Episode 15 — Nathanael Greklek, Corporate Brand Director at Mohawk Auto Group

🎙 Episode 15 — Nathanael Greklek, Corporate Brand Director at Mohawk Auto Group

In this episode of 100 Marketers, we sit down with Nathanael Greklek, Corporate Brand Director at Mohawk Auto Group—one of the most creative, progressive, and community-driven dealership groups in the industry.

Nathanael shares how he went from delivery specialist to building a full in-house content team responsible for some of the most viral dealership videos on TikTok and beyond. From their “Office-style” series that exploded online, to building a brand that customers trust long before they step foot in the showroom, Nathanael reveals exactly how Mohawk Auto Group has woven social media, storytelling, and community impact into the core of their business.

Whether you’re a dealer, marketer, or content creator, this episode dives deep into the real playbook behind dealership branding in 2024—how to create content people actually want to watch, how to scale internal creators, how to turn philanthropic work into a brand amplifier, and how to build a culture where employees genuinely want to participate.

If you're looking for actionable insights on social content, dealership brand building, team structure, and the future of automotive marketing, you’re in the right place.

📌 Key Subjects Covered in This Episode

• Nathanael’s Path to Corporate Brand Director
• How Mohawk Auto Group Went Viral
• Does Social Media Drive Store Traffic?
• How Social Media Has Changed for Dealers
• Building & Scaling an In-House Content Team
• Community Partnerships & Philanthropy as Marketing
• The Four Tiers of Dealership Branding
• What Dealers Should Do First If They Want to Start Content
• Hiring the Right Internal Creator
• Creativity, Inspiration & Staying Fresh
• Building a Culture People Want to Work In

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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. 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.

Some dealerships wait for attention, others make it. On this episode of the hundred marketers podcast, I sit down with Nathanael Greklik, the creative force behind Mohawk Auto Group's viral office style videos, if you haven't seen them, you need to, where he builds a culture where the staff is comfortable jumping into skits, the community is paying attention to what they're doing, and the store's personality becomes its biggest advantage. We get into how he leads his creative, keeps the ideas flowing, and turns his dealership into the content engine that shoppers actually want to watch. I'm Andrew Street. This is the Hundred Marketers Project. Enjoy this conversation with Nathanael Greklik.

Tell me a little bit about your background and your role within the group Yes. So my official title is corporate brand director. That's not a normal title for a dealership. No, no, it was chief digital branding leader before that. So we kind of, you know, condensed it a little bit. But essentially, I oversee four entities here in the Mohawk Auto Group, collision center, our vehicle wrap shop, Honda store and a Chevy store. and I oversee social media marketing. Started off as me, but now we got a full team of in-house marketer, content creators, and we go ham every day. Lack of a better term. And so we had met before, and then I guess since then, like in the last few years, you guys blew up with some, like especially on TikTok, with a lot of the content that you guys were creating. Could you tell us a little bit about how that got started and what that's been like? Yeah, that was a whirlwind. That was about two years ago at this point, but it seems like it just keeps going. So we started, I'm sure you guys are all familiar with the show The Office, and we had Grace and Ben here at the Chevy store, and one of our employees started hiding ducks around the dealership. So we're all sitting, and Grace goes, why don't we, we should like, turn this into something like The Office. And so we kind of put those pieces together and Ben and grace took off, started making them more frequently. It was only, it was after the fifth episode that it actually went viral and then whole bunch of things. They were on so many interviews. I can't keep track. And, uh, grace now works at general motors because of it. So, right. Yeah. She, that's, that's the shorthand of it. She got to be the CEO. And then what do you know? She has a job now over there. No, she's amazing. She's a very talented. Ben's very talented. So, you know, they, they, not many dealerships can, can say that, you know, not many dealerships have an in-house marketing team. So it's a content creation and marketing team, which is amazing. And that's kind of what is, is great part of being a Mohawk. They're very progressive. I mean, as you can see, you see, uh, Jeff on this side, my, my screen's mirrored. So Jeff's on this side, Andy's on this side. And then we also have Steve Harrington, but they are, uh, contributing factors to the fact that there's a content team inside their dealerships. Yeah. And Nathaniel, what was your experience like as the content was getting viral? Do you feel like it was starting to translate and store traffic in a recognizable way? Yeah, I mean, there were multiple anecdotal evidences where people would ask for Grace, ask for a photo with Grace. Just recently found out that there have been vehicles that were sold across state lines because they have seen something. So there's definitely an ROI to social media, even if you can't really be like, oh, well, this specific here and there, they saw this video, went to this ad, got... third, three hundred emails and then came in to buy a vehicle. Yeah. The phrase I've heard lately that I really liked was that marketing pays the roads that sales eventually will sell on. I like that. I'll roll with that. Like, that's a good one. Sometimes, you know, with the content creation, which you do a ton of and Andrew does a ton of and I do a ton of right aside from like explicitly asking people, how did you hear about us? And they say social media like it's really difficult to prove any kind of attribution and you hear the anecdotes and we love hearing the anecdotes but i think the favorite ones that i hear that i heard when the salesperson will come to you and say oh yeah they they're following you on social media and they like what you do or you go to a conference and people come up to you and say like i saw that video you did on this thing right so you know if you're touching those people and they're willing to come up and talk to you about it that it's hitting a much much bigger audience than you can really measure Yeah, I mean, I think that's the biggest thing that most dealerships don't understand is that there's a brand. And brand is my biggest thing. And I'm sure every marketer in the world, if they never had to make another lease special, that would be amazing. But it's a necessary evil, but it's not the all. And that's what it's been for me. It has just been, oh, well, we got to make sure we get these lease specials out. People want to see the lease specials when, and then social media came in, they're still doing the same thing. Let's get these lease specials up on social. It doesn't really translate as well. I mean, it did when you got your followers, but now social media has completely changed even since I started. And I've been at Mohawk now for, Eight and a half years, been doing content creation for seven and a half, social media and content creation for about seven and a half of those years, created my own job position. And it used to be like email marketing. You would get your followers, and those are the people that would always see your content. They would comment. They would like it. And then... with the tick tock vacation of everything, you started to get interest media instead of social media. And now whatever you're interested in is what you see. So you have, it was basically that too, except they would just get served it. They would just, it would just go to their inbox, quote unquote, When you post it, but now, and you could, if you posted too much, it would be too much. And if you post too much now, it's not too much because half your less, thirty percent of your audience will see it now. So, I mean, everything has changed. And when we start to think more about. How do we create value for our customers on social media and everywhere we go? it will be better for us when we throw our marketing dollars at it. Okay. We think very similarly. Do you feel like there's a vibe for how many times like a franchise store should be posting I don't think so. I think that you're muted. I was going to say, is this like vibe posting, kind of like vibe coding? Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm sure there's always times that people are on, but it's completely changing now, the way that people get their social media. Like if I'm scrolling through my feed, I see like, oh, this person posted this five days ago, right? So it's like it's not necessarily – recent posts that you're seeing. It's recent has changed from, I mean, if someone liked, if someone likes something in October first that they think I'm going to like, because they're my friend and a bunch of other triggers, then they're going to share it with me. But yeah, I don't think that there is because it's just going to hit different audiences. Now, if you're posting the same exact thing, right? If you're posting the same exact video, even that, I don't know. I haven't really tried that yet. But even if you're posting the same video, it might just hit differently to somebody at a specific time. And the triggers that the algorithm... is seeing might uh might push it out to other people but i mean content is at this point a lot of if you are in that space you kind of understand what to do if you're over indexing on a video make more of that video if you are trying to get somebody's attention you're going to work on the first three seconds for your hook and then the next three seconds to get uh to niche down and really get people into what the video that you're looking for so there's it's become an art science at this point. Um, and before it was, Hey, I could just post whatever I want. Now you have to think about what am I posting? And if you're not getting the views, it's essentially because no one likes it. It's a hard, it's a hard pill to swallow. Cause you know, you know, you post your content and you're like, Oh, this is going to do great. And it's like, all right, here's your three hundred test views that we gave you. That's right. Yeah. Oh, we've all done it. Like, my social media, I haven't, like, my personal social media, my professional Instagram, whatever it is, Nathaniel G. Like, there's some that hit and some that don't. And you're like, man, I really thought that that one would go. You know, I'm trying to be personal, relatable, all of these things. And I thought my hook was good, and I thought people would really get that. But, you know. I did everything Russ Phillips told me to say, and it didn't work. Yeah. I love Russ. He's awesome. yeah there's like a little uh grief period to go through it's like shock at first you're like huh maybe i'm shadow banned and denial and oh yeah the the infamous oh oh trying to point fingers Listen, I think there's, there's so much, yes, there's so many things that you can do and there's little, as you get better into the space, yes, you can focus on when you're finding the most views, what time of day are people typically on, right? Like, you know, there's, there's those, there's always those nuances, but at the same time, it's going to share it to whoever's going to share it and whoever's going to watch it. So if you make something fun that someone's going to watch, they'll push it out. And it sounds like you've got a bit of a formula that you kind of try to walk people through or when you're shooting with a hook, is there a specific formula you let you try to hit or some acronym? I mean, no, there's no, there's no secret sauce that I have that gets me millions of views, but the, the concept is what I've heard over, What I've heard as I continue to do my research on social media is you start general with your three-second hook, and then you come into your six seconds where it's a little more niche. So you're going global, then you're coming into more contextual. And then as you get in there, then you can tell your story because people are like, oh, okay, I heard the preface. I heard the actual substance. Now what's the story behind all of this substance? And that's really what it is, is just trying to stop the scroll, as everyone says. The infamous stop the scroll. Stop those thumbs. yeah but essentially that's just hitting people on what they like well what's someone searching for that you can hit in their their feed so give us a kind of a peek behind the curtain so you guys are really intentional about your social media how do you go about doing it do you sit down every month and plan out the content calendar is it quarterly what is that process for bringing all this to life Yeah. So there's definitely a content color that's made, you know, Ava's currently working on December's, you know, same with Jared for Honda. So I have a team at Honda. I have a team at Chevrolet. I have a full-time editor on staff for those that don't know. Very fortunate start off as just me, but now we have a full team. So a lot of the strategy and planning, I allow the team to, have free reign, right? That's why you hire people, you hire the best, they create and you adjust accordingly. And a lot of my role now is taking community roles, so community sponsorships and taking them to the next level. So a lot more collaboration versus just partnerships and sponsorships and just handing cash over and us just going to event. But how do you elongate that relationship that you have that's really what my focus has been because and we can get back to the the social media content you know what's that look like but this is kind of where my role is moving from it has moved from you know i'm the only one making content i have the team that i'm planning with that's making content now the team is planning and making the content and now i've kind of moved into how do you further the mission of the dealership right there's so many dealerships that are giving I mean, hundreds, if not million dollars away, just one dealership giving millions of dollars away each year. But how do you push that out to your audience? Because that's a relevant, valuable piece, right? Your customers want to know who you support. And if you're showcasing, hey, we just did a food donation, we just did a hygiene drive, and you're trying to get them involved, that's taking it to the next level because now you are involving... these nonprofits, these charities, there's a, a huge charity that we work with special Olympics, New York, make a wish. Um, there's a bunch of other ones, but those are the main ones off the top of my head as I'm kind of ranting at this moment, but taking those, taking those and really taking them to the next level. And that's what I do. That's where my creative, I'm a creative. So like when, if I can take something like, okay, we are do. So, let's go to October, right? We did something with a farm, Elm's Family Farms. We come to them every year now because it just so happens to work out great because we make content and we get a vehicle on site and we share our stuff across social, but you're basically sharing the resources you have. Not all businesses have a full production team with high quality camera gear, et cetera, et cetera. Not to say that you need high quality gear, but it's a plus. And so we go to the farm and we say, Hey, We want to do something. We want to collaborate. Let's make some content together. Let's do a giveaway. Let's do some fun activities, things like that. So we go to them. They're like, hey, that sounds like a good idea. Let's do it. Now we have a collaboration. And so we have something like that. And we do something with a haunted hayride. This past October, we do stuff with a haunted hayride that's literally right down the street here from Mohawk Chevrolet. I could see it from my window. But the same thing is, hey, we want to be a part of what you're doing. Let's just not have a table, but can we vlog the hayride? And we've been doing that for, oh my gosh, like five years now at this point. Things have changed dramatically. During COVID, we did a car ride with people in the car. We had GoPros set up as people scared you, things like that. But most dealerships don't think about how do you push those? How do you push the sponsorships? How do you push the collaborations so that... everybody sees everybody together, right? Because it's a dual effort. And that's kind of what you're doing when you sponsor an event. So maybe it's a gala or it's a golf tournament, right? What if you, instead of just going there to do a foursome, go ahead of time to the golf course, you make a video saying, hey, we're going to be here, but you make it a fun little skit, however you want to do it. And then you get the charity that you're going to be at. And then you have the golf course that you collaborate with. And now that you have collaborations on Instagram, all of those profiles are now tagged. So people that like that golf course, people that like that charity, and people that like you now can all see that content. And maybe it's a new eyeball for that charity that that charity has never seen. So- I love this approach too because it's something that I think advertisers and marketers are tasked with or they should be tasked with and that's a way that dealerships notoriously do such amazing philanthropic stuff they don't think are always great at taking credit for it in a public way without either sounding like a blowhard being like hey we just gave you know we gave three thousand backpacks away to back to school but being from the marketing end, finding a way from like a third party perspective or just integrating with a brand that you guys are working with or money that you're doing to a local, you know, weather disaster, stuff like that, where we can incorporate that into the advertising without that being the dealer saying, Hey, we're the best. Just make it something you do, right? Like that's it. Don't say, Oh, we're the best. Like we just did all this, but it's, Hey, we're the best. because of your generosity, I mean, coming up, you can see we're doing twelve days of giving. What's going to happen with that is we did a Facebook nomination. It's currently on our Facebook page at the moment is say, hey, we're giving away sixty thousand dollars to twelve deserving charities, five thousand dollars to twelve local charities, total of sixty thousand. Comment and nominate your charity or your nonprofit that you want to involve. And Some could say, oh, well, they're just trying to blah, blah, blah. There's always those naysayers, those keyboard warriors that are like, they're just doing this for publicity, blah, blah, blah. But we have seen that we actually Mohawk. Sees new charities that we never seen before. We have more pet adoption clinics and we do pet adoption clinics. So like we find out new SBCAs and different animal foundations that have started that we never knew before that we can invite to that. Right. Or we can donate in the future. But this is just if we never did it and we never won, never posted on Facebook. We just kind of picked our own that we always take care of. Right. we wouldn't be able to find these new, these new charities, these new not-for-profits that could use our help. Right. And using your platform to provide that value, bring like leaves its weight. Like it just, everybody sees it. Everybody wants to be a part of it and you want everyone to be a part of it as well. And, and using the local community too, is just cause like, from a dealership, we employ three hundred and fifty people in the community. So we want to make sure that the philanthropic stuff we're doing is at the local community level. And we wanted to resonate with you guys, the community. Can you guys give us some feedback on what we should open our eyes to? Yeah, just yeah, I think it's a cool way to approach it that seems tasteful and you'll get some a little bit of a little bit of hate and just filter through the noise and keep pushing fortunately we haven't really received any of that but i can see how people would say who are watching this who haven't done like well that's just you patting yourself on the back that's just you doing this doing that but you, you have to see the heart. Like I know the heart of the owners. I know the hearts of the managers that are trying to do that. Like we legitimately want to give back because the community is so gracious to us. So, you know, that's understanding that you kind of have a firm foundation that you can just stand on because you know exactly what and why you're doing it. We've been talking about the heart and soul of this. A lot of this is really about building the brand. How do you think about balancing the, all the brand pieces with the, hey, we need leads right now because we got to sell cars and we got lease specials to do. How do you juggle those? So two ways to look at it, right? Brand, if no one knows you, no one likes you and no one trusts you, all of the marketing dollars are not going to, they're going to be spread so thin that you're going to pay way more money. It's synonymous. You have to have a good brand because what happens is, and what we've seen is that as you build your brand, and fortunately we've been around for a hundred years, like that's the first showroom right there. Uh, nineteen nineteen chevy wagon i think they called it whatever so fortunately we have a strong brand of being around the capital region since nineteen nineteen but the same period we brought back we we lost the the chevrolet franchise we got the honda franchise then we brought back the chevrolet franchise and we are selling over three hundred cars a month now we took a the team took a dealership that was selling seventy or less a month to three hundred and it's from obviously all the processes and you could talk to the director of operations and sales managers and all them to get you know those processes but a lot of it has to do with brand what do people think when they think mohawk right so when i first started My goal has never changed. I'll just put that out there. My goal has never changed since I started, which was to showcase the people, the processes and the mindset behind everyone. Because if people know you, like you and trust you, they're more likely to do that. And how do you do that? You showcase the people that they're going to meet. Right? It's not some fancy actor that I hire on our social media. Right? Who you see on our social, you can walk in and say, hey, I've seen Sean Sheldon on Mohawk Chevrolet's organic social media. That's really cool. I've seen AJ from Service. I've seen Trish Trav from one of the lot walks. Like, all of these... every single point, touch point on social media that has one of our own in there, people relate to the people that are in your dealership. So showcase that. And when you start to build that brand, your marketing dollars can spread so much farther and you're paying less to see more. And that's something that people don't understand is that when you have a strong brand, you may pay the same in advertising, but it goes a farther distance and you're paying less per CPF. Oh, yeah. And what we see too is like getting those videos on social and putting inventory below it. It takes up more space on people's phones, but our cost per like VDP view and kind of like metrics that a lot of people in the dealership side want to see is these Google Analytics bells getting hit. That collection ad with that video is going to produce more affordable VDP views and it's going to be much longer time on site and people are much more ingrained with that dealership from seeing the people too, plus the inventory. When you're approaching somebody that's on the staff to get them to, when you're going to start shooting with somebody new, do you have a kind of an approach that you like to take? Well, at this point, everyone just knows. You don't have a choice. The fun part is that since building it, there's just the atmosphere of shooting content. The best part is we recently had GM Energy in the showroom. They're making some things, and they're like, yeah, everyone's just like... happy to be on a video like yeah you know we just kind of make it a thing um everyone's just so used to having a camera in the showroom now that it's just it's just we've had i mean we've had um A SOTU here for a shoot. We've had GM Financial here, GM Energy. We've had Cox Automotive down at Honda shooting big things. There's so many professional crews that have come to the dealerships and they're like, oh yeah, everyone's just so willing to be on camera. They don't even bother. yeah, you know, we just kind of shoot a lot. They're kind of used to it now. They're like, and then when someone else, so what I think a fun part is when someone new starts, you'll have someone who's been there for like, get ready. They're about to put you on social, you know, give them a heads up. Um, and, and I think it attracts, right. It attracts those that are actually on social because they're obviously on there. They see us on there. And if their dealership is not doing it, then we become a little bit more attractive to them. because they know that they're going to get the resources they need to push that out. I've approached more dealership employees than I can count about being on video to do interviews with them. And for the most part, everyone's either willing or they're too shy. The ones that are always the most surprising and most fun are always like, I'm actually not allowed to be on video. I'm like, oh, no. I don't know. Don't say anything else about somebody different. So I'm glad to hear that you guys don't have that problem. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Nathaniel. Oh, no, I was just saying, like, the way that I kind of see it, right, is there's four tiers. And I've talked about this for a very long time. There's four tiers of marketing. You have your first tier, which is your automotive OEM, right? Then you have your second tier, which is your group of dealerships in the capital region. Then you have your third tier, which is your dealership. And then your fourth tier is your people, branding your people. We've talked about, I mean, everyone's talked about branding your people. It's been a buzzword for six years at this point, but it's true. And I think more dealerships are allowing people The fourth tier, but not enough for allowing the third tier for social media and content. Per, you have a Russ flips whips, selling cars like candy bars. You have all these salespeople that have gone on to do bigger and better things because they branded themselves and now they're teaching other salespeople. But there's something to be said about the social media content creator at the dealership that makes content for the dealership every day to build the dealership brand. Okay, tell me about that. Because there's a lot of stores that we work with just doing social media advertising. And then a lot of times they're eager. They're eager to get more involved. And we can do a lot of stuff from our end with graphic design. doing voiceover and doing green screen effects and stuff like that. But if they're super, if they have an appetite for creating content, but they haven't started yet, it's like, I'll send them a guide with a bunch of hooks that we've used that first three seconds to get people started. I want to try them. I'll send it to you. I'll send it to you right after this. It's good. It's just a good idea. It's like, Hey, we need to make some new videos. It's like, let's, Or we have concepts for a few different video ideas, whether it's like Black Friday sales or specials or a manager special and just kind of like what let's pick one of these twenty hooks or at least like have that get us started for what other people have found success with. But I guess like when you're when you're giving somebody if you were going to start over, let's start there, like if you're going to start over from scratch with a dealer group, that's not making any content. what would your approach be? Well, I think there's a lot of dealerships that don't make content. So if you're not, here's a good one. First things first, all salespeople have to sell you, have to give you their delivery photos. Delivery photos are non-negotiable. They have to have delivery photos. By far and large, those are top performing posts all the time. You with a customer saying, hey, congratulations. Step one, that's easy. Those should be posted on your social media as frequent as you can. It's like for us at our Chevy store, we do it once a week or more. Honda's every single day. They're also selling, I mean, they're delivering, ten, fifteen, twenty cars a day. That's amazing. There's a lot more there. But that's step one. Step two, is going to be showcasing your people. Do a background story for your people. Who's there? Why they're there? So a basic script for us is I'm so-and-so. I've been in the automotive industry this long. What I really love about this job is this. When I'm not at work, I do these few things. If you have any questions, let me know. And then as that goes on, then you start to put in the trending content. But then you also put in some walkarounds. You put in some live videos. I mean, we have a live podcast every Friday for our stores. We have a Mohawk Auto Group, Mohawk Table Talk. And what we do is we actually take that content. And you guys know, you repurpose it, right? You're going to take that content. You're going to chop it up using Opus Clip or whichever one you love. If you have Riverside or whatever it is, and you're going to take that and you're going to post that. You're also going to post whatever you're doing in the community. And if you don't have anybody, you should definitely hire at least one. Have to hire one person for social media for your store. End of story. And here's why. One, Having an outside vendor is great. We use lots of vendors for our advertising. However, they're not there. They can't be there and see the day-to-day operations every single day. They don't walk by your general manager's office and hear them say something. They don't hop into the meetings that they're not invited to because they just don't know, right? So they get the nuances and the culture of the dealership and that translates into content so that you can then send that to your vendor to put that into a marketing piece, to change the copy, to personalize it and distribute it properly, right? Yeah. and it's going to come full circle back to, then you're going to see a better return on your investment because you're building your brand on social. You're getting content that you know because you've tested it on organic. You can see that people like it. It over-indexes. Then you send it to your vendor. Your vendor puts it on OTT, CTV, Hulu, all of your things that you want to meta, TikTok, Pinterest. Snapchat, whatever you're feeling. Right. And you're going to take your dollars and your marketing budget and it will grow it astronomically. If you don't have that person on staff, I think you do have that person on staff. Probably a lot of dealers. We work with a couple of dealerships who like five-star auto that have found somebody that's in the finance department who may be just got out of college, their twenties that understands social, they create content and help usher them where eventually they just change jobs from being in the finance, being in, you know, being a. Yeah. service manager to be in, or, uh, you know, somebody that's like a porter that can do it. And then that kind of is a springboard for their career. What would you do? Would you try to find somebody who's already doing social or. I mean, always find someone if, if you don't have to spend the recruiting dollars, step one, right. I, that would, that for me would just be a given. So if I didn't say that, that's what I obviously look inside. Right. Um, but at the same time, don't just pass it off to someone that's younger. If you're, if you're a general manager, if you're a general sales manager, if you're an owner, you need to have a slight knowledge of everything that's going on. Cause chances are you're going to look at something. You're like, I have no idea. I don't know how to gauge this. They're not doing their job. They need to go, right? You have to have a basic understanding of social media. And I think at this point, there's a lot that are starting to learn a little bit more, but there's also some that just say, oh, it's for the young kids. It's for the young kids. I'll stay on Facebook. But you have to have an understanding because if you just say, oh, well, why would you post that? That's, that's not right. Like put my lease special up there, put my lease special, put the car up there, put the car up there, put the car up there. All of our lease specials, like six, seven months. Yeah. Why? It's so skibby Ohio, you know what I'm saying? But that's the thing is like, yeah, definitely hire somebody if you can that has the knowledge and learn from them. Be willing to be a student. I think that's a common trait that every successful entrepreneur has anyway is that they want to learn, right? Obviously, you don't have to go deep down into the weeds on it. understanding that you got to get a Hootsuite account attached to this, blah, blah, blah. Look at the metrics impressions, but you should have a basic understanding of, okay, views, engagements, comments, shares, and it's no longer an email blast. It's actually what I interact with. And now AI. I think what you're playing with too is like an old trick, like I worked at Facebook years ago and we'd always run ads, like asking people to comment. And it was also when you'd like the ads you'd run too, would just be like, get people to follow your page. And then once they follow your page, you'll see all your content. And then Facebook stripped that away where it was like, four percent of the people would see your posts. And so all of the clients- Oh my God, I remember that so hard. You have no idea. It was heartbreaking. It was, there's like picketers outside of the office being like, you just held all of our, our followers hostage and now we have to pay to reach them. Oh my God. It's like, yeah. Be the person that is paying to reach them while everybody else is sitting flat. Yeah. Um, but it's, it's interesting to do stuff within their framework to, to spark other engagements besides BDP views. Your camera got blurry again. You moved it. You hit it. Oh, Andrew. Oh, you're back. You're back. You're back. There you go. Your voice is still clear. Yeah. At least your voice is still clear. Good. I don't even know if anybody watches this, but they might. Hey, you know. At least they listen. My mom listens every once in a while. Hey, that's all that matters. Hey, mom. We're talking about the comments. If you can be... We're recruiting. It's like, hey, we have... three positions we're trying to fill right now in our sales department we want somebody hungry with this entrepreneurial spirit tag somebody below that would be a good fit what we see is like a lot of people come through and do the application themselves but a lot of people start tag even if they're not the right person that'll help jog their thoughts to be like i'm not gonna but i know somebody that'd be a perfect fit doing this and start connecting with their friends for us so they're doing the advertising for me while not reaching deeper into our pockets to spend money on reaching folks nathaniel where do you turn to for inspiration both within the automotive community and without you're a creative and creativity just requires inspiration sometimes whether you're asking for it or not where do you look I mean, when I see things, I mean, I just I see things and they kind of start. Not dead people. No, not dead people. I mean, except unless you're Brian Ortega, then you do. But I mean. I will say I watched a lot of Gary, not a lot, not, not much anymore, but every now and then I see what Gary V is doing. Um, he's been a huge inspiration of mine. I mean, I started off on Casey Neistat, Peter McKinnon. A lot of the stuff I do now is I just social research. And it's like, everyone's like, Oh, the doom scroll. I'm like, I'm like on social research. Like, I'm like, Oh man, how's this video being made? Like, what's the, it's, I think it's, it's, it's when you become a videographer too, you start watching commercials and you're like, Oh dude, why'd they cut that there? Why is this angle off? The leg's a little bit, it's a blessing and a curse. Like you started looking at content, which is great. Cause I don't like, I don't compare myself on social media. I'm not a doom scroller. I just like, Oh, just keep going. But I start to look at What's the structure of this piece of content? How is it working? What are people commenting? Different things like that. And so when you become a forever learner, you're not just looking at someone's content like, oh, wow, it's a good piece of content. Scroll past. It's, all right, why is this a... good piece of content. Why is this a good YouTube video? Why is this a good YouTube short? Why is this a good TikTok? Why is this a good Instagram reel? Why is this a good Facebook reel? Why is this a good Facebook post? And so you start to get inspiration like, oh, that'd be sick if we could do like something like that. Right. It's kind of, I see something, I say, see something, say something essentially, you know, my team gets text messages from me like, yo, this would be cool. We should try this. I'm always doing that too. Just like sharing ads that I'm checking out that are like outside of auto. It's like, how can we translate this for auto using the same type of script, the same type of flow cadence, it's going to be a story ad or a real, and here's the, here's the hook. I love that. Now our story is going to be about why the urgency for the dealership. And then the call to action is, you know, to tap the low and go through their flow, but like, just to steal ideas from other advertisers, and just simply translate it into a dealership. is where I'm getting by far our best content right now. We did something like that at Trade Pending. So there was an Instagram reel, I think it was, where a fellow was jumping out of a plane and he ends up landing in a taco shop. Did anybody else see that one? There's a bunch that are like that. It starts with way far out and then it kind of zooms in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it makes its way to dot, dot, dot, dot, and then it just goes in. So we had one of those moments where we used AI, made the whole thing, and it was really funny. And it got like, fifty views. Yes! Can we put some money behind this, guys? We did it! We got an unfair shake. Now I feel that. There's tons of things that you're just like, Yeah. This is the same exact thing that this person did. Why does it not work for me? Right. Yeah. Is it because of the way I look? I know. I'll let you get discouraged. Um, okay. So here's a little bit of a right turn here. In my experience, the dealership environment really is a great grounds for entrepreneurial people who can make it or break it on their own. And you have the safety net of having a base pay and a number of things that are much more comfortable than just the risk of putting your neck on the line and just starting your own business. But to really be able to foster that kind of stuff inside of a dealership, Uh, and when you started with Mohawk, you weren't doing content yet, right? You said it took, were you in sales? No, I was a delivery specialist. Perfect. Yeah. So the basic quick story is that I was a delivery specialist. I saw that they were posting some stuff on Facebook. This was seven, eight years ago, eight years ago now. And I saw they were posting some stuff on Facebook and was like, hey, I made that comment like, when you used to post, the more you posted, everybody would see it. Well, we were starting to get a bunch of unfollows because they would literally post every single delivery photo, like separately as a post. And like I said, they're delivering twenty plus cars. They were selling almost seven hundred cars a month. So like twenty five, thirty posts a day were just delivery photos i was like guys we gotta take a look at this like we're losing thousands of followers because they're just getting bombarded and they don't want to see this content anymore um so i kind of noticed that and while i was there i was i had some free time as a delivery specialist so i would i made some fun content had some ideas but the fun part is before i got to mohawk they had sponsored the startup that I was working at. And it was a company called Twill. And for every product you donated, they would give back to the charity of your choice. And Mohawk became the sponsor of warmth, so they gave us a van. And we had come in to do some trending videos, and I used my GoPro three black, three plus black. I look at that thing now, I'm like, oh my gosh, what the heck? It's all rattly and shaky. But we did, I think we did two or three. The two that I can remember is the Black Beetle Mannequin Challenge. I don't know if you guys remember that. We're like, that girl is a real crap. And you just freeze and you would walk around with the camera. And when you move, the people would move. So we went through the whole dealership for that. And then the second was the sponsor, the purpose behind the purchase. So every time you buy from Mohawk, there's a purpose-driven factor behind it, not just you buying a vehicle from a business. And so I had made those two videos without even being like being a videographer or anything just having a camera and being willing to shoot it and then it was a startup and i was doing valet at the time and uh there was one i think i was i was also i think i was working as a counselor for an after-school program somewhere around there So I was running like sixteen miles a day and then doing this. And so one of the salesperson at the time, he's now a service advisor, goes, hey, Mohawk's hiring. Like, oh, yeah. What is it like? Oh, yeah. Eighteen bucks an hour. And yeah, I think it's like only like eighteen bucks an hour. It's like eighteen dollars an hour. That's what I make with tips right now. I'm running sixteen miles a day. Sign me up. sign me up uh he was like yeah you look like you're a techie guy i think you know you'd be like going over the technology and stuff and i was like all right yeah sure so i applied and the best part is that uh this guy he was the director of variable ops at the at the time uh andy yelcher and uh there was uh it he hired me and we kind of grew and started talking about social media as the, as time goes on and he go, and I mean, he's, he's a huge inspiration and a huge motivation to where I am today for sure. But, uh, I would meet up with him and I, I remember sitting, I'm sitting at a coffee shop with him. We're doing a one-to-one and I'm like, yeah, I know. I think like, I think Mohawk could have this person that just does social media like full time. I go, what should I do? He goes, you should write up a job proposal. I was like, you can do that. So, so I wrote up the job where he goes, yeah, write out what you think you would do and pitch it to the general manager. So I go in there and I, I pitched the job position. They say yes. And seven and a half years later, here I am. And we've gone through lots of this so much, like did not expect to be in the automotive world. I wanted to be a police officer and, Turns out I'm not really good at taking tests. So failed that one, missed that boat, but that's okay. And so I love what I do and just try to get better every single day. And that's one thing we harp on here is get one percent better every day. And that's all you can do. And here I am. Eight years later, I've been to all over the country talking about social media branding and, and marketing and never thought this would happen. It's been awesome to hear your story here virtually face to face. Totally. And it's clear that like your stores have a cool culture, like a culture that not only people, you know, feel like they're working for part of something, but it's fun. And it's a place that it sounds like other, people want to work at that aren't working there right now. Yeah. Which is it says a lot, which says a lot to to to have some energy and enjoyment with your role and then have the autonomy to be able to kick around some ideas that may or may not work and have somebody that believes in you on the team. Like what a what a propeller to help a career really get going when you have somebody higher up that's more experienced, that believes in you. I mean, both of them. I mean, I, like, I couldn't say like all of the owners here that have been very gracious with their time, with their energy, with their resources. I mean, who can say that their dealership has bought them over thirty five thousand dollars worth of equipment to make videos. Right. And that's actually one thing that we kind of touched on it, but you have that prop when you go into the nonprofits like, hey, we have a full digital team that can make content. And sometimes you don't even pay for a sponsorship, but you help them create content because they don't have the ability to. And that's an intangible dollar amount that you can put on there because if they had to do it, they'd have to pay five to ten grand to get somebody in to shoot a video at the quality that they're looking for. And I have a fun story. He had an office down in Honda before we did the rebuild. He's sitting down in his office. This is when I just started talking to him. I noticed this box on the ground. This is after the general manager was like, yeah, let's get started. Let's start doing stuff. We'll see what happens. I sit down in Jeff Harriton's office. I go, what's that box right there? He goes, oh, it's like a It's like a camera. We wanted to shoot our own commercials one time. There's a green screen and everything. I was like, can I have that? He goes, yeah. I was like, sweet. I was like, awesome. It's just so fun. The stories that have happened from them saying yes and me willing to stand in for the Mohawk brand. It's not really hard because it's just a brand that you want to stand for. I so much fun. Well, Nathaniel, I can't thank you enough, man, for being willing to hop on here. All right. Do you have any speaking engagements coming up? Uh, I don't that I know of. I don't think so. Um, what about stuff online? Where can people follow you? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm all over social Nathaniel G official Nathaniel G on Instagram, Nathaniel Greklik, LinkedIn, Nathaniel on Facebook, Tik TOK, X wherever, wherever you want to go. I mean, I'll be there, uh, some way, shape or form less on, I said less on X and threads at the moment, but you know, everywhere else, if you DM me on X, it's probably going to be a couple of days, but cool. Well, uh, Matthew Nathanael, it was real guys. I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

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