Mets Kramer and Ron talk in more detail on the Digital Dealership.

That was rather a laborious introduction. Why don't you restate what you view as a digital dealer so that we can start from a common platform? For

sure. It's actually something I've been trying to write out in a clear way. But I think the simplest way to start thinking about it is to look at the dealership as the execution arm of what really is already, in some ways, a digital business. Everyone at your dealership sits in front of their computer screen for large amounts of time putting all this information in. And so a large part of the business is digitized. But the problem is it hasn't become a single entity and it remains like a bunch of silos. We often complain about how our business is too many silos, but it also stays information silo. And we have groups of people who are responsible for marketing, who are doing our website, which is a bunch of static pages. We have departments doing parts and they have their online function.

But really, I think probably the best comparison, and I always try and bring something that's relevant to our own experience, because I think most of us are better at living in the digital world than we are at working in it in the equipment industry. So we come on to, for example, Facebook or Amazon, two of the easiest examples to use here. And we find a world there that is tuned to us. We don't show up on those platforms and find a whole lot of things that are of no interest to us. We find things that have been curated through backend processes that have collected who we are and what we like and what we're there for and present us with that from day one, from the moment we first arrive. And I think that's probably the most easy way to consider what would a digital dealership look like.

It's like if we are working digitally, then our entire goal is to make sure that our digital experience is as easy as being held, handheld through our physical dealership.

So stay, stay with that point then and use your, your two examples of Facebook and Amazon. They collect information on what you and I look at what we do when we're there. What technology is out there that has allowed that to happen, that they will be able to track us and what we're looking at and what we like and what we do? How's that done?

The simplest piece of it is the thing that everyone gets asked to OK when they come to a website is your cookies. Cookie is a small database on your computer. in your browser that when you return to a website allows that website to remember who you are and use that information to customize your experience.

Okay. So stay there, stay there for a second. Who at a dealership today is responsible for designing and creating those cookies?

In the end, the cookies developed by the developer, the software developers, but It's really beyond that. It should be people in dealership that recognize like, hey, when my customer comes to visit because I happen to be away for the weekend and they go to this website to try and get self-service, what are the things that that site's going to need to know about my customer so that we can customize it? And even it's something as simple as a cookie that remembers. what your email address is and feeds that into the site. So the site can go look up all the data about you in their CRM or other business systems. That's enough to then turn that into an engaging experience.

So is it fair to say that there is a job function at a dealership that should be driving all of that?

Absolutely.

And have you found many dealers that that has a job function that does that?

There unfortunately aren't. And that is, you know, if for the larger dealers, it's probably oversight. And for a smaller dealer, that's just a limited resources. You know, those smaller dealers should be working with partner organizations or consultants or et cetera to provide that.

So on the size differential, the bigger dealers are probably going to have somebody on staff that will be able to look after that. The smaller dealers would probably be outsourcing that to a specialist that helps them with IT. Fair comment?

Exactly. I mean, we do that for a lot of small and medium dealers.

So let me get a little bit more technical for a second. With HTML, I know that you're on my site. With XML, I can track your cursor. So I know everything that you're looking at. Do you want to talk to that just a little bit so people understand what really is there technically without overpowering them?

Yeah. So really, I mean, aside from the technology that does it, what you're doing is you're really tracking the user's engagement, what they're doing so that you can. understand that so that you can then use that, analyze it and predict what they're going to do next. So if people are hunting through different pages or different areas of the site to see, you know, to find the information they need, then that becomes a profile of that visitor. And that's what... It's like you mentioned the cursor. It's like digital eyes. You watch where the eyes are going and then you know like, oh, this person came on this page. They never got to this part of the page and therefore they weren't interested in the bottom of the page. They then went over to this side.

So, I mean, if you can track even something as simple as a user comes in every single time and he goes through the homepage and then this site and that page, this page, this page, he's memorized the path to where he really wants to go. Why is the site? making him do that all the time.

Okay, so that's perfect. So let me draw one other distinction before we get into application. I'm going to say that most of the part, what we're looking at and dealing with is data, which is raw and very little information. And I think that's an important distinction as we go forward and how we can use the digitized dealership. Google Analytics, for instance, will not tell me who you are because they don't want me to know the inside of their system. And that's a privacy issue. That's cool. But I do know how long you spend on whatever page, how often you come back to it. If there's new people, old people. I got a lot of statistics that I see on our website. Yep. Do you find? that there's dealerships out there that have people that look at Google Analytics relative to the dealer webpage.

I can honestly say that even on my websites, I probably don't spend as much time as I should trying to understand.

It's complicated.

It takes work and it takes people who start to understand it. And for someone who really understands it, it's like 10 minutes of work. You know, give a specialist in that area your Google Analytics and they can tell you a lot. Try and figure it out yourself. You probably spend a really long time. And I like kind of that distinction. In the dealership, like you have the people who drive by because they like to look at machines and they want to see if there's something in the yard. Those are like the equivalent of your anonymous website visitors. But a dealership's a relationship machine, right? where we, we build relationships. It's the best part about the industry and why I love it is it's a repetitive business. You get to deal with the same people. You know, if you just like selling stuff and you go sell TVs because it's different people every day.

But if you like relationships, you sell equipment because you get to see the same people for 20,30 years. And so you have to kind of look like once you recognize who a visitor is and there's lots of ways to. get the visitor to identify themselves. And once that's in a cookie, now it's like, oh, you're not my visitor, you're my customer. And yet so many sites treat every single person the same way, including all of their customers who are coming all the time for service.

Yeah, the repeat buyers, the repeat visitors are treated exactly the same way as the new guy, the newbie.

Exactly.

It's kind of distressing. So with that as a background framework on the digital side of the dealership, the information technology side, the artificial intelligence, the cookies, the movement of the cursor, getting that information. Let's move over to how, what's the foundation from your perspective? What's the foundation piece of data that we need in the digital dealership?

Well, as charming as we all are, And as much as we like relationships, you know, the truth is that the people, the connection is equipment. Your customers come to you because they need equipment, they own equipment, and you're serviced. It's always about equipment.

The machine itself.

Exactly. The fleet of equipment that your customer owns is what drives their purpose for having a relationship with you. We can augment it lots of ways by having better relationship, better ways of doing business. But if they didn't own machines, they wouldn't come. So I have, I always found it's really surprising when I, especially when I went on my own and some of the other dealers that I was with earlier in my career, when the dealership couldn't track that information, it was kind of stunning. And I was lucky enough to see like both dealers that did it well and their system was built. for tracking all kinds of information and then other dealer systems that, you know, couldn't even repeat a customer's previous machines that they had either worked on or something. It just forgot it all the time. And those are the two extremes that you see.

And so step one is make sure that you can write down or record digitally all of your customers' fleet data. And often in the way that they talk about it, right? My customer calls me and says, unit 27 is down, which what's the serial number? I don't know what the serial number is, it's down. Well, then my job as the digital dealer is to be like, oh, unit 27, you're talking about serial number such and such. That is the heart of both your customer relationship, but also then I think everything that comes from what you then know about the equipment and the customer. because of that information.

I couldn't agree with you more. And let's rest in there for a second. What I've said for decades is that if you do not know the machine population, the machine ownership of your territory, you don't know your business. And you're using the two extremes that I know, Unit 27, and I'll go further. Unit 27 has operator Archie, and that machine worked 1,742 hours last year. It was bought in 2003. It's got a meter reading of $12,000. Its cost per operating hour for parts and services, $92.72. And the mean for that machine is $80. It's time to trade him in. Now I've got information from that one little piece of data called the machine.

Exactly. The difference between data and information. Yeah. Information is what... You derive out of different data points. Yeah. Exactly.

I used to call myself, I was like a mule brain in a tin barn in the parts and service world. I made a lot of noise, but didn't get much attention. It's the same thing for where you're going. You're kind of plowing new ground for the dealers. You've got to get the hearts and minds of the dealership to understand and accept. that that truth that we just talked about is something that's beneficial for them.

Yeah, I think one of the easiest ways to point it out, and I've done it with almost every person that we've worked with, is to find, you know, that customer that you sold some machines to five years ago. And then only to find out that five years later, they just bought new machines from some other dealer. And you ask yourself the question, why? Like, well, I have a customer who's a low engagement customer. You know, there are two machines. There's not a lot of money there. And the sales rep just doesn't call on them. I mean, sales reps, as proactive as we want them to be, are still very reactive. They tend to work with, you know, the 80-20 rule. They spend most of their time with 20% of their customers, if not more. And so they're not calling on them. And that's where that data, who owns what. It becomes information that says, hey, Bob, this customer over here has five-year-old machines that we sold him.

At this point, you really need to start talking to them every six months. And so get a notification up in front of Bob so that that doesn't slip through his fingers.

So let me take that a little bit further in poking. The salesman, as an individual, is going to determine the success of the dealership. Do you agree with that?

Always.

Okay, so let me go further with that. The salesman then is motivated to get to a point economically that he's comfortable, that he has satisfied his needs financially for he and his family. You agree with that?

Yes, there.

So once he gets there, how do I know how much more there is in the territory that I've given to him for us to be able to get? Because he's not going after it anymore.

Correct. Correct. So that's a combination of data gathering. Your primary source of data is, I think, still your sales route. Yep. They know the people. But that's not to say that there isn't stuff missing. I'll be honest. When I started down this road, I estimated in my head how many dealers there might be in North America. And I was like, you know, a couple thousand. And then we went looking and documenting and we found something like 15,000 and it stunned me. So there's always more out there than you think. And that's data gathering, turning that data into something then, and then deciding like, oh, we did do an analysis of that territory. And we did have some data gatherers go through, you know, especially with digital tools and found everyone. And we realized that that territory has 30% more. potential customers that we even knew about. We're simply not touching them.

And now, you know, you've got lots of history in territory analysis and how to reevaluate designing territories. That makes you realize that you're just not getting to everyone and that that territory needs that different focus.

So come further up in the helicopter. How did you find 15,000? Where'd you go? How did you get that?

Well, there are lots of websites that are very happy to present long lists of dealers that use that website. And I simply got people to go in and find them all.

How about also traditional print media?

Same.

It's amazing to me that people looking for machines still use their traditional print media. It's been around there for 50,70 years, but it's still there and still used.

Yeah, I'd say it's still used. There's definitely a generational divide there on what they like. And there's a little bit of source bias is, I guess, the best word I can think of. When you're asked by someone in a survey, where did you find us? And you don't really remember. You give the answer that you think is what you're familiar with. You know, so it's like, oh, where'd you find us? Oh, equipment journal. I have it in the bathroom, you know? And so there's a combination there.

That's kind of the way it's kind of interesting. If you look at the used parts business, there were two sources for people to go through. determine if they had a party you were looking for used, an axle, a blade or whatever. Comes to find out it was the same family. They had a breakup in the middle and they ended up competing with each other. And nobody really picked up on that. And if you look at Amazon and Facebook where you started, Amazon has really devastated bookstores, haven't they?

They've certainly made a really big dent in it. Yeah, for sure.

They came from nothing and took market share away. So here we are in the digital dealership with the salesman being the limit to our sales volume based on their comfort economically. Yeah. And our lack of data, equipment, facts. Yeah. The dealer doesn't know that they're doing well or not well. No,

they don't. They don't really understand the size of the market, right? You have dealers that look at PINs data to see what's being sold. But those are deals that are happening. It's not market size. And I'll go back to, so I spoke at AED. I did the educator series in 2018. The topic of my presentation was a granular data-driven approach to strategic sales. And it all came from my... time very early on in my career. I went to see the CIO at the dealership and we created a good relationship. And he's like, hey, take a look at this. Here's a list of 10-year-old backhoes. They're all case 580s, I think. And he's like, here's our next marketing campaign. And it's never left me. He was sitting in his office digging through the equipment file and identified so easily. that right there staring you in the face is every single person that you need to go talk to because you know there's a high percentage of them that are going to be in the market.

And it's all about timing.

Roughly give me a timestamp on that. Is that 1990,1980,1970?

It'd be like 2003.

Okay, so 20 years ago. Yeah. Right? Yep. If I looked at a universe of 100 dealers, how many do you think have people that do what he did?

probably say are in the 5% range that are actively using that data. Even the ones that have the facility to do it have admitted to me that they're not doing that quite yet.

I agree with you. So come in a different direction. That's for the brands that we represent, that we sell. How do we get the information for everybody else?

Relationship. Bring value.

So that works if I have a relationship with a customer who bought a piece of equipment from me. What about the universe of the customers that haven't bought anything from me yet? How do I find them?

So there are definitely stores for that. The U.S. market is great for that. All the financial filings, the UCC filings that go through, there's several organizations out there that scour all the UCC filings and clean that data and make it available. There are people who scour. you know, every auction to gather that data. With that information, it's fairly straightforward. But then, like, that's like a traditional data gathering exercise. But what's stopping a dealership from finding excuses or reasons why a customer doesn't give them that data? You know, all those visitors that come by. come to your website, even if they don't do business with you, they're probably price checking or finding specs on your site. What's stopping you from finding ways to gather that information? I mean, if someone walks through the door, you ask them for their name. Why don't you ask something on the website?

It's a perfect segue, Metz, because where I was going with that was, yes, there are people that do that, that scour that data. And they've monetized that term because they sell that information. It's public information. I mean, everybody can get that. Yep. The dealers haven't spent any time doing it because that's not what they view to be their primary function. They've got to sell equipment, period. Yep. If I've got a guy out there lucky enough to find a customer who wants to buy a piece of equipment, then I can engage in a way we go. I do not, however, have anybody on board that goes out and looks for new customers. Yeah. I can't afford to do that. Oh, my goodness. You're spending money. I can't afford to do that.

Doesn't it kind of pay for itself?

Well, market coverage has become a bit of a trap also, hasn't it? I have the number of salesmen that I can afford. Yeah. I end up having a market capture amount. I have a sales volume in my territory that's determined by the financial comfort of my salesman. Yeah. And I'm okay.

Yeah. There's a bit of complacency there. Yeah.

My performance criteria isn't particularly challenging, is it? No.

And I'll be honest, I think that's where, you know, just like we keep using the same example, I got to find some better ones, some additional ones to keep it spicy. But, you know, that's where Amazon came from. They figured out how to take where everyone was weak and be strong at it and make it so easy that they just took over all that market share.

We have other examples to keep it spicy. One of them is Walmart. Yeah. You know, Amazon is viewed as one of the largest retailers in the world. So is Walmart. Yep. So we can see how they compete with each other back and forth. And it's all digital. But your comment about somebody comes to my website. Yep. And I don't trap who it was that came in. Oh, my God, what's the matter with you?

Yep.

They're coming in and checking specs when they're evaluating because they don't trust the salesman of that brand, whoever it is. Maybe I should go see what the FUFU valve is on a such and such machine. The Case 580 is a perfect example. That particular loader backhoe used to have astounding market share.

Exactly.

Doesn't have it anymore. Yeah. It's kind of amazing how all of this thing evolves. Shift over for a second to parts and service. In the terms of my career, the published, market capture rate, market share for parts,

has

gone from somewhere around 80% to somewhere around 40%, best practices. And I'm not going to challenge this to numbers. I don't want to get more precise. They're not precise. But the market capture has roughly shrunk by half. Where's it gone? It's gone to competitors. Cool. Why did it go there? because that competitor paid attention to them and I didn't. With the digital dealership, I don't need to have hundreds and hundreds of man hours. I've got hundreds and hundreds of machine hours that can do that for me and pop something up and say, hey, wait a second. George bought a machine six months ago. He hasn't bought one filter from you yet.

Yeah, there's your hidden person at the dealership that everyone should be considering is your data analyst. Yeah. to tell you where those weaknesses are. But also, if I forget the person who hasn't bought anything in the last six months, the name, but, you know, when that person does visit, like, why is he navigating through a complex system that he's not used to, to try and buy those parts?

Let's look at a statistic. About 15 years ago, one of the manufacturers I was working with was complaining that The people that bought a machine in one year,44% of them bought nothing from the dealership in the following 12 months other than warranty. Boy, that's an astounding statistic.

Absolutely. When I was running parts and service, I was stunned when we started doing some math on the machines that we'd sold and what they should generate per hour and what we were getting. like 20% of the business. And that was like a really, really unique brand. We still weren't capturing very much of it. It was kind of stunning. I think, you know, you've done a lot of work on like part sales and stuff and the whole idea of selling maintenance contracts. And I mean, if those aren't indicators that we knew that we were not capturing the business, if we let the customer buy the machine and take it home, I mean, we knew that if we didn't sell maintenance contracts, someone else was going to do it. And that's why we sold them. We sold parts kits because, and several kits at a time on a good deal, because we know that if we don't make it an easy buy, that they're going to find other sources for the same parts. We allow the door to be open.

And so we've known this a long time.

And the thing that astounds me is we've known, you're right. We've known it a long time, but we haven't done anything with it. And now where I've got. sensors all around the machine as far as the health of componentry and the usefulness of the machine, temperatures, clogged filters, all that stuff. And I've got telematics that'll take it from the field into my shop, my office, and I still sell a machine by itself for a price with this warranty rather than packaging. Here's a full service contract. Back in the 70s, I think it was. we started offering a buyback, machine buyback. Yep. Then it went so far as we're going to give you this machine for $39.43 an operating hour. And after 8,000 hours, we're going to give you a new machine.

Yep. So many like it.

We kind of lost that, haven't we?

I think one of the challenges there, and In a sense, the challenge you see on the digital side too is that pulling off all of that coordination means coordinating different people. If I'm selling a machine and as a sales rep, I'm motivated to sell machines, but if I have to sell maintenance contracts, that means I have to get quotes. Getting quotes means I got to talk to this guy over here to get those numbers and present that. Those are all things that get in my way of getting the deal done. When I was with the cat dealership, I was responsible for all of the technology products, including all the great control systems. And that was like an $85,000 add on on a $600,000 machine. And although we paid a 25% commission on this stuff, the sales reps couldn't sell it. And it was very simple. It's like, it's too much work to call the guy who's putting those quotes together and explaining it to my customer.

I'm just going to focus on selling the machine. And they just did the math in their head. You know, I can sell the machine in a day and make this much. I could spend three weeks on it and make like an extra five grand.

I agree with you, but I'm going to color it a little bit saying you're giving them more credit. I don't think the salesman wants to ask one more question that the customer can say no on that gets in the way from him saying yes on buying that machine. So if it's a maintenance, I don't want to talk about that. And you're perfectly correct. That brake system was wonderful. Cost effectiveness, safety, everything you want to talk about. Another beautiful example was the John Deere 844, first hydrostatic, best fuel consumption. The Caterpillar 980 ate it. Market share, the 844 never got anywhere. Unbelievable. I used to say we've got fat, dumb, and happy. We're comfortable where we are and don't rock the boat. To some degree, that's where we're at today with the digital dealership, isn't it?

I think that's the grounds that we're starting from. I think the great thing is that the digital dealerships can solve that. Like selling a maintenance contract with a machine, if you're executing a huge part of your inflow. digitally and allowing customers to take that further. Don't do like a click this contact me button and a sales rep calls you two days later. Like take it farther. And for the rest, it's math. Like, you know, it's just data applied to whatever the customer wants and offering it. You know, why do you see so many websites selling the machine and offering a button to get financing? It's because that's when they're going to want it. You know, why are you not presenting information on maintenance contracts or at least preventative maintenance contracts, which there's, you know, very little risk in showing numbers on, you know, the service cost is service.

Or even an inspection after a certain, if you don't, if you do the maintenance, that's cool, but let us come out and do an inspection. One of the things I used to do, and everybody laughed at me. from those data mining sources for the financing company, the competitive machines, I used to send the customer a birthday card for the machines that he had purchased that weren't mine.

Yeah, I like that. That's funny.

And then I called them afterwards and asked the question. I said, other than that birthday card from me on that machine, have you seen the guy that sold you the original machine? Yep. Because survey data used to say that was the worst thing that ever happened. The salesman sold the machine. I need salt to find them from that point forward. He's gone. He's onto something else. Yeah.

We've done a project exactly like that with a small dealer. We took that sales data, the UCC data. We enriched it as we entered it into their CRM. And really what it was is like we started with machines that are a year old. It was like, you know, whether it's because their sales rep hasn't gotten back to them or because that customer after a year may have bought a machine they don't really need anymore. It was for a project or it was the business has changed. I mean, these are opportunities and a reason to go and talk to that. You know, many times it was a way of finding new customers because you didn't know that landscape or existed even until you saw that they bought, you know, a Bobcat skid steer from someone else. And so it's taking that data and then... creating the information of value and then creating an action plan for this kind of data.

Like when we see this data show up, we point it in front of the sales rep and say, part of your job is getting in touch with these people who bought machines from another competitor a year ago. We want to know them.

From that work where you're the outsource data analyst. How many people are you seeing based on what you've been able to prove to people? How many of them are bringing in their own data analysts at some point in the future? A lot or a little?

Most of the people that I've been working with are fairly small. I have one dealership that's invested in an analyst. And it brings all kinds of richness. I mean, he's putting up. information screens in service, in parts. And, you know, people are so much more aware of what's happening. There's so much more on top of things because the queue boards of all the work orders are just hanging there. Or, you know, this report, I'm not a big fan of like reports going out in email. We get so much email that, you know, I used to get emails from 50 different systems telling me something new and you just don't read them anymore. But like being in situ, hanging a digital board, of what's happening in the business is harder to ignore. When I ran the customer support center, we had one big screen and all it, we had only four numbers on it. And one of them went red. If we dropped a call, if someone tried to call customer support and we'd lost them.

And it was like a game to find out who called and we didn't get to answer that one time, you know, and that's the kind of thing that takes data dropped calls and turns it into something that we can get value out of.

We used to have in the old days, it's almost like the before the internet and after. In the old days, we used to have the phone companies come in and evaluate every single phone we had. How long was every phone call? How long was it before it was answered? How often did they get a busy signal? How often did we not call them back? Trump's busy, blah, blah, blah. That's a fundamental that's gone away also.

Yeah, that's surprising. I mean, the phone systems are easier than ever. Every parts department and service department should have phone data.

And I'm going to suggest something that might be a little offside, but I got voicemail. I don't need to worry about that.

That's a whole other blog.

No, I'm with you, but that's part of how we've lost the personal touch. It's remarkable. One of the things that I believe and I've preached about is that if I assign a customer to a salesman, I expect that customer to be my customer with that salesman forever. If I assign a customer to a salesman and that customer defect stops buying from me, I want to hurt that salesman. I'm serious because, you know, think of all of the people in the company that are dependent on the success of that salesman doing their job. maintaining the relationship, keeping the customer happy. I've got clerks, I've got financial people, I got all manner. They're the face of the outfit. And if they don't do their job well, we all get messed up. Yep. Yep.

Hey, but here, here's a tent. Like that is, that was a somehow like the change of technology and eventually some sort of technical limitation that is now, you know, you can step over that. I mean, have your phone calls, go to voicemail, have the voicemail. you know, auto-translated, have it show up as a lead, you know, or an action item on your sales reps, CRM dashboard.

Let me, let me go further. It's your largest customer. They ain't going to voicemail. The counter's busy. The parts manager's busy. The branch manager's busy. That's going to end up in the president's phone. Yeah. Right. You know, it used to astound me. We have, hotlines for customers that are not happy with something. Yeah. And the ones, those offices that were most effective were part of the president's responsibility. Yeah. If you got there and there was a complaint and the customer was called back by the president of the company, ooh, there's something different about these dudes.

Yeah.

People stop complaining because nobody pays any attention. Right? And a complaint is the best gift we could ever have. They're still talking to me.

Yeah, exactly. The silent customer is your worst customer, the most dangerous customer. Yeah. And at the same time, we're in the beginning of the golden age of being able to offer alternatives. Yeah, it's hard to get through on the phone. People don't want to be on the phone anymore. four other channels we can create really easily for me to ask for the same thing, you know, and, and one of them fits, you know, you talk about the sales rep that loses a customer. I mean, I I've talked to sales organizations who do like more of a dating game between customers and sales reps, you know, like, Oh, these two guys like each other. Great. There's your sales rep, you know, and customers are the same. You know, some someone wants to sit in their machine with their phone and realize that their machine is due for service, scan a QR code and say, come service my machine. That's really great.

The other guy likes calling up because he, you know, he knows Jim in the service department. He doesn't mind a little chat to order his service. You know, like we should be. And I think that's the integration of like a digital dealership is that there are so many channels and we need to like integrate those channels together. into the same flows, even though they're coming in, you know, too often you see like, oh, my online parts orders are going through this channel and the parts guy doesn't see it. It just goes straight to the warehouse. I mean, you know, the parts store, isn't that really just an extension of the parts department? Isn't there value you can bring? It shouldn't be one or the other. They shouldn't necessarily be separated.

Yeah. I'd call those customer service delivery systems. And it's the face that the customer is telling me how they want to be treated. And if I don't want to satisfy that, there's something wrong with me. It's kind of strange. This digital dealership having as its foundation piece the machine and everything that we need to know about that machine, make model serial number, year purchased, year made. hours to date, hours used, application, operator, who does the main, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. If we have that, we can do remarkable things. If we don't, it's like giving six of us a pistol and putting us in a dark room and saying, hit the target. Start shooting. Just make sure you don't kill the other five guys that are in the room with you. It's kind of a wishful dream, isn't it?

Yeah, I think it's kind of like a ground up rethink of, you know, when we talk digital dealership, people picture websites. And people leading into this conversation, you brought up like how website templates were created by one of the OEMs. And then, you know, everyone kind of did the same thing. And that kind of got stuck there. And I think people get stuck on like, oh, my digital presence is my website where I have my contact us page form. And, you know, the inventory. and some stuff about our history. And that's, there's my digital presence. And I think it'd be great for people to realize that people who are strong in a digital operation, they're not running a website. They're not running web pages. It's actually a web application. It is a singular piece of software that has all of the input information from the visitors and the people interacting with it, but also from the backend systems.

We need to coin a term, Metz, because it's a door. It's another door into our business. We have physical doors. We have virtual doors. We have web page doors. We have QR code doors. We have telephone doors. We have all of these different doors. And I'm afraid that we're at the place where we can only handle so much change in our life. When we're young, we're dumb. We think we can do anything, right? And we don't know what we can't do. So we're going to try things. We have lots of time to recover. When you get older, you start becoming more careful. This works. Don't mess with it. The trick is acknowledging it doesn't work. And that's looking in the mirror saying, God, I screwed up for the last 40 years. Because that's what the truth is, isn't it? Going from 80% to 40% on parts. On our watch.

Yeah.

Boy, that's a hell of an indictment, I think, of our performance.

Yeah, for sure.

I hope that the audience has paid attention to this. There's an awful lot of stuff here. And we're carving new ground. And this piece being the foundation piece, talking about equipment being the foundation for everything that we do. to develop the relationship with our customers and have them be friends, which is the joy of this business, because we do end up having our customers be friends. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

For sure.

I'd like this to be the first of many chats about the digital dealership, if you don't mind. I'd like to do another one of these things in the next couple of three weeks. Are you game?

Absolutely. Yeah, I think it's a... It's going to become a critical topic and someone is going to come out on top and we may not even know who they are yet, or it'll be someone we do don't, but someone's going to figure this out and it's going to change the industry a little bit.

And it might not even be somebody who's in the business today. Yep. Like Amazon came out of the blue and the bookstores didn't know what hit them.

Yep. Exactly. Yep.

Matt says, I think this has been very beneficial, very good time spent. And, um, I'd like to stop here because I think we've probably reached a point of overload and set up a date where we can get together and continue this thing, if that's good with you.

That's great.

Thank you, Mets, for being with us today. And I look forward to any comments or thoughts that the audience has on the content that we've been discussing. So at that point, mahalo. Look forward to chatting with you and others and another candid conversation. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.