Episode 3 – Dustin Schuler, Director of Marketing at Bud Clary Auto Group

🎙️ Dustin Schuler, Director of Marketing at Bud Clary Auto Group

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

Hosts: Andrew Street (DealerOMG), Matthew Davis (TradePending)

In this episode, we sit down with Dustin Schuler, who climbed the ranks from dealership intern to Director of Marketing for Bud Clary Auto Group—now overseeing marketing across 14 franchise dealerships, government fleet centers, and retail stores. Dustin shares his journey, the strategies driving their success in used car acquisition, and how his team balances grassroots community branding with the ever-present demand for leads.

We dive into his approach to leveraging AI tools like Microsoft Power Automate, ChatGPT, and Google’s VO3 to streamline workflows, personalize campaigns, and cut production costs. Dustin also offers a behind-the-scenes look at building a marketing tech stack, managing a hybrid team, and keeping every profit center aligned.

If you want real-world insights on dealership growth, creative marketing, and staying ahead in a tech-driven auto market, this conversation delivers.

⏱️ Timestamps:

• 00:04 – Show intro & mission
• 00:09 – Hosts introduce the podcast & automotive marketing focus
• 00:15 – Host introductions
• 00:17 – Why this podcast exists
• 00:22 – Sharing insights for retail auto marketers
• 00:30 – Dustin’s career journey: intern → Marketing Director
• 00:34 – Managing multiple dealerships & staff
• 00:39 – Fleet, retail, and group responsibilities
• 00:45 – Using AI and leading a hybrid team
• 00:51 – Organizing profit centers & processes
• 01:16 – Guest introduction: Dustin Schuler
• 01:20 – Overview of Bud Clary Auto Group (14 franchises)
• 01:24 – Breakdown of fleet, retail, and service operations
• 02:29 – Leveraging video content & past resources
• 05:10 – Strategies in used car acquisition
• 07:40 – Grassroots community branding vs lead generation
• 10:05 – Building a marketing tech stack
• 13:15 – Microsoft Power Automate for workflow automation
• 15:45 – Using ChatGPT in dealership marketing
• 18:20 – Google’s VO3 for personalization & cost savings
• 21:05 – Managing and motivating a hybrid marketing team
• 23:30 – Keeping profit centers aligned across the group
• 26:55 – AI’s evolution in automotive marketing
• 27:47 – Challenges and skepticism around AI adoption
• 28:20 – Connecting with peers in marketing & AI
• 29:30 – Closing thoughts & takeaways

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Transcript

We are on a mission to talk to the 100 leading marketing minds in the automotive space. I'm Andrew Street, owner of Dealer OMG. Matthew Davis here, chief marketing officer at Trade Pending. Why are we doing this? Well, we like automotive.

We like marketers, and we like retail automotive marketers. Our goal here is to give you the insights into what these leading marketers are thinking, planning, and doing. 

Hey guys, if you want to hear somebody's story and growth from being an intern at a dealership up to being the marketing director with a staff overseeing a bunch of dealerships within a dealer group from doing fleet, doing retail and his experience using AI, working remote, keeping his team in communication and really drilling down with his platforms into different profit centers at the dealership. You'll enjoy this conversation. This is a hundred marketers. I'm Andrew Street, and I'm here with Matthew Davis, and this is Dustin Schuler. Enjoy.

Well, Dustin, you want to give us a quick introduction to who you are, where you are, what your responsibilities are? Yeah. So my name is Dustin Schuller. I am the marketing director for the Bud Clariato group, fourteen franchise dealers in Washington state. We do have a body shop, eight government fleet stores, eight retail fleet stores, And we just got another, we have a second dedicated government fleet service center opening up this month. So exciting times to be with the group, help them grow from eight stores to fourteen so far. And I started as an intern, so that's pretty cool. I've been able to work my way up. So I know that there's some dealer groups out there that don't really promote within, but we've been able to, I'm a case study of that, being able to do so from here. So it's been pretty awesome. What were your intern responsibilities? You know, I wasn't the intern that was going to get coffee all the time, you know, they did push that on me a couple of times. But I was actually I kind of weaseled my way in as like an SEO specialist type deal where I was finding broken links and different things like that. Each one tags that weren't optimized. And this was, you know, around twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen or so. and i didn't know how to do seo at all i was doing roofing at the time and i was uh just watching youtube videos and old moscon recordings so being able to do that um that was my training materials and then uh you know to be able to provide value and kind of prove my worth type deal and i got hired on after about three months or so so wasn't an intern for too long ruth roofing to automotive seo Roofing to automotive SEO. You know, a lot of parallels, a lot of parallels, a lot of heavy lifting for the group, but. You might not be the first, but I feel, how long have you been in the auto industry now? This month on the seventeenth would be nine years. Okay. Yeah. You can't get out now. It's like once you get in, I've done, I've emptied trash cans for people and things like that in my previous jobs. But like once you build out your Rolodex, you start understanding the different profit centers at the dealership and how you can make an impact from your desk. And you start building out your Rolodex of contacts in the auto industry. You're kind of in, you're in now. Yeah. You've seen it too, where people, they, they leave the automotive industry and then they're back within a year. So it's hard to pull away once you're in it. Yeah. Yeah. So have you graduated from doing other things besides SEO? Yeah, I mean, I work as an agent for the Claries at this point where I just kind of work in what's the best interest for the auto group and what their goals are, especially being able to grow. And really, we kind of break it out into different pillars of different profit centers. So each one has their own unique kind of KPIs that we work towards. Um, I manage everything from the vendor relations, the tier two relations, OEM relations as well, in terms of at least the marketing side, shift digital powers. Um, along with that, we run our own, you know, our Google ads and Facebook ads. And besides that, I mean, we kind of lean on our vendors and our vendor partnerships built to execute our market plan day to day. Do you have a staff that helps you on your side of marketing? Yeah, I have three team members right now. We actually have an SEO specialist in-house who helps create all the content, all the landing pages, which really helps especially, you know, staying on top of the new model releases and being able to have pages ready and live in a short time period for being able to get signups and people that are interested in those vehicles. And then in addition to that, we do have a social media specialist and then we have, a kind of a catch-all graphic designer but he's able to do inventory feed requests and basically anything that you ask him you throw his way he's able to handle it so that's that's a team four people across all the different dealers they're working rather well um and then like i said we do rely on all of our vendor partners and relationships to be able to do a lot for us too because there's so much that goes into this but it's good you're not a solo practitioner like god bless the ones that are they got a tough job it's always great to have a team Yeah, especially when you have a scale. I've seen some of these solo marketing specialists or marketing directors, and I can't imagine having to deal with fifteen stores or multiple states, different regions, different incentives, all kinds of stuff. So it becomes a lot. Yeah, like I've come across. groups about your size that have one person that's in that seat and their hair is on fire and they're scheduling events and they're doing the fleet. They're doing like so many different things, websites, inventory feeds, all the breaks that happen. And then you go to, I'll go to like a single point dealership. That's one roof that has four people in their marketing department. And it's like, yeah, it's just completely different ecosystem and levels of support and design and creative and all the things that go into marketing. sounds like you've got a good setup are you guys in an office together are you guys working remote um so we actually have a corporate office out of uh kelso washington right next to our main our first couple stores we have and so that's where all of our employees are at my marketing team we have three obviously those three that they go into that office and then right now i am fully remote out of las vegas nevada but i do go and visit the stores um you know once or twice a month and i will be this month of august i'll be there for six full days so i still have a pulse you know with the dealerships obviously there's all teams meetings and project management that goes along with that right now how do you think about managing the essentially the need for brand awareness so when somebody's getting in that buying cycle they think of you first versus we just need leads right now Like how do I think about the mix between the two? Yeah, in terms of your marketing mix, maybe how you allocate budget or don't allocate budget. Sure. I don't have a set percentage type deal, but for brand awareness, our big things are grassroots events, being able to be a local sponsor within the community for some events, but also throwing our own as well. We were known for the PACE program, Perfect Attendance Creates Excellence, where we give out bikes to everyone that was in elementary school that had perfect attendance throughout the year. There were some stipulations, like you could have one or two missed days, but That's one of the big events we've ran in the past where Toyota has come out for it and gave us an award for it. you know, we are tied in with our local community, especially with like, uh, Spanish organizations and things like that. Cause in Eastern Washington, at least we have a very high Hispanic population. So it's good to be in touch with, you know, that community, especially at the grassroots level and helping them grow. Um, and obviously we, we have to balance these things in terms of like what you're saying, where it's, we need more leads. It's always the, it's always the answer for everything from the general manager or GSM side type deal. Um, but yeah, You know, we do set a dedicated budget and we spend about fifty thousand dollars or so per quarter, you know, give it back to community or else sponsored events, you know, create our own events and things like that, too. But in other ways that we drive brand awareness as well as having different creative aspects, especially in our Facebook marketing or YouTube creative as well. So having the same ads like on the first episode, what he was talking about, where you'd have a Florida dealer and an Oregon dealer that potentially have the same exact commercial and stuff like that. We've seen that. We've actually used vendors in the past that have done that, but it doesn't resonate. And like what you're saying or like what he was saying in the past was, you have to be able to custom tailor it to your market and to your people because otherwise it's just background noise. So that's kind of how we've been managing it. Um, but no set percentage or anything like that for brand awareness versus a need leads right now. Yeah. And my experience is like, Very few dealers are branding or at least branding well, especially when you have like a handful of stores that have the same name to kind of unify it and have this corporate identity that's doing its marketing that can be doing, you know, even through social, like you're talking about like pre-owned inventory sales can do branding, can do recruiting for staff and like a number of things where it's like the principal might like it, the marketing director might like it, but the general managers are like, No, don't take that out of my budget. Like I need, it's the eighth of August and we still need, we need to, you know, we got, uh, seventy Tacomas that we need to move. Like they've got their own plan in front of them that doesn't involve sponsoring the little league tee ball and getting the brand awareness out. Yeah, and that's one of the things that I'm very fortunate about was within my group, at least all the leadership, especially the executive leadership, general managers and such, we actually kind of all embody that same spirit of, you know, being part of the community and knowing the value that brings to not only us, but our community that we live in. Because as auto dealers, we always have that perception of the snaky used car sales guy type deal. But, you know, especially in this day and age where information is just so readily available, It doesn't make sense to screw over your neighbor or something like that, especially we are in the community and we're going to be out there, you know, at our kids little league game or soccer tournament, whatever else. So. don't necessarily have that issue but i do know it's a big deal especially you know especially when times are tough or money's tight you know they don't want to spend you know that extra expense on you know sponsoring the local animal shelter or something like that potentially just because money's just so tight so totally understand and i feel like that's like a cool avenue for you to be able to unlock this social media person or like charismatic people at the dealership level to convey like not the sneaky salesperson or that that mindset but to be able to introduce like hey here's people from the community that we employ that work with us that help connect people with vehicles that maybe they didn't think they were going to be able to get into and here's the service and A person who's worked here for twenty years and, you know, use the marketing people that go in there to help pull the story out of the dealership. And that's why I got in touch with Matthew, because he was good at like going in there and interviewing the staff and getting like the human vibrancy and the pulse out of dealers. That's not just, here's a shiny tool. That's going to automate your advertising and it's going to, you know, pull inventory price, generate leads, automate lead nurturing, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. No, it's cool. Like having, having people that can go out there and shoot this type of content and like with all the technology that's outside of like the organic, cool, fun stuff. which my parents think I do, but like all the automation and technology, like how much, how many tools do you feel like you guys are using in a given day for your marketing team? We use a lot, but you know, in terms of our, our tech stack right now, especially with the AI coming on board, you know, we, we rely heavily on tools like power automate from Microsoft, um, ChatGPT, of course, especially with the GPT-Five, just releasing. Excited to dive into that. Google V-O-Three is a new one that we've been testing out as well, especially with JSON prompting. It's a different format, so I'm just putting it in a text prompt and stuff like that. Billy and I will create a video with that. It's been really exciting, but especially with my team being, you know, hybrid slash remote, we have to use a lot of different tools to be able to communicate with each other. So a lot of teams meetings, a lot of monday.com project management and being able to keep track of everything. But definitely the tech stack has been growing quite a bit. And so putting an account on how many tools, I mean, I log into so many different dashboard and so many different tools. So there's a lot. So you could use another dashboard is what I'm hearing. no no we can't use another dashboard hold on i'm taking notes build a dashboard build ten more so give give us a sense you rattle off those first three tools i was familiar with two of them like the vo three the chat gpt you said one first just give us a microsoft yeah microsoft something or other like what what are you using there how you use it so microsoft power automate um it's it's similar to like An eight N or a prismatic where you're able to do kind of workflows, automate workflows, especially with your vibe coding now. Very similar. Yeah. Where you're able to just automate processes. So say an email comes in, we can ingest that data, use chats, UPT to, you know, format it a certain way, send it somewhere else. So we can use it in power BI as a reporting. Things like that. One of the main things that we've done is being able to automate the vehicle descriptions, being able to have those customized from a vehicle where it includes the dealership address and phone number for every vehicle, especially used cars, and be able to include all that, clean Carfax data, all that kind of stuff. That's what Power Automate has allowed us to do. Obviously, ChatGPT, we've been able to use it for a lot of different creative scaling in terms of email marketing, having custom creative at least a base template or a starting point where you're not having to write out everything. And then Google VO three, we're really early on with it. Before the JSON prompts, it was really hard to get what you wanted out of it. Obviously it'll get better over time, but VO three was a big step in the right direction, especially compared to the previous models where now it includes audio. not just voiceover, but also music in the background too, which is pretty incredible. And we've seen just some of these commercial producers being able to come from like pharmaceutical or other industries and use the VO three to be able to have a five hundred thousand dollar cost production quality just from a VO three prompt that it costs them like five hundred dollars. So that's super exciting, especially I know you guys both have experience with shooting commercials and production, and the cost can be very expensive very quickly, especially with when you start hiring in actors, having the different cameras to get the fly crew or go to different shoot spots. I mean, it gets it stacks up really quick. So when you think about mentally. When I think about AI, I'm curious what you think. There's a spectrum of like, this is really amazing stuff. Wow, I can't wait to try it out versus like, I'm totally overwhelmed and underwater. Where the heck do I even start? Where are you on that spectrum? So I find myself on both sides of the spectrum multiple times because it keeps getting better and better. There's different updates that come out. And then previously, especially in my role, I had to follow up on or I still do, but I follow up on the industry trends like, okay, there's a new Google ads campaign that came out just in the past week or so. We've had new things come up for Instagram in terms of engagement reporting and stuff. so now we have to follow the ai trends and what's coming out with those and be able to use those tools but um having that that knowledge i mean especially be able to stay ahead in such a competitive marketplace of automotive retailers especially my markets you know seattle metro portland metro we have some very sharp dealers and so being able to keep up with the tools is very important for our job role at this point But there's so many times where I find out something new and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I could do this, this, this with it. Or that didn't work at all. I like to think I'd be a lot like you if I was in your role, just like continually having to learn and research and find new tools. And how can we unlock this? And then there's like a constant feeling of like, oh, my God, we're behind. Like they're already there. GPT five is okay. How do we? are we using it then you talk with other people like okay never mind we're not behind everybody's behind but we're less behind than a lot of people and right here's how we're going to have it you know work with us and we're going to save a ton of money that we can allocate to somewhere else um with our budgets and it's like you know something i like hearing too is like Is there a moment that you can think of in this career going from an intern to where you are, whether it's at whatever role, where you've had a big moment that was like, aha, I can do this. I'm nailing it here. Yeah, well, I think... The intern and my progression to where I'm at now is the marketing director. My first real role when I got hired on was the digital analytics specialist, which was an incredible role. Obviously, I handled SEO stuff as well, but I was able to create kind of a reporting and how all that works. for our group and being able to see, being able to tie in direct ROI between the things that we do, um, and being able to really know and be tied in with what, uh, we're doing in terms of, um, marketing and being able to connect with the reporting and be able to have an ROI that's really helped me, you know, set up for success, being set up for success in terms of, uh, you know, what we're doing in the future. Um, We might need to cut that part out. But if I go back to that, with the digital analytics specialist role, I was able to create a bunch of different reporting, being able to know the ROI of what we do and that really set me up for success, especially in the marketing director role, being able to know what's the hot buttons for the ownership, what's the hot buttons for the different departments, different profit centers, you know, how could I have an effect to be able to grow the dealership and makes it really simple for me, especially knowing that like, okay, we could, for used cars, it's being able to have vehicle acquisition being able to get acquire high quality vehicles without paying the auction fees for new cars we have to be able to measure our sales efficiency being able to sell the new car volume we need to measure csi being able to have a pulse on our reputation management and know you know these are the problems that some of these departments are having to be able to fix those or remedy them or at least bring them to attention of the general managers or the service managers and things like that because that sets us up for ownership to be able to acquire more dealers things like that. So I would say really early on is kind of where I got my aha moment of, you know, it's really comes down to reporting, you kind of be able to report measure what you want, and then being able to set a plan to be able to attack those metrics and whatnot. Andrew, did you have an aha moment? Because some days I feel like I'm great at my job. And other days, I feel like I'm flailing around aimlessly. It's those little victories, I feel like it's like, haha, we got this big account, or we've unlocked little things within our own little ecosystem of like focused on social like when we're dealing with like you're talking about spanish audiences like we've got a lot of hispanic audiences that we cater to and it's pretty easy to flip the switch target people in spanish But then it's like, okay, a lot of them use WhatsApp. They all use WhatsApp. I'm now using WhatsApp. So we can drive ads from meta platforms from Facebook, Instagram, right into WhatsApp and start the conversation there. And let's get the Spanish speaking virtual BDC to start the conversation and turn it into a phone call. It's like tinkering with tools like this and being like, I don't know if it's gonna work. But let's try it. And if in two weeks it sucks, let's stop and move it somewhere else. Or let's grow it. Let's grow that. And for fleet, it's like, OK, I'll go. You have squad cars. Let's go after all the police departments in your state and just show them all of our inventory. Like our fleet, that's not what a lot of dealers are doing. Let's try to be the dealership that's doing something unique or on a platform that has a lot of attention but other dealers aren't there really in a meaningful way yet that was my way to yeah so you're hitting upon something there so marketing is always an experiment and sometimes things work well and sometimes they just they don't dustin what's working well for you guys right now what's really working well for us right now i would say is uh our used car acquisition, being able to buy cars off the street, being able to handle the KV leads well, or the different other third parties that have the sell my car leads. Most of the time, they give you a metric and they're like, if you get a three percent close rate, that's amazing, you're doing well. If you're doing seven percent close rate, you're buying those cars, you're like the top tier dealers. And then if we're able to do fifteen to twenty five percent or so, that's that's kind of our key to success. We have built out that kind of department being able to acquire those vehicles. So we have a used car acquisition director that handles only those sell my car leads and every store has an agent to be able to buy those cars off the street. And that's been working out really well for us. We haven't stepped into the radio territory and been able to brand that kind of stuff yet with a dedicated budget. As part of my twenty group of other marketing directors, we do have some other groups that have been able to do that already and really take it to the next level. But that's something I'm really excited about, really proud of and can't wait to keep growing, especially if we could stop buying cars from auction. It changes the whole business, changes the whole business. There's some dealers that are doing it. Everybody. What marketing are you doing towards those buying centers? So right now we're paying for a lot of the different third party leads. And then we're also, we have our own standalone website for being able to sell cars, which we built with a full AI tool. That's budclarybuyscars.com. And then, um, know we're driving traffic there we're trying to promote more lead sources directly from the website versus having to rely on the third parties themselves and then we're also looking at you know craigslist facebook and these other platforms that we're selling cars able to buy them off the street as well are you guys doing anything with your dms data to try to do vehicle acquisition or like in the service department giving people an offer yeah and we we've been able to do that kind of actually with trade pending tools to, uh, being able to, uh, be able to get like different offers in place, especially, um, for the people that come in through service and then having QR codes, being able to go to our trade tools and stuff like that too, which has really helped us at least on a passive level. Um, we haven't cracked the code exactly yet in terms of being able to convert people from the service lane to the, uh, you know, sales department, uh, It takes a special person. So we've had that a few times. We've had some really shiny moments. But at scale across fourteen stores, having fourteen people that are able to do that, it's really difficult to have that special person across the board. Yeah. And do you guys have like a call center that's reaching out to you? I know you have like a vehicle acquisition manager. Are you going to go ahead? Yeah, so we have acquisition specialists at every store. And so we do have people that are doing those outbound calls. We don't have a BBC team dedicated just to this. It really comes down to the agent at the store level, along with they have their own CRM, their own call tracks, their own everything. So we're able to measure it and see their success and watch them grow. It's been pretty awesome, especially, you know, people that are we've had some people that are straight up high school and, you know, be able to make really high paychecks just by doing this and just killing it. So it's always something really cool to see, especially in automotive industry, because it's it's pretty prevalent. What are you thinking about experiment experimenting with for the back half of the year? Right now, we're doing a lot with AI automation, being able to handle a lot of the requests. So I hear something in a meeting and it might be, oh, this takes me four hours every week, or this takes me six hours every week. And those are different departments that I'm talking about, mainly on the service side. And to me, as a marketing director i know it's not exactly my role to be able to do those things but if i could help someone based on my skill set with ai automation and being able to have that um being able to save them that time every week and just have it automated whatever they're doing pulling reporting or even simple things like uh hr's newsletters and employees being able to have forms come in and automate that so it's formatted properly you know each store has their talking points their photos and all that stuff um that's a big priority for me especially just taking some workload off of people so that they could work on the business instead of in the business, especially at the executive level. I feel like there's a parallel between Dustin, the intern, who just started helping out with SEO, and now it's Dustin, the marketing director, helping out with AI across the department there. I guess it's the evolution of the role, at least in this current state, because AI is very unique. I know there's a lot of people that are scared of AI, but for me, I'm seeing it as a great tool to be able to rely on and have in your back pocket. So trying to make the most of it. Until it comes after us, I think that's the right path. Yeah, I mean, I've seen the movies, and so that does scare me. But we'll wait for the robots. I like to think you can be the one to know how to work with the robots, and they'll put you on their side of the equation. Yeah, I say thank you sometimes in chat GPT. So I think that might be my saving grace, but I don't know about everyone else. I saw some interview with Sam Altman where he's like, we waste blah, blah, blah, zillion gigawatts of power responding to people that just say thank you. If your AI is that smart, it should probably know better not to have to process that. Am I right? I agree. Yeah. Just don't, don't, I'm pretty sure it's listening, but well, Dustin, how do people connect with you if they want to reach out or follow you? Um, the best way to reach me would be LinkedIn, um, Justin Schuller. If you find me on there with, uh, the bud clear out a group and, um, always happy to connect with other people, especially like-minded individuals that are looking to grow, especially in the AI space or marketing space. Um, I am part of a. Twenty group of other auto dealers. And so being able to learn from others has been a really good thing for me, especially growing in my role, because we could always learn something from each other. So always happy to connect. Um, you can find me on LinkedIn. Dustin, Matthew, thank you both. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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