Dealer Talk Podcast with Danny Zaslavsky on the Vehicle Buying Center

Herbert Anderson:

What up? Welcome to another episode of the Dealer Talk Podcast. This is your host, Herb Anderson. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today we’re going to be talking about acquisition. I’m going to be showing you guys a really cool alternative to some of the solutions that are out there. I’m super, super excited to have this conversation and share some insights with all of you, amazing people in the automotive industry.

Herbert Anderson:

Let’s just jump right into it. Without further ado, today, our guest is one of the founders of VINCUE, Mr. Danny Zaslavsky. Did I get that right?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Well done. Well done, man.

Herbert Anderson:

All right, cool, man. Dude, thank you so much for doing this, super excited to have you on. I typically kick things off with a little bit of a background. Tell us about you, man.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We’re going way back?

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah, man. The whole story, man.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Okay. I’m a first generation Russian, Jewish, American kid. My parents came here from Ukraine in ’79. I was born in ’83. But Russian, believe it or not, is my first language. I didn’t speak English until I was seven. I learned it in school, and then grew up. My dad came over. He was a cobbler. He fixed shoes for a living and my mom went work for a clothing factory.

Herbert Anderson:

Wow.

Danny Zaslavsky:

But him being a cobbler, actually, believe it or not, what got us in the car business. We he had a shoe repair business at the bottom of this hill on Johnson Drive in Kansas City. At the top of Johnson Drive was this very small car dealership named Country Hill Motors. My dad always had a fascination with cars. He walked up the street one day, because he saw a Mustang up there, he always dreamed of having.

Danny Zaslavsky:

The guy at the time only had about 10 cars on the lot and said, “Hey, I want to negotiate buying that car.” They became fast friends. He bought the car but then said, “Hey, can I come here and sell cars part-time?” Because my dad had just hired his first employee at the shoe repair business so he had some extra time. My dad came up and started selling cars and eventually became business partners with Josh.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Back then this was in the early ’80s. They quickly figured out that selling wasn’t the problem, buying was the problem. If you buy it right, you’ve solved the selling problem. We had some cool things happen because, Josh, my dad’s business partner had some money. We have a little access to start getting inventory. My dad had this idea that he bought some Nextel phones, like pagers. He went out and passed it around to a couple of new car dealerships.

Danny Zaslavsky:

He said, “Hey, when you’re bidding a car page me and I’ll tell you what it’s worth and then I’ll come buy it.” This is the days of [inaudible 00:03:09] in your pockets. My dad was getting … I remember as a kid was getting pages all day long. I’m saying, “Hey, what’s this car worth? My dad would bid it, and then we come in, and early on we call it or WAR, Wholesale Auction Retail, W-A-R.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

We bought everything. The good, the bad, and the ugly, and if it was too expensive for us, we’d wholesale it. If it was not good enough to sell in the lot, we auction it. If it was retailable, we’d retail it. That’s how we cut our teeth on acquisition and we’re innovative back in the ’80s and ’90s, and then I joined up when I was 14 years old. That was the beginning for me.

Herbert Anderson:

Very cool, man. I love those stories of just starting out in the lot and working your way off. There’s so many of those, mine included. I was a tire tech and loop technician, worked my way up to service, and then management, and all these things. I think that’s cool testament to the industry.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Thanks.

Herbert Anderson:

I love … There’s so many things that I like about … When we did the demo for one of the stores that I consult with and I started learning about your company and your solutions and stuff. I was super impressed, man. Then when the opportunity came for us to do this deal, I was like, “Dude, this is great.” I wanted to talk about different things here. Let’s start with what you said right now. I caught my ear. You talked about you guys bought everything.

Herbert Anderson:

I want to explore that because that’s … I don’t know, dude, maybe … I don’t know how to say this … But maybe not an easy concept to digest. But to me, it makes sense, dude. If you bought every single car that you had the opportunity to buy, no matter if you’re in it for a couple 100 bucks, or you’re in it for 10 grand, I just feel like ultimately you’re going to win more. I think that a lot of dealers don’t have that mentality, don’t have that philosophy.

Herbert Anderson:

My question to you, man, is why do you think that is? Or do you think that that’s really … When you say that, is that an exaggeration, or you guys actually did that? If you did, you must believe in it. Why is it that the majority of dealers are just trying to pick these trades and just get these deal where they can make all this money, and then they miss the opportunity of really becoming a genuine buying center in their communities?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. I’m going to first talk about what we do, and then … Because I don’t like being told what to do so. I’m going to talk about me first, and then we can talk.

Herbert Anderson:

Right off.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We can talk about it. I don’t want to be like, “You should be doing this.”

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. That’s super dope, man.

Danny Zaslavsky:

No. We, first of all, aren’t an independent car dealership. I don’t have a flag to fly. I don’t have a truck showing up with inventory. That’s number one. Just that problem by itself, you’ve got to think differently. That’s number one. Number two, we solved our acquisition problem early on by figuring out that if we didn’t buy it, somebody would. Somebody’s buying it not because they’re doing their Mother Teresa of the car business. They’re buying it because they can make money.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Why couldn’t we be innovative and figure out these channels in order to, A, acquisition, and B, sales. What I created years ago was concurrent teams. We have a wholesale team and a retail team at Country Hill where the wholesale team, once the vehicle is identified as wholesale, they take over. They get the car ready for wholesale. They have the wholesale relationships to understand which vehicles are going to do best at which vehicle sales channel, whether it be ACV or Manheim or whether it be even a scrapper yard or an LKQ.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We figured out these channels and you start to build either data points up here or in the system. Then once you have those, it’s no different than build a muscle at the gym, all of a sudden, you graduate from picking up 25s to picking up 35s and 45s, 55s. It’s the same concept. You get to learn, you grow. We always had the attitude that wholesale would be profitable. We never had the attitude that if you’re making money in wholesale then you’re probably leaving money on the table. Not in our world.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Again, that’s because we are focused on the total profit and loss, not just on a segment of it. It came in … Like many good things, it was born out of pain. We had to solve acquisition. We couldn’t afford getting into the new car business. We also made a decision a long time ago that we would never have a floor plan. That decision caused us to grow slower. But we, to this day, do not have a floor plan and we don’t owe anything on our building or on our other properties.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That also forces us to decision differently when thinking about churn and what inventory goes where and when we exit out of it and so forth.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. Just bottom line, man, do you feel that if you did buy … Did you think that there’s a restriction just because you have a manufacturer attached to your building? Or do you think that you would ultimately win more if you did have that mentality of buy every single car no matter …

Danny Zaslavsky:

You would win more if you bought the car, period.

Herbert Anderson:

What?

Danny Zaslavsky:

There would be pain in the beginning, but that you would absolutely win more. Today, well, number one, COVID has, I think, woken us up to that idea, and we’re out of pain, figuring that out. But we also have a common competitor. The whole industry has a common competitor and of common competitors. If we don’t buy it, somebody else will.

Herbert Anderson:

Sure. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Along those lines, if we are going to adopt the philosophy that we can win by buying more cars, to another area of deficiency, for lack of a better term, that I see within the dealer when it comes to this process is that they don’t have teams dedicated to buying cars. It’s another task for the BDC agent. It’s another task for the salesperson.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Right.

Herbert Anderson:

A lot of stores don’t have their dedicated buyers that are 100% incentivized just to buy cars.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

That are managed by one central manager that, hey, his whole pay plan and compensation is based on acquiring vehicles. Do you think that’s something that can be improved on? If so, how would you set that up?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yes. Easy. Absolutely. If you call my store right now, what the way the answer is, are you calling about buying a car, or are you calling about selling a car? Okay. That should tell you enough about the culture and the mentality that we want. I was actually just talking to Darren, our vehicle buying manager two hours ago this morning in person. We were talking about the idea of scarcity, meaning, what if … Because there’s like 19 dealerships around me.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Everything from Highline to Chrysler Dodge Jeep at a Hyundai store, and they’re building a new Genesis store. If every one of those guys had buying centers, we would still be okay, because guess what, they have selling centers. They managed to sell cars, and we still hit records. Absolutely, there is enough cars to buy. But we’re in an inventory based opportunity industry. He or she who has the inventory wins. Yes, you have to buy, you have to do it.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We started with one person. This was seven years ago, again, born out of a pain, my dad had a stroke. He was our predominant buyer. I didn’t like go into the auctions. But when he had a stroke, I didn’t have another choice. I always felt stupid go to the auctions. I mean, the last guy with my hand up, paying the most transportation fees, post sale, inspection fees, auction fees, and then on top of that, always, always, always out of every batch, there’d be a number of cars that I’d be like, “Shoot. I got to spend more on recon than I thought I had to,” every time.

Danny Zaslavsky:

I felt rushed. I never got the cars I wanted. I said, “There’s got to be a better way.” I hired Darren, who’s still with me today. We shook hands and we said, “Hey, we’re going to figure out how to buy 30 cars a month from the public.” We essentially duct taped it together. We started identifying these channels of where to go. Like, “Here are the places they are.” Then we started making Excel spreadsheets of how to track this stuff.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then one of the biggest epiphanies we had is when we started tracking the results. This is … There, I use the word sexy because I think this is sexy, I do. I think this is the stuff that gets me excited. We looked at of the cars were buying, when they sell, what’s the average age, front gross per copy, and then segment. Do they come from the auction? Did it come from a trade? Did they come from vehicle buying center? They come from dealer network, meaning I bought it from another dealer.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We started watching all those metrics. Then we also watched the cars that we have in stock. How old were they on average? What was our average investment? What was the average lead volume? It started become crystal clear. We’re like, “All right, chicken in the egg here. Do we build a new buying center, or do we buy from the auction?” The answer was clear. We needed to start focusing on buying more from the public and finding efficiencies to do that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

It’s like anything, you start down a path, you’re just going to walk towards it when it makes sense, and you’re going to make discoveries along the way. I think that for me, it doesn’t need to be perfect for it to work. We’re going to continuously work towards making it perfect.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. Okay. You guys have said, “This is what we’re going to do. This is the goal. We’re going to start this.” You’ve got going and then you obviously learn the process. Did you find that you had … Because there’s obviously resistance from the customers. They feel they’re at a disadvantage when they sell to dealers or they’re going to get taken advantage of and all these things.

Herbert Anderson:

Did you find that … Because you guys are not using any third party validation, a KBB, ICO, or anything like that. Do you have any of those processes in place? Or you guys are straight up Country Hill buying center, personal … it’s your own brand?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. No. It’s our own brand. That KBB is now today with all the knowledge that I have of, to this point, because there’s still so much to learn, but to this point of private acquisition, so KBB and there’s others that do it, too, we consider that a third party opportunity. We don’t depend on those opportunities. There’s actually five lanes that we know of as of right now, inbound, which is where we say to the world, “Hey, we buy cars, when people call.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

We give them a place to go, sellthecountryhill.com. Just go to sellthecountryhill.com, give us your info, we’ll give you an offer, and we’ll have a good conversation. That’s inbound. We did a lot of those. They close at a high clip, because those are people that are coming to us saying, “Hey, I want something more.”

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then the second one is outbound. That’s when we actually go out to the world and say, “Okay, cool. Here’s your cars on Facebook, or Craigslist, or eBay, or Autotrader, or whatever.” We start looking at, “Cool, these people are selling their cars. Let’s reach out to them, have meaningful conversations about them, and buy them.” When I say meaningful, it’s not like, “Hey, Herb, I saw your car online, is this still available?” That’s not a conversation.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We truly want to have meaningful conversations about the car because we don’t want to waste their time. Our people are on payroll and on commission. We don’t want to waste our time. We’re calling because we want to buy the car. That’s two. The third one is third party, which I talked to KBB is one of them, cars.com used to have one. There’ll be more. I’m sure.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. There’d be sure. Yeah.

Danny Zaslavsky:

But as that third party, the fourth one is service drive. We have service drives. We started making offers to consumers’ right in the lane. Then we figured out, “How about we just give them a QR code to scan and either automatically produce the offer,” because we’ve pre programmed it, or give them the ability to go to the sell to page and put in their info, and they always know where they’re at on value. Keep in mind, we control the data it spits out, right.

Herbert Anderson:

Sure. Yeah.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That’s the fourth one. Then the fifth one is a private party that converts the trade, because we figured out that about 15% of all people that are selling their car when we just asked them heard why selling your car? You’ll say, “Well, I don’t need a truck anymore.” “Okay, cool. Well, what are you going to do get around?” They say, “Well, I’m trying to figure it out right now.” We go, “Cool. Let’s talk about it.” It’s a meaningful. It’s not a, “Would you like to trade, Herb?”

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. I laugh because I just had this conversation. It’s like, “Dude, you’re going to win more, man, if you just focus on the acquisition, because what are those people going to do? I don’t know. You’re a dealership in a horse?” Like, “Dude, they need a car, man.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

You need a car, just ask, ask.

Herbert Anderson:

It’s such a … Okay. I like that. I like that broken down process. But you yourself, I guess what I’m trying to get at is because a lot of people, a lot of dealers, I feel they have these resistant to promote it, because they’ve already given up. They’re like, “Well, customers don’t trust us. I’m not going to focus on buying cars. I’m just going to focus on buying cars that make sense for me.” Can you do this? Can this be done without having to say, “Well, I need validation from a third party? I can create this myself.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

You can.

Herbert Anderson:

You know what I mean? I can create the brand myself within my local community. I think what a lot of dealers miss, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that they … First they don’t think about … They don’t think of themselves as a buying center. They think about themselves as, “We’re just selling cars. If we get trades, or somebody just happens to come in, and great, hopefully, we’ll get a couple of those.”

Herbert Anderson:

Then the other thing is that they don’t have the structure internally in their dealership, or that even to go further. They don’t have that cultural shift of, “Hey, listen, if we buy more cars, if we just focus on buying more cars, ultimately, we’re going to win more.” I mean, do you agree?

Danny Zaslavsky:

I mean, absolutely. Because I mean, going back to my roots, if you buy it right, selling is not a problem, period. I mean, you can sell the car, there’s a tremendous need. You can always wholesale the car. Yeah. It’s just a matter of time and attention. I made the mistake, Herb. This is I did this. I told salespeople, “Hey, I’ll pay a $200 commission if you buy a car.” Mistake. I told sales managers, “Focus on acquisition from public.” Mistake. Because it diverts their attention.

Danny Zaslavsky:

It’s push and pull, yin and yang. You got to have acquisition deserves a full-time person and eventually a full-time team. No different than sales does. You wouldn’t tell your sales people to focus on sales and service at the same time. It doesn’t work. It deserves a full-time person and/or team, especially if you want the numbers. I mean, the net lift for us was over $200,000 in month in profit.

Herbert Anderson:

From going to that philosophy?

Danny Zaslavsky:

From leaving the auction and going to private.

Herbert Anderson:

Now, let me ask you this, how much … I don’t know if you can put this in dollars? If you could, that’d be amazing. Or maybe you just did. But when you said that, okay, we’re going to. We’re going to do this we’re going to commit. How much of that became … Or how much now do you spend time at the auctions and stuff, versus just people now know that you guys are buying center, that you probably have your brand, locally, pretty much established, and now people just come to you when they’re trying to dispose of a vehicle, just because you’ve been doing it successfully for a lengthy amount of time.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. We sell about between 150 and 200 retail a month, and another 200 wholesale a month. We’re selling between three and 400 cars a month. For an independent, that’s a very exciting number for us.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. Sure.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We’re still having to buy about, I’d say, 40% of our retail inventory through either auction or dealer network. We’re growing our vehicle buying center, and this is actually walks into the topic of like, “How do you grow?” We figured out that there’s a essentially a customer acquisition cost for private party. I’ll explain it. Just a salesperson, when you have a dedicated vehicle buying center agent, they can buy between 20 and 30 cars a month.

Danny Zaslavsky:

You’ll have those odd balls that are just savants buying 40 cars a month. But it’s not the norm. We’re lucky enough to have one of those spots on our team. But most of the time, they’re buying 20 to 30. If you want to scale to over 100, or 200, you just need to scale your team. Assuming you have the population density to go after the vehicles, that’s one way to do it. The other way to do it is a personal friend of mine, Rob Ruth, and Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. He’s in a population of 4,000.

Danny Zaslavsky:

He’s buying over 100 a month. But he’s now trying to figure out how to penetrate the Philadelphia market and buy sight on seen and ship those cars. That cost, when we run a P&L, profit loss statement for the entire team that includes payroll, any advertising, and software costs is about $250 per acquisition. Make sense?

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah.

Danny Zaslavsky:

If more people running about $25,000 in the department buying 100 cars, it’s about $250 for my customer acquisition costs, which 250 versus paying the …

Herbert Anderson:

Auction fees.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Well, yeah. All those fees I just measured, but the one fee that I didn’t talk about is the stupid tax, raise your hand expert tax fee. You’re literally competing. You start out with a dealer trying to sell you a car for the most he or she can get forget and then you got … If you’re lucky, five other guys competing in raising that number. You’re not doing that with an individual. There’s all this more opportunity that exists. Not to mention you get to pre-negotiate reconditioning, because you have time with the car. You can talk about it.

Herbert Anderson:

Sure. Yeah. No. That makes sense, man. Like you said, you build your whole team, just like you would sales before the acquisition side. Little by little it starts to pay for itself, not to mention that you’re winning more, you’re spending less time at the auction, you save all the fees, the cars are better. I would assume that those vehicles are a little bit better condition, would you say that that’s another advantage, too, when you buy him straight from the public. That’s so it saves you on that end as well?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

Then obviously, you get to hopefully sell a few of those folks into buying one of your vehicles.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We do. Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. No. Dude, I love it. I want to talk about where we are today, because obviously, this is a different situation. I wanted to get your take on that and what you guys have done to stay competitive and how you been a buying center already has benefited you, because I’m sure it has. But before we do that, you said something earlier, and you said something in the demo that we did a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to explore, and that’s the acronym, WAR.

Herbert Anderson:

Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I’m very curious about that philosophy and what that stands for, and how do you guys leverage that?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Today, I believe that this is the first time, at least in my lifetime, that automotive dealers can come together against a common competitor. We’re in a race now. There have been companies that have come in and have worked, made offers to us and saying, “Hey, let us white label your inventory. We’ll put it up online. When the customer buys it, we’ll send them to you. Then you get to sell a car.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Sounds nice in theory, but all of a sudden, now, we’re just dealers are just warehouses for inventory. We’re losing our souls, our personalities, our businesses. I’m automotive through and through. My vision and mission is to help dealers stay in business, including myself. I think we do that through doing good business on the ground, obviously, but you have to have the inventory in order to survive.

Danny Zaslavsky:

WAR is just that. We are at this really cool space and time where we can go to war, and fight for the inventory, fight for making sure that our acquisition channels are built from the ground up, just like we did our sales departments and our service departments. We worked to build our service department, customer pay. We worked to build our sales, brand, and we fought for that. We have to do the same thing with acquisition.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That’s what I mean when I say war. Digital retailing is certainly something that’s now been around for a few years. Many of us are starting to get comfortable with using, if not all of it, but aspects of it. But what’s now going … You watch what will emerge and we hope to be on the front of that is digital acquisition. Then again, you can use that war mentality to go fight for consumers inventory, even if it’s not in your own backyard, because, Herb, you know this, you’re in Utah, I’m in Kansas City, there are cars in both of our markets that Carvanha has put into them that don’t exist in our markets.

Danny Zaslavsky:

I can’t over touch them. I can’t feel them. I don’t have that opportunity. I’m not big enough to put my cars across the entire country. I’m now competing with Phantom cars. In order to win, again, I have to have the inventory. Digital acquisition and having the tools to do that, you got to … This is a game of war and you got to go fight for it.

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Herbert Anderson:

Yeah, dude, I love that. I think that’s super dope. Thanks so much for elaborating on that, because I totally agree with that philosophy, especially when you touched on digital retail, and that’s one of my biggest pet peeves, because it’s not a fully cooked idea.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

But I do feel that it’s the future. It definitely can’t be blinded to that. Acquisition is obviously a big part of it. I see in my commute, and I just learned this recently, but I guess Utah is the biggest market for Carvana. I see that in my commute every day and it drives me insane, dude. I see 10 or 20 transporters every single week. Obviously, I hate that. Yeah. That’s cool, man.

Herbert Anderson:

All right. Let’s talk about … The two things just for the listeners out there we’re going to switch gears here in a minute. If you’re listening to this, what you want to do is you want to go to the video portion of this on YouTube in a little bit. I’ll tell you guys when so you can actually see. We’re going to demo a solution here that I really feel it’s going to be something of interest to you guys and you’re going to get a lot of value from it. Definitely when the time comes, make sure you catch that portion on my YouTube channel.

Herbert Anderson:

But before we do that, let’s talk about the current situation, dude, because obviously you guys are experts at buying cars, you have this whole philosophy I feel or system rather down. You got it pretty well thought out. It’s obviously delivering results, but these are different times. With different times come different results. I’m sure you guys have had to get creative as well. Just tell us a little bit about that.

Herbert Anderson:

If your setup has helped you win more is a bit something that you’ve had to adjust because of the current situation … Give us a little bit on that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. You’re talking about more how do we appraise a car, what’s the tech, what are we looking at, what tools do we have?

Herbert Anderson:

No. Now, given the shortage and everything, how …

Danny Zaslavsky:

Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. There’s a combination answer there. With the shortage, let me first say, I don’t have a shortage.

Herbert Anderson:

I love that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

At Country Hill, I’m landlocked. If you looked at my business from Google Map, here’s me literally across the street as CarMax, behind me is a brand new Audi store, which I have a funny CarMax story for you. They planted a lot of trees to block me out, but it’s not working. I really did. But they have a pond and you can’t plant trees in the pond apparent.

Herbert Anderson:

Right.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then across the street from me as a Mercedes Jag Land Rover dealership, and then you have a whole row of Hendrick Store, Chevy, Toyota, Infiniti, and so forth, and then there’s me. I see the shortage. I see the shortage, because we’re waiting. We’re hoping and praying, is the transport truck going to come in? Is factories telling me that I’m going to get cars, all that stuff? No different than we talk to salespeople is, “How are you going to hit your number other than a hope and a dream? How are we going to get our inventory more than a hope in a dream?”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Years ago, a decade ago, we all … I think whether we saw it or not started feeling a pinch with gross. Our gross is …

Herbert Anderson:

Sure.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Are they going down commoditization? COVID is obviously taken away a little bit of that, but that is going to come back, mark my words. In the way to solve that is to, number one, start paying attention to your acquisition, but, B, start looking at the data on the screen differently. One of the things we started doing differently when appraising cars, especially in this environment, is instead of … My dad walked around with a black book for years, eventually that changed.

Danny Zaslavsky:

He then started to look like MMR transactions, lived and died by MMR. I don’t like MMR transactions. I think it’s a lagging indicator and I think they’re inflated prices because you got a bunch of experts bidding on cars. Doesn’t made sense to me to look at MMR transactions. We started looking at and we have this in VINCUE, retail sold transactions, meaning what are these cars leaving the internet for?

Danny Zaslavsky:

They go online, pick a car 2016 Toyota 450,000 miles, went online on this day, left online on this day, what was that price drop of that car or average of that car within that segment class or price range. That is what dictates …

Herbert Anderson:

Wait. Sorry to interject here, but I got a question on that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

But you don’t know that is car sold so there’s a little bit of a educated guess with that, because how do you know that that car … Just because it came off the side doesn’t necessarily mean it transacted. How that should have an impact on that value?

Danny Zaslavsky:

We do know that it transacted. Within VINCUE, we track when the vehicle goes live or goes live and goes off and then if it comes back on it’s considered … Meaning If it shows up in a wholesale arena like Manheim and ADESA and OBU whatever we can see it. That vehicle isn’t retail …

Herbert Anderson:

You take that out of the equation.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That’s right. Or if it’s transferred to a dealer trade, we can see that. That doesn’t play into the equation. It’s not 100% perfect, but it’s 95%. When you’re looking at a comp set and looking at it by those values you can … I’ll show you once we jump in, you’ll understand. But looking at those retail transactions makes them different. For instance if I was talking to you, Herb, you were my customer. You came in and said, “I want to sell my car.” I said to you, “Why do you want to sell it?”

Danny Zaslavsky:

You said, “Well I don’t need it anymore.” Cool. What are you asking for it?” “Twenty-six K.” Why do you think it’s worth 26?” “Well, that’s what I see them online for.” We go, “Cool.” We go in. We do our research, bring it back and say, “Well, let me show you what they’re leaving the internet for,” because we can actually show you that what you’re asking isn’t necessarily accurate, and we can use data to our advantage.

Herbert Anderson:

That’s pretty dope. If you can tell them like, “Yeah. I mean because you’ve list a car but there’s time that car sits there, there’s all kinds of price drops that happen and before they actually transact on.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. It would be …

Herbert Anderson:

How do you overcome …

Danny Zaslavsky:

… in the system here a minute, too.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. What would you say it to those that talk about the valuations from the KBBs and the Carfax and all these that are … Customer comes especially now, customer comes in right now and they want all the money.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Double-edged sword. KBB traditionally gives a very low value, because they back it. Their algorithm is often low. That’s why the conversion on KBB, ICOs is usually low, but it gives us an opportunity. The nice thing they’re doing for us is it gives us …

Herbert Anderson:

To step up.

Danny Zaslavsky:

… to step up and say, “Hey, Mr. Customer, that wasn’t our offer, that was their offer. But let us show you where we could come in at.” That’s pretty good. The other conversation about consumers coming, with a puppy chest and saying, “Hey, I want 30 grand for my car, because where are you going to find one?” Also can work to your advantage, if it’s honest, and you can just say, “You’re actually right, the car business is really good right now, and it is a seller’s market. You’re going to get more for your vehicle. Let’s take a look at it.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Here’s where we use history. I’ll show you that, too. Within VINCUE, I can see as long as it’s 2015, or newer, at this point, I can see every car dealership and every auction, any vehicle has ever been through and every price that it’s ever had on it. I can see if that customer bought it two years ago at this dealership, I can see what they paid for it, I can break down what their average cost of ownership was and say, “You know what? You paid 30 grand for it. You’re about to get 26 grand for it, driving it for two years for 1,500 bucks a year, that’s pretty darn cheap.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

“Let me show you the retail transactions, what they’re leaving for. Your car, by the way needs X, Y, Z, and we’d still like to make some profit.” Then we look at competitors, because we know what others would offer for it. One of the things we … We have a slogan that we’ll pay up to 250 more than CarMax. But really, it’s 250 more than CarMax, Carvana, Vroom, and so forth.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We just did it the other day on a Cadillac that is in my inventory now. I’ll show you. But the other thing we did a campaign on is free second opinions.

Herbert Anderson:

I like that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Come on out. We’ll give you a free second opinion.

Herbert Anderson:

Very cool. Bottom line in this market, have you bought more cars? Have you been more successful at buying cars, or has the customer thinking that their cars worth all the money?

Danny Zaslavsky:

No [crosstalk 00:37:17] We’ve been buying like crazy. I’m not alone. We have a lot of dealers using our platform and doing the same thing. They are buying a lot of vehicles. I can share some fun facts about a couple that let me as well.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. All right. Folks, if you’re tuning in to this on the app, we’re getting to that place where we’re going to switch gears here and we’re going to do a live demo. Make sure to go to my YouTube page and check this out. I really feel you’re going to get tons of value from this deal. You guys know. I’m never for or against anything. Come to your own conclusions. That’s why I like to do these so that you can see them and determine if it’s something that’s right for you. But I think there’s some value here and I think this is something that you guys are going to want to check out.

Herbert Anderson:

Go right now to my YouTube page and check the second half of the session. All right, folks. This is it. Tune in. This is going to be really, really, really educational. Danny, take it over.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Cool. Let me start with this here. VINCUE was born out of a need to bring together a number of solutions that we felt were essentially despairing. I was a [vAuto 00:38:43] client for 11 years. I got tired of looking at the same data and feeling I was on a race to the bottom, and also I was paying HomeNet and Stockwave plus from my website. Every one of those, I had to have a separate login for.

Danny Zaslavsky:

VINCUE was born out of that need to create an all-in-one solution so that inventory can work together, meaning from the moment you buy it, it goes into inventory management. That’s where we work towards what we call the highest authentic value. Give it all the correct options, features, packages, use Monroney labels within the system to make sure everything is correct. Then look at market pricing. Make sure that the comps you’re looking at aren’t just the most, but the most accurate. That’s really important.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Because I remember my guys just changing prices, or the cost of market percent to market, because they thought that they were trying to be competitive and hopefully find a bargain shopper, but meantime here we are losing gross, that market pricing. Then auction sourcing is in here because it gives us the avenue to be able to see what we can either sell any piece of inventory out to the auction or buy or get do research.

Danny Zaslavsky:

My website countryhill.com, among many others in the country is VINCUE website. It’s a one-to-one. You can change the price. It changes immediately. It changed any of the options, features, packages, changes immediately, plus a lot more opportunity to share our highest authentic value. Dealer, exclusive items, reconditioning, certification, things that you do right from your own site. Boost is …

Herbert Anderson:

Let me interject there really quick, because I think I missed this when we were doing the demo with you guys. Did I understand this correctly? Your website is tied to this. There’s no feeding through another company. It just goes straight from this to your website. You make the changes. They happen automatically?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yes, you got it.

Herbert Anderson:

Oh, dude, that still, but I totally missed it. Part of your guys’ solution includes building the website as well?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yes.

Herbert Anderson:

Oh, very cool. I like that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Yeah. Then Boost is Vin’s specific targeted advertising. Well, I’ll share a little bit about that. It’s easier to show you. But essentially, when we’re doing pricing decisions, we want more levers to pull other than just changing the price. This gives us the ability to get eyeballs. On a car that has a high market day supply, we know that it may sell at this price at 45 days, but we want to sell it in 15 days, and it would take this many eyeballs to do it, then we can just spend the 50 or $100 instead of reducing it by 500.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then the last one, and the one that I think has just a lot of firepower is our Vehicle Buying Center. Let me jump in. We’re looking at right now inventory management. This is where we can see any vehicle. For instance, this Acura RDX, here’s the VIN number, there’s the original window sticker we can jump into and look at it then we can come across here, we can see my price age, my age of my vehicle, my price on it, I’m ranked one of three, my profit.

Danny Zaslavsky:

If I sell at this price, my price to market, cost to market and then VDP views on that car, and leads on that car. Then I can jump into any one of these, and manage them. Let’s just jump into one real fast and we’re on the inventory management side for a second before we get into VBC. But this screen right here, this RMV, our retail market value screen is an important one. Some folks out there, I want to give a shout out to my friend Jasen Rice who owns Lotpop.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We work with Lotpop and integrate. You can see lot score for those clients who have both solutions integrates right into VINCUE. You can see if you’re heavy or strong in a segment, yeah, you can see all the relevant data that his performance managers trade on right here in the system. But 2018 Chevy Colorado there’s the original window sticker, I can click it, it opens right up. I can see all the original features packages, price and so forth.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We use this for syndication purposes, too. I’ll show you that in a second. But here’s the comps. There’s the books. We can see I’ve sold three, a half five. My needs is okay on this particular car. I can see that this car was a customer trade. That’s how it came in. I can bring in sold data. When I bring that in, those green ones …

Herbert Anderson:

Okay. Danny, I’m sorry. Let me interject on that one, too, because that’s a pet peeve of mine with vAuto. You have to collect all these boxes in order for that to … But in order for you to have the correct information. I’m sure this is same here. The system isn’t going to know that this is a vehicle acquisition, a trade, or you bought it from the street or whatever.

Herbert Anderson:

But how do you identify? What’s that process? Because let’s say that I am using vAuto, and that I use this only for as my buying center, how do I … Do they talk to each other? How do you make sure that that information translates, or do you just have to do double the entries?

Danny Zaslavsky:

No. You do not have to do double entries. There’s two ways to solve this. A, it’s captured in the appraisal. When you’re doing the appraisal, we identify what it is, what the opportunity is. Is it a trade? Is it a street purchase? If I click this, you can see these are all the opportunities, Service Drive, Auction, Street Purchase, Sight Unseen, Simulcast, Lease Return, Dealer Trade, Demo, you can add.

Danny Zaslavsky:

But you identify when you’re doing it in the appraisal. Then when it merges the file from the DMS, it also can … For us, we have four numbers, one, two, three, four. One means auction, two means dealer trade, three means dealer network, and four means VBC. When it’s entered into the DMS, it can overwrite the file. It’s always up-to-date.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That is what gives you the ability then to run those reports I was telling you about, sold inventory, and/or active inventory, and look at it by aging, look at it by gross per copy, looking at it by even your salesperson or vehicle buying center person, productivity, all that is possible because we’re tracking it. Does that make sense, Herb?

Herbert Anderson:

Sorry, I was on mute there. Yeah, dude. I just wanted to show that distinction. That’s cool. Because if you’re going to use two, if you’re going to use this system just to kick it off as a buying center, as a … I don’t know, if buying center, but an acquisition program, it’d be cool to just to let people know that, “Hey, it’s not you’re going to be doing all this extra work.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

No. No. No. It’s all contained and we make it easy for sure. In here also, we capture recon. We can get into recon later. But this is all for the purposes of attributing value to the vehicle also later. For instance, if we do brake pads to it and we want to communicate that to the world, we can say, “New brakes, value $379,” and save that. It’ll push it right to the comments. Throughout here, in this example, we can look at wholesale transactions. There’s a lot of stuff we can get into nitty-gritty.

Danny Zaslavsky:

But if you notice, there’s all checkmarks here. These checkmarks so that we can create our own book values. Meaning, if I see that this one, this one, and this one are the most accurate to my vehicle, then I can create my own auction report right there. As I change it, you can see these numbers change, too, because the average of the vehicles I actually picked, I’m creating my own comp set.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That is important because when you’re looking at either a retail or wholesale comp set, you want to make sure that, A, the computer does the very best it can to create a comp set, but then you as the human needs to make sure, because dealers aren’t always putting their cars accurately online. That brings me to this … See this little poop emoji right here. We sympathetically call that our shit list.

Herbert Anderson:

I like that. I like that.

Danny Zaslavsky:

If you find that there are dealers out there that are playing the game, either wrong, or their cars an enterprise that you don’t want in your comp set, you can put them on that list, and it will remove that their inventory so they don’t ever show up in your comp set. But within here, we can obviously adjust our filters. We can take out franchise independent national chains. We can include or exclude additional years and trim levels. We call it a trim matrix.

Danny Zaslavsky:

If you want to go a year back or a year forward, you can do that. Then we can just jump into the all the similars and sort them. That’s every price change that’s ever been made on any one of these cars. We can also … Let me just click a couple of these. I’m going to show you something here in a minute that’s cool. Click three cars that I picked. Then we’ll go into Sales. Sales is that retail sold transaction list I was telling you.

Danny Zaslavsky:

On this particular car, average leaves in 37 days, average price drop 1,230 bucks. Here’s all the cars that have recently left at a car dealer’s website and we can, again, make a little list of them if you want. I want to identify these three here. I’m going to do that real quick. Then NHTSA, National Highway Traffic and Safety, TSPs, and so forth, or I can go right to the auction say, “Cool. At OVE Manheim ADESA, Auction Edge, here’s what’s running. I can appraise proxy bid, jumping to the sale, bookmark, put my shopping cart, and eventually buy these cars if I want to, or use them as comparables.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then once I own the car, inventory management is just this one button. Now, you’re in inventory management. You can manage your description here. That is a whole topic we can talk about for SEO and SEM purposes, the way we do it. All your photos are right here. Notice, there’s a bunch of really cool customizations you can do with, yeah, overlays. But we also do a sale pending, new arrival, sold fast process.

Danny Zaslavsky:

If that car sells, we’ll put a sale pending banner on it. Then on our website, that updates with that sale pending banner in 60 seconds. That creates urgency for our customers. It also creates transparency and we really like that. I’m going to put it back to that so my team doesn’t think I’m crazy.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. I like that feature. It’s really cool.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Thanks. A lot more to share there. But as you’re working, a lot of cool price changes. I think the thing that I really want to share with you is the vehicle buying center. But before I do, one of the learnings that we had was once you have a vehicle buying center, you can certainly play defense and just buy everything that comes at you. But at some point, you got to make the decision to play offense and go inventory that you know will turn well and will bring a higher profit.

Danny Zaslavsky:

There’s a couple ways to do that. You can go into your own sales history by class, price range, whatever. You can sort by sold volume. Then you could open up any one of them and see your own sold log for as long as you want. Then you can start making a targets list to identify what vehicles and what segment and what brands and what price ranges sell well, so we can go buy them.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Demand then shows you in your primary market area. If we’re in the same class, let’s just sort by sold. It looks like Lincoln MKZs do well for me. I don’t have any. I happen to have a Lexus and Mercedes E Class. But let’s look at MKZs. I can open those up. Let’s sort by highest sold. It looks like 14s and 17s. There’s nine of them available. I can go out to the auction or private and start buying these cars.

Herbert Anderson:

Wait a second. You said the auction. Obviously, this is not … I’m sorry. I’m a little confused. That’s …

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. This is you can go out to the auction or private and we’re going to get into the private right here.

Herbert Anderson:

Okay.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

All right. There’s two. See, I missed this, too, run. Did we cover that part?

Danny Zaslavsky:

No.

Herbert Anderson:

Okay.

Danny Zaslavsky:

It’s so hard to cover it all.

Herbert Anderson:

Okay.

Danny Zaslavsky:

But yeah, you can go out, too, because we have all the auctions connected in here. But you can also then … This is what most guys are used to. They’re used to use them just like, “Here’s what I’ve sold. Here’s what I think the world needs and I’m going to go out and find it at the auction.” But now we give you the ability to do all …

Herbert Anderson:

Look at all in one place.

Danny Zaslavsky:

You got it. Boom.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. Thank you.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then you can go … Let’s go out to the auction. Let’s go to our vehicle buying center, at VBC.

Herbert Anderson:

Just to a customer to customer auction?

Danny Zaslavsky:

I know, right? You’re not kidding. Here’s the private party sector. If you can see that says CL for Craigslist; CG, CarGurus; AT, Autotrader; you have Facebook in here. These are all cars that you can begin now to search and identify. This Nissan LEAF is at two out of four star from me. But I can click on it and I can set an appointment, reach out …

Herbert Anderson:

Wait. Wait. Let’s talk about that rating again. That’s based on the parameters of whatever you said in the system as far as your sell rate, and all those things or …

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. It’s really four things. Let me explain. When we’re looking at what’s going to do well for you, you can create your own targets. All right. You can also create your own no flies. As you get better, you can say, “You know what? I don’t want to buy Jags anything older than in 2010.” Put those on no flies, we’ll filter those out. On targets we want Priuses in this price range or classes or whatever. That’s one way to do it.

Danny Zaslavsky:

The other ways to do it is we take into account what you’ve sold by time of year, and then … Earlier when showing you my sales, that’s one of the things that plays into the insight. The second thing is the market demand, what’s leaving in your area. Many cars coming in, cars coming out. Then the last one is competitor data. We can look at any competitor. Here’s somebody who’s my competitor.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Let’s bring him up. Herb, if you let me, I can do this with one of your stores, too. But we look at their overview and we can see they’re number 1 out of 29 in used cars in the market. They’re number 12 out of 29. We can see how many used cars they’ve sold and whether they’re up or down and new. Then let’s go over their sales log. Here’s what they’re selling. Here’s the summary. Now the summary is important because we can look at by sales, what segment they’re selling in. We can also see who they’re doing transfers to.

Danny Zaslavsky:

When I look at their used sold log, I can sort it. There’s those transfers I was telling you about. I can also see what they have in inventory. The inventory summary is nice, because I can see their price, bucket strategy, or no strategy if they don’t have an image trying to stay alive right now. Then they’re used the new. If I wake up tomorrow morning and decide, “Hey, I want to sell 10 more cars a month. I got to either spend more on marketing, or I got to fill the need within my area.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

If I know minivans are selling around $20,000 and there’s a bunch of them leaving the market and I don’t have any. What do I need to do? I got to go buy some $20,000 minivans. Make sense?

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Fill the need.

Herbert Anderson:

Much more efficient than spending on marketing dollar. I’ll tell you that much.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Here. Let’s play that game for a second. I want to buy … Let’s see if there’s any Odysseys online right now. Well, how about that. Look at that. Here’s all the Odysseys online right now for sale. Let’s see, hold on, boom, there’s one that excites me. It is a one owner, clean Carfax, 16 EX-L with 48,000 miles. Let’s take a look at it. I can jump in and I can start chatting with the customer right here. I can set an appointment. I can send that consumer an offer. I can also do a retail market value screen. Remember we did this earlier.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah.

Danny Zaslavsky:

See some … Because I don’t have a VIN number on this car, because the customer didn’t put one in. But I can get pretty close. This brings up a good point. The first question I should ask this customer is, “Hey, I saw your minivan online. Low miles for the year. I think it’s awesome. Can you send me a VIN number so I can understand some more about it?” That’s a real conversation. Not, “Hi, Danny, Country Hill. Is your car still available?”

Herbert Anderson:

Right. I want to buy your car.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Get the VIN number. Pop that VIN number in and then begin to work the deal. Make sense?

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. Super dope. You can send them the offer right through that, through …

Danny Zaslavsky:

[crosstalk 00:57:46] Right through the chat. That’s exactly right.

Herbert Anderson:

Nice.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We do the same thing through the ICOs. Let me open all of them up. Here’s a Sierra up. In this case, if we go over to the VBC offer, we can see that KBB offered him 29,940.

Herbert Anderson:

I’m sorry. Let me play devil’s advocate really quick.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yep, man.

Herbert Anderson:

Even on third parties, like the auto traders of the world and things of that nature, chatting really sometimes just isn’t the most efficient. It takes forever sometimes for people to respond and stuff. Do you guys see that … Do you run into some of those issues and because of the volume, it doesn’t matter, you just move on to the next one? Or what would be your approach to that?

Danny Zaslavsky:

I love that you asked that question. This was actually a big learning moment for us. Herb, I don’t know if you’re going to hate me for asking you this. But how old are you?

Herbert Anderson:

Oh, no, that’s fine. I’m 39, bro.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Okay. Because I’m 38. We’re about the same. I don’t know about you. But I’m on that line where sometimes I like to text, but sometimes just call me, stop texting me. My dad does not like to text. He’s horrible at it. I have a 22-year-old sister who hates to be on the phone, loves to text. The answer is ask. When we started saying, “Hey, saw your car online, is it better to text or call?” Then we actually begin to communicate with the consumer the way they want to.

Danny Zaslavsky:

We figured out that we were just assuming that they wanted to text and the people who hated texting, like my dad, would never respond or would get burned out because they’re like, “I just can’t do this. Just fricking call me.” Does that make sense?

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. No. Totally does. That’s why I asked because I’m assuming the first point of contact, this chat. Then from there, you’d have to ask the customer, like you said, “How do you want to communicate?”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

For the people doing the demo just, I felt like that’d be a good question. Yeah. [crosstalk 01:00:15]

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. That is a really good point. Yeah. The first point of connection is we send them a note, whether it be in, “I have both, I can email them, or text them.” That’s the difference. I can start writing here. Just like that. If I click Send, then it’s going to go right to him, email or chat, or texted this, excuse me?

Herbert Anderson:

Oh, very cool.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. We manage that whole offer. Should we just do one real quick?

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. I wanted to talk about that, too. I wanted the customers to see the … Because you mentioned the five pathways, but it’s cool. It’s all there, man. Think about this. If you’re in your dealership right now, and I don’t know, if you’re like most dealerships, and you’re probably a lot of this is relegated to the BDC, which, obviously we just had a conversation about that. But if you had a dedicated buyer, imagine how easy it would be for them to just pop this open every day, look for the cars that, obviously, are of interest to your store, and then start having conversation, and start engaging with people to buy their car. It’s great, man.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Can I show you my favorite screen?

Herbert Anderson:

Yes, sir.

Danny Zaslavsky:

This one.

Herbert Anderson:

Oh, I love that. Yeah. Wow. Look at that. Jeez.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Ain’t that fun?

Herbert Anderson:

That’s awesome.

Danny Zaslavsky:

That’s the money screen.

Herbert Anderson:

Very cool.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Let’s just do one real quick. Let’s get one together. Let’s go sell us a car. Herb, tell me a car.

Herbert Anderson:

Let’s go with the 2021 … no 2017 Accord.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Okay. You can put a VIN number in here as well, EX, EX-L [inaudible 01:02:34], which one?

Herbert Anderson:

EX.

Danny Zaslavsky:

I’m going to put it this as a test lead. Actually, I’m going to put my last name so the guys know that it’s me. What’s your cell phone number or …

Herbert Anderson:

702 …

Danny Zaslavsky:

702 …

Herbert Anderson:

… 526-0900.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Cool.

Herbert Anderson:

I’m always a test subject for these deals.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Ah. All right. Here’s the …

Herbert Anderson:

Dang, all right.

Danny Zaslavsky:

You should get it in your text in just a second. But hey, Herb, let’s talk about your car. Tracy’s going to call you. We can offer you between 16.1 and 17.6 for your car. You can trade it for between 17.6 and 19, or you could sell on your own for between 18 and 19.5. Here’s how we get the data.

Herbert Anderson:

All right. I just want to show folks. Can you see that? There it is.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yep.

Herbert Anderson:

Text received.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Do me a favor, click See the link in that text. Click on the link for me.

Herbert Anderson:

I’m clicking it.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then let me see what you’re seeing.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. It’s right there.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Boom. Okay. Scroll down a little bit. I want to see if there’s something there special. Does it say increase your offer on their?

Herbert Anderson:

Option? We buy it? What’s the right road?

Danny Zaslavsky:

If you scroll up to the top towards the top?

Herbert Anderson:

What’s the bottom line, value train? Let’s talk about your Honda Accord. I don’t see it, man.

Danny Zaslavsky:

No. That’s fine. We just released a new feature that we’re adding where you as a consumer can click a button and it turns your camera into a Vin scanner, you can go scan your own, then take a couple pictures of your car and then appends all that data right to the file. That’s the beginnings of digital acquisition.

Herbert Anderson:

I love this. Okay. We be super dope. We can see that. But I love this here. But I wanted to get your take on this screen in particular, what you guys are seeing there right now because I used to work for Cox Automotive. I used to sell KBB, ICO, and all these things. Obviously, at the time, the offer, the hard offer was what we were pitching to dealers, “Hey, it’s a guaranteed offer. We write a check. If you don’t want the car, give it to us. We’ll cut you a check, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.”

Herbert Anderson:

As time has progressed, it’d become more and more a believer in the range versus a set price. What’s your gut? Obviously, you guys must have the same philosophy, or maybe it’s because of KBB offers a check versus this is … I don’t know. I mean, why did you guys decide to go with the range versus just a hard, this is what your vehicle is worth?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Two reasons. Number one is that you actually have a choice. If we go back into VINCUE for a second, and we go into our dealer settings, and if you look here in the buying center, specifically, the dealer can set all their own parameters. You can set how high or low you want the reconditioning to take part in the offer, how big or small the margin is. You can choose how wide or narrow you want that offer range to be. You can, obviously, set your sales tax rate. But then you can also use cost to market as a percentage for the low number and the high number.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then you can do what’s called VBC margin projection. on a car, that’s maybe a $10,000 on retail, you can say, “I’m cool with making $1,500 profit versus on a car that’s 60 grand, I want to make 5 grand profit. Then the offers will all land differently based on how you set up your business plan. Then beyond that, all of those offers, all these numbers are market-based, not book-based. They’re all live today. I’ll show you where that’s coming from.

Danny Zaslavsky:

When we get into one of these appraisals, here is a … Let’s open up this … Let’s see here. How about this Sportage. We’ll go and open the offer. When we scroll down, we can see what the consumer was offered. If you remember and on your phone, Herb, this was where your offer ended. You couldn’t scroll down any past this? Well, for the VBC, HM, we give them all the data that actually fills this sheet out..

Danny Zaslavsky:

If you look down here, the live market comparables are all here. You can sort them by age, odometer, whatever you want, then the sold retail transactions are here, and the auction transactions are here. You can then go in and pull comps, either for yourself to make a good decision or for the consumer when having a meaningful conversation.

Herbert Anderson:

Wow, dude. I really like that part, because I mean, imagine calling this customer up after the fact, let’s say that they don’t transact or whatever, and then you have all that information available to you, that’s just a much, much better follow up. I’ve got a lot.

Danny Zaslavsky:

The answer is why we would give you both options to be their arranger, or direct number, direct buy. Also keep in mind, this is the first pencil. You can go in. In the appraisal itself when you open the RMV, you’ve got all the data here. But check this out, I can go in and I can change the offer. If I want to offer them … This was a expensive car. Let me go back to the other one that we were on, this one right here.

Danny Zaslavsky:

In this case, it says, “Sorry, we’re already sold it.” Apparently, we were too late, Everett. But if I wanted to change this offer, and I can say, “You know what? Because look, the ACV is 15.5, that was our top end. maybe 15.5 is our low end, and, oops, and 16,000 is our high end, I can save this. Then I can now send this new offer to the consumer with a note that said, “Hey, we sweeten the deal, or whatever.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Then up here, I’m not going to send it, because this is a live consumer. But up here we would save every offer that’s ever been set, so you can always go back in time. Then this is the thing I didn’t talk about earlier. Once you acquire, once you click that Acquired button, this vehicle actually … This is what’s beautiful about having an all in one system. It goes into …

Herbert Anderson:

Your inventory and then publish it?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Boom. As quickly as [crosstalk 01:09:57]. Yep. Watch. Here, I’ll show you. It goes into right here. See this acquired bucket? I have 79 cars sitting in there.

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. But you would need to have either you website attached to this in order for that to be the experience? I just want to make that distinction so that people …

Danny Zaslavsky:

… don’t. Yeah. Let’s talk about it. Hold on a second. Otherwise you have to, what, wait 24 hours, right?

Herbert Anderson:

Right.

Danny Zaslavsky:

But even then though, what happens is the car goes into acquired, and then you can manage it whatever, then it goes into hold. Hold is … This is our process. You can customize this. Hold for us is service. I can see everything sitting in service. Then NFR, Not Frontline Ready, is as merchandising, and then it goes to the lot. But if I want to grab any one of these and push it directly to online before it’s ever hit the DMS, I can do that and push it live. Now, yeah, if you have a VINCUE site, it’s instant, or if you have a third party site, then it’s as quickly as they’ll receive the feed from us.

Herbert Anderson:

Well, I guess that’s another question, too. If you have this and you don’t have the site, you can still syndicate to the website?

Danny Zaslavsky:

We syndicate, absolutely. Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

Okay.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Totally. Totally.

Herbert Anderson:

I mean it makes sense, the inventory there. But I wanted to ask up.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Totally. That is the whole point, for sure. I wanted to show you. Remember I told you about history. Here’s a 2018 Dodge Journey that I have. On any of these cars you can go into the history tab. That’s every price change we’ve ever made, but then look at this. This is the previous dealer. it was at in 2018 and what they had it listed for online and before that the dealer that sold it brand new and what they had it’s on line four.

Herbert Anderson:

Wow. I like that, too. I like the … Dude, that’s really valuable for you can see the history of that car. That has price fluctuation, too, right?

Danny Zaslavsky:

That’s right.

Herbert Anderson:

[crosstalk 01:12:02]. They dropped it. They raised it. Yeah. That’s cool.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Really to wrap up, unless you have other questions, in the vehicle buying center those service lane, it was to be those swimlanes I was telling you about. These you got inbound third party, outbound service, obviously, appointments, and then trades falls into this deals working tab. This is all the trades fall.

Herbert Anderson:

Let’s talk about the service one really quick. Now it’s not a mining tool. It’s just about the cars that are in your service lane that have appointments for that day and then you can set offers for those vehicles as are there, right?

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. It’s as simple as making a service hang tag with a QR code that says, “We’d like to make you an offer on your car. Scan here.” They scan it. It takes them to the sell to page. They put in their information, and they get an offer. Then they can either say, “I’m interested or I’m not interested.” If they’re interested it alerts somebody in the vehicle buying center and they make a phone call or a text message. If they’re not interested, we leave them alone.

Danny Zaslavsky:

The culture is always know what your vehicle’s worth. We help them stay ahead of that values curve, and then if they decide to trade. Then we incentivize that. The service managers get paid when a consumer converts to either sell or trade. Then obviously, we do the same thing in our vehicle buying center.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. Very cool. All right, sir, is there more that we’re going to look at?

Danny Zaslavsky:

There’s always more, but I think this is a hopefully a really good start igniting some heads.

Herbert Anderson:

No. I love it, dude. This is great, man. Thank you so much for taking the time to show that to us. Like I said, I wanted people to see it. I mean it’s one thing to talk about it, but there’s really actually seeing the demo. Hopefully, it triggers people enough curiosity to reach out to you guys and take that a step further, because I really feel there’s a lot of good information there, and super glad to be able to share that here on the show with everybody.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Thanks Herb. This …

Herbert Anderson:

Yeah. I mean, this is becoming probably the longest podcast and our longest episode and in our history. It’s fine. All right. There is one question that I asked everybody that comes onto the show. We’re going to get to that in a second. But before I do that, really quick, tell us how we can get in touch with you, tell us what are the next steps? How can we reach out?

Danny Zaslavsky:

vincue.com. If you want to schedule a demo, danny@dealercue.com is my email, danny@dealercue.com. Pretty easy. It’s C-U-E, like the line. But vincue.com is the website. I love to help people scale. If you’re just stuck, or trying to figure out how to get from 30 acquisitions to 50, or 50 to 100, or 100 to 200, whatever it is, even those, I love those conversations, because they certainly challenged me to grow. But yeah, just email me.

Herbert Anderson:

Well, I’m going to put you on the spot, and we’re going to put that theory to the test.

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah.

Herbert Anderson:

Hopefully, you don’t hate me. But I asked you this question when we were doing the demo just from the business side, but I feel like it’s a fair question. Let’s put it out there. Every tool has a deficiency. Every tool has room for improvement. What is your place that you’re like, “Man, if we get this to that next level, and then this will be that much better for dealers. To your point, it would help dealers reach their objectives better.”

Danny Zaslavsky:

Yeah. Here’s my dream. I want to be able to know what the right path is for each car. There’s a lot of players in the game. There’s ACV and Backlot, and Auction Edge, and ADESA, and Manheim, and all these different players. From a dealer’s perspective, when I look at a piece of inventory, I want to know what’s the path that is going to produce the best result for that car, because then I can scale. That’s the journey we’re on. We’ve solved I think about 30% of that puzzle. But I also think we’re one of the first to really think about it that way.

Danny Zaslavsky:

It’s not about running faster. It’s about running smarter. We’re on that journey. We have a ways to go, that’s where we’re deficient. We haven’t solved that. But that’s a problem that we created.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. No, I agree. That’s super cool, man. Thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. There is one question that I asked everybody that comes on the show, and that question is, where do you see the automotive industry headed in the next five years and why?

Danny Zaslavsky:

I see a frictionless automotive industry is my answer. Right now it’s being defined by those dealers who are creating a frictionless experience, both on acquisition and on sales. That’s where I see it going.

Herbert Anderson:

Right on. There it is short and sweet, good point. Danny, thanks again for doing this. I really appreciate it. Folks, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for checking this out. Please reach out to Danny, reach out to these folks over at VINCUE, do with them. Again, we’re not for or against anything. Come to your own conclusions. I really feel this is something that you’re definitely going to get a lot of value from. Make sure to check these folks out. That’s all the time we have for today. As usual, we’ll talk later.

Speaker 4:

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Speaker 3:

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