make those appointments to do those sales meetings. It makes a difference what when I left the lead, I took a little time off. And I worked for another company that I’ll leave nameless or whatever, because just wasn’t good fit for me. And I didn’t think the product was that great. But I remember going hammer through some deals and I was trying to set up and sell the CRM. And I called the guy that on the product and I said hey, man, I got a deal in Nashville looks like it’s gonna be a deal. He’s got 678 rooftops, you know, this is a pretty good deal for us. I said, let’s, let’s go down there and take a look at it. I probably need to be down there Tuesday, Wednesday of next week. And he said, Yeah, let’s set up a call Tuesday or Wednesday. And I was like, I don’t think that’s what I’m talking. I was like, I think we need to go down there and visit with this mela. And he was like, well, that’s awfully expensive. A call would set it up. And I was like, definitely not doing that. Like we definitely have to be there Tuesday, I did end up selling that product with him. And then I quit the company the next week because I just it was just a bad if you’re still on that product, man, I’m sorry, Mr. Dodge and whatever. I’ll just leave it at that in Nashville. But it was the there’s better products out there, man. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But it isn’t it does make a difference I was getting to my point is in retail is that I was talking to the owner of the store that I worked for now. And I was like, hey, look, I think this is a good product that was a product that I’m gonna bring to him. I said look, I’ve been listening I’ve been studying I think this tool not only solve some problems that we don’t even know we have, but it’ll create solutions for things that we have. I think it’s a good tool. I said I set up a meeting just a Zoom meeting for you to look at the demo and literally as busy as we are he goes just do me a favor just tell me the next time he’s in town and then just get him here and get me here. He’s like there’s no way I’m gonna watch a demo on Zoom. My attention spans that big you know what I know? And I was like, Yeah, deal I got it. So I understand

Herb  14:38

let’s you can’t convey to an owner that this is one of the reasons I love this industry so much like, and we don’t think about it this way. But the dealerships that we do business with even one man, those stores make a lot of money. Like these are business people. Yeah, you know what I’m saying? These are like business dudes. You know, and you’re not going to get a person that has As that business acumen to sit through a zoom, dude, this guy’s getting people in his office, his phone is ringing every five seconds, he’s got a problem, or two or three, or maybe 10 that he that he’s dealing with from the prior day. He’s got employee issues. Like, it’s just, it’s not even fair to them to even to even propose that, you know what I mean? And a pile.

Steve Fucile  15:19

So now in COVID, it was gonna say what the

Herb  15:24

companies are trying to

Steve Fucile  15:27

that go for that was COVID. All the

Herb  15:29

all these companies are trying to like cut costs and do all this stuff. And it’s just we’re, we’re not connecting with with, with the decision makers a way that we should,

Steve Fucile  15:39

yeah. Pile on, what you’re saying is that these guys are business people, not only business people in the car business. So many of these guys have other businesses, right? I mean, they own banks, they’re in real estate. I mean, the, the dealer, I worked for own likes, I worked for Mr. Monday for many, many, many, many years. Bill Monday, you had all the south points in Austin, he had a big, giant Chevrolet store in Houston. I worked for him for about 13 years. And I didn’t know this for about eight or nine years. But that wasn’t even his bread and butter. He owned like eight hospitals, you know, you’re like, you know, you’re thinking you’re doing all this, you’re making all this money. And he’s like, Yeah, we also have eight hospitals, you’re like, you’re, you’re doing some other stuff. So you know, connecting with a guy like that and trying to connect with him and say, hey, look, I’ve got a product talk to me on the phone. You know, there’s no way that that’s going to translate. No way.

Herb  16:34

Right, exactly. No, yeah, for sure.

Steve Fucile  16:36

So what was your favorite city to travel to? What was the what was the did you do in a European travel?

Herb  16:44

I did I, I did Europe, but I was mainly in Latin America. So I pretty much I did I think every single major city in Latin America, and my favorite place was Santiago, Chile. I really, really enjoyed that, that experience, the culture, the vibe, the way that they do business. And it was an steal. I was just there a couple of months ago in December. And the organization that the country has is insane, really, like in some aspects more organized. And some of the stuff that I see here, like the airport is a very good example. Or they got that system down. It’s super organized, very easy to to to get stuff done. And yeah, I love that. What’s different?

Steve Fucile  17:32

What’s different about it?

Herb  17:35

Well, you know what I like? I like the culture. So okay, so here’s a quick anecdote or story. So back in those days, we used to do these things called the key service or something like that. And that was done through the Department of Commerce, I believe. And so you pay an amount, and they, the United States Embassy connects with the embassies over there. And they hire local people to do this key research on the business that you’re trying to develop. And they actually set up appointments in your behalf. So the American Embassy of the country goes, sends people on their behalf to those businesses, and they say, Hey, we got this person from the United States traveling here. You got you guys might be a fit. You, you know, you guys should yeah, you guys should do business, you should talk. And so it’s got some clout to it as well, because the American Embassy is, you know, setting the American

Steve Fucile  18:27

Embassy. Right. Right. And so gold, so you have embassies.

Herb  18:33

So I mean, it’s yeah, you know, like it’s, it’s pretty dope. So then you you get there and they have drivers for you to take you to your meetings and sometimes even a representative from the the local embassy, they will travel with you to your meetings. And we were driving and I’m seeing all this all this culture, like classical music on the streets. The way it looks to the architecture, and we’re just driving and we’re at the at the at the stoplight, and two cars in front of us was like the sport Fiesta or something like that, like a little tiny car. And the drivers telling the store and he’s like, you know that that car right there. And then there was a lady driving and he’s like, that’s the president of the country. Now, I was like, What? No, no police nothing did. She’s just going to work. She was just going to work and I was like yeah, and that story just that just stuck with me and and they have a lot of jazz and I like jazz and that’s cool. See that in Latin America was was dope.

Steve Fucile  19:37

Very interesting. I you know, I know a lot of people that travel I’ve traveled and I’ve never heard a a Santiago Chile story that made me excited to maybe go look it up now. You might have just booked my next vacation. Rose. Thank you very much.

Herb  19:53

It’s great. It’s great. They have a lot of good stuff to do there too. So and the people I really enjoy the people and you know, it’s So I get to use my Spanish to Yeah, but

Steve Fucile  20:02

yeah, that’s me use your Spanish in Europe, right and Spain. Yeah. What was Europe? Like? Did you have any experiences in Europe? So I happen to know that as I do a little digging that you might have a European story that our listeners might be might be interested in hearing. Oh, man. Yeah. I teed that up.

Herb  20:22

Yeah. So we were in where were we we were in Eastern Europe, I think was Poland, but it might not be. So don’t quote me on that. So we were driving to these different countries. And then we were gonna go to the show in Germany called Automechanika. Which at the time, I don’t know if it is now but at the time, it was the biggest automotive show in the world. It’s like nine Seamas. Wow, put things into perspective. It’s huge. And so we’re making all these different stops. We’re in polling. We’re on a rental. And I remember we had those. tom toms remember the Yeah, those GPS? Yeah. Before they were on your phones. Yeah, they’re great. Oh, by the way, that was, it was pretty good. We never got lost for it. It was pretty awesome to have that on the trip.

Steve Fucile  21:11

If Tom right now, you’d be like, Why are you giving me this? But if I give you 150 You’re like, what is this? Yeah.

Herb  21:20

Right. So we were so we’re driving, and we get a flat tire, we get a flat tire pull on the side of the road. And we’re like, Dude, what are we going to do? I think the place that we we were at didn’t have cell phone reception also. So we can’t connect to our phones. In this old dude, man just kind of walks up to us. And he starts talking, and he’s talking in Polish, and we don’t know, the language and he doesn’t speak English. And we’re like gesturing each other. And we’re in the all dude is like, you know, making these mannerisms or whatever. And we just kind of let him do his thing. And he pulls a you know, the stuff out of the car, and all of a sudden, we realized that the guy is trying to help us change the tire. So, you know, we crank the car up. And this dude is like, you know, he’s you could tell this guy’s like, in his 70s at least and he’s like, all energetic and moving on it. Yeah. So yeah, he’s

Steve Fucile  22:21

on this tire change. Yeah. Yeah,

Herb  22:25

he changes the tire for us everything. Then, you know, we’re picking up the stuff and the guy walks up to the front of the car gets in the car and takes off like that’s it. So he left

Steve Fucile  22:53

oh my god, that’s amazing. Phone, no car, like no cell

Herb  22:59

phone. We don’t know that language. And we just got robbed by like an 80 year old man. Yeah.

Steve Fucile  23:06

You got strong arm robbed by the weakest arm robber. Like, that’s like, that’s amazing. That’s hilarious. I had a, I had a buddy of mine. I’ll tell you this story. It’s not my story. So I probably shouldn’t tell it. But it’s a really good story. So my buddy worked in oil and gas. And he he traveled internationally. And I don’t know where he is Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia. I mean, he’s in a place. It’s nothing but desert, nothing but road. And then there’s like this fuel station essentially for you know, not a convenience store. Like we know. It’s like you only buy fuel here. There’s like a, like a toll booth for fuel. And he said he’s getting his fuel. And he’s in some kind of Toyota pickup truck and the guy. This guy comes in, taps him on the shoulder and he says, he turns around, he says, Hello. And then my buddy. My buddy’s name is Steve. And he goes high. And he says, Oh, are you an American? And he goes, I am and he goes, Oh, good. Please help me my car is on fire. And he points to the back and this guy’s got some card. It’s a gulf in flames. And they’re like sitting on like 7 billion gallons of gasoline, you know, and he was like, he goes, I jumped in that Toyota truck and I drove away as fast as I possibly could. And I was like, Steve, it’s not very nice of you. And he’s like, Yeah, but I’m alive. I don’t know if those people are or not. It’s one of those kinds of things. It’s like, foreign country foul play. You know, it’s interesting. Yeah. Oh, man. So tell me about your company, man. Because I think it’s, it’s it’s quite interesting. I think your podcast is cool. But I think what you’re doing is very interesting. Tell it tell my listeners and these car dealers out there what you do and how you can benefit them and not in a commercial way. But it’s I really want to hear about it and hear how you formed this idea and put this into fruition?

Herb  24:54

Yeah, so So because I was a rap I understand some But the the deficiencies in that sector like for example, like a GM is not supposed to be a data analyst and a marketing expert and all these different things, right? He’s a GM, he’s his thing is people, putting people in the right in the right seat of the bus and stuff. But that business itself is at a at a in a place right now where it’s growing exponentially. There’s all these kinds of different technologies that are coming our way. And we have to be ready to understand it. All right. So the best, the best way for me to describe it is what we do is we’re a filter, right? So we take the stuff that matters for the dealership success. And we put it into these very simple KPIs. That right now it’s all Excel spreadsheet based, but we can do these things with those reports that really tell you where your business is at. Right. So oftentimes, the first thing that a decision maker or a dealership says is all my marketing is off. And in reality marketing is only going to help you a little bit like we do these things. We have this FOMO when it comes to marketing, but you don’t have to do as much or spend as much as you are or you think on marketing initiatives, because they don’t do them the as much as you think that they do. First of all, you should only be concentrated in your in your backyard 10 mile to 30 mile radius, there’s enough people there to maintain your business. Now we have a DMS it’s full look, are you saying this

Steve Fucile  26:42

for sales? And for service? Are you saying this for when we talk about this 10 to 30 mile range? Can you define that a little deeper?

Herb  26:50

Yeah, so So the overall performance of your dealership, maybe service, you can go a little bit out maybe a 50 mile radius, or maybe 50 mile radius for single point stores, things of that nature depends geographically. But that’s it, that’s what you need to focus on the most, that’s your neighbor, right? Because that you have the majority of businesses now or the majority of dealerships are worried that, you know, we because we don’t have internet, we’re borderless and shipping cars, and Carvana and all this other stuff. And the reality is, is that if you take care of your PMA really, really well, you’re going to be set for life. Number one, you’re going to have those customers that are coming in and out of your PMA, every year, every day, every second, right? And then you’re going to have a customer a database full of customers that say yes to you by purchasing and continue to say yes to you by servicing your vehicle. And if you do that really, really well. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on marketing, you don’t need the extra promotions, you don’t need the extra pushes, you don’t need the extra expense. And so but the thing is, when we look at the these KPIs that we’re talking about, we’re looking at things that don’t matter, like going into Google Analytics, and going into your platform, your 17 Different platforms you have to go to to make sure you got the lead or whatever. And there’s, that’s not the way to do it, you first need to understand where the issue is. And you do that by measuring things like what’s my website traffic in relationship to how many cars I sell. It’s such a simple mathematical base suasion, but nobody knows that, right? You know, dealers don’t know that. Like, listen, I’m going to tell you right now, if you have a $10,000 budget, right, and you drive about 2500 website visits to your month, every single month, or I mean, every single week, 2500 visits every single week with that $10,000 And nothing else changes. There’s no pandemic, you don’t lose salespeople, your mark, your inventory mix doesn’t change, you’re gonna sell the same amount of cars, plus or minus, you know, 10%, okay, nothing else change, you’re going to sell the same amount of cars. So if you understand that relationship, or that number, or that percentage, however, you want to look at that, then you know that if you want to pull that lever of hey, I want to sell more cars, great, then increase the traffic at that point. But until you understand what that relationship is, there’s no need to do anything you got to understand first what that what that’s doing

Steve Fucile  29:17

to you. So obviously, we’re talking about that being there’s a ton of waste being spent by these dealers or by I like to call it fried ice cream. Are you familiar with that term? So no. Give me what it sounds fun. Yeah, fried ice cream is fun. It’s expensive, too. It’s Friday schemes, the smoke of the vendors that don’t need to be in existence, right. So it’s, man, I’ve got the latest, greatest coolest tool for you. It’s amazing. Get to say you pay 18% Does everything but wash your car shirt. It’s only the cost of one car deal, right? It’s the smoke. It’s not real. It’s pride ice cream. And maybe that’s an old Houston thing. I don’t know we’ve been using that forever, but how much Fridays? cream? It is is in our budget. Right? So immediately you’re talking about cutting out the waste. What do you think on average, as you go through these dealerships, just your typical for Toyota, I mean, you can average it out, you can get specific, but how much waste is being spent?

Herb  30:14

So So I would say, a healthy marketing mix just for sales services, a different conversation, but just for sales, it should comprise of 1/3, party provider, classified site, you pick whichever you like the most, you don’t need to be on all of them. You need to have more focus on SEO than anything else. Why? Because SEO is the long term success strategy of your dealership, if you dominate on SEO, you have to spend less on everything else. Because what Google says right? 30%, I think is this statistic of people do not click on ads, Google tells you that they don’t click on the ads. And yet, we want to spend all this money for 30% of the activity. And yet where people spend most of the time, we spent no money, I don’t understand that. So may have a very, very good SEO strategy. And I’m not talking about I’m doing a blog post and I’m posting three times a year no, like, you have to have a consistent, like Do It Yourself articles is a really good way to increase your SEO, how to take photos of your car, how to sell a used car, which third parties are the best one to list my cars, tell people inform people educate people do local things about your area? Yeah, you know, things that people can do on the weekends, what’s you know, people, places that people can go drive, you know, you know, like, like, we have a piece and one of the, the groups that I work with that we call it the Sunday drive, and we put our maps and I have people go out to the location and do these videos. And we post it with YouTube and everything and content. And we put that stuff every single week, it goes on to that website. So stuff like that. And I it sucks that it’s like this, but pay your website provider, the extra 15, you know, to $2,000 are going to charge you a month for technical SEO which by the way, it’s highway robbery. Like what if I’m already paying you two grand for a website? Why do I have to pay for you to optimize it? As well, I don’t get that.

Steve Fucile  32:17

But it’s the world we live in. Yeah, it’s like the extra bounce it’s like it did not buy

Herb  32:24

this so. So you should you should be heavily invested on SEL more than anything else. And then be have a good strategy for Facebook and a good strategy for for Google. And that’s a digitally I’m talking about digital, right and understand the difference what you’re going to get digitally and what you’re gonna get with other forms of marketing. Digital is all about driving people to your to your digital dealership and capturing that consumer outside of the land of competitors. You don’t want that person. That’s why you don’t want to be on all these different third party sites. And you don’t want your inventory everywhere because you’re there and your inventory is there as your competitors inventory is there as well. The other thing too, is when your inventory is all over the place. You don’t control the narrative. And we are in an industry of distrust customers do not trust dealerships i i want to eradicate that. And it’s one of the goals of the podcast and to get this information and social media No, and I love what you’re doing. And you know, Jason Harris and all these other dudes that are out there, you know, promoting the good side of the business. But until that day comes, people don’t trust us. So we have to be on the defensive. And that means controlling the narrative as much as possible. Yeah, if your car and autotrader shows a price, and they go and they see it on cars.com, and it has a different price and they go to your website, and it has a different price. That is not a good experience for the customer. They don’t trust you. You know what I mean? And so you have to be really careful with how that information is out there.

Steve Fucile  33:54

And so much accidental. I, yeah, people experienced that. And it’s accidental, because that’s all been you know, you’ve kind of manually manage that or have somebody full time managing that. We were small dealership with 8090 us cars, right. And it’s a full time job for us to manage all the prices on all the websites. And so we have a little bit different strategy we go, we do ship a lot of cars, and we do do a lot of that. But a lot of that is because our of our niche market, right, so I do a few exotics. And then we do a bunch of big trucks that are sexy, and they’re hard to find in other places. They’re a bunch in Dallas, but there’s not a ton in Arizona. There’s not a ton in Washington and so it works for us in that specific range. But on the franchise side, I get exactly what you’re talking about. 100%

Herb  34:39

Yeah, and those cars are going to take care of themselves as well too. So you don’t really need to do a lot of mark on autotrader presents or a cars.com presents or any of those is going to get the exposure that you want on that car and those cars are going to are going to move Yep. So you don’t need to do a lot. You know the where you need to spend them. The majority of your money’s is going to be on social and SEM, right. So social is still to this day, I don’t know, that’s that I think that’s going to change here soon. But it’s still the cheapest way to drive traffic to your website. The problem with social is that it’s an interruption. People don’t go on on Facebook or Instagram, and they’re like, Oh, I’m gonna buy a car, they go there to get education or entertainment, right? And you’re interrupting that experience. So you can’t just put your cars on on there, you have to pull that customer out into an experience, where you give them alternative options, and try to capture a lead, and then you have to answer the lead immediately, not an hour from now. But as soon as the lead comes in, because then I’m gone, I’m doing something else. I totally forgot I saw that car, I’m onto another story or another flip of the phone or whatever, and I’m gone. So you know, social is cheap to get the customer. But it’s, it’s not the customer, you’re not capturing their intent. You’re interrupting them. So when you were in Google, and now, I’m sorry,

Steve Fucile  35:59

no, no, you made a great point about it. And it brings up a question about branding, right? So that you’re exactly right, they’re there to get educated or they’re there to get entertained. That’s why we go, that’s why we pull out Tik Tok. That’s why we get on YouTube, rather than either trying to learn something, or pass some time by having some fun. So who’s doing well give me an example. If you can have a dealer that’s doing, I don’t know, really well was social in a way that does both. You know, like, from the entertainment standpoint, that’s long term branding, right? I mean, and that’s kind of go with the flow and the vibe of who that store is. Kind of like when I was talking about the uncle savings videos earlier. That’s a brand new thing that we do with our stores. And it’s super goofy. It’s so over the top that that there’s no possible way that somebody’s going, Oh, this guy’s serious. It’s clearly a clown show, right? It’s a circus. It’s a joke. And so people look at that, and we get a lot of play off it. They’re like, Oh, your uncle savings. That’s funny. You know, I mean, and so there’s some branding to that, because I’ve got humor, but how can these dealers work on social and either entertain or educate more? Just from your standpoint?

Herb  37:02

Yeah, so that’s a different type. So I’m this is not AIA. Specific. This is how can I use my social media platforms to ultimately sell more. And that’s all about like, the perfect example I can give you is Glen Lundy, and what he did, and I can’t remember what the Chevy store, whatever, but he had all his crew on social media, and they were all posting every day. And it was not about come by my car. Right, right. Oh, I got the special I got no, it was people talking about how to help people, there was people talking about the community. And everybody at the dealership was doing it. Because that’s the other thing that we forget that this these these platforms have algorithms. If you post if we all work together, and you post and I take your post and reshare it and then you take my post and reshare and everybody’s posting, are we sharing each other’s stuff? It triggers the algorithm, right? Right. So if you get your entire staff to do that, you’re going to ultimately be in a better position, you’re gonna have more exposure than you know what to do it. Yep. Right. But we don’t do that stuff. And we’re afraid to be in front of the camera, we’re afraid to post and we’re like, this is the new TV, social media is the new TV, NBC and all that stuff is going away. And this is the new thing. And it’s free. That doesn’t cost anything to us. Anybody can go and post. And now we are our own editors, we are our own editors over the content that we put out there. So the imagine the opportunity that this is for you and I to do this 20 years ago, this would have cost $100,000 100. somewhere in that neighborhood. Right? Easy.

Steve Fucile  38:32

And now Now

Herb  38:33

we face? Yeah. I don’t know. So no, but now you can do this. Yeah, with with a laptop and an internet connection, you can go on there and get the stuff done. So if we don’t want to recognize the power of the camera, then we’re in old times. And that’s eventually going to catch up to

Steve Fucile  38:58

the thing. I want to encourage people that are listening. And whether you’re old timers or dealers or principals or salespeople or sales managers or whatever you are inside the stores. The thing that people really need to remember is exactly what you just said this is burry, right. It’s absolutely free. I mean, I don’t know exactly how much setup you have there. But I’m looking at about 1000 bucks for a neon sign. I’m looking at a Shure MB 750. That’s an expensive microphone, but other than that, it’s pretty free, right? And what’s valuable about your podcast is the content, not the studio. It’s not the look, it’s not the this it doesn’t have to be television doesn’t have to be perfection. It doesn’t need a photographer, it doesn’t need any of that it needs you and your content and your message. And if you can hone that in as a dealer, as a salesperson, whatever it is, figure out who you are and run with that. You’re gonna connect with people. I mean, that’s it,

Herb  39:53

ya know, for sure. And so and so those would be the four pillars for me man SEO, SEM, social and some sort of display or something like that, if you look at your, if you’re GA today, they’re going to be at your at least in the top five in some order, right? And so if you do those things really, really well, now you’re driving people to your sandbox. Now. Now you have to think about, hey, I spend money to get the people to my sandbox, what’s the experience in the sandbox? I’m a big believer of the one click deal, especially now with digital retailing tools. Why do you need four or five different widgets on your website? You just need one, right? Yep, just one. Yep. And that’s it, and you’re done. And then let the customer go, oh, I don’t get the leads. Well, guess what, you’re going to miss 70% of them, because only 29 people submit leads. And you’re focusing all your effort on the 29%. And you’re forgetting about the 70% of website traffic that will never submit their information to you. Yep. So why are you focused on that? So get the people to your website offered a different experience, which by the way, it’s super easy to do, because you go to one website, you’ve gone to them all. It’s like, and I’ve said this multiple times on my show on other shows, but it’s the equivalent. And I don’t know what the name is, but it’s the equivalent of those dudes that used to stand in New York with a trench coat. And it’s like, Hey, dude, I got the I got the phone. I got the watch here. I got the Cologne over here, dude, what you want? You know what I mean? Like, crazy. Yeah, man, I just, I’m just looking for a car, dude. Yeah, let me just navigate this thing. I mean, right. Like we overcomplicate it, we just make it so difficult. And it’s not that difficult.

Steve Fucile  41:35

No, I agree. 1,000%. Good. So do me a favor from from a dealer who doesn’t know you who somebody is interested in this. And they’re hearing this and they’re saying, Okay, how do I improve my sandbox? What’s something that a dealer could do just without spending, you know, a billion dollars and without changing everything that they know? How can they improve that experience for their customers? So as a filter, you’re obviously a reductionist, right, because we want to reduce the amount of fluff that’s in the air, right, what we’re spending on what we’re looking at the problems with our customers, what are the things that you say, hey, let’s pull this out. Let’s do this, you know, to name names.

Herb  42:10

Let me get let me get you three hacks, one for the homepage, one for the SRP experience and then one for the VDP. The SRP, bring the bring the tabs down to three or four, what are people going to do? You don’t need 50 million, and you don’t need to click down and open another menu of confusing stuff that nobody’s reading, and nobody’s paying attention to you, you just need four things. Are you there to shop? Are you there for service? Are you there to learn something? Or do you want to just get to my dealership, that’s it, that’s all you should care about. Shop should be a shop new or used all inventory if they click the shop. Or if you have to, for whatever regulations you have with your OEM just put all inventory at the top and then use right now I’d put us over new because of the shortage. But typically, I’d put new and then you write, and then and then you’re done service, you don’t need 50 million different tabs, it’s very simple service schedule, you know, put your service special, don’t stop doing the three coupon thing that you forget to update every month and it’s expired, put all your menu on their service menu, stuff, all the services that you offer with a price and if you want to discount one or a couple of them, put the discount right there legible, so the person knows, and then schedule your service. That’s it, you don’t need anything else. If you want to go that extra mile put a recall thing up there that people can submit information to see if you if you have the parts or whatever, or put those recall Vin stuff. So people can put their VIN number and see if their car has a recall. And you’re done. About Us or the the section an education section, it’s all about do it yourself, how to change the oil yourself, how to change a wiper blades, how to say your car play Tech Tech Tech Tech, you know, do it yourself on the service side, and then help the customer get rid of their car, even if it’s not with you, hey here, as a dealer, this is what I would recommend for you to take the best photos, this is how I would recommend you to market your car. This is how I recommend you to do this, this this this that value, value value value, and then make it super easy for the customer to get to you with some sort of, hey, you know, visit us today. Map, I would highly suggest that you if your website doesn’t do this, or if you have control over your website like a lot of dealers are doing today. Do an API connection with map because it helps with SEO and all this stuff with Google. And now you can like connect through their API, which is super cool. But that’s it man. Like we complicated. Like we need to have all these different things on there where you don’t you’re I promise you you’re not missing out, right? We have FOMO in this industry. We just fear that we’re missing out

Steve Fucile  44:51

how much of how much of the vendor, how much of the extra fluff and stuff do you think is driven by great salespeople that are vendors

Herb  45:01

I don’t know, man, I don’t know where, when and where we got to this place where we think that if we don’t have those experiences, that we’re gonna lose customers, dude, we are focused on the 30% Who gives a shit? I’ll give it to you have free. You can have that. Right? Just just I challenge everybody that listens to this to think to think about the 70%. And if you do that you can forget about the 30% Sorry, I got it. I got my dog here. That’s okay. You know what I mean? Like, it’s just not it it’s not, it’s, we were overcomplicating it and then on the SRP, what I recommend you do is put an interrupter every 456, cars, whatever you figure out the math, but interrupt the customer’s experience with something about your Why buy, why buy from you. Don’t tell me about anything else. Just tell me what’s different about you figure out two or three or four or five things about you. And not that we have amenities. Everybody’s got that shit. Not that I’ve got the most inventory. Everybody’s got that. Please don’t say family owned and operated. Nobody gives a fuck. Pardon my French, they just do not care. Be creative. What is it about you? That’s gonna make me get out of the couch right now and go buy a car. So please help me give

Steve Fucile  46:24

me an example. So give me an example. So it’s not family owned? Because they don’t care about that. Like what what is intriguing out there?

Herb  46:32

In some cases, maybe you have a tax incentive. Right? Maybe your paperwork is cheaper than the other, you know, the next county or something or the next closest place of competition? Maybe at your dealership, you guys now because of the pandemic or whatever you do test drives at home. So tell me that

Steve Fucile  46:50

carwash, baby. Now the case may be right, yeah,

Herb  46:53

right. Maybe maybe you don’t have market adjustments. So tell me that, hey, no market adjustments ever? You know what I mean? Yeah, like stuff like that, like town, figure out what’s really different about your business? Come on, you don’t have two or three things that are completely unique and different. And if not find them, because it’s going to help you. Right? It’s going to make you stand out from the crowd. And so and interrupt that experience, the brain is designed to work every 10 minutes, we need a break. Right? So give me a break and that experience, and then I’ll start to pay attention to it. So what I’m saying these interrupters

Steve Fucile  47:28

the videos like what what is it? Like it was expand on that right? Because there’s there’s everybody’s going to video talk right? So I’m on a couple of calls I’m on the monitor carsales podcast or not podcast but call every morning and I’m on there were some absolute savage human beings that are that are, you know, true jet eyes of our business. But they didn’t become jet eyes overnight, right? They had to go through Mila had to learn the force, Luke, you know, and they got zapped with lasers, they were shot at by Stormtroopers. They had to find out that their girlfriend was their sister. All these different things were had had to be had to be solved to become jet eyes. And what we talked about, especially in service and sales, all these things like our video, video, video video, I want to do video right, like, get the video too and get the text. Yeah, we get that. But But But where does the video hit? Right, like, what is it that we need to be pushing? And I think you nailed it a little bit with with what are your unique competitive advantages as a dealership? And how do you communicate to that, you know, to others? And is it really a unique competitive advantage? Right.

Herb  48:29

Right. Yeah. But to answer your question, I would prefer video interrupters for sure. And you can do that super easy now with YouTube and stuff. It’s just a website is the website of availability for dealers, and I feel sorry for dealers is very subpar. In our industry, they just suck. Sorry to say, if you have to pay a website company $2,000 To optimize my site. That’s a problem. Yeah, if you can’t run ads, right? If you can’t run Facebook ads and Google ads out of your website today and 2023 that what right you should be able to go to a portal in the back of your website and run ads been specific directly to the car that’s on your website? Great. No question. That should be the easiest thing. Every single website in the car business should have that agreed, but we don’t why? Because it’s just so happens to be that the people that sell websites, what else do they sell, SEO, and Facebook and Instagram, if you put that on the website, guess what you can’t do? You can’t charge a management fee. So they’ll never do it. But you should have the ability you should have that technology. And so putting videos every six car should be super easy to do. And it’s an interruption to the customer’s experience, which is what the psychology in the mind is designed to do. We’re designed to every 10 minutes to now right so put that if you’re I’m going to tune out anyway give me something to stay tuned out on your SRP and not go somewhere else.

Steve Fucile  49:50

No, I agree. I agree. 100% I agree 100% I think it’s sometimes the way these guys sell these. You nailed something with with the website providers and what they’re doing and what they’re Selling. It’s like the Dude, Where’s My Car lady? She’s like, you know, like, I’ll take the fried rice. And then like, I’ll take soy sauce. And then it’s like, yeah, it’s just constant build and build and build. It’s a million milking machine. Because I feel like a lot of vendors that are selling fried ice cream. Listen, there are a lot of really good vendors out there. And we want to talk to them, right? Because there are people making differences with stuff but if you’re selling fried ice cream, and you’re selling smoke, and you just got the best salesperson on the block, it’s it’s a sham. And it’s a shame for these dealerships because they get burned. And that the salespeople suffer the finance guys suffer the finance director suffer the porter suffer, everybody suffers, because you’re not selling as much cars but you’re spending more money because you got pulled into a smoke. So by a guy that can really sell stuff, right? He knows that lingo knows. Yeah, talk. I think what you’re doing, yeah, go go

Herb  50:55

on the VDP. To to kind of bring that full circle. This is an easiest one. Nobody’s reading your comments. Nobody. I’m telling you right now. And nobody. You can actually cuss out a customer on the comments. And they’ll never complain because nobody’s reading, right? I’ve literally for some stores, I’ve done the test. And I’ve put stuff in there to see if anybody said anything like a you know, if you buy this car, something will give you $3,000 down or whatever. Yeah, no, it’s never come up. Dude. Nobody’s reading that stuff. Yeah. But the the you have to find a way to tell the story because your car has certain things that makes it more expensive that people are going to miss on the SRP. So how do you do that? Put it in the photos. Put it in the photos, scroll through photos, then a bullet point or three or two of hey, this car has this package. This we did we spent $1,500 on brakes on this car. It’s got a brand new battery, three more photos. Another bullet point. Tell me the story again, because they are looking at that stuff. Right? Looking at the photo taking opportunity. Yeah, take an opportunity in the photos to put the stuff that makes that card different. Yeah. You know what I’m saying? Like

Steve Fucile  52:10

a video, you know, you can even have a card in the video, hey, I’m, I’m John, I’m your local attack. I do all the PDR you know, for the dealership. In this particular video, you know, this particular car, I put it in a new battery, I put in a thermostat. Matter of fact, I cut my knuckle doing it right here, you know, add some personality, add some charm to that kind of stuff. And then give that guy a tick tock so he can start to that stuff every day. I mean, you know that. So imagine,

Herb  52:33

imagine just doing that on those three things. And then you go to 10 websites and I end up on your website? Is my experience gonna be different? Just by doing those three things. It’s going to be a different experience. And I’m going to be like, Wow, man, this is different.

Steve Fucile  52:48

Yeah. You just you’re not that hard to do.

Herb  52:52

I don’t know how long it’s gonna last and how long we’re going to have this. This opportunity in the industry to kind of one up, you know, the competition. But dude, right now, it’s very simple. It’s very, very simple. We just we’re overcomplicating it. We’re over overcomplicated. No, I

Steve Fucile  53:09

agree. 1,000%. So, what kind of, you know, listen, as you’re coming into the stores, what kind of reduction? I’m like, that’s how I’m looking at from from a reductionist standpoint. Right. So reduction maximization, right? Like, it’s not just about reducing these these things that aren’t valuable inside the store. But it’s also about maximizing the things that we have or don’t have, that will be valuable, right? I mean, what is it? Yeah, so let’s go for it. Yeah, break it down.

Herb  53:38

Let’s break that down for a second. So there’s two things that that I run, it’s kind of like what’s the word? It’s kind of in flux, right. So most of the people they want traffic, I want traffic. Right?

Steve Fucile  53:56

Okay. Do you? Really Are you sure? What are you gonna do with find out? What are you gonna do with it when you get it? Yeah, right. Right.

Herb  54:06

So So here’s what I was saying. Like you got to look at there’s two different things digital marketing, right? If you do digital marketing, well, you’re gonna see uptick in traffic to your website to your digital dealership, and that’s going to trickle into, you know, more opportunities and more sales, but it’s not going to drive people in droves to your building. Unless your cars are super cheap. Like if you look at a if you look at one of these dealerships that do salvage title stuff, do they have a shit ton of traffic? 1000 leads a month 3000 phone calls, because why? Because I see the Porsche that’s, you know, $20,000 last and I can’t believe it. So that’s gonna drive a shit ton of activity. Time for that work.

Steve Fucile  54:49

I’m gonna give you an example. I got a friend of mine who has two PhDs. He’s a brilliant human being. He’s in a in a totally different space than us right? He sold cars was all through college like not for a dealership but for himself he had you know acquired enough little money to buy car flip it by car flip it that’s how he put himself there are two PhD programs right brilliant human being sends me a lead the other day because unfortunately my dear friend was an awful car accident and he’s fine so everybody’s praying for him out there appreciate it but he’s fine. He was driving a makan it got smashed. He’s like, look, Steve, I want to upgrade to 2021 2022 Maybe you know, year two year old. makan, let’s go to a GTS. Let’s do something fun. And dude, he sends me I’m like, Yeah, man. Let me get on OBIEE let me get on some places. Let me see what I can do see what I can find for you. The same day sends me a text. He’s like, tell me about this car. These people have a great story. This is a great opportunity. That is a you know, he runs down like, tells me exactly what the salesperson exactly what the internet told him about this car. And I pulled the car up red flag. It’s a flood damage car out of Florida. Brand and title. I’m like, I’m like, pump the brakes. Because yeah. Like, I love you. But you know, this is not good for you. Right? Like you’ve been in the car, you know that you don’t want to buy a $70,000 branded title. Right? I mean, you know,

Herb  56:20

so you’re never gonna sell that car.

Steve Fucile  56:21

You’re never gonna charge forever. But But the trick is there. So it’s a adding on to your point. It’s exactly what it is. But now, but now look how, look how that works. And they’re hooked. And they’re pulled. There’s a story being told. And now you get a really good salesman on the phone. And all of a sudden, you’re driving yourself down to Houston to buy flood damage. makan. So yeah, but you’re dead. Right? You’re dead, right?

Herb  56:44

Yeah, if you’re, if that’s what you’re trying to do with price, you can do it. And it’ll work. I promise you test it out. And it’ll work, right? But that’s not the reality, right? We want to make some money. We’re holding girls, especially now. So that’s not going to work. Right? Oh, well, Herb, what about the car that’s the diamond does and how many times you’re going to sell that car dude, one time. So you get 10 or 20 people on that car. And then it sells. So guess what? Now you’re back to your bronze cars that are going to sit there and it’s going to take some time and all that jazz. So that’s the reality of digital, all you can see is the influx and digital activity, more people to the website. If everything still stays constant, you should sell right around the same amount of cars. And as you grow, you should grow a little bit more. But remember, the more you grow, the more you’re going to create bottlenecks in all the other areas. So you’re not going to sell at the same rate. But you will sell more cars at the risk of aging out too. So you’re going to you can potentially incur some aging issues. Now if you really want to drive people to the to the store and its people bodies that you want in the store, digital marketing is not the answer, you have to do that with more traditional forms of advertisement and you have to have a gimmick, you have to have a hook, you have to give me a reason to get out of the couch, create some excitement, that’s gonna get me to go see what is going on over there. That’s how you get people in the store in the store. You don’t do that by spending $5,000 more on a auto trader and $20,000 more on Google, you now you’re at a point of diminishing return because the pie is the pie Dude, you’re not going to force more deals into the market, you’re just going to take it away from your from your competitors, right? So you got to understand the difference between the two. Like we’re in this place now where everything’s digital, and we forgot about traditional, but traditional has its place. It just depends on what you’re trying to do. Oh, and by the way, for those who say, Well, you can’t track it bullshit, you can there’s there’s specificity to the data now that allows you to do that you can you can be very specific on a direct mail campaign, which you weren’t able to do 1020 years ago, right? You can send a $2,000 mail piece it’s gonna be a lot more effective than probably your presence on autotrader for that specific month, provided you have the right hook and the right message and it’s done properly. Right. And it’s omni channel, not just a direct mail piece but direct mail social and you know, it’s on your website and the same message same customer repeated multiple times customers are everywhere and you need to be everywhere to what about my commercials on TV? Is that worth it? Yes, it’s worth it. If you do it forever, got to do TV for every 100 person you don’t just do that for the weekend. Or for the for the month you do it forever. You commit to that forever and you change your creative and you change your message every single month but you do it consistently forever. Well, how do I track that to digital easy you you get the the schedule that your that your broadcast partner is going to send you and then you track just like you do on the Superbowl. Right how people go to the website after they see the commercial. You measure that for the past two hours when the commercial hits. And you can superimpose that on things like liquor, and you can show that hey, two hours after the commercial comps we get an influx of website traffic of 1015 20% Depend when the It depends when that when that commercial hits, right, you can do that you can do the same thing for radio. Like we forgot about traditional. And that’s a mistake. If you’re trying to drive human beings to your dealership right now, you have to get them excited about some sort of message. And please don’t put a message out there that just says, I have a lot of inventory. And nobody cares. Give me a reason.

Steve Fucile  1:00:22

Don’t forget her. We’re family owned. Yeah, and we’re family owned. Like plenty of inventory. You gotta come down today by today. Get it today. Don’t forget you can come today, right? Yeah,

Herb  1:00:38

like right now. And I’m not kidding. Like, right now you could do something like hey, well, you screwed during COVID by your by your competitor dealership? Did you think that you are getting a now you’re, you know, $10,000 upside down? Well, over here at ABC motors, we are helping customers just like you. Come visit us today and talk to one of our professionals to see how we can help you and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Another one could be something like a profit sharing program. Why don’t you give some of the money, the profit sharing the profits that you’re making back to your customers? Hey, over here at ABC motors, we share our profits with you. If we sell your car within 30 days of getting it, we’re gonna not just pay you what your vehicle is worth right now. But we’re gonna give you some of that profit, you know, things of that nature? Yeah. If people have reason,

Steve Fucile  1:01:22

you know what I mean? No, I do know what you mean. I think that some of this like, I want to I want to tag on something because I’ve been talking a lot people a lot about branding. Right? Like, what does your dealership stand for? What’s your unique competitive advantages? Where do you really stand out in the community? Why should people buy from you? And people are always like, Well, how do I get people to the store? How do we drive traffic? How do we get bodies? Well, there’s about a million ways you could drive traffic to your dealership, right? And a lot of those things come tied back to what you were saying earlier. About. We were talking about. Man, let me get on with my thought. And I’ll it’ll pull back in. What I’m saying is there’s tons of churches, there’s tons of community groups, there’s tons of nonprofits, there’s tons of organizations that that need spaces to meet, right? Like, here’s a simple little idea, right? Like you have a conference room. Why not make that available on Sundays, or any day of the week to these different nonprofits, where people can come in and can come brand from those ideas. It’s like, Well, where do you meet it? We meet at Freeman, Toyota. Why do you meet there? Well, Mr. Freeman provides us with his conference room at no charge. So matter of fact, he has the lady that works in service Glinda. She’s the most kind person I’ve ever met. She brings us coffee, doughnuts from the break room, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, the coffee sucks, but it’s free, and gluten is great. And now all of a sudden, you’ve got this influx of people coming in. And instead of making our dealerships a place of, oh, hell, I got to go to the dealership and buy a car. Ryan, I gotta go deal with some guy out here trying to upsell me for a Toyota into, hey, today’s the day I’m going to celebrate Mr. Freeman, for allowing me to use his conference room for the past two years for free. Today I’m buying a Toyota at Freeman. Right? Today, I’m going to pay Glinda back for all that trouble that she gave us. Today. I’m bringing a customer that’s going to buy something from us. I mean, it and there’s a million of these opportunities, right? I mean, whether you’re a church organization, non church organization doesn’t really matter. Your dealerships opening I mean, it’s completely empty on Sunday. Completely empty, right? How about the Boy Scouts of America? Great idea. Yeah, have the Boy Scouts of America come over once a week, there’s about 25,000 troops or whatever, come over and spend the day with a tech you got 70 texts there, I guarantee you got four of them, or five of them that would be happy to rotate through once a Sunday, for a little extra bonus or for nothing to just teach these guys what wrenches are this is a ratchet. This is a thing. This is how we change oil out of it. I don’t know. And it’s such a simple thing to start rebranding and rethinking about what these dealerships are to the community instead of of what they actually are in the community. And you can you can change the way people perceive you as a store immediately. I mean, it’s so easy.

Herb  1:04:05

I love that this is such a great idea, because I’ve talked about this concept that on my show, but like, Dude, we got to make it so that people want to get into the business. Like every story always starts with like, I caught on here by accident. And then I saw my paycheck and oh my god. Everybody has the same story. We want people to be like, actually, I want to be in the carpet. You know what I mean?

Steve Fucile  1:04:28

I think I might be the only guy that got into this deal on purpose. I was a failed construction worker. And the thing that made me fail the construction business was the 104 degree temperature beaming down on my body every day. And I was like, This is not for me. You know, I think 10 years of insults and people are like Steve, everybody ever told you you remind me of a used car salesman. And this is at 12 and 13 years old and so around 20 I was like, well, maybe I am a used car salesman. Let’s go find out worked out fine for me. Hopefully

Herb  1:05:00

one day they’ll ask our car salesmen born or made.

Steve Fucile  1:05:06

Yeah, that’s a good question. Right? Yeah, hell, I don’t know.

Herb  1:05:10

Yeah, man. But like when it comes to marketing and stuff, man, we put so much emphasis on the spend, like I get this, this conversation from so many decision makers like how much more money can I spend this month? I need to make 20% more sales

Steve Fucile  1:05:22

today. I need it today. I need to change my business day. Yeah, I mean, spend zebra

Herb  1:05:28

on marketing, spend more on people and processes because you can run a successful dealership with people and processes and zero marketing dollars. But you cannot run a successful dealership with 100% marketing spend and zero people and process you won’t last a month

Steve Fucile  1:05:44

that goes back to what we were selling. Right? Like, okay, you want more traffic? I want traffic. I want traffic. I want traffic. Great. Okay. What are you going to do with it when you get it? Are you sure you want traffic? Right? Right? Are you sure you want traffic? What are you going to do with those leads when they come in? How fast are you answering? What are you really doing with it? What are your processes in place to take that lead into an appointment or to a call to an appointment to conversion to an appointment, you know, to a sale to a delivery to a follow up? Right? And most folks don’t really have an answer for it. And that’s why I think it’s important that we’re doing what we’re doing, whether it’s my podcast, your podcast, whoever it is, because people need to remember this and see these things that are that are so simple, and then find the people that care about them. Even though it’s not our business, right? We care about these dealers, I care about this business, because because I care about the people in it. You know, I know what it’s done for my life. And I know that there are 800 kids out there. And when I say kids, I mean green peas, whether you’re, you know, 18 or 80, it doesn’t matter. You’re trying to make your way through this business. And it’s in it’s a difficult, daunting task. But there are people out here that care about you and care about your career and want you to have that success. And I think we feel the same way about dealers that we do as those folks you know, we want them to have success

Herb  1:06:58

for sure. No, it’s It’s about giving back to to industry that’s that’s made it possible for me in particular to do a lot of things that I I never thought that I would be able to do. And so yeah, I totally I resonate with your message there for sure. Amen. Amen. Amen. One other thing I wanted to talk to really quick before, you know, I don’t know how long we go here. I don’t really care. But I I’m open to whatever man

Steve Fucile  1:07:24

for whatever bit worst thing it’s gonna happen either. This is you and I end up liking each other. Like, that’s

Herb  1:07:30

one thing I want one thing I want to talk about, because dude, I can’t I don’t know how to say this. But it’s just It blows my mind how much of an impact it does to activity, whether it be digital or in person, and nobody pays attention to that. And that has to do with cars that you have available to sell. And the drip edge, what I call the drip edge rate of that. And what do I mean by that? So a lot of times, dude, I’ll talk to decision makers, and they’ll be like, Oh, dude, it’s slow. I don’t know what’s going on. And then I look at my report, and I go back, okay, like, what do you want me to compare it to? Well, last month, okay, great. So last month, you had, you know, let’s just do it for the sake of this conversation. keep the math simple. You had 100 cars when you started the month. Right? This this month, you started the car with seven this? You started this month with 70 cars. So you have 30 Less units? Well, yeah, but my website has X amount of cars. Yeah. But it doesn’t matter how much on your website, you have 70 cars to sell. And the car, those extra cars that are on your website, are not going to generate activity. Why? Because they’re not merchandise, matter of fact, and unless you have a low reduce reduced price, yeah, you’re not gonna do anything.

Steve Fucile  1:08:40

Matter of fact, those extra cars are costing you money. Because if you’re paying for clicks, if you’re paying for ads, people are clicking on cars that don’t exist. And if they don’t exist, especially in the used car market, I’ve talked to so many dealers about this. If you’re paying for clicks, if you’re doing any kind of like, you know, like dealer Alchemist type ideas and things like this, if you’re paying for these clicks, those are unique items. Right? Those are one off cars. I mean, I’m, I’m clicking that black Ford F 150 with the gold top because I thought there was something really interesting unsexy about it. And if you don’t have the exact if you don’t have a twin brother sitting there, you’re not going to sell me a car, you’re not going to sell me a red board 500 miles away when I’m looking for that car. So you’re just spinning your own wheels. I just never understood that. You know, I never understood.

Herb  1:09:29

Yeah, I don’t I don’t get I mean, I understand the philosophy, but these are very intelligent people. And the philosophy is that it’s failed logic, right? Well, it’s going to generate all this activity. Okay. Okay, let’s, let’s, let’s talk about that for a second. What kind of activity do you want? Do you want activity that’s going to piss people off? Or do you want activity that’s going to sell you a car? I don’t understand this logic. Well, I have to have all my cars on there because it generates activity. Yeah, but do you’re gonna sell only 100 cars that said, You’re not going to sell more. Well, we sell stuff out of service all the time. Yes, of course, because you have a percentage of your inventory that’s hot that as it comes in, it’s going to go out, but the majority of your inventory is going to be in the bronze category, and it’s going to save here. So if you start with 100 cars, you’re going to sell 100 cars. If you’re amazing. You know, most dealerships are gonna sell 50% of that. Yeah, you’re gonna do 50. So you know what I mean? So it’s like, Dude, stop kidding yourself. But that’s not even my thing. Right? So okay, so that’s, that’s that. That’s that for what it is. But then what happens is, now we look deeper. Okay, so you started with 100. Now you have 70. You have last but look at what was happening last month. The first week, you sold 20 cars. Right? And you’re dripping? Which 25? Yep. So you were plus five units. This week, you sold 10. So you’re negative units. Right? Right. In this negativity, this negative pattern is costing you traffic, not just today, Mr. Dealer, but it’s costing you traffic 60 to 90 now 120 days because of where we are in the industry, and shortages and all that stuff. Why? Because I went to your dealership today, sir. And you had 30 less cars plus 10 minus because you didn’t make up the drip edge of what you sold. Now you’re in a deficit, and I have less opportunity. So what did I do, I went there, you’d have the car when somewhere else, they had the car, they capture my intention, I went back over there four or five different times, and you lost the business. So if you’re not studying your inventory to the week, you if you sell 10 cars today, your objective tomorrow is to buy 10 cars 100%. Right, that should be your objective. If you if you’re not maintaining that relationship, you’re going to experience a decrease in activity. Now let’s do the flip side. If you have too much, if you’re too good at buying cars, and now you have an overage on what I call the drip edge rate. That’s a problem too, you’re gonna have a surplus of opportunity, which is the opposite of the first scenario, but you’re going to be more likely to age, right, because now you have too much inventory you’re not making too, you know, unless you’ve now you got to crank up the marketing, you got to do all this stuff to drive the extra traffic to get you to that place. But if you just turn the faucet on the inventory, you don’t do anything on the marketing side. Now you’re in problem now you have problems because you’re going to more than likely age on your inventory. So you’ve got to pay. Like sometimes the issue isn’t anywhere else but just the how you’re buying and how inconsistent you are from month to month and week to week. You got to look at those patterns closely. How it blows my mind how many people don’t

Steve Fucile  1:12:41

how often are you experiencing this in stores where guys just and guys gals everybody and you know, just as a term, are really at attune with, with what the fluctuation in the patterns are that are in their store.

Herb  1:12:55

I’d say probably 60 to 70% of my consultations, it’s not a marketing thing up Listen, it’s funny because I’m a marketer, quote unquote. But I put very little value in marketing, because marketing is not the way that we do marketing the car business is illogical to how we run the business, we run the business on a very specific level. Right? Everything our stocking has been specifically our recon has been specifically but our marketing is ala carte. I’m going to put all my Honda’s 27 teens, you know, on on on on an ad, I don’t have to put all my inventory on autotrader. Like, it’s just not you got to get more to have been specific mentality, because that’s how you run your dealership. You know what I mean? So you can’t have all these things that are very specific. And when it comes to marketing, it’s just whatever, I’m just gonna throw a wide net on everything. I want my cars everywhere. You know what I mean? It just doesn’t it doesn’t. It’s a lot. It’s an illogical way of operating. Yeah, that’s an interesting so I don’t I don’t have a lot of faith in the marketing the heart the value of marketing. Unless you’re doing you stick to a to a

Steve Fucile  1:14:04

long term strategy. Yeah, yeah, I

Herb  1:14:07

use you stick to a strategy and you don’t deviate that we do this in the car business every month, right? Oh, I had a good month. It’s because I signed that dealer and then this month is shitty. Oh, no, it wasn’t that dealer. It was this dealer. Or it was this vendor. I mean, and it’s like, Dude, what the hell man stick to something.

Steve Fucile  1:14:23

We turned on a man and we went up through the roof. You know, like, Yeah, I mean, you did go up through the roof. Again, like you said you had 20% surplus. You had hired a you know, you had your processes and people in place. You had a full staff now you’ve lost three people. You’ve got 10% less, right. It’s the whole it’s the whole process. It’s the whole process. Yeah, for sure. So, so many variables.

Herb  1:14:47

And then we have to focus more on the training side and the development side like take you know 50% of your marketing budget and put it into your people, man, great people. Great salespeople don’t need marketing because if I’m a great sales person, I’m not going to go wait for an up on the golf cart dude, I’m going to be on Facebook, I’m going to be asking for list, I’m going to go outside of the dealership and hand my business card to everybody, I’m going to call my mom and my dad and my brother, my sister and send me customers, I’m not going to just sit around waiting for opportunities to fall from the sky. You know what I’m saying?

Steve Fucile  1:15:17

The other thing I think, that I’ve been talking to a lot of people about lately is, hey, listen, where are your, your where’s your marketing budget at on a low level, and what I mean low level on a personal level with the people that you have in your store, right, take leave Monday, whatever the case may be. But if you’ve got 50 salespeople, and you’ve got this, you know, let’s call it 40 grand to spend a month, right, whatever, well, for a pretty nominal amount of money. I mean, you know, $8 a day, $5 a day, per salesperson. And then you incentivize these folks to be able to do great work, or work together as a team to build this social media platform, whether it’s, you know, the cars or the education, the entertainment portion that inside the store. So few dealers that I talked to actually allocate any money specifically for those salespeople to be able to get themselves out there. Because each and this is so crazy, because since I’ve been in the car business, I’ve always heard something, it’s like, well, you’re not gonna make a living just standing up there taken up. So you better be out there in the community get, you know, building your thing. But as soon as you want to go build something in the community, your manager goes, What are you doing out there, we got cars, your belt, you know, you’re like, literally literally just told me not to. You literally just told me not to take up. So now that’s what you’re saying. So I don’t understand what it is that you want me to do here. I don’t get it. But, but as soon as you do that, but here we have this unique opportunity. Tick tock Instagram, Facebook, Facebook groups, right, there’s so many things that can be easily managed for education groups, or whatever. I mean, we have a ton of single women in the car business that are struggling with their children’s with those things. And you don’t think that’s valuable information for women to hear. I mean, for other single women to connect with. And obviously people can connect with everybody on a wide swath. But if you’ve got a niche, you know, you’re a young Arabic guy, trying to start up in this car business, you’re you’re an old African American guy that’s trying to learn a new trick. I mean, there’s a there’s a lane there that you can own and hone into for a few dollars a day, that dealer can be putting money into that that literal person’s advertising pocket and say, hey, look, we’re gonna load you up. Everybody gets 100 bucks a month. You know, if you get a really good idea, and you got something you want to boost that use that $100 How you want, but it’s can only be spent on these accounts. And then try to grow your dealership organically and then build that up by your tagging. And then you’re sharing and then all of a sudden, like you said, now you got these marketing ideas that are organic and real because you’re connecting with somebody, not some stupid family owned big inventory come to us. We’re open Saturday, right, you know. So

Herb  1:17:59

yeah, like, Gary Vee said it best man. And he was on my favorite podcast, which is the dealer playbook, Michael Cirilo podcasts listening to that thing for ever and lots of good insights. But he said, You got to be the mayor of your town, man. Like if you’re selling cars, you should be if you see a pothole in the street, you should stop record yourself talking about that pile, hey, I’m here at the corner of blah, blah, blah. There’s this major pothole if you’re going to take this route today. Be careful, everybody, you know, everybody have a good day, you know, blah, blah, blah. By the way, this is her from ABC motors. If anybody needs service, or they’re looking for a car, make sure to hit me up. I’m here to help you with your automotive needs and do shit like that. You know what I mean? Absolutely, that you should be pumping out that content every single day. Great, because believe it or not, people feel indebted to value. Right? If you save me from from from that accident, or you saved me from this other thing. Now, I feel like I owe you something. And when I think about buying a car, you’re gonna pop into my brain. I’m gonna be like, oh, yeah, this dude, I always see his videos. He’s giving me two or three suggestions that have helped me. Let me go see him. And you know, let me give him the business.

Steve Fucile  1:19:07

Let me give him a shot. Let me at least call them. Yeah. You know, you touched on something earlier about helping people even if they don’t buy from you. And I love that because I’ve offered I’ve tell I’ve told I don’t know how many 1000s of people hey, listen, it’s okay if you don’t want to buy my car I’m in use space a lot. I like to use space and so a lot of that unique experience right? When I was at Monday Chevrolet for a very long time and I was a new car guy for ever and ever never because that’s where the majority of our of our you know, our vehicles came from it’s what we had the most of. And then we had an open floor and so there was a mix there but I’ve always loved being in the used car business. I think they’re all unique experiences. I love unique experiences. I love hearing about stories, but no mental gonna lose my train of thought I must be. I’m killing it today with this thought process.

Herb  1:19:53

You were talking about helping people.

Steve Fucile  1:19:55

Yeah, you don’t want yeah. And so I’ve always told people probably 1000s of times. Hey, listen, it’s okay. If You don’t want to buy my car. If you call me before you, you know, maybe I don’t have the trade value that let’s say like, Hey, listen, even if you don’t mind my car, do me a favor, call me with your VIN number and your miles, I’ll touch base with my used car manager or now, you know, I can get my own cars, whatever, as a grown up, I don’t need to talk to somebody, but I can say, you know, call me with your VIN number and your miles. And let me give you a number on it. And make sure and keep those folks honest and make sure you’re getting the best deal. Or if you need some help, if it’s a new car process, let me see what I can help you with. And I’ve had a lot of people call me back, a lot of people call me back as a result of just offering that help. And they bought from me, they weren’t calling for help. They gotten frustrated somewhere else. And they thought, Well, hell, that guy’s at least nice enough to offer to help me there. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to buy anything from there. So I didn’t like get experienced, but I’ll give him the business. I’ll give him the shot. And if you get in front of me, I got you, you know, I’m gonna help.

Herb  1:20:55

It’s, it’s, it’s the what axiom the right word that you know, people buy from people, man. Yeah, you know, if, and they got to buy a car, people have to buy a car where they’re gonna go man Carvana if they’re around, but other than that, it’s the dealership, right. So if you’re the guy that’s out there bringing value more value than then then that’s perceived from for the, for the individual, you’re gonna win 100% You know what I mean. And then again, it goes back to this thing, you got this platform, you have this TV station, available to you, 24/7, where you can post your content for free. You can edit it yourself, you can get the message out there, whatever you want. And you can create a brand around yourself as a person. Right? And if you’re if you’re selling anything, then why would you not use that? Oh, I’m afraid of the camera. I don’t I don’t have hair, or whatever do like who cares, man. Like you’re out? Believe it or not. I don’t know if you know this, but you’re out in the world and people see you every single day. So I don’t I mean, what’s the difference?

Steve Fucile  1:21:59

Yeah, nobody’s ever seen you before sir. Right? Exactly. Yeah, you know, the other thing is it’s just as a an encouragement to people that are scared of that camera. I’ll say this. You don’t even have to be in front of the camera. You know, you can you can add flip it around and talk camera facing forward. Hey, listen, let me show you something really unique about these automobiles. Or let me tell you where my drive is like you were saying on the pothole, hey, you know, I’m your guy out here on the street. Let me show you what I’m experiencing every day you find that pothole you show it you could do it with a tripod and fill it nobody ever has to see I mean, there’s a million ways to do this. Sit down, spend some time find out who you are, create whatever kind of brand you think it is that you really have uniquely to you. And then work on it. Gary Vee didn’t become Gary Vee in one day, right? Like, yeah, Andrew Tate didn’t blow up in 13 minutes, Joe Rogan didn’t have the number one podcast in the world in 14 minutes. I mean, nobody listened to him for three and a half years now. You know, 10 years later, you know, 50 billion downloads or whatever. You know, same thing with you. We were talking about your show. And you had mentioned that you’ve been on what, four years now?

Herb  1:23:06

Yeah, four years? Yeah.

Steve Fucile  1:23:07

And when did your what? So give me the define that that traffic growth from year one to year two to year three to year four. What did that look like?

Herb  1:23:16

Well, I remember the, you know, the first couple of episodes if we got like 10 downloads that will be like, oh, man, that was awesome. Yeah. It’s awesome. Right. Yeah. And then, you know, and shout out to LinkedIn, because I think that that’s that that organically speaking, that’s a platform that helped us the most when we were first starting out. I don’t know if that’s still the case will like with their algorithms. I know there has been some changes and stuff. But you know, you, they allow you to post your content there and people see it. And I think that that’s what helped us grow. And I, I wasn’t the guy because I was doing everything myself. I was I was consulting, I was starting a business. I was doing the podcast, I was editing it. I was doing my social media, all that stuff. I was doing myself just singing my song. Yeah, man. So it’s like, it’s a lot. You’re you’re singing my song. When I got when I got an editor. I was like, Dude, this is amazing. This is awesome. Do anything I just record and done. I have charity

Steve Fucile  1:24:20

for the day forward to the day where I can say that I trust me. I have a charity. I’m so happy to say that. She’s amazing. By the way, shout out to your girl.

Herb  1:24:29

Yeah, yeah. And then she came on and helped out with with social media part of it and posting and all that stuff. And it’s just been, it’s gotten easier and easier. And I think that that’s helped with the growth of it. And, you know, we’ve been experimenting with it. And now we’re finishing up the season that we are right now and we’re going to start doing in studio for next season. So that’s going to be a whole new concept of the whole new field. Love it. No more interviews. It’s just going to be about us giving insights and stuff like this where I can actually give dealer errs and decision makers out there tips that they can, you know, take some action with that are coming from us directly. I feel like I’ve had so many people on the show, and I’ve learned a lot. And now I really want to give my secrets and my stuff that I do away for other people to use and leverage them.

Steve Fucile  1:25:17

That’s beautiful, man. I love that. I love that. I think he got a great vibe and a great spirit. I love your show. You know, I was joking with you earlier about just loving the intro song. But I do love that. It’s quite fun. Y’all got some good stuff going on over there. I’m glad to have you on man. It’s been a real pleasure. Where can we find yet? I mean, I’ll obviously put your links in the bio. But, you know, where can folks find yet? And why should they find you?

Herb  1:25:43

Yeah, so look, we are we’re pretty we try to be everywhere, right? So heavily, heavily invested. So I do the 8020 80% of our time is invested in, in LinkedIn, and then 20% Everywhere else, but we have you know, you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, wherever you get your podcast fix, even Amazon, we were on on their platform as well. So you can find us there. And then you can visit our website at dealer talk.io. And we have a we try to do a weekly blog post or article of some sort with some sort of nugget or something that’s happening in the industry or just some thoughts. So you’re welcome to check that out. And if you like what you see there, you can subscribe. And every time when it comes out, we will we’ll send you an email and let you know, let you know that it’s available for you to check out. Why should people connect with us? Well, look, I think that and like I said earlier, the industry is in a very rapid pace. And if you don’t have a digital analyst, somebody or a data analyst, rather, somebody at your dealership that’s taking all this information, and then it’s making it makes sense for you, and breaks it down into these very specific KPIs that you can see where it tells you like, hey, it’s not marketing, it’s processes or it’s not process, it’s inventory management, or it’s not inventory management, it’s the market, the industry, or your marketing isn’t good. And we need to adjust this, it’s you can’t just say you can’t just talk to each one of your vendors and be like, Hey, bring me more because the reality is, is that your vendors only make up a fraction of your marketing mix, right? It’s a combination of that mix that’s going to drive the results that marketing is going to drive for your business. So it’s not fair yourself. And it’s not fair to your dealerships. Right. So you know, that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t work anymore. And the more advanced and the more that the more data that’s out there, the less you’re going, the more of a disadvantage you’re going to have if you don’t have somebody that’s analyzing that. So you can hire somebody, which is what I recommend. Like I think that each dealership should just hire somebody paid them a good salary. And then you know, but if this has to be somebody that’s well versed on Facebook, Google, third parties, all that stuff, let me show you can hire somebody for let me ask you a question. You can hire somebody like us? Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

Steve Fucile  1:27:55

You were saying to have somebody in staff and this is I think it’s interesting and important, because what would somebody like that cost? Right? So what what would it what would somebody and obviously, your company is there, but what would an in house person cost?

Herb  1:28:08

Well, you know, you got to think about it this way, you would have to be the the agency approach. So you would have to have somebody that is really not they don’t have to be masters at this, but they have to understand the basics, at least of Google ads. So V LA’s search ads, video, pre roll, dynamic ads, those sorts of things. Somebody that knows Facebook, and when I’m talking about Facebook, it’s not just about posting, but AIA ads, and what how does that work? And what’s the, like I said earlier, that’s an interruption. It’s not a, Hey, I’m going there. I’m not capturing intent, I’m interrupting an experience. So you have to understand that somebody that’s well versed with third parties, VDPs impressions, leads, somebody that understands the tools that you use, that are not really marketing related, like a VinSolutions, and a viotto. And all these things. So I’d say it’s going to be a very expensive person, right?

Steve Fucile  1:29:04

That was kind of my point to the thing is that you really have to take an agency approach with something like this, it’s got to be a team, because one human being dedicated to something that like that, that has that experience, and the cost would just be astronomical to have an expert.

Herb  1:29:20

Yeah, for sure. So are you gonna hire us and we have the ability to, you know, incorporate all all the stuff that we know and the stuff that we see from other stores and put it in a nice package that’s affordable and you know, we are we’re available to you and whatever you need and you know, we can talk more about that if you want to learn more and hit us up and we’d be more than happy to have a conversation. Yeah, I

Steve Fucile  1:29:47

agree. I think your company is great that did a lot of check in I even check some references. I’m not gonna say who but I’ve heard some really wonderful things about your company and everything that I’ve met with you about so far man was was obviously spot on in your tip top of mind Sup, bro. So I mean, great job, great podcast. I love it. I really appreciate you coming on. You know, let’s connect again, man and I’ll get all your links and all that stuff in the bio but really, man really, really, really, really appreciate it.