Dale Hanna and Ron talk about Foresight Intelligence

absolutely. I come from ERP background, and I noticed that people need information to use. This is many years ago, and we started a business intelligence company that's Foresight Intelligence. customers was John Deere. So we got a chance to get into the equipment business and working with dealers. So we've been focusing on, among many, many things, dealer KPIs for every area of their operation about 12,13 years ago, since 12,13 years ago. And it's been wonderful, wonderful to have a chance to work in this industry. Wonderful people all around.

Absolutely. The best people I ever met.

Absolutely.

I think they want to, and a lot of them do. And I think it's becoming more and more widespread as part of the way to manage dealer business, especially because dealers are getting so big. When you have two stores or three stores, the principal pretty much remembers everything. But when you get to 12 stores, you just can't do it anymore. When you get 500 employees, you can't keep track of everybody anymore.

Exactly.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, of course, we're also dealing with unprecedented labor shortage, supply chain problems. Yes. pretty much have to change, right? There's no way to manage it the same way. We also see the new generations come in and that's pushing the adoption of technology a lot faster. So it's amazing to watch.

Yeah, we have been, from what we can see, very helpful. to this industry, which we're very, very grateful and delighted.

In some places, we're speeding things up. And I think process change, as you're talking about, is going to be extremely important. I was talking to a senior leadership at a dealer, and he basically said the brand differentiation from pure hardware standpoint is becoming more and more difficult. So the future is about customer experience. It's not about I necessarily have one more feature than you do. And that could happen, but the differentiation is not widespread. And you see that in the car industry as well, right? That's what Mercedes-Benz sort of talked about. They used to have such a lead in so many things, but now the lesser luxurious brand, let's just say, can do pretty much everything they have at a fraction of the price, right? So you still have the luxury factor, but in terms of pure functionality, yeah, they'll get you there. 100,000 mile warranty, not a problem.

you know as as some of the some of the new players come into play in a manufacturing space um a lot of them from china pushing into the market and their functionality you know they got basic functionality that's going to work it's going to move dirt so the differentiation really is how how customer experience the dealership

That is really true. That is so true. Yes.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that if you look across all industries, you know, the companies that that are winning provides in general some of the best customer services in the industry. So Starbucks is about a lot about customer service and coffee per se. I mean, coffee is great, but that's highly duplicable. Southwest Airlines talked about that as well. And everybody have us, whatever, aluminum tube flying around. But what you can't copy is our culture. how we treat our customers, how we behave.

That's hard to teach. Yeah.

Yes. There are some parts that can be automated. So one of the things I am learning, you are absolutely right, Ron. Those are very hard to teach. And I continue to believe that. But one thing I'm sure you know, Chris Voss, the FBI negotiator, one thing he said was interesting, you know, in hostage negotiator, he was the lead hostage negotiator around the world. In hostage negotiation, one of the most important thing is trust. But trust can be formulized to a degree. So sometimes you meet somebody you just trust. It takes a while, but you can formulate some stuff in a business context or hostage context that almost guarantees success for that transaction, for that experience. That's predictability, right? So technology could help you provide that without additional manpower, which is in such short supply. So those are the stuff we're looking at. How do you automatically... Make sure a customer knows what you're doing, where you are.

They can check in time. And that predictability gives customer the comfort that, okay, that's a good experience.

You are so right. Absolutely. Absolutely, yes.

Yes.

Absolutely. It doesn't matter

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I think it helps, right? It definitely helps. There's culture, but technology does help a whole lot. What you're talking about, parts business, the phone rings off the hook and now it has a supply chain problem. If technology can provide the kind of visibility. to the people providing the service. Now they're going to be that much more powerful. They're going to answer so much better and also give that predictability. It's going to be here in three days. I see it's here. It's right here. The other thing is what we deal with quite a bit in the service side process, right? So dealership, I know you help dealers to build a really, really good process. And the technology to many degrees can help you help the process flow and help keep everybody in line. So if something is not done, you get an alert. Hey, you missed the step.

So well said.

Absolutely. It's exception management. It's also self-correction, right? Our people in general, they love to do a good job. So if you give that tool to them, they already correct it. You really don't need management jumping up and down or doing anything. They already done it. In the end, they took care of it. Everything's good. Yeah. So that's efficiency as well.

Who are you?

No, not at all. Not number one, not even close.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, people want to do a good job. So if they have the tools to succeed. they can do a good job and they feel fulfilled they feel motivated that's that's what we see yes so

You're summarizing that better than I can do it.

The only thing that was on my mind was unification of data or... connectivity of data, right? So we see that also as a major trend. Everybody focused on individual systems more than the connectivity. Individual systems are advancing by leaps and bounds, no problem. They're going to continue to do that. But I always thought, rightfully so or not, that connectivity is just as important, if not more so. That's the only other thought I always had when we talked to our people in our industry. But other than that, nothing else.

Absolutely. And a lot of times, there are a lot of systems, they don't belong to any particular dealer. or any entity, right? So you're going to touch systems that belong to so many different people, the manufacturers, the rental houses. So if you don't connect them, then their power is limited. The bottleneck becomes people working Excel to death trying to figure things out. So, yeah. Yeah.