Episode 11 - Michael Moushon - Marketing & Technology Director, Jenkins Auto Group

🎙 Episode 11 — Michael “Mouch” Moushon, Marketing & Technology Director at Jenkins Auto Group

In this episode of 100 Marketers, we talk with Michael Moushon, known in the industry as “Mouch,” about balancing data, technology, and people inside a fast-growing automotive group. As the Marketing & Technology Director for Jenkins Auto Group, Michael shares how he manages marketing across multiple rooftops, integrates new stores, and builds smarter systems for collaboration, data, and customer experience.

He opens up about the realities of being a “one-man band,” how to navigate vendor relationships, and why empowering people at the store level is key to long-term growth.

If you’re looking for an authentic look at what it takes to modernize dealership marketing while staying human-first, this conversation is a must-listen.

⏱ Key Topics 

• From Store-Level Hustle to Group Leadership: Michael’s path to leading marketing and tech for a 20+ rooftop group
•  The Reality of Wearing 8 Hats: How to stay organized and effective as a one-man marketing department
•  Balancing Brand and Performance Marketing: Building awareness while still driving short-term results
• Dealer Growth & Integration Challenges: How Jenkins Auto Group scaled from 16 to 23 franchises
• Data, CDPs, and AI Adoption: Why clean data is the foundation for automation and personalization
•  Vendor Relationships Done Right: Translating between store goals and vendor execution
•  Empowering Store-Level Teams: The power of collaboration and involving GSMs and internet managers in strategy
•  In-House Innovation: How dealers are building internal tech and marketing teams
•  Culture & Communication: Why accessibility, humility, and helping others still win in this industry

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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.

This next marketing director is not afraid to break things that are working well in pursuit of finding stuff that works better. Meet Michael Moushon. He's our guest on a hundred marketers project. He's the marketing director of Jenkins auto group, and he's rethinking how dealers can reach car buyers. So catch this conversation with me and Matthew Davis. I'm Andrew street owner of dealer O M G. If you're liking these conversations, please like, subscribe, leave a review to help us grow. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Moushon.

Michael, we couldn't be more happy to have you talking with us on a Monday. Could you give people a quick introduction to who you are and what you do? Yeah, so I'm Michael Moushon. I'm the marketing and technology director for Jenkins Auto Group here in Florida. To all things marketing and technology and data. Right. But I also double as sort of a pseudo corporate Internet director. I, in my department, more or less I'm a one-man band. We do have some other folks at like a group level for graphic design, video, more traditional media, but as far as anything digital, marketing, technology, data, that's me. That was like eight things there. Which one of those consumes the most of your time and does that change depending upon the time of year? I think really, you know, I live out of my email, so it's a combo of know starting at the top of the inbox and then going to the bottom of the inbox and trying to pick out you know what i spend my time on first um but you know i also have a desk line and a cell phone so uh you know it's three four hundred emails a day numerous calls texts um But, you know, after being at a store level for like, fifteen years, you know, I understand that right now, sort of, need or necessity, you know, because you're trying to sell cars. So, I could be working on something and deep in it, but somebody's going to call me with an issue, and I'm going to knock it out right then and there, you know, and then get back to the other stuff. And your experience, what type of like, I guess like qualities do people have that are successful in the marketing director role? Like I've seen some people who are super creative and they want to shoot the content and be out there in the front lines, like outside the box ideas. And some people are just like really organized. Yeah. Uh, so I mean, um, it's not that I'm disorganized, but I think you either have to be like really good at one or two things and then have a really good support staff, right? That work alongside you with you towards common goal, or you kind of have to be a jack of all trades, you know, and have some things that you're better at. And for me, I think the people that can you know, find that delicate balance between, uh, being an advocate for the vendor, you know, without it, uh, being an issue for the store and vice versa is helpful. You know, like it's a lot of translation and try to like help the conversation go in the right direction and credit where credit's due and then, you know, let's go after them when that's, that's necessary as well. But I think, um, Yeah, being well-versed in a little of everything and trying to help maintain that relationship between the vendor and the stores because they don't always communicate the best together and don't always speak the same language. Jack of all trades, master of none. That is something that has been used to describe me in the past. So I get that. And if you're the one man band, you're forced into being that jack of all trades for better or for worse to some degree. Yeah. And I think people like you don't need to know everything, but you need to have a desire to self-educate. Right. So if you don't know something or if I don't know something, You know, it's possible no one else does, so I have to learn it, right? And no one else is going to do it, right? So, you know, it's a great opportunity to build your skill set and grab more tools. Have you found, like, cool resources for you to kind of get up to speed with what, you know, other forward-thinking marketers are doing, other forward-thinking dealers are doing right now? So usually it's a phone call, you know, to my counterparts, you know, in the industry. Right. So I might reach out to NIF, you know, for advice on something or chat with Gray Scott or somebody to go, hey, listen, I've been tasked to do X. Here's what I'm thinking. I'm sure you've done this before. Right. You know. help me understand what are some of the things to look out for to do not do um you know it's usually talking to other people you know uh that i've heard them speak before we've had conversations and ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of what's coming out of their mouth rings true for me you know so i view them as like-minded yeah that is such a superpower to have Just, and it sounds so simple, but it's amazing, just picking up the phone and calling and asking for help. It sounded like, I don't know what I'm doing here. You've done this before, help me out. Like that is like the, I wish every person in every job, especially marketers, just followed that as a best practice. And I should follow that more myself too. Sometimes it's hard too in automotive, you know, we have, we're allegedly, we have a lot of egos, you know, in our business. I know that. you know uh sometimes people look at a marketing or technology director as like a know-it-all or something right and uh you know we're not you know know a lot and we We self-educate a lot, but you got to be able to pick up a phone and ask somebody, especially if you know that they've tackled something previously, whether that's a CDP or incorporating AI into their stores or whatever it is. Yeah, it's kind of like, dude, it's like one thing I'm getting away, figuring out like from doing this podcast right here, it's like just expanding that the Rolodex of folks that can be in our ecosystem to reach out to. And it's like, you know, I don't know, but I know somebody who does. Like I had a conversation with somebody who's really progressively pushing AI into ingesting their DMS data I don't know how he's doing it, but let me reach out to him or connect the dots. Yeah. Well, they can reach out to me because I'm doing the same thing. Yeah. We'll have to come back to all the acronyms, the CDPs and the AIs. But before we get there and if at the top level, do you think about building the brand for jenkins auto group and that brand awareness versus more like performance marketing we have to get leads right now to sell cars right now because they're they're one in the same but they're two sides of the same coin how do you balance that i think it's really hard um so uh You know, especially in a group like ours right we've been really fortunate to grow significantly in a short period of time and. I'm terrible with analogies, but it's like, you know, young couple falls in love, buys their dream house and everything, and then they decide to have fifteen kids and they're still in that, you know, starter home. And Jenkins is not a starter home. But when you don't realize how fast you're going to grow and, you know, all the opportunity that's going to come to you as a group because of how you treat the communities that you're in, you can grow really fast and miss a couple of things. And I think a lot of what I've been doing over the past year and a half, two years is going back and going, well, did we check this box? Or when's the last time somebody looked at this? do we really have a connected, you know, sort of strategy for branding? I don't think it's been necessary for us as a group, right? But I do think it would be beneficial. You know, we're very decentralized and everybody has a lot of autonomy at a store level. One store's branding could be nationwide lifetime warranty. The other one is one person, one hour, one price. I mean, it could be whatever, right? But I think the general thing that kind of ties us all together is how we treat customers. We're typically only in rural markets. So everything is very family oriented and then obviously privately owned. So our slogan has been welcome to the family for a while now, but My day-to-day is constantly the short-term, the sprint, not the overarching brand messaging and tying it all together. Especially with every dealership having their own essentially branding and marketing opportunities. You heard you say that my mind started to melt with that complexity. Well, yeah, when you think about it, you know, when's, When's the last time a GM went, you know, really deep or hard on their SEO agency, you know, or talked about, you know, investing a lot of money there. They're looking at, you know, paid search or SEM and the short term sort of payoffs, you know, because it's a right now. business and the goal line is constantly shifting and moving and people coming and going and you know all sorts of fun stuff and automotive yeah we live the same uh conversations with, with dealers and you know, it's like pushing back and it's like, should we sponsor what, what does it look like to sponsor? You guys just bought a new store. You've changed the name. Is there like local locals, you know, kids, sports leagues or fun runs or marathon, you know, something to get a name tapped into the community outside of just lead generation type of campaigns. So you mentioned some shifts going on, like looking at the organization, like looking at the group from a thirty thousand foot view, what is do you feel like you have a finger on the pulse of like what's one of the biggest shifts that's happening right now? You know, at least in my seat, I think. My stores, our GMs are getting a little more hip to customer experience, site speed, how to be a little bit more efficient in our ad spend. We're, you know, measuring foot traffic data now where we weren't, you know, a year ago. I think everybody has some sort of agentic AI in either sales or service. We don't use one group wide. Again, we have a lot of autonomy at a store level, but I think people are realizing it's not a replacement for people. It's supposed to free up people to do what they do best, and that's talk to people typically on the phone or send videos or shake hands in the showroom. But I think, you know, us and a lot of other dealers are getting more serious about their first party data and how to make it work for them and how to tastefully, you know, less is more sort of thing to utilize agentic AI. And I think some of us are getting more into building sort of like an in-house privacy first self-contained AI, you know, product with a vendor that's customized for us, not built on existing AI platform. But we have a lot of people taking things in-house or no longer paying vendors to do X, but trying to build it themselves and working with developers and programmers. Because once you get you know, much bigger, you know, you got forty or fifty rooftops and you're paying the same vendor two grand a rooftop. I mean, that adds up real quick when you know, build your own. Yeah, I've worked with a handful of groups that are not too dissimilar size for me that just want to they start building their own DMS and it changes the nature of the business, it's like, OK, we're building a dealership now, we're building dealership, you know, now we're adding stores. Now we're building out sort of a marketing agency inside with our own capabilities, our own staff. Now we're building software. And if it starts to work well, it's like, do you think other dealers would want to use our software? Should we be, you know, selling? We know you're a dealer. Yeah. There's a lot of dealer principals and GMs that have done that exact same thing, you know? But yeah, I mean, it's... know not surprising to me anymore but initially i was surprised by how many dealer groups have multiple stores operating out of the same crm or dms even you know or utilizing um you know the same accounts or platforms for multiple you know locations you know it's it's wild michael you mentioned the acronym CDP and AI. And usually when we talk about that, there's kind of this, first you have to have clean data, then you can put the CDP to work, and then AI can go to work at the same time. Give us the sense, A, is that how you see it playing out? And then what are you doing in all of those spaces? Yeah, so... You know, it's been probably at least three or four years since I wanted to do something like that here. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I think it only became what I viewed as a possibility in our group, maybe within the past year and a half. Yeah. You know, when I started looking, there weren't as many options, right? Now there's significantly more. I think it's overwhelming. You know, somebody in my seat or just anybody who wants to partner with an existing, you know, company or vendor that could provide that service. Man, there's a lot of questions you need to ask, you know. Some only have integrations with this, and then some only have that. And you're like, well, I have both those. I need one to integrate with everybody I care about, you know. But... You know, as a dealer, you can, you know, subscribe to the data hygiene that your DMS provider provides you and your CRM company. And it'll never, I promise you, it'll never be enough data hygiene to de-dupe, go against NCOA, DNC, remove invalid emails, append not just good ones, but the best one and multiples of them if they don't look at that one. Um, you know, and, uh, yeah, it's overwhelming. And then, you know, you've got to activate those audiences appropriately. And then when you look at it across an entire group of how much overlap and spend you have trying to talk to the same customer, even between your own stores, it's just becomes a really big motivator to go you know maybe we should get our you know what together and make some really important decisions about you know cleaning it up but also you know coming up with a strategy on what we're going to say into whom and who can say it and when you know um Because I think we'd all like to spend less, you know, per hood and have a better customer experience. And we always focus on, you know, trying to talk to as many people as possible. And we forget how many people we upset with, you know, over communication and, you know, non, you know, or irrelevant, you know, messaging. Yeah. There's a lot of room for opportunity. Which is cool. I think if there wasn't, I don't know if any of us here would have any jobs. It wasn't like a continual puzzle to keep finding the best components and pieces to stick together. Since you've started there with Jenkins, have you guys added stores? Yeah, I think I came on in September of twenty one and I initially came just to have a few stores and then it was a third store, then a fourth store and then a fifth store was like, hey, can you kind of like spend some time at my store and we'll figure out something here? And then it was just the entire group. I think when I came on, there was maybe like, sixteen or seventeen stores. And, you know, Now there's seventeen different OEMs, twenty-three OEM franchises, we have a classic car store, we have heavy equipment with Bobcat, golf carts, we have collision centers, you know, and we're spread out from as far south as Venice all the way up to Jacksonville, Gainesville area. definitely have grown. And do you have your fingerprints? Are you helping with the, like a lot of people in your desk are like helping to like claim admin and pixels and vendors and website providers. Are you, are you putting your fingerprints on each one of those new stores? Absolutely everything. Uh, ask me how excited i am about you know it's like uh you can't forget anything you know it's a it's a big responsibility because you have you know a gm going into a new point and they're bringing somebody from the other store and all these people have husbands wives kids that are depending on them to You know, do a good job and sell cars and come home and not like, be completely miserable and stressed out, you know. And so you want to do a good job, you want to not forget anything and. You know, you want to. put your thumb on every little thing to make sure that it really gets done right. Because typically in our experience, if we weren't a part of it, it probably didn't get set up correctly, you know? And it's much easier to do it right the first time than to undo something and try to fix it later, you know? Are you starting to drill into like a playbook for when you are onboarding a new store? We have them. yeah so we uh we have very lengthy checklists you know all of us um and we have you know multiple meetings every week you know in anticipation of either opening a new point or when there's an acquisition um you know uh and You know, can things sometimes hit a bump in the road and take a little bit longer? Yes, you know. But in general, I think we got it down pretty well. We've done so many over the past few years that I think we're getting the hang of it. And we're going to have stores separating here probably before the end of the year, you know. So that's a whole other scenario. We went through that when we opened up our new Genesis points, separating them from Hyundai. So I think we learned a lot from that experience and we'll probably take those lessons and apply them when we separate Subaru and Volvo and Ford and Lincoln and everybody has their own buildings. But I think we'll get a little better and faster every time. What, as it relates to your marketing efforts, what do you feel is working well for you and your dealerships right now? Well, I probably can't specify anything real specifically, but I think in general, I think what's really helped as of recent is empowering people at a store level to have access to additional information, encouraging everything to be a lot more collaborative. So if we're on a budget call, let's not just have me and, you know, the GM and, you know, some other folks from, you know, the group level, but let's incorporate their GSM. Let's incorporate their internet manager. If we're doing a call with the digital ad agency, let's get a couple more people on the call. Let's be more inclusive. I think it helps, you know, when people see, okay, well, okay, that's what we're spending. Oh yeah, we do have that vendor. I haven't deal with them in a long time and really tossing it back on a lot of the vendors to go, hey, I'm expecting you. to contact these contacts at a store on a monthly basis including the communications set a reoccurring you know monthly meeting with all those people and if for any reason they can't make it still send a recap get me involved so i can pick up where maybe the store wasn't able to i think that's been helpful, at least for me, I hope the stores like it, but like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's good for me, you know, cause I can't look at everything. I can't be everywhere. And I think the more we invest in our people, uh, You know, I think they'll appreciate that it makes them more valuable, but also gives them maybe more of a say in what goes on day to day. And they feel a little bit more confident about either suggesting something or doing something themselves. I think the message is clear. It's to have the people in the stores joining these calls, having it be really brief and putting the Um, you know, the little bit of pressure on the, on the vendor to be able to ask that GM or GSM, the right type of questions to make sure that what they're doing from their desks and with their software, their products to help with, with what the store currently has. If you're just floating them with leads, they don't have the BDC, they're not working badly. You know, it's just to make sure that if they've got like a shortage of pre-owned inventory. It sounds like we might want to divert some of this advertising budget from just pushing CPO, maybe doing the vehicle acquisition and having that brief five to ten minute conversation with the store level just to have you be the mediator in the middle, but make sure that we're able to tune dials as a vendor to what each store needs because each one's a snowflake versus here's the cookie cutter stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. We're done. Well, I think we're about to hit our time limit here. Yeah. It's going fast. Yeah. Anything people should know about getting connected with you? Are you active on social medias? I'm not. If you've ever seen me at a conference, you know I'm not a public speaker either. So, but yeah, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, you know, So they can always reach me there. I'm not really active on social media other than posting an obscene amount of pictures from my kids. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way to get in touch with me. And I will respond to everybody and help everybody. That's one thing I think that's really important is we're all super busy, right? You know, if there's somebody else in our industry that may need help or something like that, you know, it's important to stop what you're doing, help them out, because that will come back to you a million fold. Amen. Well, Michael, it has been a pleasure. Michael Mouchon. Is that how you say it? Yeah, yeah. Nobody actually knows my real name. So if you say Michael Mouchon, they'll be like, never heard of him. Everyone just calls me Mouch. That makes it easier. For my entire life, Mouch. Well, I like your attitude and what you're doing, not only for the stores that you help, but for the industry. Thank you, Michael. Much appreciated. Thank you, guys

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