Episode 8 – Steve Schmith, Director of Marketing & Strategy at Travers Automotive & RV Group

🎙️ Episode 8 – Steve Schmith, Director of Marketing & Strategy at Travers Automotive & RV Group

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

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

In this episode, Andrew sits down with Steve Schmith, Director of Marketing & Strategy for Travers Automotive & RV Group in St. Louis. With more than 25 years in automotive marketing and data strategy—but only months on the dealer side—Steve shares a unique perspective on what it takes to balance brand, data, and day-to-day dealership demands.

Steve talks about:

• Moving from the vendor/consulting side to the dealer side and how that shift changes decision-making
• Building a clean data foundation before unleashing AI and marketing automation
• Managing a martech stack of 10+ partners and creating cross-partner “town halls” to unify efforts
• The importance of walking in the customer’s shoes when evaluating ads and user experience
• Balancing brand building vs. lead generation when you’re a marketing team of one
• Using reviews and reputation management to drive search visibility and customer trust
• Creative marketing channels like Saturday Night Drive, their long-running local TV inventory show
• Experimenting with AI for segmentation and content while protecting customer data

Steve’s blend of big-data insight, hands-on dealership experience, and purpose-driven leadership offers actionable ideas for marketers navigating today’s automotive landscape.

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Transcript

Hey guys, today's guest has a rich background with over twenty five years of experience with automotive, and he's worked in radio, television, film for a good background and then worked with data specifically for years. And now that's translated into the foundation for his career, working in the marketing director role for a dealership group that also has RV dealers and car dealers. And he's got a really good insight on leveraging a handful of platforms and what's making some unique marketing pushes that they're doing, like even on TV for his dealer group. This is Steve Smith with Travers Auto Group. I'm Andrew Street. This is Hundred Marketers Project, where we are on an unstoppable, relentless mission to talk with a hundred marketers that work at dealerships. So if you know some that are interested, reach out to Ashley at DealerOMG. We can put them on the podcast and hit like and subscribe and leave a review. Anyways, ladies and gentlemen, Steve Smith.

So Steve, tell us a little bit about you and what you do and the roles you fill. yeah for sure so uh my name is steve schmidt i've been in automotive marketing for my entire career now in years what i am doing right now is i'm the director of marketing and strategy for travers automotive and rv group here in st louis uh really responsible for lead demand generation data both in the respective quality as well as analytics, managing a ecosystem of data partners and Martech vendors, and then ultimately our overall go-to-market strategy. Travers is unique, I think, in some respects. Number one, it is a group that has been part of the St. Louis fabric since nineteen ninety five. So going on thirty years. And I think we have a unique mix of businesses that give us a bit of a competitive advantage in the market space. So we are an independent used car dealer. We have two car lots. We also are a new franchised RV dealer. We also have two service centers, one on the car side and one on the RV side. And our RV side actually does body and repair work as well. One of only two within the broader St. Louis, Illinois marketplace, et cetera. And I think that's unique. It gives us the ability to look at those things, data, et cetera, and in a very straightforward use case. Hey, you bought a new truck from us, you know, ninety days ago. You're interested in a brand new camper on the back of that. Uh, and vice versa, right? So the ability to sort of cross sell those units, et cetera, is something that, that is really appealing. One of the things that I think is a huge opportunity for us. And like what I find too, about working independence, RVs is like different, uh, avenues for creativity for somebody like you, like at the marketing desk, it's like, Hey, we have some compliance stuff here. We have no compliance. We have no, you know, guard rails on. Pre-owned, let's do something more creative. Have you found like some fun ways to differentiate just kind of like the, I guess the marketing flexibility between RVs, franchise and pre-owned? Yeah, I think, you know, I'm one hundred and fifty days, about five months into this gig. And so I certainly see it. We have tried a couple of new things or different things that have really created some engagement, new lines that we're bringing on the RV side, et cetera. We've done some sort of data analytics around, hey, who were the target audience we can use looking at sort of these natural buying cycles in automotive and uh etc and i think we've we've found some some things some opportunities there um you know i i wouldn't say i think we're still building that at this point right um and you know the notion of some of the investments that i found here relative to our martech partners um number one i was pleasantly surprised with some of our martech partners they are what i would call some of the best of the best in the various lanes that they operate in And so the ability now to look at all of those and ask the question, not only how do you all work together, but also be able to understand, you know, do the effort of cleaning up the data behind that. That's the point we're at right now. We are going towards this mission, you know, of having that clean data and being able to let all of these technologies, et cetera, run loose on that. But right now, I think we are still, still, yeah, a hundred and fifty days in, et cetera, building some foundational stuff here. I'd love to hear more about that process. So just five months in, it's a question on everybody's mind whenever they start a new gig, like, well, where do I start? What do I need to look at first? How did you approach that? Well, I think important context is to say, while I say I've been in the automotive marketing industry for twenty five, twenty six years, I have only worked for an auto dealership for one hundred and fifty days. Right. And so for me, it was very important coming in to do two things. The first part was do no harm. And that was very important to Give me the time to understand the business, understand the daily ins and outs. But part of that is also based in what I think is an important personal, professional, and I think leadership philosophy for me is that I feel very accountable to the people that are at the store on the other side of the street or down the road, because I understand that these individuals are working hard, are putting a roof over their family, et cetera. And my role in that is to help that, right? And so for me, it was certainly about doing no harm to continue to drive the business, but it was also an important part to me to say, look, as we do this, I got to make sure that that what is in place right now that is helping these individuals make money and earn a living doesn't break. And so that was first and foremost. The other piece of that was really studying the various platforms that we had, et cetera, and really thinking about what does that future look like and how do we march towards that future. And when I say, keep in mind that I'm on the dealer side now for a hundred and fifty days, let's keep in mind that Prior to this, I was on what I'm saying on the other side of the table, right? I was with a data provider sitting down with dealers talking about the services and solutions that that company delivered. I spent a lot of my career at one of the big four consultancies doing the same thing, acting more in the service providers, professional services role. And it is an entirely different view on this side of the table. entirely different view on this side of the table, right? And so it was also important to me to sort of come to the table with that side of that perspective from that side of the table, but also again, in the do no harm part of my job at this point has been very focused on understanding the business, not only in terms of the ins and outs of a dealership overall, but particularly this business. And I think that has been sort of how I've balanced my time over the last hundred and fifty days. It sounds full circle. It sounds validating to get to work in different components, whether like it's cool talking with people who were like with the manufacturer on the vendor side, on the dealer side, and kind of have this, uh, encompassing outlook. You know, that resonates. It was very important to me as I moved from my previous, where I worked previously to this, and I thought about that exact same thing, right? If you think about a career as a mosaic or a career as an intertwined set of puzzle pieces, The notion of the vast expanse of the automotive value chain, none of my career ever at that point got close to the end consumer. And I thought that was a perspective that was missing and it was something that I needed and it was something that I could grow from and learn from. And it has been a tremendous, it was the right decision and it has been a tremendous decision, right? Because to your point, Andrew, I've got that background, but now the ability to say, take all that and operate not only in the role as a dealer but who my customer is the individual are the individuals that are on the street that are looking for transportation it is it is a puzzle piece that that frankly i didn't expect i would find in my career it is one that i am cherishing because of that end consumer experience right being at the end and certainly also having the front line experience of understanding Um, you know, the ins and outs of a, of a daily dealership and how they operate, I think is just, it's, it's been a great journey. I love that message of getting the advertising from the buyer, from the buyer's perspective, because it's easy as the owner, as the GM, or as the marketing company, or as the in-house marketer to look at it from your big, beautiful screen and what would work for you. Might not work for, you know, and this is like what I'm constantly going through with our ad team on our agency side. It's like, we need to look at these ads on our phones, go through the flow because everything I do is on social. And so it's like, let's look at it on our phone, go through the flow to the dealer's website and make sure we can get through to the finish line easily. Mm-hmm. Because it's easy to do it just and assume it works or do it on your desktop on a big, beautiful screen. And the ad looks beautiful. The flow goes great. But that's where point zero one percent of who we're targeting is going to go through this process. So we got to. It all falls apart when you look at it on your phone. Yeah. I would also say, though, I think we're a bit myopic in that, right? Because we're the experts in this, right? And I do think that this notion of walking in the other person's shoes is an important one. And to your point, right, at this point, it's walking in the customer's shoes. What I have discovered over my career in the various roles that I've found is, is As experts, we like to think, to say that we understand the customer and walk in the customer's shoes, et cetera. But I think it's entirely different to actually play that role exactly like you described. What happens if I'm a consumer and I see this? Does this work or not? I think that's an important thing to take in mind because, you know, there is some bias in what we do professionally and what we do every day relative to evaluating customer experiences, etc. And consciously or subconsciously, I think that that feeds into some folks decision making process around these things. So let's drill down into a little bit more tactical stuff here. There's being in marketing, you know, there's the concept of like brand. How do you think about balancing building brand awareness for everything that you're doing versus we just need people coming into the dealership like right now to buy stuff? so again i go back to what my going what my philosophy is at this point and that is do no harm while we do some of these bigger more strategic things right and so right now i'm balancing my day with very sort of what i would call tactical but important stuff in terms of that uh and and i'm a team of one by the way and very tactical, but I think important brand building stuff. Every morning, first thing I do is check all of our feeds. Are there any customer complaints? Are there any things that we can either amplify in terms of good, or are there things that we need to address in terms of missed opportunity? Straight up blocking and tackling. Straight up blocking and tackling, right? Yesterday's news and And I apologize if that puts a timestamp on when this will air. But let me just say the recent Fed announcement of at least one rate cut and maybe two more this year creates opportunity to go back to those individuals that have served or that have served that have bought vehicles from us before and say, hey, rates are down or coming down. You're so many months left in your vehicle. You're so many right. You've been in your vehicle so many months. Are you ready to come upgrade? Do you want something new? Take advantage of this. That is that is the stuff that that takes up. Fifty percent of my time and really balancing getting those leads not only again to the growth of the business, but but, you know, and I don't know if it's just me, but more importantly to me, When I think of individuals, and I won't say any of their names, but when I think of him or her or so-and-so that has a new baby and they're looking to buy a house, right? They do all that based on the leads that I'm able to generate and the foot traffic that I'm able to... uh you know the end in mind is obviously growing the business but i think more important at least my personal philosophy is i have a very very important responsibility to help those individuals that choose to come here to work every day to sell vehicles to come with the purpose to provide transportation to people out there that need it and the purpose of building their families and supporting their families, to me, that rises towards the top of my list of priorities as well. Andrew, we've never had anybody talk like that on this show before. I love it. No, it is good. It's like, you know, and to think of like the perspective of the customer, it's like when I'm working with somebody who's like really good at getting people qualified and they're connected with banks or even they like sometimes they're doing in-house financing or their job is to help people get from point A to point B. You know, that can't ordinarily get from point A to point B without the help of a dealership like there, or, you know, a financing opportunity that that dealership can extend. And I think it's such a healthy way to think about it. It's like, you know, versus somebody else, if we're selling Rolls Royces, this person wants to be concierge, they wanna have their car delivered, they wanna have the deal done at their kitchen island, maybe. where this person just needs to be able to get qualified, reasonable down payment, reasonable monthly payment type of thing, that's totally different. That's a completely different industry that we're serving right there. I agree. And I will tell you that every person on the front line that I've had the opportunity and the pleasure of meeting finds purpose in that, in being able to provide hardworking people affordable, quality transportation at a price that they can afford. I mean, we're human beings, right? We all have good things and bad things in our lives that impact our ability And I think the purpose driven culture within the team that we have here that says, you know, we come to work every day, certainly for our own personal benefits, our own personal sense of purpose. But I think underlying that is we have a deep desire to give people that might struggle to find ways to get from one place to the other the opportunity to do that. And so you had a background you had mentioned earlier. with, it sounds like radio, television, film. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a journalism, I have a journalism degree, so a major in journalism, typical reporting journalism and a minor in television and radio production. And I found that helpful, right? Been honored and lucky enough to host a few podcasts, been guests on a few podcasts, et cetera. And so this is fun stuff. you're on the best one right now so career career trajectory is like unlock a new level yeah i i am curious right how many you're on a mission to do a hundred how many how many are in the in they can i'm gonna say eleven okay we're on a roll yeah totally that's awesome that's awesome yeah and once we hit a hundred i think We retire. I'm not quite sure what happens after a hundred. It's like the end of Indiana Jones and when the faces just start melting. Yeah. Well, then you got, then you got, you know, a hundred finance managers to go interview. Yeah. I don't want to spend that much time with Andrew. I think we're going to figure that out first. That's awesome. We've got to get a rapport. So I did, I did billboards and radio after college was, was my industry. Like I worked for radio stations and billboard companies and, And I find a lot of parallels. Like, I didn't even realize it, like making radio ads, you're making a hook, you're making a story, you're trying to get a clear call to action. With billboards, you're trying to capture somebody's thought for a split second while they're zooming past you on the freeway. Same with social, same with, you know, making videos. All part of our activation strategy. All of them. Can I tell my introduction to marketing story? Is that fine? Can I do that? Yeah. In college, myself and a fraternity brother decided to start a window washing business, having never washed a window in our lives before. We got all our tools, everything. We drove to a nice neighborhood. We put our tool belts on. We got our notepad, books and everything. And we just started knocking on people's doors, asking if we could give them estimates. After about the third house, The woman comes out and says, you know you guys can advertise, right? You don't have to do this. And we were like, never thought of that. And we talked to the Yellow Pages back when that was a thing. Did you change your name to Triple A Window Washing? No, we were diamond window cleaning. Windows so clean you can see through them. That was our tagline. Wow. Great tagline. Yeah, right. The tongue-in-cheek started at an early age. All right. Steve, you mentioned there you joined, you looked at the tech stack, had some best-in-class tools there. Two questions. One, if you had to guess how many tools that you're kind of managing in your tech stack every single day, what's that number? Like, fifteen, thirty, a hundred? And then, What are the tools that you're really kind of latching onto here in the first five months? Yeah, so I think somewhere, depending on the count, ten, twelve different providers from a marketing standpoint, everything from reputation management, those types of partners to traditional DMS to our CRM and and various other providers. And so when I look at that ecosystem, again, about anywhere from I'd say average, I'd say about a dozen is what I'm looking at, working with at a daily basis. So not yellow pages. Not yellow pages, not yellow. And again, Andrew, to your comment, that also includes various channels, billboards, radio, et cetera. We do TV here in market as well. In fact, we are famous for every Saturday night against Saturday Night Live. We run our television show called Saturday Night Drive, thirty minutes every Saturday night, eleven o'clock. And it is something that when people hear our brand and you know, oh, you guys are the ones that do that. Yeah, that's us. So what does Saturday Night Drive include? It's a thirty minute commercial. It is an inventory review from all three of our service or all three of our dealer lots. Where I'm at right now, one of our lots is across the street and we spend about ten minutes of our newest inventory that have come in over the last week to ten days. We then go out to our other lot, do that for cars as well, and then we close this segment with our RV inventory. QR codes run across the bottom. And so it's been a real exercise going from what I inherited in terms of, hey, how many clicks to getting, setting up a construct to be a little bit more detailed in the sort of things we are capturing, not only in the detail that we have now. but also setting up to where I hope we are going. So we run that every Saturday night. In fact, the vehicles that we feature on each show are actually decided on a data-driven process. Very soon after I joined here and digging through the data, really happy to find one of our partners had already established how many VDP views, how many unique shoppers, et cetera, and being able to customize the date range for that. Pardon me while I close that. That is one of my other providers telling me that something came in. And so... Hopefully it was good. It was good. That is a good... that is a good noise to hear. And so, you know, we moved very quickly from, hey, let's just pick a nice selection out there to informing the inventory that's out there based on the previous week's views. And so we look at, right, what are things that are rising to the top in terms of our video, in terms of our website visits, VDP views, and we use that to then inform the vehicles that we shoot every Monday that are then aired the following, the coming Saturday. And that has been useful. And one of the other things that I think that has happened here is what I will describe as all ships float higher. Right now, when I come in on Friday mornings, I very quickly expect one of my team members from across the street to come over. First thing, often before I even have my computer turned on, give me the list, I wanna start setting out cars. And so, it's really interesting to see that and understand sort of, this evolution of sophistication of of across the team of why data how to look at data what can I discover from data and I will say in many cases and increasingly many more cases an appetite for data tell me what I can learn from this and I think that's been a really really interesting and I think fun reflection over the the last several months that I've been here as well yeah we've got So it sounds like you're using the hotter inventory that's getting more traffic, more eyeballs. Yes. Prioritize that over the ones that need some love, the aging inventory. Yep. Yeah, that is just, I mean, it's a matter of philosophy, I would think, Andrew, right? I mean, certainly there is the need to move those units that have been here, you know, you know, eighteen of them out there on the lot that we need to move. Those are signals that to me suggest an upward interest in that sort of vehicle and to then showcase, continue to amplify our inventory in that area. How long has that still been going on? You know, honestly, when I was getting offered this opportunity, one of the reasons was because I remember back in college, late at night, watching TV, seeing the show. No kidding. It's been around for a long time, right? Was that like back in the forties or fifties? I graduated high school in ninety two. And we've been around since ninety. I graduated high school in ninety two and in the early nineties, mid nineties in college. And, you know, we've been around here since since ninety five. And I remember, you know, ninety five, ninety six, ninety seven going back that that commercial back then. And are you finding ways yet to like repurpose some of that content for other channels? Yep. We use it on YouTube. Cut it up, you know, cut up a segment. I'll I'll post just the, you know, the content, the ten minutes of content for this store on this store's Facebook page, and then I'll cut it up for. All right. We have an interesting Facebook construct and that we have a Facebook page for each one of our locations. But then we also have to we we take an effort of span of serving the the hispanic community and so we've also got two sort of properties that are completely in spanish serve up our entire inventory in spanish we've got dedicated sales teams that that are bilingual in spanish etc and so that is that is also a piece of that's been that's been beneficial for us yeah that's another way to think about it from the customer's perspective it's like A lot of times now when we're advertising to Spanish audiences, it's just targeting people on social that use the platform in Spanish. It's easy. But then also walking them through WhatsApp, like have the ad open up WhatsApp to a chat. Yep. And we're noticing a lot of people really comfortable that speak Spanish to carry on that conversation in WhatsApp. Yeah, we have to build that bridge. I see it. It's on my to-do list right now. We don't have the WhatsApp plug-in, but given the use of WhatsApp globally, and I think given the international sort of relationships I think that audience has, it is important for us to be present in there. Steve, what are you all doing with AI these days in your marketing efforts? So AI, we have it. I have not let it run loose. This is why I have not let it run loose. Because our data is not in a place that I can do that. There it is. If first name is four question marks and last name is six question marks, I have high concern of letting the AI make decisions based on If I have a database where there is a population that says no at gmail.com, if I have a database with an address that says one, those are all things that until I'm comfortable that that data is better, I have high reservation with letting the AI engines loose. Yeah, I think there's my philosophy is like there's never perfectly clean data. It's what amount of mistake are you willing to accept? I feel like the bar is a lot higher when you're talking about letting AI loose on it. Yeah, I agree. And I'm a big fan of experimentation. Quite frankly, I love these tools because we can experiment very quickly. And I have used AI. And I want to be very clear. You know, this is not a free sort of subscription, et cetera. We have paid for the premium sort of access, et cetera. I think, you know, you listen to a number of different news outlets, media platforms in automotive and automotive dealers. That has been the red flag that that folks like yourselves and others have been very strong in terms of advocating in terms of don't put PII in the model. because of all sorts of sort of risk and bad things that come from that. And so we've gone through the effort to pseudomize data, right? So to pull it out, to pseudomize it, to replace PII. What word is that? Pseudomize. Oh, right, like so, okay. Yeah. And so we've gone through an effort to mask PII, et cetera, but through that lens to be able to understand what the AI can tell us, right? In terms of, hey, here's a subset of our customers and Again, let me be clear and just validate, there's no PII in there. But the ability to look at shopping patterns, et cetera, and say, tell me what you find, create segments, et cetera. And it has been beneficial in experimenting that and trying that as we anticipate sort of a much cleaner data set, sort of that practice, if you will. And we've already seen some interesting sort of ahas. Now, I would not say describe those ahas as opportunities. I think right now those ahas are gaps, if you will, breaks that you're like, okay, now that we've identified that, we have to address that before we really let the AI models loose on these things. It's cool. And I find there's so many creative opportunities. ways to push AI with all this data that you're sitting on that can help you make decisions or tell a story at least of, you know, here's our inventory, days on lot, here's our website traffic, here's VDP views. Help me come up with a plan to have fifteen cars that we can do a manager special on that aren't getting a lot of traffic that have been on the lot for a while. And help me come up with a script for why these are the manager specials that we can feature and have these vehicles that aren't getting love because they're not priced right or because they're the wrong color or whatever to have these get some love and get some energy and urgency for people to come in and test drive them. Yeah, we do that, I think, on a daily basis, right? In terms of, hey, we're going to do a paid social campaign. We'll upload the content to our subscription, right? Whether it's a video clip, whether it's a, you know, we attach the file to the AI bot and do exactly that, right? Review this video. And as a market researcher describing what the role you'd like them to play, or a copywriter, right? Facebook appropriate content for that supports this video. We do that often. But even in that regard, there is the opportunity to fine tune. One of the things that I have found very helpful is stipulating what kind of role you want the AI agent to work in, right? As a copywriter, as a, and that changes, that changes. You see these nuances when you make those shifts and ask it to have a different sort of personality or serve in a different role. You see some sort of shifts that you can play with and experiment with. Yeah. And then you can be like, drop the marketing stuff. We already had the message, translate this to where it would resonate with the Spanish audience. And now, Like I saw a list of like the top jobs that are about to be replaced with AI. Number one is the translators. Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean the AirPods, the new AirPods will translate for you, right? When they're in your ear. I mean, that's how democratized that sort of technology has become. That's going to be crazy. I can't wait to try that. Let's start to bring this home. We've got a couple more questions here for you. We'll throw at you. So what's working well for you and what are you going to be experimenting with in the next six months? What is working very well for us are reviews. We have been on a concerted effort around one of our service centers, and we're going to start to expand this to our other sorts of stores to incentivize five-star reviews, incentivize our team to ask for five-star reviews. And again, I won't say the name of the individual because I don't know if she's comfortable with it, but she is killing it, killing it. And we are seeing the needle move in terms of going, you know, in terms of not only the volume of reviews, but how many are five star reviews. What's the trick? Well, you know. She is very intentional with asking for reviews, right? And I think in that moment when you're sitting across from the service desk with somebody that has, you know, they're writing you a check, they're paying for their RO, et cetera, it I think is an authentic sort of customer connection to say, how did we do? And she's intentional about that, right? It is at the forefront of her thinking. It says, when I'm done here, or as I go through this closeout process to ask for a review. And for me, I think it is how she approaches that, not only of how she engages with people, but that she intentionally asks for the review of the service, I think is a good thing. And as I've sort of watched this, it's interesting that how the end in mind is now at the beginning of the customer journey. It is evident to me that if at the end of this experience, I'm going to ask this customer to give me a positive review, I've been able to watch the thinking that says, how do I prep for that moment when I ask for it now at the first engagement? And it's nothing that I've done to do that. This is sort of this natural progression and this sort of evolution. And it's been fun to watch. And so right now, reputation, I'll call reputation management and taking a concerted intentional effort on reputation. let's drive more five-star reviews is moving the needle i mean literally in terms of of our rating where we come up on on google review and google searches etc uh it is moving the needle for for sure i like to think that that feeds other things outside of like um you know getting more reviews google loving you yelp love it like dealer rate or whatever platforms it is, but like to be able to have that third-party endorsement and then start using it with your marketing more. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Over reading one of the reviews that's like very favorable. Yep. We just moved to a new website provider, and that's actually one of the things that they do. They serve up our five-star reviews as client testimonials on our homepage. I think we could have opportunity to be a little bit more creative there, right? Video testimonials, right, at vehicle delivery, et cetera, on the car side. turning over the keys on the service side type of thing. I think we have opportunity to be more creative in those things. But I also think that brings up another point is that empowering the frontline people to be their own content capture creators, right? I get asked frequently, hey, can we shoot some video today? And my response is always the same. You don't need me. You want me to amplify and tell that story out on the various channels? The more authentic, the better story is when you're holding the camera yourself and you're delivering your own story. And even yesterday I had this conversation and the sales individual that I was speaking with, I didn't know that. I was like, yeah, go out there and record a video. What do you like? Tell people about yourself, right? Why shop here? Send it to me. I'll amplify it. But you don't need me. And so I think from a mentality perspective, there's a bit of a mental roadblock in terms of content supply chain and still sort of educating, empowering folks to say, hey, your own content is the best content and look at me to amplify it. Right on. What do you experiment with the next few months? right now what i am experiencing with is uh having all of our data all of our vendors all i hate the word vendor so i'm going to scratch that having all of our strategic partners having all of our strategic partners actually work together i've told all of them i envision a future where every quarter we have a technology martech town hall where everybody shows up and understands what lane they work in, and all of us are working together to grow our business. And that, I think, is fundamentally built on everybody working together. It is very interesting on this side of the table. When I have two vendors, both that have email capabilities, I'm paying for them both, but I only use one. Right. I see that on this side of the table more and more frequently. It is sort of the best analogy that I have been able to sort of come up with is that we are paying for big brains, but like humans, we're only using a small percentage of that brain. Right. And I'm hopeful and I've seen some very good traction, at least from the folks that are serving us of that willingness to say, okay, we aren't serving all of their needs, but so-and-so can serve us and it can fill those gaps where we don't have a core capability competency. It's not the best thing that we do right now. How do we work together? And there are literal pipes being built in terms of data flows between our vendors as a result of this desire to say, hey, I love you both. I love all of you. but it's very fragmented right now in terms of what I get from you, what I get from you, what I get from you, what I get from you. On top of that, I'm paying for things that a lot of you have, but I'm not using all those things, right? So I'm driving towards what I hope is a future that says so-and-so shows up in this lane, so-and-so shows up in this lane, so-and-so shows up in this lane, and we have that harmonious ecosystem. And I think the biggest thing that I'm experiencing with right now is, moving all of the data that sits into all of those things into one unified cloud that sits in the middle of it. Because I think with that, then you let the AI loose. Then with all of this stuff, then I think we're able to really sort of activate this strategy that where we started the conversation right we're able to automatically understand and reach out to people that bought a something that tows something forty you know six six months ago and say hey you want a new toy to tow on the back of that thing um vice versa right somebody bought a big giant diesel pusher from us and that bus can't go to all of the little village and streets that they're going to visit while they while they tour across the u.s do you want something a smaller vehicle to tow on the back of your diesel pusher those are all things i think we can effectuate uh once we get not only the data right but all of the all of our strategic partners working together in harmony amen utopia yeah dinner's fine and Yeah, that beats twelve dashboards that all have their own nuances and idiosyncrasies and data that they're providing that's overlapping with other ones. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you touch on another thing, right? I have six dashboards understanding which they are. But then when I see the same data point, but different metrics for the same time frame of the same data point, which one's right? We're right. Those are all those are all things that that i'm working through right now and frankly having been on that other side of that table i don't think i would have had this sort of i would not have had this point of view right because again it gets back to being a little bit myopic right this is the platform that i represent this is the service the solution and right and i think looking at all of these things from this side or the view from this side of the table and saying Hey, y'all are great partners, but there are things that you aren't enabling. That is not allowing us to get the maximum value for our investment in you is, is I think a, a, just a point of view that I think is there's, there's tons of opportunity there. Um, and so I don't know. I mean, is it a utopian vision? I don't know. Do I think it's the right call for, for dealers? Yes. Um, I'm looking forward to building that and in this journey and, uh, Whether it works or not, we'll see what happens. Yeah, I don't think we'll ever get to the utopia exactly, but it's not going to be dystopian. It's going to be pushing in the right direction. It's some kind of topia. It might be zootopia. I've never seen that movie. My kid is too old for that one. Yeah, you're due for another kid, it sounds like. No, I got a twenty-year-old. I'm good. Well, Steve, can people follow you somewhere or connect with you anywhere? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and so forth. Yeah, S-C-H-M-I-T-H. It's a bit of an odd spelling. Every week, you can find me and my co-host hosting Inside CVC. It's a podcast that you can find on uh spotify wherever you find your your podcast we talk about corporate venture investment we talk about capital uh you know private equity had the chief futurist of salesforce on a few times and i think in in or as one episode and i think is what we're talking about here relative to crm and salesforce and what they're doing around ai etc Very interesting conversation that I think is relevant to what we're doing as well. Yeah. And by all means, welcome folks reaching out, connecting. I love creating a network, talking to people. And if I can be helpful to anybody, by all means, don't hesitate. Steve, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. I love it. It's a great conversation. That's it.