We continue with Joe St John, Chief Customer Officer from AutoFi, in this episode.
Joe is so passionate about his role, that he went on a journey round the states, in disguise taking sales jobs in order to understand the current process good and bad.
What stood out to him, is that managers are exhausted and covering many roles. Customers are more sceptical than in the past and the trust gap with the trade has grown.
We discuss empowering your sales team and giving them the tools to succeed.
Here are the highlights:
{00:52} Back to the floor
{03.33} Transaction time is longer
{04:32} Trust Gap
{05:36} Negotiation Process
{11:35} Empower your sales people
{14:53} Best manager on the journey
{20:09} People make the difference
{26:51} Why change career
{31:23} Break everything
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visitwww.symcotraining.co.uk
Time, welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade podcast in Association of Car Without. The online car-changing destination. Together we share tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service department, and generally put more profit into your department, dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett, or some of you might already know me as Skippy. First thing, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Listen, I'm very keen to talk about this. Okay? You did a road show, a trip around, you put lots of disguises on because people don't know Joe, you're very well known in the US, and you want to see what it's like on the showroom floor.
Now, our trainers, we do lots of stuff on the showroom floor, we'll speak to customers all the time, but you did different. Okay? Sure, the customer's might not know you, but there's lots of managers who would know you. Can you just talk us through exactly what you did, and I'm so keen to find out, look good, the bad, the ugly, what you actually seen from a brand, can you tell us the idea behind it and what you found? Yeah, I loaded my pregnant wife and kids into a sprinter van, and I drove around the country and sold cars. And you're still married? You're still married? We had like Airbnb's and hotels and out working at dealerships, and I would show up, and like, I shaved the beard into a mustache, it was hilarious.
And I would show up and they would give me like a golf shirt, like with a dealership logo and a new employee packet, and I would fill it out in the showroom so everyone would see it, and I would give it to the GM, and I would written a bunch of obscenities on it, and then they would giggle and go shred it. And then I would go, it would just be a new salesman, I'd go start taking ups and working cardials. And you know, first was like, is this last year, 2024? Yeah, so I did 723. And what I saw, and I'll probably do it again this year, like I'll probably go because it, when you're out of it, I mean, I got out of retail in 2013, so a lot has changed since then.
And so for me, I wanted to see what was different and what was the same. And I think that when you like, you probably see this a lot, when you pull yourself out of it, and then you go back to it, you see the world through new eyes, right? Like you literally see, you're like, well, like this is, and I would say that for me, a lot of things really stood out, like a lot of things really just stuck out to me. So management, people, people stacking the deal for you, or you would say, pencil and the deal, they didn't know who you are, they thought you just a brand new idea. They literally thought of some new salesperson.
And I went out and then usually by a couple of days, the gig would be up because I had the deals together and I'm out there, you know, closing and, and then I would start working the desk. So usually the second half of the week, I'd be basically taking numbers out for people. But the first couple days, I would say what I noticed was managers are exhausted. Like sales managers, we keep putting new jobs on them. So when I was a finance director back in the mid 2000s, finance submitted all the cardials, right now at 95% of the deals in the US that dealers, the sales managers submitting and working on the lender piece with the well, the customers out there.
And I would say that we just keep piling stuff on them and they're, they're breaking under the weight of it, which is why they're not training salespeople because they have too much other stuff going on. I would say that time kills deals and gross. And I thought it was going to be way better and faster. For some reason, it felt even slower to me while I was out at the deal. It's almost like it's slower now than it was in the 90s when I was selling cars. And we've got all this technology. And so you would see these things where it's like, Oh, we'll, our radio work can deal. Hey, if you logged him in the serum, Oh, hang on, let me go get him in the serum.
Like you would see all of these start and stops and this back and forth with the customer. And I think dealers, we tell ourselves a story like it might do a second time out of what the manager going out there. Well, if a manager's got five cardials working, they're not going. And so you would have a salesperson going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And a lot of times it wasn't because the customer was negotiating, it was because they wanted to see it at 72 months. They wanted to know what it looked like with five. It was like simple data requests. I would also say that, um, I don't know why I thought this Simon, but I thought customers were going to be nicer today.
I was like, Oh, they're going to be so much better than they used to be. Bro customers are like meaner. Like customer today are like, I would say more skeptical. They trust us less. Like the trust gap between us and the customer, like is grown. And for some reason, I just thought it would try and trunk and try as well. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you should go like go get a golf shirt and go talk to like go take ups like something like they literally like just look at you like, Oh, like that's the vibe. And I was, I'm super friendly. Hey, welcome to dealership on Joe. I'm really excited to give you a great experience today.
Is this your first time here? You're looking for great. Your first time. Well, let me share with you what you're about to be a part of like, I'm a very vibrant and happy and like, like, people were just like, and I think it's because the trust gap is there. And then I would say, but we cause that we cause that because they get so much information online, you go and book a holiday, you got all the information, go and book a flight, you got all the information, you decide which one we don't go into travel agency more. And we're still trying to put them into an old travel agents. That's why the trust gap is growing.
So where in Italy would you like to go? No, I've already told you I want to go to Rome. I want to go to Vint and like, okay, so yeah, we shoved them into this. And then I would say that it was shocking to me to watch the negotiation process. I've negotiated thousands of cardio's like I've closed thousands of cardio's as a salesperson as a sales manager. And I never saw it then I see it now. Salesperson gets back, they go to the desk and the customer literally just does this. Oh, right, like they just like listen to the wheel switch. And this is what it looks like from the customer side, you ready, Simon?
All right, let me show you what our manager is willing to do. And they like slide it across to you and then they put their hands and then they just stare at you. And you watch the like, it's like this weird moment that happens where the customer's anxiety goes to the roof, really, the salesperson anxiety goes to the roof. And it's just like this unnecessary thing. And it also distracts great salespeople from doing what we really want them to do. Think about how many great salespeople that had all the digital in the world that never really made what they could have been because they were just focused on working cardels. I just want to just get them on paper and try and close this cardio.
What do great salespeople get them to fall in love with the car so that when they go to work the carto, it's easy, right? Like one of my favorite salespeople I sold cars with their name summer, they were a Starbucks barista that got like blue hair, like total Gen Z like kid, right? And selling 20 plus cars a month every month like clockwork. And I asked someone, I was like, hey, what makes you so great at selling cars? And their response was, you know, like, I just am good at reading people and figuring out their vibe. And then I find a car that fits that vibe. And then it's really easy to get them to fall in love with it.
And then everything takes care of itself. That's actually the perfect answer. Like that's what the answer should be. And so I would say that's the other thing that I confronted was man, salespeople today are wildly different than when I started selling cars. Like the Gen Zers, we have this huge turnover problem happening in the US because people that started selling cars in the like 20s and 21 and 22, it was a different market in the market condition. And so now they're having to actually sell cars in a company. It's not overtaking anymore. It's not, I listen, whole South Florida was, I've got one got four other people want it. You wanted to know what that's that markets we're in the push market gone.
Yeah. And so and so what you have is a lot of those people are leaving and they're getting replaced with a 23 year old that was working at an Amazon warehouse, which is what it used to be. Right. Yeah. And I think the whole we're struggling with is I'm gonna say something controversial. I think this Gen Z Salesforce Simon has more potential than any of the last three or four generations. Like they are, if you can unlock that potential, they're so good at selling. But I think the problem is, is we're struggling to figure out how to unlock that potential. Right. We're struggling as an industry to empower them with tooling and information that makes it feel seamless and easy for them to execute a process.
And so, like, all right, here's what I want you to do. I'm going to draw this green line. Here's a sharpie on the smiley face. Here's what I want you to go tell them. And we don't give them tooling that makes it easy to get a customer to say yes. When I was out selling cars, one part of what I was doing was I would start with paper and then I would use technology to present numbers. So I'd use auto-fi to present the numbers to the customers. The shift in the ease of the cardio by presenting everything interactive on a screen with a customer was like wild. So, like, I sell the cars on paper and then I'd be like, okay, I'm going to try auto-fi now.
And I would go out and I said, I'm like, all right, Simon, here's the car we just drove. This is the stock number. Is this the vehicle you'd like to own? And you go, yep. And I go, great. Then let's build your deal together. And I would turn my chair like this and I would turn the computer screen and you know the customer would turn sideways like this with me. And I would just read what's on the screen. Okay. So with 10% down at 60 months, you're at a 782 payment, is that what you would like to do? And you know what the customers would do? They go, okay, we'll put five grand. Okay, five grand down.
60 months, no, I'm running back and forth, back and forth. I would just play around with it and overwhelmingly, and this may not be normal for everyone doing it this way, but I would have a customer play around with it and go, okay, I'll do that one. Wait, what? Like, not ask for more on their trade, not ask for like, okay, I'll do that. Okay, well, what's the rate you're using? Well, we're using 785. I think I can give it a great thing. Click continue. Let's submit it to the lenders. It'll go to the top three to five for your profile. You'll let the banks compete for your business, which one do and then you pick what's best for you.
Like, I never had to get up. And so the flow, this, sorry, I'm cutting off. I hate this, I'm loving this. There's some real good science behind why that works. The fundamentals, why people buy things as comparison value, scarce, the urgency. Okay, they're not as Robert Chaldini. We'll talk about these fundamentals that have to be satisfied. Okay. You and Charlie, you can have been through his institute. Oh, wow. Absolutely. So comparison, if we can't satisfy comparison within the dealing process, they need to get from somewhere else. And what you've done is you're letting the customer have their own comparison. What is it over 48 months, 42 months? Let's go. You guys will do 72 months, which we think's mad on this side of the pond.
Okay. Four months. So 96 months now. 96 months. And that's a car, not a house you're talking about. Wow. That's it. But it's the comparison. So actually, they satisfy their fundamental need for comparison. If we don't do that, they have to go and get it from somewhere else. And that's where you create the shopper. Yes. Yes. Like Simon, that was my experience. I, and then I told people it auto-fi. So this is like the deeper story, right? Yeah. So I have guys that work with me and auto-fi that were a hard code or a core retail. My director of change management or senior director now, because he just got a promotion. He was my general sales manager when I was a general manager.
And I told him, it was like, Matt, you got to go try selling cars with this because I've never seen anything like it. And he was like, I don't know. I was like, bro, you just need to go. And so I got him to go work some cardials using the technology. And I can remember him coming to me like, bro, it shouldn't be this easy. Like it shouldn't. And I was like, I told you, I told you, like sheet of paper equals resistance, turn the screen and let them play with it. And they do exactly what you just described, Simon. It's okay. I'll do that one. Yeah. But well, actually, I'm going to be controversial now, but I'm just thinking some of the deal groups I work with.
And we'll go in there and say, you know what, leave Paul. Paul's in the corner. Okay. He's selling me 35 cars a month. Okay. He's a rock star. Okay. He doesn't follow our process. Okay. But we let him off because he sells so many cars there. Every dealership's got that Paul in the corner. When you go and have a look at what Paul's doing, they give Paul access to Trent value the trades. They get Paul access to stack the deal. They get Paul the access to give all the information there. But we don't give the other sales people that because we don't trust them. They're not selling us 35 cars a month. Maybe if you gave them.
Guys who are just listening to this. Okay. Joe was just rolled back in his chair. He's always a rolling in the back of his head because he has this conversation every day. I'm sure. Well, Simon, actually, I don't and I should because I've never thought about it like that at my dealership. So when I was I was at a 500 unit Toyota store is working the desk. It's where I sold cars at. For as a finance manager, it was a big machine in a small market. We were the massively dominant player. Yeah. I had a group of sales people. We actually called them sales managers because we wanted them to have a title that has a prestige and we gave them access to everything and they all sold their own cars and they were all doing 30 something cars a month.
And then we had our sales people who we like were managing and you had, you know, eight cars, six cars, 12 cars, 15. And I never it's until this moment and I hate that I haven't realized this because I'm pretty dense sometimes. Like maybe not maybe the reason they were selling 30 cars a month is because they were empowered and they didn't have to do that back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Like, I mean, that's that's a real lesson, Simon. We are preaching to some of the converter. I'm sure some people is listening saying, yeah, yeah, I'm doing this. But hey, listen, if you're still having that paper four square going out to present the deal there and listen, I'm guessing both of us use four square at some point there and I don't want to knock.
I don't want to knock that. But actually, if we're still to people trust the computer now to have the information, new cars, everyone's done the new car deal before they've come to us anyway online because the OEM, the manufacturer, that's what they have. It's going to be the same with you, Scott says. I'm going to show you something that'll blow your mind. And for your listeners at home, what I'm showing Simon right now or Skippy as he's known in the industry is I was out when I was out visiting dealers, a dealer group I was at. Literally, this is how they penciled every single cardio. And you can see it was written down on a sheet of paper in Sharpie.
Nothing printed out. This is a nice full sheet of paper guys. And it's but it does have a smiley face on it. Like I'll get on my Starbucks receipt. Okay. And that's what I'm at this sort of like, no, this is how we work out. So you don't even print out the like legitimate, if we're no, no, we work it with it. And that's still a common practice that is out there. It is crazy. You go and hire a car from Hertz. That wouldn't happen, would it? No, no, the industry, it just would not happen there. That's that's really interesting. So listen, okay, the other thing I want to have a look at, it's so you're undercover, okay, you're the brand yourselves person, okay, this is what a manager's there.
How did managers treat you? What did you see were the great managers there? How did they help? I don't know, is it load your lips or were they just, did they listen, did they come out and coach? What separate the great managers from the all right ones? So if I'm being really honest, I, the best manager I worked with is probably 24. And most of the time when I would show up to work in deals, I like, managers would almost be caught off guard because I would show up with everything ready to go to work a cardio. And so I would come to this already, get everything ready to go. This is what like, this is what their payoff is.
Like I would just have my ducks in a rub, like, all right, get everything together. Let's go work this cardio. And I was very active. Like I was out taking ups. I was getting customers. I was not standing around. I'm not there for practice. I mean, technically I am. So a lot of the catch them off guard. The best manager I worked with was probably 24, 23, 24 is young. It's only sold cars for a couple of years, have been really good at selling cars. But not just my deals, every deal that was at the desk, if he asked a question and you didn't give him an answer that made sense, or you even gave an answer that made sense, but you didn't sound confident, he would just get up and go talk to the customer.
Like there was no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I was just sitting down talking to the customer and I would follow around with him and he was like, all right, so you like, and so for me, that was probably and he's running really great numbers. And I think it's because the salespeople know like, you're not going to pull one over, he's not just going to take your word for it, involved in the cardio. And then I saw some managers that there's a lot of managers that seem really disconnected, but it's because they're doing tons of other stuff. Yeah, so lots of managers that are on the phone with the dealer train.
They're talking to the use car department there. Like they're just like, they're just in this motion. Like this is what it looks like. Just not stop all day every day. Not bad people, not lazy, just doing everything else. They're just doing everything else. And then when it's time to work at Cardo, they'll set it all aside to work with the cardio. But they're not proactively pulling everybody together to train. There was one store I was at that when you would get there for your shift, you would meet on the showroom and they would do like a pre meeting before the shift. But most of them, you just showed up and you were like, I was shocked that some of the stuff I saw, this is like real car guy stuff.
And my dealership, when I was a manager, you had to check out and I would check you out right yellow or green. It was in our CRM. I didn't know that that wasn't what everybody did. There was this for people who just leave and I'd be like, you didn't check out like, how does the manager know who's here who's not here right now? Like people like, oh, it's five o'clock. I'm out of here. And I'd be like, we're going to go check in with the debt. Like there was, I saw lots of variants in the levels of systems and controls and the levels of like manager engagement. There were some stores where managers seemed like almost disinterested in what I was doing.
And then there were some stores that like the one I was describing where that manager's up and getting involved in it. There's some stores where they're really coaching salespeople at the desk. I had one manager who would literally, okay, here's what I want you to tell them and tell me what's going on with this. Someone's, okay, here's how I want you to go do this and if other managers, they would just slide it to me and then go back to doing what they were doing. So I saw a really wide variety. And they thought you would bring yourselves person one week in the job. They still slide a deal to you. Just slide it to me.
Wow. Okay. And we wonder why turnovers, we wonder why staff turnover is huge. I used to, I'm like, bro, I told you they got 2500 down the train to be at 550. You just gave me eight grand down, eight 80. Do I need to get a real salesperson? Do I need to get a veteran? Okay. Now I got it, bro. And then I go up, hey, congratulations. Right? Like, it's, you know, bright news and say you're 250 a month. You're at 600 a month. That's brilliant news, isn't it? As oh, yeah, man. Yeah. I would also say that like the one thing I would call out that thing was a really good thing is the follow up tools today are way better than they used to be.
So I was using Drive Center because of CRM and I loved it. And a couple of the stores I was at, I closed card deals with sending people gifts and videos like the amount of times I was like, what up the not? Jarenda, this is Joe Saint John, your salesperson out here. Hello, Subaru. This is your, and I would like send videos directly to customers and they would get it in a text message and immediately start texting me. And I was shocked at how good those tools were at me. Like I closed the deal with like a gift of somebody doing this and walking forward with their hand. And then the customer said back to gift like this.
And it like it was playful and fun. And it allowed me to like I could extend my personality beyond the walls of the showroom. So in this digital age, to people still buy people, if that's still as important as it's always been. Yeah, I think it's a difference maker. I think that there's a lot of people that buy in spite of people. Right? Like I think the car that they want. Like my mom bought a Subaru not too long ago and had that experience, which is like, I'm guess I'm gonna buy it. But I do not like this guy. Like I think people still buy and spite of people if we have what they want and it's priced effectively.
There's a lot of factors. But you can't deny that it's not a people business because you could have those people at your dealership, one doing 30 cars and one doing 10. And so for me, what's the difference? Are it's the people and I when I travel to NADA, we have a special rate at an ADA with the Ritz Carlton and Tyson's Corner. I still book it through the app. But when I get there, the reason I book it is when I get there, like, Oh, Mr. St John, welcome back. I go to the enticed restaurant and bar. I sit down and Sasha immediately slides me in Manhattan because it's eight 30 at night on a Monday.
And I just landed and asked me, do you want the burger, Mr. St John or do you want the biryani? Because those are the two things that I always order. And it like makes me it's wild. Like I could say anywhere. That's where I choose to stay. And I think that it's those things that are psychologically and subconsciously influencing us to want to move forward. The reason why I said with this technology, and you are the chief customer officer at Auto Fi. Okay. And I'm going to get you explained exactly what that means now for people on this side of the pond. Can it tell us a little bit about how Auto Fi helps speed up the process?
Okay. For someone who's never heard about it. And you know how these works, make it not a salvage because people on this side of the pond can't buy it anyway. Here's what here's what Auto Fi does. We basically empower a sales person to put the real deal in front of the customer the moment they get back from a test drive that's fully interactive and engaging for the customer that helps the customers to close faster, helps the dealer to hold more gross, helps lead to better CSI. And we automate a lot of things. It's interactive with the desk. The desk can change things. And it changes it out there on the showroom. But what it allows is me to get back from a test drive and go to the workflow I just described to you, where I don't have to go to the desk for the first stacking, I can turn my screen and go, here's what we've got.
What would you like to do? And then we automate, I think our real secret sauce is a big lag in the process is submitting to the lenders. So then you go to the desk, the manager submits, it comes back with the rate, we automate all of that, basically using mountains of data, so millions of approvals to decide what would be the top three to five lenders for Simon's credit profile on this deal structure on this unit of inventory, based on the probability of an approval at the lowest rate with the biggest back end available. And so we're like building out a work stream that allows me to submit to the lenders and get a better probability of callback than if a manager does it in just guesses.
And the data is pretty overwhelming. Most managers when it comes to submissions don't have any logic in how they're submitting. They're using gut feel based on my TD rep was here last week, they brought me golf ball and told me about a new program. Let's try TD out and see what happens. And we don't, we analyze millions of transactions and approvals. And we submit to the lenders that have the highest likelihood of getting the best approval for that customer while also protecting the dealers profit in the process. Are there many dealers in the US? And again, I don't know that market, but I was speaking to someone in the Australian automotive industry, great dealer, really knows his stuff.
And I was speaking to Jeff, hi, Jeff, friend of the show. And Jeff is not a client, he's a real good friend. And we're talking about you go put the deal in front of people as quick as you can. And he was saying that Holden still there's this salespeople sold the car and then you go to the finance manager. And then they said, and I can remember when I started 17 years old, you'd sell the car first and I was thinking, well, why would someone buy a $28,000 car? Okay, not knowing how much a month is going to cost them. You wouldn't mortgage a house without knowing how much the mortgage is going to be.
You wouldn't buy a can of coat with that. Does that still happen where you have this, we used to go and bolt on business measures years ago. Sell the car first and then you go over them to the business manager. That doesn't stop it. That's the normal business model in the US. So 99% most likely that's a made up number right now. But the vast majority of dealers, the salesperson sells the car and then finance does the securing of the finance, which is typically done by the desk. So the presentation of the payments and the F&I product menu upsell. And then they do the contracting. Wow. I sure we've and auto-fight, you just bring all that rut to the beginning.
Rod that because it's that multi-pimacy important thing for me. Yes. And you can empower, we built our software to be flexible enough to empower multiple different strategies and work streams for the dealer. We have some dealers that it's about closing the customer on the payment as fast as possible, getting the submission, choosing the best rate for the customer with the rate mark up applied, right? And then getting that into the F&I office and as quick of a process as possible so they can present the F&I products. We have other stores where they do everything on the showroom and the salespeople sell the F&I products. And we have stores like that that are doing the entire deal start to finish from the time they get back from the desk drive.
So sell people doing the finance deal, everything. And the business manager then is doing the admin basically. Is that right? Yeah. So I'll give an example of a model. We have a dealer group we do business with where they have basically their sales managers or sales manager slash F&I managers. They can kind of do both. They're driving everything out there. They have a biller. I don't know what they call it, but she worked at a credit union like breaking down cardials. So she was a funder. She would do the funding. Make sure everything was right. Every time they sell a car, she puts the e-contracts together, has it on an iPad and gives it the salesperson that signs the customer out.
And so that group of stores, they're getting from back from the test drive to contracting in 20 minutes. It's 22 minutes, 24 minutes, month by month. They're in 20 minutes from post test drive to contract and taking their card on. Wow. And do you have data on what that does to their gross, their profit? Yeah. For that group, it's up. I'll give you the no specifics, but just overall, how I have you so you did a case study on them since moving from paper to technology, their front to back incremental profit per deal is up $911. Like think about that. And what's wild to is their average units per salesperson when they went from paper to a technology in power, checkout using Autofy, their average salesperson has got up 48% in units per month.
That's the driver that in the US is the one that I think is the least talked about, but most valuable is how do I get my 10 car average or my eight car average salespeople to sell double? Because my cost is about the same and it just all rolls down to net profitability. Cool. I love these stories. We could go off on this one on the interview. We just have a chat here and it says like we're at NADA. But I'm always, when I speak to people like yourself, David Anderson's in the world, there's so many trainers we've had. And I can't can't start listening. I'll be in trouble by missing out someone. Jennifer Suzuki saying, you missed me, Simon.
I'm always amazed. Why does someone go from being general measure of a Toyota dealership and good money, right? And then going into the training world, you went and invited the F&I train. Why does someone do that? What was your motivation to get in the training world? It wasn't my choice. My dealer sold the dealership by race. I was still there. The best thing that ever happened to me, I actually Frenchy met me for lunch because I called him. I was like, Hey, he's selling the store. What am I going to do? And he was like, you're a free agent now. So he flew his plane to the town. It was living in took me out to lunch.
Simon, I was a wreck. Like I was all I'd ever wanted to be was a GM. Like that was my goal. I was going to be a GM someday. I'd gone to an ADA dealer academy. And he took me to lunch and he gave me the best advice I've probably ever received. He said, dude, let me tell you something. Let me tell you something. You know, the path you are on very rarely ever ends up where you think it's going to go. But it is all the shit you learn on that journey that gets you ready for your next adventure. And you my friend are ready for your next adventure. We're going to do something magical and like, convince me, the most valuable thing I could do was go help other people to figure out and find success in this industry.
And if I put myself out there in that way, the return of everything else financially, everything else would all fall in line. And it was so true. The more I focused on helping other people in the industry figure it out and get better at it, the fruits of that in my own life have been way more than would have been had I stayed running a dealership and just done that in perpetuity. And again, people listen to this, they can hear it coming through this because they you have that energy, you believe in the industry still is in your blood. Where's that energy come from? Is it still the path? Have you keep the passion there after all these years?
Ben, go spend time at dealerships. Like, I love it. It's this like, my dad dropped out of college to sell Subaru's in the 70s, because he was failing out of school. His life was in shambles and he basically was selling shoes at the mall part time went to buy a Subaru and they're like, bro, you should sell Subaru's showed up and they were like, what? Your late shift started and I was like, well, I told you guys, I'm in college like, oh, that didn't go to work. So he dropped out and started selling cars. And my life was made unbelievable with because of that. I got to study. So when I was in college, I got to do a summer at Oxford.
I was at Lady Market Hall. I got to do a summer at Cambridge. I was at Modlan. Like I literally had these experiences that were all paid for by dollars that were generated by parents that worked at a dealership. If anyone understands the power of this business to transform people's lives, it's some of the children in this business like me. And I look out there and I see story after story after story of people who got their life together through the car business and created a future for them and their children and their families that is wildly different than any other path they could have gone because most of those other doors were closed for them.
And for me, I have this insane love for this motor trade because it's been such a meaningful part of the story of my life and of so many people I care about. I have a good friend, Chris McThur and he's on LinkedIn. You should look him up. He's one of the top state farm salespeople in the world. And he was a 22 year old college graduate with no prospects. It was like a C student. He borrowed his dad's suit and walked like three miles to a career fair. And the only person that would talk to him was basically me at a car dealership because I was hiring salespeople. And he now, like he's his success is just been unbelievable.
And it was that like opportunity our business gave him that helped him to find that way. And that story is not unique. That story is told over and over and over again. And I love getting to be a part of that. And I feel it my mission to do everything I can to help this business to keep evolving and moving into the future so that it creates opportunities for future generations to experience the same thing that the car business gave me. And we're not going to be replaced by AI. We're not going to be, automation is going to take over. All the different tools that should make us better and more effective. I use AI all the time.
Yeah. Yeah, we do. So I want to go backwards then. Okay, you've learned so much doing work and for audify and teaching at the academy. You see all the good, the bad, the ugly, everything there. And wrapping up, I want to go backwards now. If you went in back into general measure, your own your own business, and I'm driving the way I'm thinking about this is someone's listening to this thinking, okay, I like Joe. He's learned lots from what's the good, the bad, the ugly out there. What would you do if you bought your own deal or you're the general manager in a dealership? What would you do in the first 90 days? Where would you start looking at the process?
I would, this is I can't believe I'm saying this a lot. I would break everything and rebuild. Like I would literally analyze the financial stability of the company. And then I would do everything I could to reorient us towards a customer focused business. I like what Jeff Bezos says, right? The customer interest in the shareholder interest are never misaligned. And as the the only shareholder, I would basically build a structure that delivers a seamless customer experience. It makes my dealership the easiest place in America to buy a car. And I already know how I would implement that. I know the team structure I would use, it would be informed by Stanley McChrystal's team of teams.
And I would basically have pods that work together to deliver customer experience first and everything else flows off of that. And for me, I would shift managers from being managers into being leaders. If they weren't willing to be leaders, I would be developing people to become leaders. And we would think of our dealership as a talent machine that creates leaders to help inform or help empower our growth. I would move away from a traditional model of like salespeople, then F and I, and I would start with a highly empowered desk that I have high expectations of performance for and highly empowered salespeople that I have high expectations of performance for. And I would, that's how I would build it.
I see a lot of people that get new stores that are so scared of disrupting what's going on that they let a bad old system just keep running. And man, I like, I've learned too much to not trust the learnings I have by observing others do it. It would be, I would regret forever not being bold enough to go in there and get the changes happening. And that's terrifying. I don't want to do that. So let me be very clear. That's not a career path I want to go down. But man, if something went wrong here or whatever, and I was back in retail and this path ended, like French said, I was right from the next party, I would break the model and install a new one.
And it would be a hyper customer centric. It would have really highly empowered sales assets that are really good and love it. And it would have really great leadership team in the middle because it would be leaders that managers. And we would handle all the automation of administrative duties that we possibly could so that everyone was oriented to taking great care of our customers. Leadership comes up again and again, what's some of the best books, some of the best podcasts on leadership you come across? But I read obsessively, people that know me are like, it's annoying. I'm reading all the time. My favorite leadership book is probably extreme ownership by Jocko, Willink, and Lafe Babin.
I almost want to get to say my bag of books. I have a giant bag of books here in the office that I hand out to people all the time. From a leadership perspective, I think it is the clearest example of what good leadership looks like in the lessons of when you finally take full ownership, how empowering it is to accept the good and the bad outcomes generated by what you do. The book again is called Extreme Ownership. Extreme ownership. Yeah, extreme ownership. And then from a business structure, I love General Stanley McChrystal's team of teams. I think we have this top down hierarchy that's really inflexible and not adaptable to the changes of the world.
And he writes a book of how basically the US Army restructured their entire organization away from a top down hierarchy into an interconnected set of teams and how they did that. And it's a really fascinating read to think about the structures of new business. Too many to list, Simon. We could have a whole not gap. We just talk about books we love. But that's what happens to Motor Trade. You've got the service department, the parts department, sales department, the internet department years ago. It's breaking down all of those departments working together. If you mentioned Robert Chaldin, his book Influenza Science and Practice, one of the best tones out there on the scientifically validated things you can do to increase the probability that somebody says yes to you.
That's another great one. It is a great book. Absolutely great book. Listen, I love this show. We could talk all day. If you could leave just one thing. So you speak at an idea conference, you speak at so many other conferences all the time. Okay. If there's just one message you want to leave our audience with, okay, any message you like to leave them with? It's the one I started with. Time kills deals and gross. Like, let that inform everything you're doing because it is hurting you and you don't realize it. Joe, listen, it's been worth the wait to get you on the podcast. I love it. Heaps. How do people get hold you? LinkedIn, what's the reason why I define you?
If I'm your LinkedIn, Joe, say John, you can email me directly at joeattautofy.com. It's J-O-E at autofy.com. Come to the Autofy website, www.autofy.com. It's got all our contacts on there. If you ever want to reach out, shoot me an email. Find me on LinkedIn and I'm a fast responder. I will respond in GIF. It's my favorite form of communication. If you call the GIF, we're not friends anymore. I look forward to connecting. Listen, it's been great to have you on the podcast. Thank you again. Thanks. Give me a appreciate you. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk.
Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett through LinkedIn. Thank you.
