It is with great pleasure that we interview John Veichmanis, CEO of Carwow.
John certainly has admirable credentials, with 30 years experience working for global brands including Dell, Apple and Skype. The second half of his career has been focused on helping to build scalable marketplaces for Expedia, Farfetch and Carwow.
We delve into some of the myths around Carwow. How they have grown and changed in the last four years to become a marketplace that is trusted by customers, dealers and OEMs alike.
The future is very exciting for them: developing Ai to improve listing quality on auctions and building new capabilities on dealer facing tools.
An insightful conversation for all.
Here are the highlights:
{09:40} Sequencing priorities across teams
{11:30} Consumer Trends
{15:35} Race to the bottom
{24:50} Consumers compare 7 cars and then enquire on 5
{25:56} Only 30% of customers buy from cheapest
{32:29} Good engagement on used EV sales
{34:38} Ai checking damage on cars
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.
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Welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade Podcast, an association with Symco Training. This is the weekly podcast where we share best practice tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service department and generally put more profit into a dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett. Now, some of you probably already know me as Skippy. I will start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. I'm really excited today to be dealing with John McManus. John McManus is our CEO of CarWow. I'm so excited to have him here to talk all about not just CarWow, but the Motor Trade in general, where he's come from. I think this is going to be really, really good. The first thing I want to say is is it John or JV? What do you prefer, sir? It's nice to connect. Most people call me JV because my surname is impossible to pronounce even my wife. So let's go with JV. Thank you. I tried very hard and I obviously pronounced it wrong. Very well. It's a Kupa name. JV. Well, listen, a lot of our dealers, a lot of the audience might not know you directly yet. So let's start with some quickfire questions just to get to know you. Amazing. What's the first car you ever owned, John? Oh goodness. It was in 1997, a Ford Fiesta, 1.1 L in red. In red? The L in red, we love it. So what about a dream road trip for you? Would that be a nightmare, a road trip? Oh, no, I love road trips. So probably, I see I took six weeks off, I bought a joint car, and I drove all the way around Europe with my wife and three kids. Wow. I had a port of Panamara, it was amazing. So we could fit all the kids in, but it was a really good fun surprise. So I'll probably definitely ask my best road trip today. Did you do all the old-point passes and stuff like that? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we even took it to the aorta as well as part of the road trip. Wow. Yeah, it was amazing. So what do you reckon is the favourite feature on a car that maybe people underestimate? Well, that's a good question. And for me, adding more and more cameras to the car, based just when you're parking, you're actually, you're scratching the alloys, etc. Those are the things I think have passed a little bit on the phone. So when people ask me what options you could be, I'd say, there's some kind of thing. Yeah, I think more of the cameras just to sort of make it parking easier, sort of voice correction wheels. I think about Manchester Airport last week. I wish I had that. And the 360, yeah, exactly for that one. Yeah, the 360 is actually really cool, so that's fine. So this might be controversial. EV or ICE, internal combustion engine for you. Which one, JV? Oh, goodness, that's a good question. My heart goes EV, although I've just swapped out an EV to a petrol hybrid for practicalities purposes. But I think long term EV. Yeah, I'm exactly the same at the moment. My wife, we've just went EV. I want to go EV, but the distance I'm doing, I'm still need to be... I'm one cycle away, I think. But it's... Yeah, yeah. OK, that's about your car back, Ren. What about you? Do you have a go-to motivational song before a big meeting or a presentation or anything like that? I'm going to ask a good question. I've brought up in Manchester, I love dance music, so I probably say, I'm over to space by the apology. It's good high tempo, lots of energy. Oh, OK, good choice. Good choice, sir. OK. Are you an early bird or a night owl? I'm a total night owl, yes. I tend to work quite late into the evening. It's definitely going to have my best ideas and probably get the most done actually. I'm a total night owl. My wife's the opposite. Complete opposite, yeah? You can get best things done at night and work on it. OK. Now, this question, I've done a bit of research before on this episode, so I might know the answer to this one. But are you Apple or Android? What would you do? I'm absolutely Apple fan. I spent a few years working in Apple. So I don't have to be on that one. I used to do that. I thought it was still asking. I know something. OK, so what's your best at the app? The app you're using, if I'm the most, that's not work related? A good question. Now, Duolingo, I'm learning Spanish. So we have a car work. We have a car work business in not just the UK, but also Germany is fine. And I'm trying to learn Spanish so I can speak to the team in Madrid. Very good. It's amazing. It's a great app, actually. Quite inspirational in terms of how they've built that thing. It's really, really fun. Cool. And last one then, I think I might know this as well based on what you've just done. City break or beach holiday? What's your next holiday going to be? Well, kind of here I get trouble with work to just a quite cool city. So I go beach holiday. Cool. Listen, nice to get to know you. So listen, can you tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming CEO of Carwell? So I understand if I've got this right, you had Tom with Del, Apple, Skypiff. I've got that right. Can you share a bit about your background and where you come from and how you found yourself to Carwell? Yeah, of course. Can you answer my question? So my anniversary working next year, I've been working for 30 years. So quite a basic milestone. Interestingly, I started my career at left university in 95. And the only I went to phone me up, I studied marketing. It asked me if I'd ever been on the internet. Obviously this was 95. We're not that many people had. So it's quite remarkable now. And as to be able to be in the internet, I wanted somebody to come and build that first level website. And I think it was to have been the only marketing graduate that was in that day. And I actually get the job. And so it's always code on to build sites. So I started out as a co-host. You can code this web engineer. So that was an engineer. And which I've learned. But I've always been interested in business science and studied marketing. But it's quite a component I think in terms of, I suppose I was building websites before where it was that popular. So it's always given me this real enthusiasm to innovate and try and think about the next steps I had, particularly for a technology perspective. That's been really important in the jobs that I've taken, but also the companies that I've worked for. So I'm really lucky to work with lots of your technology companies. So it's quite a work to do as responsible for marketing in Europe. I worked at Apple. So I was working on the launch of the Apple Store in Europe, the online store. I got to work on the launch of the first app about iPhone back in 2007, which was pretty amazing. And then I moved from Apple to work for Silverblade products from the port. Skype from eBay. And we then sold it on to Microsoft a couple of years later. I was responsible for monetization. So I hope you take millions of people that were downloading Skype. Every day for free. I hope you really move that the skutt.com platform from a download center to an e-com business where you can generate some revenue from the premium services that we're offering to our customers. So you're really interested in trying to earn. I moved to Expedia. That was my first Apple marketplace back in 2011. I was really marketing that. I was currently running demand generation. So spending most of Expedia's money on Google ads. And I got into my early 40s, so a slight midlife crisis. And we're reflecting on that. I've looked at everything that I did in my careers. I really wanted to work in a startup or a scale of business with a massive margin through kids, starting my own business. I'm a little bit risky, so I went to a business called Falfact, which was a luxury clothing business. It was about 400 people. And we scaled that up to IPO back in 2019. So I finished that and then joined Power BI, which is my third marketplace in the last decade. Well, listen, JV, over that time, you've worked with some amazing leaders. Can I ask you, before you go to Cowell, are there any mentors or leaders that really stood out that you thought, ah, so right now you say, what would someone do? How would they have done it? Because I'm just thinking, some of the people you must have worked with at those times. It must be sensational. Yeah, I feel so so lucky. Yeah, some amazing bosses and amazing experience. I think definitely something that stays with me through both Falfact and Carlo is thinking about sequencing. So, I think that's the CEO of XP, you know, as dad's now CEO at Uber. I think it was phenomenal at making sure that the sequencing of the priorities across teams were seamlessly joined together. So you didn't have one team running a slightly faster pace and marketing team running a faster pace and product. And so, which ultimately leads to a disconnect on the probability of success diminishing significantly. He was phenomenal at making sure that you could invest in each of the teams at an appropriate rate or keep them in sequence and keep them moving at pace. And that led to the normal execution where we're at speed in terms of growth rates, but also just driving efficiency into the business. And that's something that's really stayed with me because it's easy to say, it's actually really, really difficult to do. It's something I would never have thought about. But again, marketing is going ahead full steam ahead. Products are not ready. Of course, it's kind of obvious when you say it. But I think you're both environment where you're really moving at pace. It's hard to get right. So that's, yeah, I've worked with some amazing, amazing leaders. I feel really lucky. Am I right in thinking you were at Skype when it was acquired by Microsoft? Have I got that right? So once the deal closed, I left and then went to XP. I was a son of a mapper so much that I cannot work with Microsoft. I'm trying to tell you the truth. So I've had to expect you have to deal with those. So what was about car wear? Why are you here? OK, what attracted you to the car wear business? Yeah, three things. I think first of all, in my personal life, I've always heard too much of my family's money on cars. It's a category that I have a huge energy and passion for. And I think that there is a need for a marketplace. Where my job at Carras, the CEO, is more and more consumers move online to start that car changing journey, to start the research phase, to short this thing. It's my job to hold and make good decisions, and ultimately drive them back into dealerships. Our dealer partners are the experts in a particular product, in a particular brand, in particular models, and the partnership between ourselves in terms of us helping consumers navigate those early choices, building that shortage, then getting them back into the dealerships. I think there's a huge opportunity given the growth in content that's being consumed online by consumers looking to buy that next car, or in our case, also sell the role. Well, I suppose this brings me on to your acquisition trail recently. I think it's 2021. Whizzle come on, the auction sites. Now, car well is big in sourcing cars for dealers in the auction side of it. Going up against, I suppose, we buy car motorways. I think it's early this year. Audevy with Auto Express, Evo, Carbuyer recently, within the last couple of weeks, grid serve leasing. Can we expect more acquisitions? We've been busy signing up. We've been busy. Can we expect more acquisitions? Or are you going to consolidate for a while? Or I suppose, what's the scale of the vision? What are you looking to build? Yeah, that's a great question. I think as we mentioned, the clear trend is that more and more consumers are going online to really think about that car changing process. There are so many more choices to make. And I think what we do really well is we help people navigate those choices in a fun, entertaining, and in an engaging way, but ultimately, consumers trust us. Somebody watches one of man's car reviews. They really trust what we say in our perspectives. And we feel that when you think about this particular category, these are big decisions to make for consumers. And they want to make sure they get the right car. We talk about, we have repositioned car work from being a new price car comparison site to becoming a destination car changing. We want to help you with those difficult choices and do that in a fun and entertaining way. And I think over the course of the last decade, we've proven we are really good at that. Millions of people use car work, whether they're watching our videos, whether they're reading the content on the site, whether they're configuring cars, whether they're valuing their old car. I think we have proved our worth that. And our focus is how do we attract millions of more people into our ecosystem? But the reason we ultimately want to do that is then connect the online world back to the offline world. We don't believe that 80% of car buyers are going to buy their car online. We think this is an only channel play where online and offline needs play really well together. So my vision is ultimately how do I help consumers through content where they build brilliant technology to connect those consumers to our dealer and OEM partners. And that allows them to either those partners to sell cars, or is that the case in the UK also source cars for that platform. And the reason I think we're really important is that it's expensive, difficult to build the level of engagement we have with millions of people, like very, very expensive and difficult to do. And we want to consolidate and keep doing that really well, but with a view to help your partners. Hopefully that's what gets us. Yeah, I suppose car work really sits right in the middle between the OEMs, the dealer and the consumer. It has to start with the consumer, I'm sure. OK, and that's where it needs to be very, you know, customer centric there. But I suppose you need both other parts as well there. And in the past, I suppose you've been accused of saying more customer centric than dealer. Has that changed? I don't know if dealer centric is a word, maybe we've just made that up. Is it change or is it that same? Can you tell us about? Yes, it's a really good question. It's a really good question. And I think your points correct. But I think if you asked dealers back in 2019, 2020, many of them would feel that car was exclusively on the side, if that's rather than focused on the end user on the consumer. But from my perspective, that's a challenging position to hold because we are not a retailer. Retailers have to be 100% consumer focused. We are a market base. And we have to balance the needs of our end users, but also our dealer partners and our OEM partners. And we've done a lot of work there to make sure that we are balancing our investments. And I think a good example of some of those, if you look to Karl, we're back in 2019, we just spent probably 95% of our products budget on building consumer facing functions, but 5% on features for dealers. If you look now, it's 50-50. We want to help dealers buy more cars on our platform or sell more cars on our platform. We need to provide them with good data to help them do that. So when we think about our sell-my-car business, we spent literally millions on making sure that the listing quality, that if a buyer is participating in one of our auctions, they can see that the pictures are really good quality. We try to identify the damage. We've done a load of work to interrogate the customers to make sure we've got fair representation of the car. And that also is investment dealer product, so we can serve our partners really well. And I think that's the biggest change. I think if you look at the culture of the business, when we talk about consumers, it's interchangeable. Our consumers are end users, but also our dealer partners and our OEM partners. And that's something I feel really passionate about. Dealers pay bills. I love the idea of your sourcing stock, because, listen, from the dealer world, we've all had BCA in the day, Mr. Scroving Cars, what greater car it was, and it turns up there. And I think it's music to a lot of deals here, saying that you need to get that bit right there. And it really is the focus there. We're so excited about it. I think, ultimately, there is now a third way, I suppose, to source cars. So there is, obviously, parts of change, buying from a physical auction. Now, there is the opportunity to buy directly from consumers from an online auction. And again, the focus for us, obviously, building a great auction technology, particularly in terms of making sure we've got all of the right information for dealers to put on those cars, there's a massive investment for us. But the biggest investment is in marketing to approach customers to this car. That's what we really do that. And that's why I think we've seen phenomenal traction with dealers, because we've got, often more than a thousand cars in our auction a day. And that's leveraging the residual trust that people have in Carwell. If they're looking to sell that car, then Alton heading towards rather than we buying a car, or some of the other sort of car line services that are attached to physical auctions. I just want to have that conversation, because it's kind of the legacy of Carwell. Was it 2013, 2012? Have I got that right? Something like that. I love James Hine's story where it was just car bars. It was like rotten tomatoes for cars. OK, he was doing the reviews. He put his phone number there. I love the story where he's getting phone calls from customers saying, can you recommend a dealer to buy one of these from? He then smart-speaking to do. I love that story. But again, at the time, there's so many times the initial investors are saying things like, hey, listen, we've all tried to buy a car, but it wasn't the most consumer friendly process out there. Why isn't anyone fix this? OK, and there was that race to the bottom. I suppose that's the legacy that you were known of 2012, 2013. And I suppose that has to change and is changed there. In fact, I've got some of our clients still, this sounds silly, but wouldn't realize that it's not still traditional Carwell. It's not the auction side of it. It's not where your revenue screens come from. In fact, JV, you've heard this, but I had one particular client I spoke to who said, why do you all work with those guys? OK, let me tell you about Mrs Casey. She bought five cars from us in the past there. OK, as she done the deal, the deal done, she went home, she went on Carwell there, then they bribed her with 25 gridmarks and spent the vouchers to get three hours. You've heard those stories, right? No more supposed to do more so. But the reason why I say that is the legacy, it's there's still some people that don't realize everything else that I suppose you're doing. So can I ask you the paid for lead proposition? That must have changed that because you haven't been, is it four years ago? You changed from a, it must have been four years ago now. Yeah, there's still that perception out there, though, isn't it? With some dealers. Yeah, I think that's right. The cost for sale one, I don't think was, I think it was fine for when the business started. Obviously it was operating in a much smaller scale. And perhaps in hindsight, that model should have changed at a much faster pace. It just did not scale. And it's very difficult to determine while, you know, how do you attribute a sale to Carwell versus a salesperson in the dealership? So we've moved on for that now. And since 2020, actually, we had a cost for in Ponehorse. It's quite simple. You can participate on Carwell. So if you're a high end ideally, you can cost up all of your makes and models. If customer can figure out Ionic 5 and you want to serve a price, that particular customer, you can do. And you only pay when they inquire. So I believe it's very good for money. But also it allows our customers to manage their costs because we, they only pay for the inquiries that they actually want. And it's very clear in terms of the bill you're going to get based on the number of clients that you've had caught up with on the platform. I suppose it's a lot of dealers not realizing all parts of the business. So I suppose your revenue, are you still making most of your revenue from the traditional carwell or is it shifted to the sourcing side of the business and the content? Where's the revenue come from then? Yeah, it's a good question. And actually in the UK business, the new car, the plastic carwell model of generating leads on new car is not the largest revenue line in our P&L. The ultimate sell my car is this, the sourcing business is the biggest proportion of our P&L. What's our media business actually? So we have significant media business, we have carwell, obviously it owned all of the auto vehicles as well to all to express, you go on our more folio and to generate quite significant revenues from media. And what we're trying to do is connect the media business to the inquiry business. So if you're going lots of inquiries on more particular making model, that's great. But if you want more on a particular model, can you use our media products to actually generate more and more configurations and inquiries in a particular made model so we work with our own partners and some bigger deal of groups that to actually generate more interest in particular parts. And that I also know is a significant proportion of revenue. So yeah, I think the makeup of our revenue is unrecognizable to that about three years ago. So I want to now talk about agency. The A word, agency is here. There's lots of people still saying I'll never work or go back to it. I mean, it's a tide we can't change. We've got Mercedes, Volvo, Volkswagen next year. I mean, everyone's looking at agency. There's a few minor people said, no, we're not going to go down that route at this stage. How does agency affect your core business? Yeah. I know there were many questions, I think, around carwell in terms of should carwell exist in an agency world. Because obviously there's no price differentiation by dealer. I think ultimately the business is quite misunderstood ultimately and that when we look at what consumers are actually doing on the platform, they're comparing multiple cars, not just one. And so typically our customers will configure seven cars and they will inquire of five different cars. So the agency model doesn't impact because you can consume a comparison of this ad to a BMW. And also that adding options, that building that perfectly and doing that perfectly with the Mercedes and their travel account, which is the best one to buy based on the price that they receive from dealers. So ultimately the agency model hasn't really had a massive impact on how consumers actually use it. I think the other aspect for us, we talked about immediate business earlier. Many of the agency brands that we work with are also spending a significant amount on our media business situation. More interest in that particular made some models. So we transfer some of the revenue between different products on the platform. I suppose a stat though had when I was with your business last week. 76% of people still buy local, if I'll get this right. 56% of people buy from the best rated dealer. And so only 30% that maybe it was below 30, but it was around 30% bought from the cheapest dealer. And I didn't expect that being a dealer myself. I thought, hold on, I'll be 76% of people buy from the cheapest. So actually, have I got those figures right, JV? Is that right? Yeah, I mean, it's after we misunderstood it. And I think it depends on the spread ultimately on the price of a particular car. Most customers, I think if they live in London and a dealer in Scotland has offered them a 500 pound discount compared to their local dealer, by and large, customers will go to that local partner because they ultimately, again, this is an expensive purchase. They trust dealers if something goes wrong, they can take it back. They want somewhere to go get the car serviced. They want to build a relationship. I think dealers have been on a lot of building longer term relationships with customers. Despite, I think a lot of the sort of stereotypes customers value that, they really do. And I think we see that in the behaviors on our platform. So to me, ultimately, the star ratings, that that's the response that consumers get from our partners plays a massive role in terms, you know, again, stood the dealers are really good at it. It's not new news. Hopefully they respond. Hopefully to the answer the questions, making sure the gaps of the point, getting them into the showroom, seeing the car sit in it, test drive it. But that ultimately, you know, helping people solve that, you know, those next steps in the buyer journey, we see really good, really good review customers and that definitely drives the probability of your own crime with one dealer over the other. Yeah, it's quite funny. Speaking to a few of our clients about car well, and it's, we've had lots of them say, actually, we do quite all right out of car well, but don't tell anyone. And they have dedicated people to deal with the car well and cry because it's actually, it is different to someone walking in. Okay, it is completely different. And they have dedicated people they get on and how they deal with it. Yes, we all know speed of response is important, but what is that response as well? I think that's absolutely right. And again, when we think about how we can help dealers, this is why I think when we think about our longer term vision, we have so much data on the platform. You know, we can see those interactions. We know which interactions drive a conversion. That would be the key that we can use technology to expose more of that to our partners. And they can feed it into their training programs and how they think about generating even more terms from the leads. There's still a lot more for us to do that. There is a real treasure trove actually of days from the platform. And certainly with AI at times, I think is overhyped. Just the ability to use AI to read sentiment in responses and connect that back up to sales. So it's a big opportunity for us to do more of a telepathist there. So there are lots of things, lots of things to do. And we're saying to walk quite a touch of any dealers that feel that they perhaps don't know carway so well. They still think we operate on our sales cost of solar and all I will. Always have to get my look driving. So let's get my car going. I think for you people personally, so reach out and I'm very happy to lose my time with dealers and try to cross the sort of paths. The myths of gas. I think Vartner and you know that it's a paper lead model now for four or five years or something like that. But I think some might not realize that well, use cars. Okay. Using carway after the use car side of it is a cheeky question for you. Are you able to compete with auto trader? Okay. Why someone going to come to carway auto trader or new interests like since? What's the vision for the use car side of carway? Yeah. So really good question. So if you think about, I mentioned earlier that we are positioning ourselves as a destination for car changing. So if you've watched a lot of videos and you know, you're interested in a particular making model, you've used our video as the basis on which to make a decision to shortlist something. We want to be able to help you that we're watching the video. I think I'm quite excited about that car. That's pretty cool. And I never even thought about putting on my short list to be able to go and get into a showroom, see the car in person, talk to an expert about that particular car. No, it makes no sense though. If you, the people watching those videos, they don't all want to buy a brand new one. That is just not credible proposition. So the reason we're adding used is not to try and beat auto trader. It's ultimately to serve the audience. We already have more effectively by the myth of breadth and choice. If you're watching a video about our Ford Fiesta, it's just a shame that there were no new ones anymore. But if you're watching that Ford Fiesta video that we made a couple of years ago, I didn't really interested in it. Well, I want to connect you to a dealer that can sell that car. And maybe a franchise dealer or actually maybe an independent dealer that's got a good range of cars that suit your needs. So our focus is, is both serving the audience that we have and using that by a very cost efficient mechanism for dealers. Think about it, we are 70% of our, of our media mix is from people that code to car work directly. They trust us as a, as a star point to their car journey. And so I want to be able to funnel more and more of those people into our dealers. And I think competition's good. So, if I can take a bit of share from also trading because I've got good quality leads, that's fine. But our focus is serving our users and finding a really cost efficient sort of use colleagues for our dealers partners. I suppose you're talking about EV there. Do we know next year was at 28% with the Z EV mandate, it has to be EV on new cars, so that OEMs, we're going down that route. I suppose it's the used EV side of it. It's really good opportunity. I think it's good. I think, yeah. And so that's where we're seeing really good levels of engagement. Obviously, we've seen a lot of variability on the residual values of EVs. But I think making sure it was sort of waking up to the point, actually, a three, four year old EV is actually, essentially, perhaps that's really good value. So, particularly if you want to get into that powertrain, but you've not been able to, because the cost of a new one is often pretty bit simply high, particularly when you compare it to a similar high small. And by and large, it's interesting in our platform. When we look at the new car business, there is a lot of engagement in terms of more than 40% of the cars configuring these. But the sales profile is very different. And I think that's in part because we do see this on the platform. She was a configuring, you know, an I-sphere, a petrol vehicle. So, you know, an I-sphere, a car in EV vehicle, in comparing prices. And that leads to quite a different commercial profile, in terms of what they actually buy. Quite exciting. The Volkswagen from Toyota has launched the first cars we've seen, where the ICE car and the EV car are at the same price. And we've seen quite different behaviours there, actually. So, who knows what we'll see in the new space, but big, big opportunity on used EVs as well. Yeah, I think it has to be, because new EVs, that 28% is definitely driving that market. The OEMs have got their head around. But that use space, it is... Yeah. Usually, because we have to work out how to use EVs. And I think that is, yeah, huge opportunity, actually. Huge opportunity. I think that's right. Again, that's why we think it... We're doing that. We're content-lapped. We're going to help people make some of those decisions through contact, whether that's the contact we write, or also express, whether that's the videos, reviews, or car work. We want to be able to raise these opportunities up in front of consumers. So, many people might not have thought about it. But we can tell, actually, this is really a good time, but it's a thing to write. But used EVs, that's... That car's future needs. Any other innovations we can expect to see from car wow in the next couple of years? Anything you can share with us. I'm sure the smile on your face, the people who listen to this, he's got a big smile on his face now. There's clearly lots coming. Anything you can share with us, JV? Yeah, well, I suppose this year we raised $52 million in additional funding. The business is doing really, really well. We're pretty much operating at Ray Keaton there, and the top line growth is really healthy. And that's a load of us who invest to seek further investment. So, the first of a benchmark is out of the US, invested $52 million. Then the bulk of that spend is going into product development so that we can build new capabilities for our end users. But as I mentioned, we are really doubling down on the D-line area and facing products and tools. And it difficult to tell you all the things we're going to do next year, but can certainly share some of the themes. From a sell-on-wire car basis, when we think about the auction business, we want to continue to really invest in listing quality. So, how can we use AI to spot damage on cars? Even though to stone chips on the bonnet. So, when the dealer's making a bid on a car, they have a really good assessment of the quality of that vehicle. We believe there's so much more we can do there that drives confidence and encourages more dealers to buy online versus a physical auction. The second area is most of our dealer partners tell us that they prefer buying online and then go into a physical auction for two reasons. Our fees are much lower. Our fees are kind of 2% of the car's value, rather than a 5 to 8 that you would expect in a physical auction. But obviously, just say it's high as well. People can sit back in the office or home and assess it just for all the range of cars that are available. But the reason they struggle to buy more cars is the last mile. How do you go and clap the car? How do we help them manage the payment between the dealership and the end customer? So, we're investing a huge amount of that to make buying an online auction as simple and as straightforward and as convenient as buying from the physical auction. So, you'll see a lot of investments going there. And again, I think when we talk about how we can share with folks or dealer folks, a lot of our investments go into creating great tools for partners. And I've already alluded to on the new car side and on the used car side, we really want to start to build better insights for our partners. Interestingly, when you think about our business now, we see every aspect of what our consumer is doing. We know which videos they're watching, which reviews they've read. We most likely know what car they're currently driving because they placed it into our value-down platform. We know each car that configured. How do we connect those dots together to score the user, help them understand how close somebody is to actually buying and how can we aid that process so they can get them to the showroom and sold them more cars. As a dealer, keen to see the AI on making sure a car is as described from a customer. Listen, we have all book cars not as described and gearbox is gone and engines are covered with the bill. So, it's the interesting thing where it goes there. I think the technology in that space is phenomenal. The challenge obviously is mechanical damage. It's the AI scenario. There is some AI that can listen to the engine. Really? Well, there's nothing compared to driving a car ultimately. And the opposite is how can we ensure for that potentially on the rare occasion that there's a problem. But suddenly, cosmetic damage, we feel we should be able to get to a point quite quickly actually where we can buy an assessment that's as good as starting to get to a car. I think many of our buyers have described. I think there's a huge scale for praising a car. So we'll probably never get quite the same degree. It's difficult to check that if something's had a little bit of a re-spray here and that. But I think we can do a much better job to help our dealer partners. But they are quite a real scale. We want to find our partners with more and more data and help those buyers appraise a car and get some really good high margin purchases and some of the customers who are going to be able to do that. I'm just laughing at myself here because some of the dealers listen to this will still have John, their salesperson that I've dealt with for 30 years, that just says, does the other side of the car look the same Mr. Customer through the window? And they value it just on that. So anything you're talking about will be a lot better than that. And listen, what message would you like to leave a dealer, an investor, a dealer group, maybe you know we haven't listened to this. Any message you'd like to leave them with? I'm just back to you, I know I've talked about this a lot, but something is the CEO of Carboy and I'm an ex-marketeer by trade and that's the most of all I've been working in building technology products and running marketing. The thing that I want to do is build a platform that really catalyzes on this ship to online. And I have a very different view of the world to perhaps Kazoo. I think the Kazoo story was more and more people are going online, therefore we're going to spend a lot of money on marketing, so people come to our website, I'm excited about parathletes, I'm going to sell them cars online. I don't believe in that. I think honestly people are going online first and foremost because they want more information. Think about buying a car, you know, a really interesting car, the discovery basis of it is you know, this is something that you're going to make as important to your family life. You know, you have great memories in that car, it's being on holiday on road trips, whatever it is. And we want to help people with the discovery process. That's why people are going online to find out more information and we have to know a little bit about that. We're not retailers, we're a marketplace and ultimately it's my job to use technology to connect that content to our retail partners. And that was all the source cars or cell phones, whether it be new or used. I think is the model that is appropriate to leveraging. What is somewhat about structural consumer change, but it leverages the infrastructure, the know-how, and you know, the brilliant retail partners that exist in this country. And so my connection is, you know, my job is to connect up the content to our retail partners. And the thing I would leave, I would say first and foremost, so they're unsightly biased perhaps, is that I think we represent good value. And that's because we're investing in content, millions and millions of pounds every year. We invest in performance marketing to capture people that are interested in changing cars. And we spend our own money doing that, it's our risk. And we convert that into a variable cost of partners. If you come on to our platform and we don't send you any enviries, you pay a zero. If you don't buy any cars on our platform, we charge you zero. And as an ex-marketeer, I genuinely think what we're trying to do is genuinely really positive because we're converting a fixed cost into a variable cost. And so what's the not to like about that? Again, I'm slightly biased, but that I think is the thing we can do because we operate at such scale at the top of the phone. And last, I think in August, we hit some billion video views on our platform. It's the world's most, not just the UK, the most popular car review YouTube channel in the world. Never realized that, in the world, wow. And we want to put that content to work for our partners. And it's difficult for anybody. The reason the channel works is because we're independent of brands, of make a model of dealership, that's why people trust us. And we want to put that to work for our partners. And we want to do that in a way that you only pay us when we actually deliver results. And I think that's a very different path to go back to the opening comments to the model we had back in the earlier years of car wear, which is based on. I can say, I was suitably impressed with the change from what I knew of car wear 10 years ago. So it was really refreshing. I'm really pleased to hear that. Yeah, and if there are partners out there that would, you just want to chat to, you know, as a son of love, I've learned so much about a list of any time in car leadership and talking to partners. So, you know, Jen, Jim, really would love these reach out. So now I will get on the road and come from a satellite. So what's the easiest way for people to find you, JV? Is it through LinkedIn? What's the easiest way? Yeah, so LinkedIn or my email address is JV, some initials, JV at caro.com. Drop me an email and look to be chat and meet in person. It's nice to know that you're an actual real car nut as well at heart. So, yeah, yeah. The ball problem we're going to do is I end up coming back with a different class, but anyway, yeah, I don't know. I used to work in luxury fashion. And as you can see, Simon, I'm not particularly fashionable. So, your whole incredible work in the car space, but my interest in the category is amazing. So, yeah. Well, I haven't said that. I've just got a last question. What's the ultimate car for you then? I've got Porsche. I've heard Porsche a few times. So I've got your GT3 touring or something like that. What's the ultimate, JV? Well, so Matt Watson, our presenter has a GT3 RS. And I keep asking you to let me have a go at these signs. You see me driving Simon's sign, probably the signs. But that's definitely on my list. I was a little bit clapping 720, I think they're quite good, good price though for you as well. So, I've never heard of a car I'd definitely like to talk to Matt. And he's under, no, just got a 911 and stuff. I quite, quite, quite a strong car. Very good car. I should let you get on then. It's nice to, I would be talking about cars all day. Thank you again for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Simon. Good to catch up. Thanks so much. Really good. Good questions. Thank 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.
