What do Starbucks Subway and the DMV have in common? They can all be found inside the world's highest volume Toyota dealer. Today I'm speaking with Doug Iro, president and GM of Longo, Toyota, which serves over 100,000 customers annually in the country's most competitive Toyota market. And he's absolutely dominating. We discuss what it takes to sell 25,000 new and used cars per year. Toyota's long-term hybrid car strategy. Our lease returns heading off a cliff in mid 2024 and much more. Don't forget to click subscribe so you never miss an episode.
What's up everyone? This is car dealership guy. You're listening to the car dealership guy podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. But before we get into the show, people ask me all the time, C&G, can you help me fill an open role in my company? Well, now I can. I'm excited to announce my new industry job board. I've built this job board so that employers in the auto industry can take advantage of my network and distribution. Your company needs roles filled and I have access to talent. It's a win-win situation. This job board is for anyone in automotive vendors, dealers, lenders, manufacturers, auto tech, you get the point. The best part is that posting roles is 100% free. Over 50 companies have already posted open roles, including lithium motors, recurrent credit acceptance, cars commerce, shift digital and over 20 dealer groups. Add your open roles today by visiting my website at dealershipguy.com and clicking on industry job board or visit the link in the show notes below.
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From Northeastern Pennsylvania to managing the largest Toyota dealership in the world. Quite the headline. Kick us off. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for the opportunity. Great to be on here with you.
Yeah, just a quick story. My background, I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the coal region, if you will, anthracite coal region. I had an opportunity to go to school at Penn State in the middle of Pennsylvania.
Actually, I worked for a detailing company that actually detailed and washed cars for some of the dealers. I just worked on weekends on Saturdays. So what did you do during the week? I went to school and had a couple other odd jobs too. Mm-hmm. Actually, it got it. I just tell people I sold credit cards on the phone back when you could call people and do telemarketing when it was legal. So that's another story for another day. That's how I got exposed to the automotive business.
To make a long story short, I ended up getting a job with Toyota. I worked on the OEM side of the business for many years before jumping into retail. I had the opportunity to see all sides of it from financial services, to manufacturing, to distribution, the field organization. Worked in different markets. Worked in Boston. Worked in DC. Chicago ended up in Los Angeles. And I kind of never left. So I've been here for about 15 years. Worked as the regional manager, general manager for Toyota, for the Southern California market.
In 2015, made the leap to retail, which has been a great experience. Tell me more about Toyota. I mean, is the LA market the largest market for Toyota in the country, in the world? It is the largest market by market share. And frankly, looking at a metro market, it's the largest market for volume as well. There's distributors that are bigger, like Southeast Toyota that has multiple states. But if you look at the actual Southern California market, which is Santa Barbara to the Mexico border, it's the largest market for Toyota. For sure, in the US, I would probably say the world for that matter.
What is the market share? It's been as high as in the 20s, 20%. It's been 22%, 23%. It's hovering a little bit below that right now, given the last two years of the inventory situation that we've all encountered. So I just saw, I think November, the latest information I have is it was 19%. So getting close to back to 20.
So you spent almost two decades in the corporate side. What suddenly switched? What why go retail? What happened? You know, it's kind of where I grew up. And it's always was kind of in the back of my mind. I probably in my career on the OEM side probably was in 700 different dealerships across the country at one time or another. And it is always compelling to me to be in a place where you could have a little bit more hands-on decision-making, be in a place where the consumers in front of you, and so it's supposed to six degrees of separation, and really impact what's happening in the day to day.
And there was a catalyst that happened that year where the company decided to relocate its headquarters to Texas. And my wife said, I'm not moving ever again. We've moved six times, and this is it. So thanks to her and her putting her foot down, I had to make a decision on staying in the industry that I truly enjoy and making a leap to the retail side. And had an opportunity to join the Penske organization, which is world-class. And frankly, having spent time working in other markets and seeing other groups, there's a lot of great operators in this business, I mean, phenomenal. And I felt like, hey, this is one of the best and why not give this an opportunity? And that's what I did.
So I've been doing it since 2015, not in this particular role. Came in in a different role. But since beginning of 2019, I've been running this store day to day. I also have some other responsibilities for our group. But this is my day job. I sit in my office in the showroom at Longoutoia, and I, you know, you get certainly a pulse of what's happened in the business real fast.
So just a table standing here for our listeners, right? You're the president, a general manager of Longouto, the largest Toyota dealership in the world. You're the president of Penske Motor Group, which I want us to define the distinction there. And your office is in the showroom of the dealership in Los Angeles.
所以这只是一个供我们听众使用的桌子,对吗?您是隆古图公司(Longouto)的总裁,也是全球最大的丰田汽车经销商的总经理。您是彭斯克汽车集团(Penske Motor Group)的总裁,我希望我们能够明确这里的区别。您的办公室位于洛杉矶的经销商展厅内。
Yes, correct. And just the, yeah, it's a fun place, right? Talk about action and seeing what's happening in the world. You get a pulse of it, you know, we're right off the 10 freeway in a very busy part of Eastern Los Angeles County.
Give us some like really nitty gritty first day as GM of Longoutoia. What does that like for you? You just moved from the corporate side. Are you nervous? Like what's going through your mind that day?
Yeah, I think so just for clarity, I didn't come in as a GM. I came in in a different role with the organization. So I spent about two to three years working with the GMs and doing some different things before I jumped into this chair. So I had a little bit of runway. But you know what, I think when you come into anybody that's sort of like on the fringe, whether it's a vendor or OEM or somebody that is sort of on the fringes of the business, I feel like, I think you feel like you know what's going on and you really know, you know, I could do that. I could figure that out.
And the reality is, you know, right? I thought I knew everything and I didn't. So I think it's a humbling experience. But my goal was to really learn everything I could. Yes, I know the business at a macro level, but I really want to learn at a micro level. I came in honestly, I spent the first few weeks. I spent on the service drive. I spent some time in our working with service advisors, working in the shop, you know, in the next technicians and understanding what the workflow is, our collision center, course sales.
Did they respect you? Yeah, they probably like, who's this guy coming in? You know, he's a factory guy. But the fortunate thing, because it's this organization, they were my customer before I worked for them. So I had some relationships and people were like, okay, I think that guy might be okay, right? And so I think it's, I was in, I had a, I guess I had a favorable position coming in just because I know. If I think if I came out the street, they ever heard of this guy before, who's this guy coming in telling me what to do or thinking I know my business? So it wasn't as much of that simple as that. You've seen that too many times. I'd been here before.
And yeah, of course. And you know what? And one thing I will tell you is I went and I was wide open because many have done that transition from wholesale to retail, if you will, and failed. I knew that was, this was not going to be easy, but it's something I really wanted to do, and I engaged fully with it. And you know, I've got a great team and great organization. We all work exceptionally well together.
So before we get to this, just the scale of your operation, what would you say was the biggest challenge for you throughout this transition from going from corporate to retail? It's just understanding, I don't know if it's a challenge, but it's, it's a, certainly a, something I learned is that, you know, people are motivated differently, right?
You know, how do you motivate people? How do you excite people? How do you incentivize people? You know, coming from the factory side, people, you know, tend to be motivated by their next job, right? What am I going to, how am I going to get promoted? What am I, what's my next opportunity to grow? And you know, there's some of that, for sure, but there's also people that want to, they're very happy staying in the job they have, right? So how do you motivate them on a day-to-day basis? Get them to raise their performance in their game by, you know, other means that maybe not the same.
So I think the whole business comes down to people. And that's really what the differentiator is, I think, with different organizations and how others, you know, how some perform better than others. And, you know, it's how you motivate and how do you lead those people. It's a little bit different.
So I'd say that was, I wouldn't call it a challenge, but definitely a, something that was different that you had to adapt to. You know, when you're in a corporate environment, you know, you have, you have a, oh, this group does this and that group does this and it has so many silos. So many different pieces to it. When you're in retail, you know, my kind of thing is, you know, you got to decide, you know, what toilet paper you're going to use in the bathrooms, and you got to decide what your three-year business plan is and pretty much everything in between. And there's no, let me go talk to this group or this planning group, right? It's you, right? It's you and your team of, you know, a small group of managers that is doing this stuff every day.
That might be my favorite line. So, so what type of toilet paper do you use how long ago to you? Hey, you know what? You got it. It's a fine line between comfort and, and cost, right? I really hope, I really hope it's not one ply.
You're trying to be a little bit more, you know, that's one of our secrets to success, right? Better customer experience. And it all flows down into even what, what goes on in the bathroom. So that's just such a good example of that attention to detail. And, you know, thinking about really about the customer experience. I've actually posted about that before, not, not specifically the toilet paper, but I've posted about, you know, you want to see a retail establishment, how it's, you know, managed, just go, go to the bathroom. How clean is it? Go look at, you know, exactly.
We have a lot of people, we've been able to kind of the hot thing during COVID was, oh, we're going to have people, you know, sanitize and clean. We do that, we do that for decades, right? We have that clean constantly. Our bathroom can clean every hour. So it's actually a thing that I think makes a difference. That's the insight everyone came here for.
All right. So give us just a sense of your scale. Employee count, how many new and used you do per year per month? Go ahead. If you look at Longwood Toyota, so big organization been around since 1967. Mr. Longwood started this business and said he was going to be the number one Toyota dealer in the world. And he was his first year, sold 469 new cars. And, you know, we've been fortunate to be number one ever since. It's not something that's ever easy. You got to earn it every day, every week, every month, every year.
To give you a sense of the current scale, last year we sold in an inventory short. It sold about 16,800 million used cars out of this location. We have a big service department. We talk about sales a lot with service. Now we serviced about 107,000 customer cars last year. And overall we have 550 team members who work here at Longwood Toyota. That includes our collision center. Our collision center does about 400 cars a month. It's a big, big operation in and of itself. There's about 85 employees in there. But overall total 550. We have a Lexus dealership that is on the same campus last year. They sold about about 8,000 new and used cars. And, you know, we have some shared services between the stores, but another big operation. So in total our place where we call our campus here, we have about 750 team members between the two stores.
So what is the difference from your role at GMO, a long-going and president of Penske Motor Group? Yeah. So we always like to wear a couple of different hats, right? Keep us busy and on our toes. But day to day I'm the general manager, run the store, have a great team that I work with. And then Penske Motor Group is a privately held company. We have four dealerships. Two here in El Monte and one in San Jose, Alexis Store in San Jose, California. And a new Toyota store, I say new, is six years old now. In Dallas, Texas. So that's our current scope for the private company. There's a larger Penske Motor Group that's publicly traded. That's a sister company, but this is the privately held side. I run that company as well. So we have GM's in those stores. They're great. They do a phenomenal job. And I work with them on different things as well. But oversee that group. You know, HR and some other pieces of it that are ancillary to the day to day business.
那么,在GMO工作以及担任Penske Motor Group总裁这长期以来的角色中,有什么区别呢?是的,我们总是喜欢身兼数职,对吧?这样才能让我们忙碌且保持警觉。但日常工作中,我是总经理,负责管理店铺,与一个很棒的团队合作。而Penske Motor Group是一家私人持有的公司,我们有四家经销店,在El Monte有两家,另外一家在加利福尼亚州的圣何塞,是一家Alexis店。还有一家新推出的丰田店,我说是新的,其实已经有六年历史了,位于得克萨斯州的达拉斯。这是我们目前这家私人公司的规模。还有一家更大的Penske Motor Group是上市公司,是我们母公司,但这家是我们持有的私人部门。我也负责管理这家公司。这些店铺都有经理,他们非常出色,做得非常出众,我也与他们在不同方面进行合作。但总体上,我负责监督整个集团,例如人力资源和其他与日常业务有关的辅助性工作。
Tell us about the structure of your store, right? 550 people, one dealership. I mean, this is an enterprise, right? Give us some, give us some of the behind the scenes, org structure or management layers. Like what are the nuances of operating such a big operation? It's a big boat. You know, we got to turn the boat. You know, you got to really be aligned. So we have about 15 director level positions that we meet weekly as a group that are, you know, I guess my direct reports, if you will. But we have three in the sales department. We have a general sales manager. We have a finance director actually handles multiple stores. We have a use car director, service director, parks director, collision center director, we got guest relations, marketing, controller, business office payroll, HR, you know, sort of those ancillary positions as well.
But it's a big business. And you know, my job is to keep it moving forward because, you know, when things get bigger, they can kind of, you know, devour themselves, right? You can get stuck in the mud a little bit. So my job is to try and keep us agile, keep us focused on, you know, what's most important, because you get bogged down in bureaucracy.
And my thing is just, you know, trying to be smart, try to be lean. Don't let yourself, even though you're big, think small, you know, we always say, hey, we're, you know, be number one, but think and act like number two. Do big things, but act small, meaning, you know, give back to the community. Don't forget about every customer, one guest at a time, you know, every single person matters.
We've got this 10 foot rule. I mean, it's simple, right? But what's the 10 foot rule? Our 10 foot rule is, you know, we've got a big place here. It's 50 acres, right? People come in here and, uh, what do I do? Right? So it's confusing. It can be. And, you know, so everybody wears a lanyard in the back. It's got a list of, a list of our key values.
One of them is a 10 foot rule. And the 10 foot rule is pretty simple. It just means it doesn't matter what position you have, right? You could be a technician, you could be a valet, you could be a wash cars, you might be a receptionist, whatever the case may be. If you see a guest that is within 10 feet of you, you're going to greet them. You're going to welcome them along with Toyota. You're going to say, hope you're having a great day. Is there anything I can help you with? I don't care. Yeah. They might be here for sales. But if they're here for sales, fine. You're going to walk them over there. So that's the kind of culture that we're trying to always reinforce and make sure our people have because it keeps it small. People are like, oh, I feel okay. People are nice here. Not like, you know, the worst thing even in many stores, the worst thing I ever see is when somebody drives in like a service drive and they're looking around, like, you know, what do I do? And what, you know, who do I, nobody talks to them? And, you know, they just get mad. They're getting worried.
Same thing. People walking to the showroom. Yeah. The example usually on customers who walk into a showroom usually, right? But it's a big place. I mean, we have a AAA office for insurance. We have a DMV branch. We have Starbucks. You know, people enterprise rental cars. People come here for different reasons. And I'm here to buy a car, service cars. You are a destination.
Yeah. I think I'm sure some people just listen to this and say, wait a minute, you have a Starbucks on premises. How did this come to be? The DMV, the Starbucks. Like, what's the background here? You know, our owner, Greg Penske, you know, I think has really great vision for being all, we always say, all things automotive are all the things that people need when they're, when they're having a need for, you know, and they have some need for the car. We want to be the resource, right? So that means, that means car insurance, right? That was 20 years ago, right? I mean, I know other people are getting into selling auto insurance in dealerships, but that was the thing a long time ago we got into partnership with AAA, great partners on the racing side of the business and other things. But, you know, they bring a DMV branch. I mean, who doesn't need to get with the traffic that we get from having a DMV branch? Because people just need, it's not licensed or driver's license, but it is, it's registration. So every single person has to get their car registered, you know, renewed every year. And I do it online, but what I've learned is not everybody does it online. And then when it comes somewhere, I talk to somebody and actually, you know, get comfortable with it. So that's, that's a big piece.
You know, of course you got to have, we got 750 employees, right? I don't want them to leave to go somewhere to have lunch. So we have a subway, we have Starbucks, and we have, you know, on certain days we have other food options for them. And of course for our customers. So I think it just came about as a customer convenience, right? You know, we have people that are waiting. We see 400 Toyota service guests a day. You know, half of them are waiting. You know, why not give them some amenity that they can spend their time with, be comfortable, feel like, hey, you know what, this is a nice place. I want to, I don't mind waiting, right? I don't mind sitting here. Of course we want to get them in and out as fast as possible. That's, that's what we do. But, you know, some people actually want to hang out.
Tell me about your, more about your team. You know, large stores, many of them have just high turnover, you know, intense schedule commitments. So how are you recruiting and retaining top people at your dealership?
Yeah, I think one of the things I'm really proud of and, you know, I can't, I won't take credit for it because it's long three days to me. We have a tremendous amount of 10 year team members, right? We actually did some math recently for a presentation we were doing and, if you look at the 550 long go Toyota team members, we have 260 of them that have been with us for more than 10 years. That's a huge, it's almost 50 percent, right?
Have been here for more than 10 years and you start going up the increments. And I think we have 12 employees that are over 30 years and we have like eight that are over 35. So there's a tremendous amount of retention here. We always want to take great care of our team. We want them to stay with us. We call it hard to get in and hard to get out. So if you apply with us and you interview, it's going to take a while. You know, it's not like, hey, I need two guys on Saturday to sell cars because I need to fill the floor up, get them on board on Thursday and, you know, get them on board Friday and they're selling Saturday.
That's not what we do. There's a place for that maybe somewhere, but it's not our place. And we run short sometimes because of that. We don't want to, we'd rather have the right people than have the wrong people. So, you know, it takes a while. We're very thorough. I actually do the final interview for every single person we hire from Car Wash, ballet, it doesn't, BDC, it doesn't matter. I personally will interview every single person. So they got to wait until I'm accountable. There's a background check, of course, all those things, references. So it takes a while to get hired. So that's the hard to get in.
The hard to get out is we want people to stay with us. We want them to build a career. We don't want them hiring as a salesperson or as a service advisor. We want to hire them for, hey, what can they do in the future? Can they be a service drive supervisor? Can they be a manager? Can they manage the BDC? You know, what does their future growth look like? And we have a pretty good history and I'm personally very focused on how do we continue to grow people, move them up, give them new experiences, move them around. Maybe that came from being on the OEM side where that happens a little bit more often than in retail, but people get renewed, they get refreshed, they get reinvigorated when they get a new opportunity. So they got to be really good at what they do first.
I think we do a good job retaining our team. I think the way we do business with integrity, you know, we don't hide anything. Everything's very transparent here. You know, I think people want to be in that environment. They don't want to have to hide something and like, oh, man, don't tell the customer this or that. And they don't want to get put in that situation and they don't want to be in that situation. You're saying we're not throwing keys on the roof anymore, huh? Yeah, it doesn't happen in a while. It's been a while. But yeah, it definitely is a little bit different. So we try to retain people.
I'd say another big piece is really our training and development. So we actually invested in a full-time learning and development manager. And we have something called Penske College, which is basically our training center, both online and in person. And it's an investment. And I know that not everybody wants to make it. I understand that maybe there's third parties, but giving people some continuous training and feeding them and refreshing. We're doing phone skills training today. We every dealership, including ours, right? You can listen to 10 phone calls and you'll find 10 opportunities where you could be better, right? So we get number of phone calls we get here is mind-blowing between the sales department. We're between 7,000 to 8,000 calls a month in service. It's over 25,000. So it's not to get off on attention about phone skills, but anyway, training is a huge part of it. If you give people that opportunity to grow and develop themselves, they're going to want to stay with you and they're going to be better at your job. So that's a big part of our retention strategy as well.
So that. Yeah. So I'll start with maybe the DMS. We actually made a change in DMS two years ago this month, actually. I can't believe it was two years, but time flies. This is not to say anything good or bad about anyone we used previously, but we were on CDK for a while and we made a change to the tech on. I don't know if you're familiar with tech on it. It's a newer DMS. They've been around for some years. They probably have a thousand clients, but our goal with the DMS was really to improve two things. One, the customer experience, right? To make it more seamless on our service drive, mainly for service. I'm very focused on service with this because it could be, it was so clunky, right? We were printing repair orders, walking over to your desk. I mean, let me type it up for you. Let me print it out. Let me have you physically sign it. We got rid of all that. We went totally paperless two years ago. It's a much, much easier, much less stressful process for our team and for our guests. So our DMS has been a very positive change.
For CRM, we use Eleeds. Eleeds has been around for a while. We were probably one of their first clients. We have an opportunity, I think, to do a little better with how we manage our database. We've got a massive database. It's one of the things I'm focused on right now is how do we better leverage that? I listened to your podcast on AI and it got my wheels turning. We do use AI, by the way, in a couple of places, which I can talk about. And then from a digital retailing tool, we were one of Roadster's first clients when they launched. It was a great experience for us. That was probably five, six years ago. And we made a switch to Toyota. The OEM has a program called SmartPath. Obviously being their biggest dealer, that's something that we should be a part of. So we launched that about a year ago. That's sort of the general stack. There's a lot of ancillary products that support those. I could tell you all about any one of those, if you'd like.
You mentioned AI. You said you're actually doing some cool stuff with that. What are you doing there? Yeah, I think we're scratching the surface with AI, honestly. We started about three or four years ago using a service. The way we look at AI, I don't think, oh my god, let's go get AI. It's the new hot thing, right? I just look at, hey, what are the problems we have that we need to solve? And can we use, is there technology that we can either buy or build? And we've built some of our own technology actually to solve it, right? So one of the problems we were having was just reaching out to our database. It's not, we have a service BDC that has about 18 team members and they support four stores. It's a shared service. But a lot of it's long with Toyota. We cannot scale big enough to make outbound calls to people who, by the way, aren't answering them anyway, right? Who's picking up the phone, right? I hate to say it, but if you don't have this for me, if your number is not in my phone, I'm probably not going to answer it because I get spammed all day, right? So how do we reach our guests and get them back for service? So we started using a system called Inversica, which basically allowed us to set up outbound campaigns to reach different segments of our database. Okay, you haven't been here in a year. Okay, you're going to get this message, right? Oh, you have ToyotaCare, but you've been laughing for your last two services. You're going to get this message, right? You were here and we offered you a, we offered you some service for your car and you didn't, you declined it or said, hey, I'll get it the next time you're getting this message, right? So we do that to the outbound campaigns. We do, it is AI. It's all via email right now. And, you know, we have a bot called her name is Tiffany and people engage with Tiffany. And people call and say, guys, speak to Tiffany, right? Oh my goodness. Which was great because we didn't actually have a Tiffany that worked here, but now we do. So it's become a little bit of a problem. We could change a name, but it's worked extremely well. The conversion from those, you know, the conversion from those outbound, the outreach from the AI assistant to the guest, converting to ROS is pretty remarkably high. The engagement is really, really good. So that's one place we're using it.
The other problem we wanted to solve is in the same vein, if you look at inbound phone calls, you know, we have an abandoned rate for service phone calls about 5%, right? And 5% on it's 5%. When you have 30,000 calls that you get, 5% is a big number, right? That's, that's, I don't want to live with anybody, right? I don't want to have an experience where somebody calls and we can't answer the phone, right? So.
Which is why averages are so dangerous. Exactly. Because you look at an average, you're leaving some new. Terrible. I don't, I don't lose, do you want to lose 1500 customers? You know, I don't.
Basically, it's picking up those calls. It's offering guests a chance to text because everybody wants to text. It'll text them a service appointment link. They can schedule if that's why they called the other big one. And I feel like this is going to be our biggest upside is parks, right?
So the absolute worst phone call experience, and I will say this, and maybe I'm wrong, but at any dealership, it's calling a parks department. And that's no knock on parks managers or parks counter people. It's just that they get overwhelmed, right? And in a parks phone call, it's not, hey, let me make an appointment. Come in Wednesday too, right? Let me see. Let me see. That's the kind of mission with it. I think there's some parks that got this wreck car in my shop.
You know, I don't know what's the tram, what's the parking? You know, those are long phone calls, right? And they require some expertise. So we just can't answer them all. So we've employed the same AI services, handling our service phone calls, actually handling parks phone calls. And they're doing just simple things like, okay, we're going to capture the phone number. We're going to text the guests now. Hey, you know, what kind of car do you have? Oh, you have a 2018 Tundra. Okay, great. What's the VIN number, right? Okay, now we have the VIN number in our system. So that when we actually get back to that guest, we have a much richer amount of information. We may even have what they be able to give them the solution right away. So we take that, what would have been like a 10 minute phone call, just gathering information. We'll let AI do a lot of that work for us and then reason our people to basically put the expertise where they need it. So that's working very well.
There's there's an opportunity on the sales side. We could talk all day about it and we don't we're not doing enough there, but those are some starting points where they are. So you just mentioned several different use cases for yourself. Let's now I want to talk about the bigger picture when you implement a new process at your dealership, given just the scale, the amount of people. What is that like for you, right? How is it changing a system changing a process? What does that like for you on a day to day basis?
Yeah, so changing a process or implementing a new initiative at Longotoyota is I refer to it as a military operation, right? It is a massive undertaking that requires everybody to be on board, right? And it is so easy to miss people. I forgot about this person or this person touches it over here. Anything that we change from their website, any kind of user experience thing that is is at the forefront inventory feeds, use cars, pricing. Everybody's got to be on board, right? You change anything here. It is it is it's ripe for problems, right? Because you're going to miss somebody. You're going to forget about something. You're going to have an upset guest. It's just we have so much traffic that if you make a mistake, it gets amplified very fast.
So, you know, I just I'm always like, hey, all hands on deck. Everybody needs to hear this. Even if you don't think this applies to you, it probably does in some way, or you're going to need to know about it. So just kind of rallying that communication. Again, on our list, how do you actually do that? Do you I mean, do you just physically put everyone in one place? Email call like what's your actual? You know, we'll do we'll do we, you know, maybe the pandemic kind of forced it, but we do a lot more teams and like Zoom, like with our managers instead of like, hey, everybody get in a room. We'll do that too if we need to. But right now, we're under construction, which is the whole another story. We'll get a new one. We'll get a new one. Under construction, it's still operating. But you know, given that these tools like this, right, just virtually everybody gets get all the quick teams call. Let's go around and make sure everybody's clear on what needs to happen. Emails get lost. People don't read them. And I get I get some emails a day. I'm tired of email. I can't wait to find solution for it. But we're trying to use some other tools that are a little less, you know, arcade.
What metrics are you tracking on a daily basis? Like specifically, what are you looking at? What's your dashboard look like?
你每天跟踪哪些指标?具体来说,你在关注什么?你的仪表板是什么样子的?
Yeah. I mean, it's it's probably not unlike other operators out there. I mean, we, you know, first and foremost, we we got cell cars, right? At our volume, you know, we can't miss a day. So we have a business plan. We have a very deliberate process. We go through like in November every year, we build a business plan for the year. That business plan is then cascaded into every report we have.
So day to day, we still run a doc. You know, we run a sales doc. We're on a service doc. You know, I'm looking at our our units. I'm looking at a gross or gross per unit, you know, basic stuff that, you know, probably most people are looking at looking at our service drive car counts. I always look at that as an index is that phone calls and leads are sort of to me, like leading indicators of what's coming. If we need to make some adjustments to, you know, get more traffic or do those things, we can we can do them by by looking at those daily. You know, of course, we look at our service gross and our parts and collision relative to our plan.
Resources, right? Making sure we have enough people in the right places. Things that come to mind are use car reconditioning. It's a big one, right? We're super focused on our cycle times because, you know, as you know, in the use car business, the way it's been so volatile for the last couple of years is it was super overheated. And then it, you know, pretty much has been on a downward trend. And in some of those downward, those little bubbles of drops have have been painful, right? You know, you go through 45, 60, 90 days of, well, where that index is, you know, wholesale market is dropping, you know, and you you wasted 10 or 15 days getting a car through recon. It's a problem. So I'm very focused on recon really trying to bring that cycle time down.
What we're doing, we have a shared service between Toyota and Lexus. So we are we are reconditioning about 550 use cars a month. And there's a lot of pieces to it. Our cars are very, very well reconditioned. I'll say. And just so you do those at a separate facility. This is not your service facility. It's separate from that. It's on site. But we have two shops. We have a main shop that is dedicated to all our customer work. And then we have another shop that just does use car reconditioning. It's all they do. And we actually run a third shift in that shop overnight. So we have. Yeah. So we have. Yeah. Then it just handles two things.
One, they do all the new car PDIs. So we only get new car deliveries at night. And they they do all that at night. For anyone that doesn't understand, can you just explain PDI? Sorry. Yeah. We're famous for our acronyms in this business. Obviously we're big vomit. We're selling 1200, 11, 1200 new cars a month in Toyota. You know, another $500 at Lexus. So you know, we get deliveries. We don't allow deliveries to come to us during the day because we're so busy with our operations. So we take new car deliveries from 8 p.m. until 4 a.m. Every night. So the loads come in. And we have a team that's here. And every new car has to go through a pre delivery inspection. Make sure, you know, there's no damage to the car that we, you know, we put in, we make sure that the errors crop, you know, correct. And the air pressure and the tires is correct. That, you know, there's different things you got to do with the head unit and the radio and things like that. So we have a team that does that process every night, fills them with gas. So the goal is by the morning, you know, those cars are our stage and ready to go. In the environment, we've been operating in for most of the past two and a half years. A lot of those cars are sold before they get here. Now, not quite as much today as we did. We had six months or a year ago, but. Still, a significant portion of our daily arrivals are our free salt, are ready to be contracted as soon as we can get the guests to make the car, which is a right start every day.
But back to use cars. Yeah, it's a separate operation. We run that and we, one thing that's unique, and we, about 60% of our cars, we actually take the bumpers off. We send the bumpers, just people get, you know, sandblasting, you know, people hit scuffs, curbs, right? You name it. Bumpers get hammered on cars pretty quickly because they're so low to the ground. So we actually remove the bumpers. We stand them overnight. They go into our collision center. We bake them in the oven. And what cars are these, though? What cars are you referring to? You know, use cars. Usually typically passenger cars.
Oh, so you're saying you do the bumper on every use car? About 60%.
哦,所以你的意思是每辆二手车都会更换保险杠?大约有60%的情况。
About, we're running about 60% right now. So anything that has any kind of scratch on it, I mean, some cars, you're old, maybe not, but, you know, anything that's older.
So we're actually taking the bumpers off, we're refinishing them, we're painting them overnight, we're, you know, we're, we're, we're baking them in the paint booth and then we're bringing them back in the morning. So it's kind of a continuous operation. Kind of a saying here. I know all about the recon world. Yeah. We live that. So our thing is long, we never sleeps, right? So there's always somebody here doing something with a car.
I want to shift a bit more to financial and economic now. You know, a lot of things you mentioned Toyota, the inventory situation, we know affordability is the big challenge for the industry.
Let's just kind of take these one by one. First things first is when you think about affordability, is that the biggest challenge for you? Like I speak to lots of dealers, you know, it's obviously a huge challenge for the industry. But for you, is that the biggest, one of the biggest, how are you tackling it? What are you doing about it?
Yeah, affordability, I think is a real issue. I think it's a real issue for everybody in the industry. I look at, you know, the payments that people are walking out of here with on a new car. And I'm almost down to it, right? Because take yourself back and put yourself in 2019 and say, you know what? Every, I'm using an example, but you know, you have a tonneur that goes out of here. And most of the tonneurs that go out of here are 900,000, $1,100 payments. It's worrisome because you start running out of people that can make those payments, right?
So our use car business is actually pretty strong right now. And I think one of the factors that's driving that is affordability, right? Because people are trying to find something that's inexpensive. I think fortunately Toyota as a brand has maintained the passenger cars in their lineup, right? So we have cameras and Corollas that are still, you know, maybe not as affordable as they used to be, but certainly affordable relative to other cars and other brands. But it's concerning, right? Interest rates are very, very high. You know, non-submitted rates are 7 or 8% for somebody with really good credit. So it's a real issue.
I think we've been very fortunate as an industry and even as a dealership to have a very, the low inventory, yes, maybe hurt some sales, but it also gave us sort of a some demand that we are now filling. But I do think when so that pent up demand or yeah, you're capturing still a lot of the demand here. Yeah, we're still we're still living that. And I think there's there's some more to be had, but there's going to come a day if we're where the the order bank and the demand sort of tips and it sort of runs out.
And at that time, When is that day? When is that day? That's a great question. I wish everybody wants to know and I wish I knew, but I would put it in the middle of 24 roughly because if the order bank runs out and interest rates are low, we don't really have a problem. But if the order bank runs out and interest rates are still very high, I think that represents a challenge for the industry.
So to me, one of the ways out of this is going to be leasing. Leasing kind of got away from everyone the last couple of years. But you know, we were 30% leasing at Toyota and last year we were, you know, 14. So it's half the year before it might have been lower, but we've got it for lots of reasons. We've got to get people back in the cycle of leasing. It's going to help our use cars. It's going to put people into the into the purchase funnel. I worry about. I worry about a lot of things, I guess, but two years from now, there's nobody coming back on leasing. There's no order bank, right? Interest rates are high. Those are the things that we got to be very cognizant of and try to make sure we're getting ready for in other ways. But to me, leasing is a huge piece of it.
I don't see another solution to the current affordability crisis in sentence, which I think gives two more of this year. I don't think any OEM is necessarily going to be dropping prices anytime soon. Because their costs are higher, right? They've got materials costs. It's like we do labor costs and everything else.
How are you how are you dealing with the lease situation? We're now 2024, right? By 2021, 2020, we already had factors being shut down and fewer leases hitting the market. How are you dealing with that and just having fewer used cars in your supply?
Yeah, I'll give you two pieces to it. One is we haven't hit the bottom yet with respect to lease returns. We're going to hit it about middle of 24. We had a dip in. If you think about the last four years of answering, right? So 2020, the second half of 2020, there wasn't a ton of leasing. We were closed for COVID. There was all kinds of disruptions. 21, the market sort of took off, right? So the first half of 21, we had huge volume. We had our two biggest months and the last four years were in the spring of 21. Huge lease penetration. The OEMs were still spending money on incentives. It was gangbusters basically, the first half of 21. So we have an enormous bubble of leases coming there in the next six months, and then it just absolutely falls off a cliff. So we're still in kind of that mode of lease retention and getting people out and cycle them in. But as you know, number one problem is their payment just went up a lot, right? So getting them into something else. We're seeing people get out of leases. We're seeing a lot of lease buyouts, which has become a bigger part of our business. But we'd rather have them buy the lease out and stay with us and then have an opportunity, maybe in 24 months when that car still got great equity, you get them back into something new, and maybe the pricing and availability is better. So that's a big piece. But I see this becoming a bigger issue as we get into the second half of this year. And I'm hoping by then the OEMs are a little more strong on incentives and lease rates and residuals and things like that that'll help us make that profit-driven.
Do you think that Toyota is shooting itself in the foot by consistently being under supplied relative to other brands? I mean, they'll clearly, that gives dealers some more pricing power. And Toyota is known for its reputation, its reliability. So you're selling cars and business is good. But long term, is it hurting the brand that Toyota keeps losing market share? Look, I think if you ask Toyota, they want to build a car they can. Right? So there's some limitations. Obviously, I think they were hit a little bit harder by the chip crisis than others. There's some insular things that I do think they'll be back. We're already seeing it. When we started, you look at October November, registration's market share was up.
Tesla is a huge factor in California. We can talk about that for a second. But Tesla, okay, so Tesla, if you look at where did that market share go? And I'm not looking at a nationwide picture, but I'm looking at what's happening in this market. And market share went to Tesla. It didn't really go anywhere else, right? Koreans maybe got a little bump, but then they've sort of leveled off. Honda has been up and down depending on their own availability. But if you look at the last three years, market share Tesla, the volume of Tesla in California, and I know some other states as well, is unbelievable. Right? So if you went back to May of this past year, so we'll call it the middle of 23, Tesla was within 2000 units of Toyota volume in California. And that's unheard of, right? Now that's changed. That number has, that gap is wide and its availability has come up. But Tesla has, even though the EV market is extremely soft, for basically the whole industry, Tesla has definitely bucked that trend. Some of it that's occurred over the last 12 months has been on the back of pricing. And they've basically brought that pricing down and they showed that they had some elasticity in that car and there's some more demand for that car if the price is lower. Now, where are they at now? I don't see that pricing. Maybe they'll go lower, but I think that bubble is behind us.
So you're saying they pulled that lever already. They can't pull that one in yours. The lever is pulled and it was pulled hard, right? Yeah, it was big time, yeah. So I don't know. And for context for anyone listening, I mean, Tesla dropped its prices. In some cases, as much as 50% on certain vehicles. So it was very intense price drops over a period of several months or in some cases, several weeks. Certainly it bounced it up and down quite a bit. But the net effect was their cars are a lot cheaper than they were before, right? Which has a residual effect on people that have bought a car two or three years ago, trying to get those people out that are in massive negative equity positions is a real issue.
But they definitely stimulated the market. Now, where can they go from here? I don't know what their cost structure is. I don't know how much more aggressive they can go. But you saw those headlines in the middle of 23 that a Tesla Model 3 or a Tesla Model Y was the same price as a camera, right? From a transactional standpoint. So I'm not seeing those headlines anymore. The latest report I got on yesterday that had November data showed Tesla lost several points of market share in the fall. I never got to count them out, but given their product lineup, it's aged. They've pulled the pricing lever. What's left for them? We'll see. But I feel like that bubble has passed us.
But that's a competitor and certainly one that, we as a dealer, you feel like, hey, you missed out on all that volume, right? Tested on it, right? There's a customer that probably were our customers at some level. Everybody says, who does Tesla conquest? My answer is everybody.
But given what you just stated, and of course you're in California, so you're definitely not representative of every Toyota dealer in the country. Do you think that Toyota is making a mistake by not introducing EVs or by staying very, you know, staying very cool in that end and going strictly hybrid? Or do you think this is the smart long-term strategy? I think it's the right long-term strategy. I really do sort of believe that from the beginning. And I'll tell you why. And Tesla's an aberration for sure, right? Yes. I would love to have some of that volume, but unless we had that product, I don't see anyone else getting it, right? You look at EV for any other brand, no one is doing well. There's not a ton of demand for it. I look at where is our demand and our demand for the past, you know, two and a half years has been hybrids, right? More hybrids, more plug-ins, right?
During this inventory, we didn't really talk much about it, but during this inventory shortage, we've been taking orders for cars, right? And at the very peak of it, which was probably about a year ago right now, we had 13,000 orders for cars, okay? Today, we have about 6,000. So it's still good demand. Now, can I get those 6,000? No, they're a little harder to get, right? It's going to take some time, but 80%, if I went back when it was 13,000.
And just I understand, are you saying orders, you have orders to the factory? Yes. So customers come in, now customers, I guess for clarity, we have 13,000, I'm sorry, today we have 6,000, but at the peak, we have 13,000 deposits.
Wow. People have made with us to buy. That's big. It's been huge. And by the way, it's been hard to manage because it's so much, right? I can't imagine. We just don't have the resources to follow up. And what was that like for like 2019? How many deposits did you have, if any? Or was everything sold? Hundreds, I mean less than 100, probably. Yeah, everything was sold on the demand. We had 1,500 cars in the lot, new cars in 2019. For the last two years, we've averaged under 200. In many cases, under 100 at the end of the month. So it's a totally different environment. It's evolving back, but even today, we sit here in under 10 days to buy cars. So we're still running lean. I don't want to go back to having 1,500 cars in stock, especially at today's floor plan rates.
I'll look at what we're paying in interest today. Over the last couple of months versus what we paid in 2019, we're paying more in raw dollars because the cars have gotten more expensive. And of course, interest rates are exceptionally higher. So we got to be careful on the cost side of things. What are you paying, like roughly speaking, for context? Interest or floor plan? Floor plan costs right now. You know, last month, it was actually raw cost was over 100 grand. It just interest costs. And that's after credit. It's not Toyota. So, yeah, it's real money. And in that 100,000 was nothing. It's 100,000 a month is, you know, sudden it's a million dollars before you blink. And that's with not having a lot of it. Right? So if you actually had more inventory, it would be higher.
So we need more cars. We need to fill the demand. What I was going to say is if you look at that order bank, whether it was the highest point of where it is today, 75 to 80% of the demand is for hybrids or plugins. So Toyota has built some phenomenal products. The new Prius is amazing. Some of the new vehicles like RAV4 and the new camera is coming, but also Corolla. There's core models that have hybrid application. They're sold out, right? There's tremendous demand for them. We have EVs on the lock. I drive an EV. Trust me, I know. My wife drives a Sienna hybrid. There you go. I didn't mention Sienna. I should have, but Sienna was lost in 2020. We're the biggest dealer in the world. And we've never had one in stock in four years. We've never had one, right? We've continuously had over a thousand orders. We get 30 to 50 of them a month. We fill them. And it's continued. It's another great model. There's nothing wrong with that. Great product. But that business model works pretty well, right? For everybody. There's no incentives. There's no, yeah.
So funny enough, I actually purchased our Sienna from California. So I'm sure you know from who, but yeah, from Los Angeles, near you, I guess. I think it was somewhere up there. So yeah, it was a peak. It was a peak 21. And hopefully they didn't charge too much oversteer. No, it wasn't from long ago. I think it was. We don't charge over Mr. Pete. That's been, that's really helpful. No, or yeah, I think. But hopefully it's what we gave you deal. Yeah, I mean, I didn't go to California for no reason. I'm sure you did your homework. You mentioned, so given all this inventory stuff, I think the number one thing that goes for my mind is, do you have any concerns about your team, right? Like the last three years, people got conditioned to the good life, right? Do people come to you, especially Toyota deal shape? I can only imagine. It's like, you know, get in line, please. What, like where's your head out? You know, 12 months out, are there bad habits? Like, how do you deal with this?
Yeah, no, it's real. I think anybody that's in the retail business has got to deal with the fact that we've been in a more customer's than car's situation for 30 months. And it's really easy to think that that's what it's going to always be, right? It's the way it always was. But I think the thing that helps us in our case, and it's not perfect. But the fact is, many of our sales consultants are very long, tenured employees, right? So they've been doing this a long time. They've seen lots of cycles. They've seen recessions. They've seen pandemics. They've seen way too much inventory. They've seen no inventory. So I think having that perspective now, sometimes you got to remind them, hey, remember what three years ago, you know, what it was like? And we've got to be way more effective and way more way faster with the way we respond the leads and the way we manage our database and all those things that we didn't really have to do because they're coming at us for the last two and a half, three years. So it's constant education on that. I feel like we've made that transition. We made it in roughly October. It was like, it was the car business again, right? It was no longer, you know, in order we're still getting orders. When, yeah, when used car prices took that day. Those cars took the hit, right? There's no gross there. All of a sudden we got new cars on the lot. Oh my God, we have new car. We have 400 cars guys. We've had, you know, this is about third of what we weren't used to being. So it's just making sure everybody has that perspective.
Interestingly today, we actually, the inventory is dipped again a little bit because we had such a huge December. But we have people that honestly, we don't, you know, we don't have a lot of turnover, but we've added, I don't know, probably under 10, maybe call it eight to 10 people in the last three years that don't have that same perspective. So it's been some education with them to help them understand how to talk to a consumer. How to negotiate, right? They never had to negotiate. It's MSRP, right? So there's definitely some education there. We're working with those people hand-to-hand day-to-day, making that transition. But it's a heart, it's definitely heart, right? Psychologically, this is a very emotional business, right? Cars, it's exciting. It's, you know, it's emotional, the highs and the lows, you know, just kind of managing our way through that is something we have to deal with every day, for sure. Does anything keep you up at night?
Yeah, a lot of things. I think, you know, it's thinking about one of those things to keep you up at night. It's really the macro things that we can't control, the interest rates, the affordability, things that happen in the world that are beyond our control. Those are things that, you know, hey, what ifs, I have confidence though, I can go back to sleep now and hey, we're going to adapt, we're going to adjust, we're going to do whatever it takes, that's what we're good at, that's what we always do. But, you know, look, we always have to, when you're at the top, you know, unfortunately we're the number one for volume, but I come to work every day knowing that we can do so much better, right? We're just, we feel like we're scratching the surface in some areas and we can be even better. So that's what's exciting and that kind of keeps you coming back.
What are some of the opportunities that you think, you know, what are they? What areas? I look at our business and I think, you know what, with the number one thing for me is, is our database because it's so rich and I feel like we're just scratching the surface with how we leverage it. All that data. Using that data more intelligently, speaking the people in the language and the place they're in, when I say language, I don't mean their, you know, their language that they speak, but I'm talking about what's their mindset today, right? As a vehicle owner or someone that's in the market, right? How do we speak to them more intelligently? So that's something that we're working on. It's a priority for this year, but I feel like one of the problems, this is going to, you kind of laugh if I say this, but one of the problems we have is that we have too much traffic and I don't say that. I believe it. I say that humbly, right? Meaning, I'm grateful that we have a lot of traffic, but I feel like because of that, we could be better at how we manage that traffic than we are. So that's another thing that's really top of mind to me.
In our service area, it's all about time. So we're really focused on trying to get the time down because again, with 400 cars a day, it's easy to get a car lost in the back and nobody picked it up and, you know, those kinds of things can happen. And we have a tremendous amount of great customer reviews. We have over 17,500 Google reviews, 4.7 rating, but every single day, I look at any one-star review we get, I read it, we get to the bottom of what happened and we stay focused on that because we won't always be better at it. So those are some things that are top of mind.
What's your subprime business like? But it's not in that business, really, really, really not. What do you mean by that? I mean, we don't, we don't, we don't chase subprime business because we're new car, you know, we sell about 11, 1200 new cars a month. 80 to 90% of our customers are tier one credit. You know, we're very fortunate to have very, very good paper. Our used car business is similar. So it's just not, you know, they have to get 90% is, is, um, tier one. More tier one plus. Yeah. Wow. And I look at our loss, we're really focused on it, right? The structural deal structure, I think having a lot of repeat business helps that.
People come back for third, fourth, fifth, sixth. Sometimes I've heard people say 11 cars. I mean, it's just becomes a family kind of generational thing, but we're very fortunate to have very good paper. Look, we make some tough deals and I got to tell you, it's not, it's all perfect. It isn't. We sell in 400 used cars a month. You see some things that are, that are a little bit tougher. But we have a great partnership with, with the captive, with Toyota Financial, some other banks. And it's just, it's not, uh, not top of mine for us.
Fascinating, man. I want to just ask you about when you think about the next generation of hiring for your business, growing your team, right? Where are you attracting talent? Where are people coming from? You know, and your best talent specifically, that's what I want to hone in on.
There's one thing I wanted to touch on that I have it. It's that's okay. And please, of course, you know, I think about differentiators and things that make it successful. One of the big things for us is diversity. LA is very diverse, um, as you know, and we have team members that collectively speak over 40 languages and dialects. It's like, I didn't know the word 40 languages. That's absurd. It is. They're like, do a lingo champions. And it's, yeah, it literally, and it's, it's real. So I think that, given the diversity of Los Angeles, over many, many years, decades for that matter, people want to transact. They'll have to go look at your website and shop and English. But when it comes time to talking money and transactions, they want to speak in the language they're most comfortable in. So having the people in our sales force, uh, service advisors that can do that, that do that, that speak the language is a huge, uh, is a huge, uh, asset for us. So. Yeah.
And I noticed that you, you have advertisements in Chinese and Spanish, which is again, I haven't seen that. I mean, I've seen Spanish advertising, but Chinese, well, that's the first one. Yeah. And we're in the San Gabriel Valley, which is sort of the crossroads of, you know, we have a significant Asian community. We have a significant Hispanic community. We need people that can speak all those languages. And, you know, we think about the Asian languages. You have Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean, and then multiple, multiple, multiple dialogues, dialects off of that. So that's a big one.
So maybe, um, you know, transitioning to, uh, you know, your question about hiring, um, we, we really like to hire people for guest service, right? So people that can, that maybe have experience, maybe they worked at Starbucks, maybe they worked at a restaurant, maybe they worked in a, in a retail store, but they're used to dealing with customers. We can teach them sales. We can teach them, you know, the, the fundamentals of the business or service, whatever it may be. That's sort of the, the mindset we're looking for.
The one thing that probably may, may blow your mind, or maybe, maybe not, but we don't actually have a sales BDC. We want our salespeople to kind of do as much of the transactions as possible. And we've had them in the past and it became a crutch. Oh, I got the guy that takes the phone calls for me. Oh, I got the guy that does the follow up for me. I just got to, you know, so, so, so, so just understand you're saying that your sales team is the one that's making the calls, but also taking the customers as they arrive to the showroom as opposed to splitting that up with, you know, one department making the calls and one department only handling ups in the showroom. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm not telling you we have the right answer. I'm not ever going to tell you we have the right answer. All right. Just the answer we have today and it's working today. It's effective, but it does manage costs a little better. So you don't have all these multiple layers of, of comp, but also, you know, just having people that I want them to be good at everything. And honestly, if you have a BDC that can't talk price, then you're going to talk to somebody else. It's bad for a customer experience, right? They're bouncing people around.
So what we do have though is we have a sales development team. So we don't bring somebody in. I don't even care if they work somewhere else. We don't put them on the floor, right? We want them to kind of understand our culture. We want to understand our process. So we put them in this sales development team as a manager, where they learn how to, you know, structure a deal. They learn how to take a phone call. They're phone etiquette. They learn, you know, how to manage leads and how to manage the CRM. They learn the product. And that's something we started a couple of years ago. And that's where we start people, even if they come from a different dealership or a different department, they're going to do a minimum 90 days in there. And then they can graduate. Some of them will stay longer because they're, they're doing the business.
And then the sales development team, are they actually working with customers? Or are they like just training? They will work with customers. So they'll take phone calls. They'll take that call as far as they can go with it. They'll, they'll take some leads as a, you know, as training, but they'll take that as far as they can go with it. The ones that are now feel like they can take the customer all the way, they're probably the ones that are ready to go to the next level. They also will, will shadow salespeople. So those spend a whole day, you know, rotating between different people, just so they get a feel for how people handle different situations, one of the objections that come up, those kinds of things. So it's been, it's been pretty effective. And that's been the answer about hiring. That's kind of what we're looking for. And then we bring them into a, a place where it's not like full pressure day one. And then not have to, you know, let's, let's, let's learn a little bit. So it's, it's been good.
Well, my friend, you're on a, you're on a hell of a business. This was so interesting. I had a ton of fun. That's been fun. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. And you know, like I said, always, always looking to be better at what we do. And we don't feel like we've solved everything yet.
No, and I appreciate you tuning into the podcast. And if anyone wants to get in touch with you or long ago, how can they reach out? Yeah. Call to email. I'm pretty responsive. And we'll, we'll throw up your, we'll throw up your website link in the show notes below as well. If you give us permission, we'll put your email so that maybe we get you some, you know, some good candidates for recruiting. If you need, this was great, man. So thanks so much for coming on. I had a ton of fun. Best for having me. I appreciate it. It's been fun.
All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.