Episode 10 – Scott Skougard, Marketing Director at Roseville Kia

🎙️ Episode 10 – Scott Skougard, Marketing Director at Roseville Kia

Podcast: The 100 Marketers Project

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

In this episode of The 100 Marketers Project, we sit down with Scott Skougard, Marketing Director at Roseville Kia, who’s redefining what it means to run a dealership marketing operation.

Scott shares how his store went from 23rd to 1st in their district in just 60 days, and the mindset, training, and unconventional marketing strategies that fueled the turnaround. From hand-coding his own website to prioritizing authentic, person-to-person communication over automation, Scott shows what happens when creativity and curiosity drive dealership success.

He also dives into:

• Building a dealership culture centered around growth and continuous improvement
• Turning “reject” salespeople into top performers
• How hands-on SEO and unique website experiences can dramatically increase leads
• Balancing brand-building with immediate sales goals
• The real role of AI in dealership marketing (and why it’s not ready for prime time)
• The power of human connection—from local newsletters to multilingual marketing and community events

This is a must-listen for anyone looking to break away from cookie-cutter OEM marketing and build something truly original.

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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.

Most marketers tend to play it safe. Scott Skogard from Roseville Kia, he builds his own lane and has moved his dealership from the twenty-third in the market to first in his market over the course of sixty days. From running ads in different languages and coding his own websites, Scott is proving that being different isn't risky. It's his strategy.  following the rest of the herd has never made anybody stand out. Enjoy this conversation with Scott.

Scott, you give us a quick introduction to who you are, where you work and kind of the responsibilities that fall under your umbrella. Great. My name is Scott Skogard. I've been doing the marketing role for some twenty plus years. We were recent changes. We were a very large group here in Northern California and the primary owner retired. So this group, the significant group, the majority of it was sold to Lithia. And his nephew has one of those fourteen points that I'm now the sole marketing guy. And we're in the process of quickly ramping up and building an entirely new group. So we'll go from large to one and back to large, hopefully in short order. So the experience of regrowing a monster is really fantastic. My role, the label is marketing director. My role is far flung past that. I deal with a lot of legal issues. I'm the in-house architect. I do a lot of inspirational speeches for the sales guys. I do a lot of things wherever I see an opportunity to push a button or make it better, really to stretch the envelope about what we're capable of. And one of the fun things for the dealership that we have, it's a key point. When we started, the previous owner was basically told, you're at the bottom of the rung. You have to either sell this thing or we're going to take the dealership away from you. So as another dealer in the area, we thought we want the property. We want the dirt this building sits on. And we get a Kia franchise. No big deal. That wasn't the focus. Well, we went from twenty third in the district. And then after about a month of applying our principles and putting our reject salespeople before they are fired, here's one last shot. Use it. We've taught you with this big dealership and just do it at the small one. We went from twenty third to first within sixty days. And that's where we've stayed ever since. And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I think last month we were number ten or number eleven in the country. So it's been an ongoing self-challenge to find how to make ourselves constantly seek improvement and then accomplish it. And that's the kind of DNA that is baked into our team and how we approach the next acquisitions, whatever they specifically consist of same recipe. Let's let's be the best and keep growing more than you did last week. I feel like for a little bit in there, like went from like twenty third to first in sixty days. Maybe we can unpack that here a little bit. Andrew, I cut you off. Go ahead. No, that's exactly what I was going to say. Like, what was the experience like going from twenty third to first? In such a short amount of time. The first part of the experience was understanding it was the mindset of the employees. The staff wasn't used to being anything but last place. And so it was really ironic. Some of the people were enthusiastic about really being professional, doing well, selling more and making more. They wanted that opportunity. And others were comfortable just sitting back in the Barker lounger and watching the world go by. They didn't want to do what it took to be successful. They didn't want to make the phone calls and schedule the appointments and have the interactions with the customers. They just wanted to cruise through their day, apparently. And so it was astonishing the kinds of turnover we had and how rapidly it took place. So we quickly saw people were leaving, not because we were bad guys, but the opposite. we give the door open to make more money and sell more cars. And many people didn't want that. So we quickly had a policy for our other stores that were close by, instead of someone just being escorted at the door if they weren't performing well, here's your last opportunity. Here's your saving grace. Step into this organization, use those same skills, and it exploded. people took that seriously. This is my last shot and worked really, really hard. And some of those people are still with us. So it was really enthusiastic on our behalf to see what we're doing has some sort of functionality to it there's some meat on the bone and just turn these people loose with the opportunity to do well and the encouragement support to do that it's been fun were you having to do any kind of brand restoration or repair as a part of that rise or was it just more of a lack of discipline on the sales process side it wasn't so much branding as it was well not branding in terms of the manufacturer branding it was more branding in terms of the ownership So from an SEO standpoint, through all of the messaging we had, it was, there's a new sheriff in town and we do things differently. And the emphasis continues to this day that we are a locally owned operation. And so a lot of what I show on our site is all about the family connection. Example, the general manager, his first position with the organization was barbecue manager. son of the owner, he would come in on weekends and flip hamburgers and turn hot dogs and get tips, hopefully. Here's your here's your soda and your hot dog. And, you know, he had a buck and he was he was thrilled. And so we've grown so many of the positions. with people who are homegrown so they understand the intensity and the do everything you possibly can as a team kind of mentality. And we portray that in our different forms of advertising and marketing throughout. I want to retire the burger flipper. What's that? I want the barbecue guy job when I retire. Well, his younger brother is doing it right now. But when he graduates and becomes a detailer, we might have a job opening. So it sounds like one of the big shifts that you guys made was with just like the mindset of the staff. Completely urgency. Are there any other shifts that you guys made in that leading up into this big growth period? The other and it's also an ongoing shift. We wholeheartedly believe in the concept of training. So many franchise dealerships I find do the minimum amount of training to get the OEMs off their back. And we completely lean into what the OEM training is. And then we actively seek out other forms of training on top of that. Whether it's people like myself or other positions in the company have had lots of experience, we go in and give training sessions to the team. And then we hire other people to come in and give additional insight. And there's been unexpected consequences out of that. For example, within Kia, some of the local and regional and national leadership has recognized our commitment to training. So they come in and give us additional visits and additional training and supplemental opportunities. And let me tell you about this new product before we tell the rest of the world. We're on the forefront of the knowledge base, which we can pass along to the consumers. And it comes across as being insightful as well as really being proud that we can be on that cutting edge. It's been a blast. And is that around the time you started creating your own websites? No, I've been making my own website forever and ever. That's one of my. my secret recipes and a lot of people ask me, gee, Scott, you don't want to give away all your secrets, do you? And my simple answer is it doesn't matter if I tell everyone because we're talking about much less than one percent of the people ever actually take any action on this. So I actually make my own website. soup to nuts I write my own HTML I write my own CSS I write my own JavaScript and I update it just about every single day so my SEO value is completely organic just like they teach you when you go to school um make your make your intrinsic changes so Google can follow what you do I personally touch the code every single day so our SEO value is legitimate and incredibly strong and then I can custom tailor all of those messages that are designed by the factory Let's face it, the factory knows most dealers aren't gonna do much other than just the cookie cutter minimum, right? Put it on a treadmill, stamp it, it's got the co-op approval, it's good. I go in and massage all of those elements and give them a real personal touch, or at least put them in a context that matches our unique DNA. So everything we deliver has a different flavor than all of our competitors. And I think that's what a lot of customers respond to. It's not just another identical site to everyone else's. We want to be a location that gives a different experience, a different user experience. And that starts with the website. My goodness, most people that come to dealerships anymore, unless they've been to how many websites? If we don't stick out from that spectrum of vanilla, we've lost such an opportunity. So it's the very least I can do is to make us unique. Yeah. I've got to take a look now. Yeah, no, it's cool. Okay. Okay. When you go take a look, you'll see a couple of things right off the bat. I encourage you to go to the very bottom. This is a, this is a great secret. Go to the very bottom and you'll see little icons. I'm there. Click on where it says contact and notice the first group of people that pop up. Actually, Have we got the wrong one? This is Roseville Kia for the record. Yeah, meet our staff. Contact, meet our staff. Look at the staff directory. All right. Well, I clicked on contact us and it tells me that it was okay if I bring my well-behaved dog. Exactly. We have a process where I highlight the dogs of the employees and we tell our customers, if you've got a well-behaved dog, bring them along with you. We take pictures of the guests with their dogs. We've got dog treats at the receptionist. We've got a little relief area. We've got little dog bowls for them. We want to do two things with this communication. One, we want to let people know we're caring people. We're just not the big bad auto guy that's coming to take all your money. We're real local people as well. And we care about things beyond what's my interest rate. And then the other thing it does, it completely shifts the conversation instead of how much below invoice can I get that suddenly the conversation is a completely different environment. This instantly became family friendly. This instantly became somewhere I can take the critters I care about that are my extended family as well as the human beings. And so we have a piece of that puzzle of that user experience that's a radical shift from what the average dealership does. It's not hard. Right. No one does it. I'm picking up almost kind of like Subaru vibes there. It's like you're appealing to a different, just overall mentality and you approach things with a different mentality. And that seems to be a part of the, essentially the brand you built. That's a fair parallel is we want to be not just another one of the same. I don't want cookie cutter, vanilla, everything. It's all different here. And we want customers to feel that. Scott, how do you then think about like building this brand, which it is unique and different. Like go check out Roseville Kia. Yeah. It looks like a dealership website, but there are differences. You can spot them right away. How do you think about balancing that brand awareness versus my team needs leads right now and we've got to sell cars? Well, they go together when we have that uniqueness and the SEO that comes out of that in conjunction to all of the traditional lead sources that inevitably come our way as being a franchise dealer because of the SEO value and then the stickiness, the amount of traffic we get, people tend to stick and have more of a conversation, whether it's our trading tool or our text module or whatever someone gets comfortable with dealing with a website that says we do things differently and they tend to engage more. So our lead count is huge. We've had the problem of needing to get more and more people in our departments to handle our leads because it's just an ongoing growth. And at one point, it was about a year and a half ago, the owner said, I want to get a monthly report that shows how many leads we've got. So I broke it down to different sources and categories and comparison. Over the past several years or there are other brands we've had historically and our lead count just continues to take off. Our expenses are not, but our lead count continues to grow because we are attracting new eyeballs and then maintaining that relationship with us, with people who've been here before. So it's, to me, it's the perfect storm. It just keeps growing. Yeah. And in my experience, if you can get people to go through the front door through the website and go through the digital retailing type process into a trade-in appraisal, a credit app, that's going to be a much more qualified lead. And then through the experience of the website, being able to drop somebody's guard to where they know you and they start to trust you before they even start doing a conversation with a salesperson. Those ones convert at a, whatever, Fifteen, twenty five percent. It's outrageous. And then a lot of the things we put in the website to support that beyond pictures of the car and beyond what the credit application may be. For the people who want to sort to the about us and the history and that sort of stuff, we have a lot of components that hopefully give people that peace of mind that we are a locally owned dealership that actually cares. We're part of the community. We support the local softball team for high schoolers. We do those sorts of things that engage with the community, not simply we write a check every month to this specific charity, but rather we're part of the community and we want to demonstrate that in an intrinsic way. I see people respond. Now you know all my secrets. The one that keeps coming back to me in my mind is what the hell are you doing? Like building your own website, right? There's all these out of the box platforms. I know you just, you just ripped off like a whole bunch of benefits, but there's gotta be some, some challenges that are gonna prevent the normal marketing director from doing this. Like, what have you seen those trade offs to be my time? I grew up in different parts of the country and I spent a lot of time with techies. I used to go to the center of the hackathon with Bill Gates. That's where I first met Steve Jobs. I still, whenever I get the opportunity, being here in Northern California, I go to YouTube studios and I go hang out with the guys at Google and I go have lunch with someone at Facebook. That proximity gives me a huge advantage perhaps, but those sorts of resources are worldwide now. And anyone can go to any community college and get instruction on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's not hard. Our entire industry, as far as I can see, just hasn't seen the benefit of doing that. So if you simply have someone who starts coding, give them a month. you can replace all of these crazy cookie cutter approaches that, you know, website X offers with classic HTML and have so much better resorts from a, an SEO standpoint. So truly to answer your question and not be flippant about it, the biggest trade-off is my time. It takes a fair amount of time for me to do some of these changes, especially when I don't just change the date or say it went from the April specials to the May specials. To put some additional thought into it and to use those coating pieces to give it that texture, that takes a couple hours a month. So really, I don't see a downside outside of a little bit of time commitment. But what it gives us is such a unique texture and nothing touches it. Have there been any good resources for you for continuing education and getting better at this craft or the fine specifics of doing website code, things like that? Great question. I've been doing it so long. To me, it's second nature. When you study another language and you dream in that language, you really get it well. Or you play too much Tetris one day and all you see the blocks falling down. Exactly. When I studied French in college, I knew I was doing decently with French when I was dreaming in French. Well, I dream in code. I see things I can I can picture the little brackets and the stuff to make it this way and spin. And it's it becomes an automatic thing. So great question. How do I stay up with that? Because it is a moving target. There's a handful of email newsletters I subscribe to. And there's a couple of great guys on YouTube and ladies that that show these are the new techniques or these are some of the evolving areas, primarily with CSS. That's the one that's going super fast. JavaScript and HTML are pretty static comparatively, but CSS is just on a rocket ship of changes right now. It's fun to see other people do the things they do and then emulate it and have a sandbox where I can build them and see what version of that I want. I'm just not directly copying. I'm putting our unique flavor, our approach, our style into our message. To me, it's a lot of fun. I get paid to have fun. It's cool too. It's like, I've seen a handful of dealerships that we've worked with, especially with dealer groups that are moving people up into more like corporate positions to invest into their capabilities and find or have them find the same thing we do with our company. It's like everybody has a certain budget each year for education. It could be going to seminars, taking classes, design classes, marketing, but just things in this ecosystem, um, to help self-identify people as somebody that's hungry to grow, but then get people to a management course, because it's not intuitive. You might be great at selling cars, but then moving from selling cars to managing a dealership, it seems like a stretch. And you're spot on. And it kills me how many times I see people thrown into a management role because you did well at job X, you should now be a manager and not everyone's ready for that psychological switch to be thrown. It's sad how many good people we lose as an industry because they're thrown into the deep end without any warning. You got to tread water, let alone how do you tread water when you get there? So you're spot on. We need to, I think as an industry, we need to focus on additional levels of training, starting with how to manage. And maybe I've got an unfair advantage there too. I worked with Nordstrom for several years. I helped Jennifer Nordstrom build nordstrom.com. And one of the challenges that she faced, her and her brothers and cousins, especially in Southern California, was the industry there was growing so fast. Retail industry in the eighties was just explosive and they couldn't get anyone with experience to go into management. So they actually started a management university. It's called the University of Nordstrom. I don't know if it still exists, but it was approximately eight weeks of intense homework assignments you went and practiced these things and then came back for a test and evaluation and then after your eight-week classes you had to live it for several weeks and then you were re-evaluated and then you got your diploma and a sweatshirt and license plate friend you're actually prepared to be a manager and you do things that no one talks about now to a large degree like work-life balance how do you enjoy your your time off and unplug so you're ready to be fresh and energetic when you hit that that floor on monday morning So you're exactly right. Invest in that management training. So we take our best people and make them better prepared to be even better. It seems like you wrote the book on doing the work-life integration and balance and have found ways to cut loose and then come back and hit the ground running. Do you have any kind of wisdom around that? What's kept your batteries charged? For me, it's two components. One, identify the two or three things you're really passionately interested in and then give yourself permission to invest time and money in that. So I love international travel. I love music. And to support that, I found a partner who is really supportive of those things and is passionate about at least one of them. So we can spend time together. One of the two ain't bad. Yeah, yeah. The travel's good. So I spend an in and out amount of my time and money in those areas. And it just, it fuels my engine. I absolutely am passionate about it. Well, I think we need to take this opportunity to throw it out there to you, Scott, but also to anyone else. If you're going to NADA in Las Vegas, let's go see some live music. Yeah. Oh, I'm in. I'll hold you to that, Matthew. Let's go. All right. I saw you two, two years ago there. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I celebrated too much. It was fine though. Is there too much? You, You were talking about trying to keep up with everything on the website. CSS is moving fast. Yeah. Is AI helping you in any of that process? And is AI touching any other aspects of your marketing efforts today? AI is a hot topic. I get it. And I've dug into the weeds with a lot of AI tools and I may be way off base. I might be the most incorrect guy in planet earth, but here's my summary. AI is not ready for prime time when it comes to talking to my customers. AI has been a very valuable tool within our organization so that my employees can refer to a resource to come up with things to say or follow up options or insights they may have missed when looking at the CRM. It can give them assistance. But back to the whole topic of we want to be different and we want to be connecting with our consumers, we lean heavily into one on one communication that's person to person. And we've yet to find an AI tool that comes close to the texture of those communications. So do we use AI? Yes, we do. But it's not the AI that actually has the direct communication with our guests. And we tried it a couple of times and it failed miserably. So we keep going back to have that personal buffer, that last element before you send it to the customer has to be a live person on our team. I think that, yeah, there's a measured approach there that is certainly worth consideration. And speaking with our team here at Trade Pending, something that we're seeing out in the field is there's a mindset amongst some of the dealer population. It's like fear of missing out on AI tools. And so we're coming in and talking about, hey, we've got these really great products for helping your website convert trade-ins and payments and all that stuff. Like, oh yeah, but I'm behind on picking out an AI chat tool. It's kind of sucking the oxygen out of the room, sometimes away from things that may actually be more helpful in the medium and long term. Yeah, for a couple of these tools, we did some AB testing. Let's have sometimes an AI thing pop up as a chat tool and sometimes have a traditional text button pop up. And the difference in the conversion and the quality of the communication was obviously distinct. So we keep going back to leaning on what we've experienced as being valuable. It's real conversation. It's real communication person to person that makes all the difference for us. How far away do you think we are from when it is right for primetime in your opinion, if ever? That's a great question. And it sounds ironic for me to be talking about this because I'm the guy that writes all the code. I should be the first guy that says, man, let's turn on the bots. Let's go. So it's hard to measure when it's going to become effective enough. I mean, you get the phone calls, the bots call you and you can tell them it's that fake voice and that incredible cadence that's just not real. It doesn't pass the litmus test yet. Some of the pictures on Facebook and Instagram are strikingly good, but you can still see that plastic sheen and that artificiality. It feels like a robot to me. So when is that going to go away? I don't know if it ever will. But in the meantime, I'm gonna stick with what's given me success and what I can be there to witness when someone has a conversation with a guest To me, I see the light bulb come on and the customers respond. I've never had one of my customers that I'm aware of ask, are you a bot? Should we ask you right now? Maybe I'm very convincing as a bot. I don't know. Yes. Cut to the scene when Scott discovers. I don't think it's ready and I don't know when it will be. So we'll continue to keep it in the background as a research tool instead of frontward facing. Yeah, it's got to be so hard to be a dealer and really be able to triage what's important and not get intoxicated by what's hot. You would think, but my argument to that is also really simple. Ask your customers. Every single customer who does a transaction with us, we send them a follow-up message that said, how could you? This isn't a factory survey. This isn't something that we're going to be accepting bribes to get a good score. We just want to know, would you come back to us? Do we treat you right? And the insightful responses we get, sometimes it's a simple five-star, great. And others, we get paragraphs and paragraphs that detail the experience, both good and lots of opportunities, both. We see both sides of it. And out of that, we have follow-up meetings. It doesn't just go into some email box and it's forgotten. I actually have those automatically distributed to all the managers. Everyone in management gets that answer. And it leads to these phenomenal conversations in our management meetings. So hopefully that's not an oversimplified answer, but ask the customer, how do we do? And what's cool, what's cool is going on right now. So I know that what, what you're working on too, is like, uh, I know from our end, we're doing like WhatsApp advertising and doing stuff in different languages. How do you feel like that type of promotion's working? It can be incredibly impactful. We've had some examples that are out of the park successful and then others that we anticipated to really form some traction, but it hasn't happened. Um, and that the risk of sounding like a broken record. It comes back to the human interaction. One of the best examples I can think of, we have or had, he's now retired. We had a gentleman, he's Vietnamese. He and his Vietnamese wife, part of a Vietnamese community, love the community, love their neighbors, love their family. And they started to advertise in a very low cost Vietnamese newsletter. And the only point of contact was his phone number and his email at the dealership. And the communication he would give them is, if you're Vietnamese and you don't buy from me, you're not invited to the party. And so his customer said, what party? So he started having monthly parties. The party got so big, it took over the entire town. And nobody, nobody would buy a car if it wasn't from him, if they were Vietnamese. So we'd literally go into the showroom floor and you'd see four families waiting in the showroom. Oh, I wait. the loyalty and the commitment to that unique persona was intense. And I think the advertising was a hundred bucks a month. So to me, it just boils back down to that community connection, that authentic person to person interaction. But it's cool too, to not have like this cookie cutter corporate approach to your marketing and be able to identify the resources you have that are on your roster and in your market and be like, okay, here's a unique character that we could find some white space in marketing that's not too expensive and own it when nobody else is. And that's one of my ongoing frustrations as a veteran marketing guy. One of my frustrations that just won't go to bed is the OEM co-op approach. from the factory, I get what they're trying to do. They'll tell you, we're going to take this bucket of money and leverage it for you, Mr. Dealer, so we can get the biggest bang for your buck. But along the way, it comes with a lot of strings. There's lots of little hooks in there. Some of these OEMs actually take the data and advertise against you. You're the dealer that got the data, but they're going to put it into their bucket. And in case you don't sell to customer X we're going to as a factory. So what many dealers end up doing by following the OEM buckets is to give away their exclusivity, to give away their market share and to just tone down their uniqueness. So I constantly take a very close look at what those advertising opportunities are in the OEM spectrum and make sure I'm not cutting off my own opportunities. like the Vietnamese magazine. I didn't apply for co-op. That's a hundred bucks. Yeah. That's not in the playbook. I mean, are you just like getting the, like the monocle out and reading the T's and C's like just to make sure that you're not signing up for anything you didn't mean to, or is there something else you got to do? That's well, that's usually the main monocle. I felt like you would have a monocle. It's modern bionicle. I use the, I use this. oh no very very closely and i make sure that um i'll flat out ask the rep is is this data also going to the oem is this uniquely ours or is it uh is it kept private and if they don't know or if they tell me it's on my you know never bother again in life dead to me list um So I make it really well known to the people I work with. I expect a certain form of loyalty. Scott, he makes his own websites, not his own broadband. That's right. We can't fault him for the internet connection. Am I back? Oh, he's back. Yeah, you're back. Where was I? Where did you lose me? I heard something about loyalty, and you're either with me or against me. All right. you lose me again you're coming yeah you keep the freeze frames you have like a really good face it's not a funny like but when you were saying like the oem or the dealership owns the data for a lot of the marketing you're doing what was the answer um if i insist on the dealership owning it That's a short answer. I know he's still talking, but no, maybe that's it. Maybe he insists. So they give it to him and it's over. Doesn't fall into any national campaigns. What I'm learning from Scott is living in North Carolina or North Cal Northern California and the Bay area for a little bit. He kind of beef up your stories and your Rolodex. Right. You get to hang out at Facebook. You meet Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. You can just kind of walk down the street and bump into Facebook employees. Yeah. You surf to school. I don't even. Yeah. Unreasonable. Something's not right here. Well, we might have to like stitch together the back half of this thing later. I don't know. It's fine. We'll cut this and slice out the middle. Um, What a good dude though. What a good, good. We're just scratching the surface here. What I like, what I admire about him is his blood pressure seems pretty even keel. Yeah. That's not normal. Can I kick him out and invite him back in? I don't think, let me see if I can text him. When you're number one, it's easy to have good blood pressure. I do not have him in my text-to-texts. Scott entered the studio. Dave. I'm on my cell phone. Apparently the OEMs heard what I was saying. They cut me off. Yeah. Big brother's big brother taking shots. Now I was just talking about how it sounds amazing to live in Northern California and the Bay area for a little while and beef up your chops, build stories, get a expanded network. Yeah. Hang out with Steve and Bill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then go to wineries on weekend and, you know, listen to live music and life is good. Steve jobs and Bill Gates have like giant margins on their products, but yeah, slim margins. And we, and when I first met, uh, when I first met, um, Bill Gates, he was just a dude. He really didn't have the, um, He didn't have the professional credits to his names. He was just a guy. So it was so much fun to just hang out with all these people who are passionate about making the lights blink on the front of the console. And you press the keyboard and it does something. That was just awesome. So to grow up with that kind of passion for making things work, man, how do you compete with that? That was cool. That's back when people just called him Willie. He wasn't Billy yet. He was Willie. It was early Willie. Well, if I'd stayed as buddy, I'd be retired somewhere on a beach, I guess. So tell us, you've hinted at some things, but what is working well for you guys right now on the marketing front? Looking at what the industry is doing and doing something a little different. I love that. So I take a long look every single month at what our competitors are doing. And there's lots of tools out there. You can spy on your local dealership, your local competitors, or find out who's number one in your district or your OEM, whatever it is, and see what they do. And then don't do it. It's like all of these OEM approaches really have these heavy campaigns or let us help you advertise. And we want everyone in the region to do exactly the same thing. Well, what you just guaranteed is the most you're going to get is your percentage of that pie. I'm not comfortable with one slice. If they're all going into advertising platform X, I'm going to go into advertising platform G heavy. So I get a hundred percent of that while they're scrambling over there. There are three percent margin difference. Yeah. It's like you do it different. The Vietnamese newsletter that you guys are like. And then each one of those tools that we decide to use. A, monitor it really, really closely. See if the results match what you expect. And then B, apply that same mentality that we use. It's about the customer experience. It's not the race to the bottom. It's about having a great customer experience that makes people feel part of the family. So if we apply those two simple formulas, to me, that's a win. And Scott, that seems like a way to keep your foothold on the leader in your market. It's not trying to compete to be the best, the best price, the best inventory, the best everything, but be different. Right. So when you spend a bazillion bucks in Google and your neighboring dealership does too, how do you grow? Only spending two bazillion. Yeah. And then you get no profit at the end of the day. So make a left. Do something else. And goodness knows there's enough vendors out there. Bless your hearts. They're always coming to us and say, man, I get this new thing. There's always ways you can try something different. Throw up a TikTok ad and see if it moves the needle. Try something different with one of the thirty five hundred Facebook vendors that are out there. Do something a little bit different. Try a crazy newsletter in Vietnamese. If it doesn't work after a month, switch it up. So always be doing something different with that same message. Yeah, it's like we did that with a dealership in Austin years ago when nobody was really advertising on Facebook yet. And it was to each different community of speech, like native language. And so they run ads in their native language and run it through Google and then bounce it off their sales team that spoke that language. And we're just the only one in town running ads to them and their language. Our best result, outside of that one gentleman who's Vietnamese, our other endeavor that's been really successful is a page I built called Languages We Speak. So each employee who speaks a language other than English, I get their permission to put them on the site as being fluent in that specific language. And then the guest can go click on that language that gives an intro in their native tongue, whatever language it may be. And then they click on who speaks this and it pops up with a synopsis of those different employees, including points of contact. How do I reach them? Whether it's by phone or email so that we can have that form of communication in a way that's native and comfortable. And I've had people drive here from a couple hour distances because we offer more forms of communication or advertise more forms of communication than many international airports do. And so that's another layer of people getting comfortable with people. Have real conversations with someone who cares in a way you're comfortable with. Yeah, it's kind of like even if the competitive Kia store in your market has somebody that speaks Spanish, somebody that speaks Russian. Right. But to be the one that's outwardly letting people know about it. Right, right. How many people have all of those capacities and never tell someone because they don't have someone that writes code and that's not baked into the dealer.com template? Does your French or German background come up at all with any customers? A little bit. I don't get a heck of a lot of French customer base here, but every once in a while I have the opportunity to hammer away a bit. It's been fun. If I join the sales team at Roseville Kia out there in California, we can add a new language, a southern drawl to the site there. Hey, if you're in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, come on out. We'll take care of you. We can get your sweet tea ready. Absolutely. what's what's what's getting you excited right now what's what's on the on the horizon that you're digging what's on the horizon you know that's a great question whenever i go to conferences i try to go into a conference with zero expectation and just be surprised by a few things you know having gone to nada and dealer point and dealer digital and cncd and all these conferences You know, you could say, man, I'm really jaded. I know exactly what to expect. I can write the playbook and I can tell you what they're going to tell me. But it's fun to just not have an expectation and go in blind and see what shocks me. And inevitably, every one of these shows, I get these these crazy left field experiences that I just dig into saying, man, I'm doing that. So I can't say right now I've got a thing I'm really excited about. I'm excited about having a wide open opportunity to see something new and fresh. And I'm waiting to see what gets me just fired up. Because when I do get something I'm fired up on, I don't sit on and wait and let it percolate forever. I do it now. Remember, I dream in code. I pull out my laptop and I just code it away. It's like, there it is. And it's on the website ten minutes later. Sometimes you just have to be open to letting the world come to you. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it's crazy things that don't have anything to do with the car business. The last time I got super fired up in Vegas at NADA, we were walking on the sidewalk and they have all those crazy people in those wild outfits. And if you want to take a selfie, you got to pay me a tip. And it just, it inspired other things. It's about the user experience was my, when the message there and, and, um, be careful when you ask for money, if you just got selfies for free, there'd be a line on the block. So we started looking at ways we could give these wonderful user experiences to customers and not charge them anything. And so it's, it's hard to say it's one thing. It's just having an experience. that you can see how you can apply that to our industry and make the most out of it. Do you speak at all at conferences? A few times, absolutely. It's often a matter of just having time for the invitation. The last one, I was invited to speak at one of the dealer digital, and I was out of the country, so I couldn't do it. But I'm happy to. It's something I'm passionate about. I think you're great. I like the background, the personality, and the energy you bring to the industry and simply to the dealership that you work in and the people you work around. Thank you, Andrew. No, and it's cool. It's great to hear from a dealer like you and somebody that's got a light on testing out stuff and is learning his own craft better and better. And I think that resonates with, with audiences of dealers. Totally. I'm following a playbook, but it's a different playbook. Right. Right. That's the part I do. There's the, thank you. And the whole idea of a template drives me crazy. Every time I do have an idea, something that does fire me up and I'm wired for ten minutes, I want to start fresh. I want a blank piece of paper. Let's go out this with a completely different psychology. So it does reflect all the changes in CSS. It's got the newest script pieces. It's got the cutting edge HTML. The whole thing, soup to nuts, is different. And no one's going to be doing it because every single new page you put on there is one of a kind. The industry doesn't touch it. Scott, we can't thank you enough for your time today. Would you like to ask people to follow you on LinkedIn or anything? How can people find you? If you go to my website, roosevillekia.com, they contact the page that has all of the people on it, the directory. That page has my complete signature block with everything under the sun. So if you want to email me, if you want to follow me on social media, if you just want to keep tabs on my crazy website, it's all there. Whatever you're comfortable with. I'm an open book. I love it. So that's rosevillekea.com forward slash contact us. Yeah. Not contact us. No. It's the upper right. I'm offline on the corporate internet, so I can't look it up. It's in the upper right corner under contact. It's the directory. Meet our staff. There it is. Meet our staff. That's it. That's a lot of puppies. A lot of puppies. Literally, I mean puppies. I wasn't using that as a euphemism for people. There you go. Yeah, it's a lot of animals. We've even got peacocks here in my office. I see the resident peacocks. Resident peacocks. They live in the tree and spring is so noisy. That's too good. Thank you, Scott, for joining us. Thank you both, gentlemen. It's been a pleasure.

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