Our first month we sold 65 cars. 30 days into it. I knew I didn't want to do anything else for the rest of my life. Why is that? Because I made more money in that month than I would make usually in a year. Can you really lose money on every car but still make money on every deal? For this dealer, it's not just a bad dream. It's in his business plan and it's very profitable.
Today I'm speaking with Ali Hanna, dealer principal for Hanna Cars, a three store independent dealer group. We discussed selling his first car behind a service center at 30 years old. How he runs his $200 million a year, used car business in two states. Can his newest acquisitions succeed where others have failed before him? 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 transparent insights into the car market. But before we get into the show, this episode is brought to you by my very own Car dealership guy, industry job board. I hear it every day. CDG, why aren't you charging money for this? My answer? Because I can. CDGjobs.com, my industry job board connecting the best talent and automotive with the best companies, will remain absolutely free for CDG listeners to post and fill available roles at their companies.
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Ellie Haddell on the CDG podcast. Ellie, welcome. Thank you, Yossi. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. I'm excited because you told me it's the first podcast you've ever done. That's number one. Number two, I'm excited because you're a used car guy and it's been a minute since we had a good old used car guy on the podcast telling how it is, how popular it is. I wanna get started with really your upbringing in this business, how you even got started with Hannah Imports. Give us some of the background. I'll give you all the background. Actually, I'm from Lebanon. I grew up in Beirut. Moved here when I was almost 18 to go to NC State University. And never had any intention to be in the car business whatsoever. Went to NC State for an engineering degree and out of college, I moved to New York City and got a job in engineering field. I was there for almost six years. I was there during September 11, actually. I was in New York City. And I never really fell in love with the engineering business and I always knew at some point I would find something else to do.
So I moved back to North Carolina and looked for a different field and I stumbled into the car business. I didn't work in the car business until I was 30 years old and I'm 47 now. So tell me more about that, right? Like, would you say stumbled? You moved back to North Carolina. What does that mean to you? Did you just start selling cars, flipping cars? Or what really happened? I started going with a friend of mine to the option when I had extra time on my hand. I would buy a car, then I would buy two cars. I would put them at somebody else's lot. And at some point I had 10 or 15 cars and I quit my job. And I started selling behind a service shop. I would actually do paperwork on the back of a car. The dad for a while, almost a year, like work from streets. And I opened my store in 2009. I always remember that the day I opened I had 40 cars in inventory. And our first months we sold 65 cars. And 30 days into it, I knew I didn't want to do anything else for the rest of my life. Why is that? Because I made more money in that month than I would make usually in a year. My man, I've given it real. So now, tell us more about that, right? You came from, and just understand, when you say, what was your job? You say, when I quit my job, what was that job? I was a bridge engineer.
So I feel like, you know, I hearing that, it's like you sound to me like someone that had options. And I think that's, you know, that's a testament to the opportunity in this industry, because typically, in many cases, people that, you know, get into the business don't have options. And the car business, you know, low barriers to entry, I mean, there's a lot of opportunity that way if you're willing to grind, but you had options. And so what was it for you that really kind of sucked you in? Was it really the opportunity for, you know, kind of the American dream financial success? What was that for you? One day, it kind of made me want to decide to do this. I was driving from the option. And that's before I had my own car loved. And I had maybe seven or eight cars parked behind a service shop. And I used to buy single ads on auto trader and cars.com. And anytime, you know, these ads expired, I kept them active. I kept them active, even though I had sold the car. And so my phone would drink all day. It would not stop ringing because I will have seven cars in inventory, but 70 cars advertised. So one day I was driving from the auction and my phone kept drinking nonstop on seven cars. I told everybody to meet me there at two o'clock in the afternoon. I get there at two o'clock in the afternoon. I have 10 people wait for me. I sold all seven cars. And then I knew I can make a living doing this. I love to hear it. That's incredible. Tell me about when you launch, you say you launch with 40 cars. How did you do that? And because the first thing that comes to my mind is, you know, did you own all those cars outright? Did you floor plan? It's hard enough to launch your first car lot. How did you launch with 40 cars? And I'm talking about 40 cars. At the time, my average car was under $10,000. And they were all cheap cars. And before I opened my car lot, you know, I started with seven, eight cars and I went to 15 and I went to 20. And I, you know, I knew I needed at least 30, 40 cars to open a place. So I didn't want to open a place before I had that. And I invested all my profit and all my savings. I mean, from the previous seven, eight years. So I put it all on the line. I even borrowed on credit cards. I, you know, that was all of it. That 40 cars was everything I owned.
What was it like with just, you know, thinking through, sure, you had got a family in the picture, right? You reinvesting everything in the business. I was single at the time. There's no family. And I remember telling my mom and dad that I want to quit my engineering gun and be a car dealer. And they were like, please don't do that. Please, my dad thought it would be embarrassing, actually, to tell the strength that the sun is a car dealer. Oh my God. And what do they think now? Oh, they're very fast. So give us, I want to take a step back. Give us a lay of the land for a second of your business today, right? Three locations is what I read online. I'm sure you can tell us more about that. But just tell us like high level, like how many units are you selling per year? Give us like a lay of the land. So our main store is in Raleigh. We currently have about 600 cars on the ground on that store. And we're pacing almost 300 cars sold in February. There's actually to be our best February ever. We've never sold 300 cars in February.
What's driving that? Because especially at a time when lots of dealers are crying in the use market and you're saying you're at best February, like tell me about that. We doubled down on inventory as a short answer. We went from 400 cars to 600 cars in the last couple of months. And we doubled down on staff. And we went all in. You know, every since I started in this business, I've only had one setback. And that happened in 2022. After 21, you know, we all had our best year ever. Every car dealer had his best year ever. And things started to go backward in 2022. And the setback was mostly caused by me taking my foot off the pedal. I started being less aggressive. I was concerned that the wholesale market is going to keep on shifting downward at a fast pace. I shrunk my inventory and I would say that's the biggest mistake I've ever made on this field. The only way to be successful in this business, in my opinion, is to operate without fear. You got to be aggressive at all times. The minute you take your foot off, things start sliding down. I'll never make that mistake again.
I can tell you just opened up another store, a former off-least only location, which we'll get into that shortly. I'm really curious about that for anyone that doesn't know. And I'm sure most people do off-least, you know, huge use car operation in Florida. That went out of business recently and you're capitalizing on that real estate, which I think is genius. So talking more about a little bit of the numbers, how have you recently scaled from four to six hundred units? Were you acquiring these additional units? In this particular case, we had a third store in North Carolina that we was a big store too. We had about 300 cars on the ground and we sold it. We got an offer that was really good offer and I thought it was a good idea to take. So we moved our inventory from that third store to the two other stores and we retained all 60 of our staff. So it was kind of how it happened. But tell me about your actual inventory acquisition sources. Like are you relying on auctions? Are you buying off the street? How are you getting this inventory? We buy anywhere. We buy from every option in this country. We buy a manheim ACV, Adeso. We buy from all the rental companies. We also buy from the public. So we think you should pursue all options. Especially in this store in Florida where we had to buy 500 cars in four weeks. So you do whatever you have to do. A lot of people tell me that buying from the public, they want to do more of it. But logistically, it's just more work. And when you're very under-resourced, low staff, it's tough to do for the small guys. I'm not referring to the big companies. How have you been able to scale up your buy from public operations? It is tough and it's gotten tougher over the last year or so because a lot of people are upside down. That makes it more difficult. And plus, there's a lot of competition. We're talking car max, carvana of the world. It's not an easy thing to do. You have to be fully committed and you have to hire dedicated staff. It's not a side job. So you have dedicated staff just from buying cars off the street or just total acquisition. So we have two people in our Florida store that do nothing but chase outside leads for buying from the public. Yeah. Tell me more about your business model. Give us the full layer to land. Are you completely vertically integrated? Meaning, do you have reconditioning in house, transportation in house? Do you outsource that stuff? How do you do all that? We do all of our own reconditioning. We don't sublet anything on recon. But no, we don't do our own transportation. We're mostly vertically integrated, I would say. Yeah, we have our own service departments. We have our own detailed department. We have exceptional Florida actually. Because we're new. And then when it comes to reconditioning, how do you operate that? Are you doing it centralized warehouses like carvana style or do you do every single store on a smaller scale? And I'm also curious to know what are you spending per reconditioning per vehicle? We spend about $800 a car in Florida and I don't. The metrics for us is time to line. We like that to be 7 to 8 days. And we like it to be about $800. We don't buy a lot of rough cars. Usually, if a car doesn't make the cut, we all sale it. Because that was slowed down the reconditioning process and will affect aging and try to avoid that.
And the reason why we're here actually is that we think it's a facility that was tailor-made for our needs. 16 acres, we can put maybe 1500 cars on the ground if we need to. We got a 24,000 square foot service building that is separate from our retail building on the same property. So it was beautifully laid out for volume. We think we can get to 500 or 600 cars a month here in the future. That's incredible. So who are you selling to? Who's your target market? Our average selling price is usually about $30,000.
So a lot of people fall under that category. I think the average selling price nationwide is what? 27,000 these days? So we usually between 27 and 30. What's your percentage of subprime business? Do you think? Probably 20%. Wow, that's a lot lower than I expected. We're not really geared. We never really target subprime, but we take what we can get.
So what do you say you don't target subprime? And if you're going upstream, I'm going to have to assume you're operating on a pretty low gross margin per vehicle. What's your gross profit per vehicle right now? It's negative on the front end. Really? Oh, yeah. That's part of the plan actually. Wow. So you're operating a very aggressive model. We think it's a volume gain. And when you can set a lot of cars, you don't have to make any money on the front. So you're relying strictly on the back end? Well, there is a back end. There is a dog feed. And in Florida, what's the dog feed in Florida? Ours is $9.98. Got it. So you're relying on it.
And then what's your average back end per vehicle or like, you know, products, warranties, gap insurance? What are you selling that? What's your profit on that? In North Carolina, it's about 2500. Here, we're not there yet because we just opened three and a half weeks. Interesting. So, you know, this kind of reminds me of, by the way, very different model from what I'm accustomed to and used to, you know, as I we were growing our independence store.
We were very much more a gross store, as you'd call it, where, you know, on the actual vehicle, we were making a couple grand, you know, really dependent on the customer. But obviously lower volume than this. I mean, we weren't doing, you know, 300 cars a month. So, you know, doesn't it doesn't shock me. I mean, you're taking an aggressive model kind of reminds me of Echo Park, how they've, you know, really scaled by offering very, very low front end on the actual vehicle and relying, you know, all on the back end. Have you operated this model in your North Carolina store for, you know, this entire time, all these years, or is this a new model for you?
Well, it's the same model, but our front end has been going down year after year. So, we used to make $1,000 than it was 800, then which 500 and 0 and now we're in the negative. But that's always been the target is to maximize volume and not focus on front end profit. On a consolidated basis, you are profitable, right? Oh, we're very profitable.
And then tell me about just about, you know, financing the company. Have you always, have you financed everything yourself? Like do you have any investors? How did you, how did you even get to this point? So my first door, it was, you know, in Acre land, I was renting it for $4,000 a month. And I was there for five years before I moved into that current rally store. And, you know, I got lucky, actually, you know, the right property became available at the right time. And I went and bought it and got 100% financing from the bank. I don't have any investors. I don't have any partners.
And so today, when you think about just your outlook for this year, what is your, how are you preparing for, you know, the market, what's your outlook for, you know, just like economic headwinds, where's the customer going to be? Like how, what, if I was a fly on the wall today in your, you know, in your executive team meeting, right? What are you and your top leadership talking about? I feel like the economy in general has been more resilient than we all expected. And the demand is still here for cars. I mean, I don't think it's going anywhere. I'm, I feel positive about this year. I feel like we can have a great year. There is demand despite the high interest rate, despite the inventory challenges.
I think if you execute, you can, you can be very profitable this year. You're an optimist. I love it. You know, the, you know how the saying goes, right? Pass, pessimists sound smart. Optimists get rich. Tell me, tell me more about lending. How did you get lenders, right? Getting lenders is a young upstart, you know, unproven per se in this business. And, and if for anyone that doesn't know what I mean by getting lenders, I mean, you are a new dealer. You want to work with the best lenders in the country, right? People that will approve your client. I mean, you know, the allies, the capital ones, I mean, and many, many more names to add to the roster. It is not easy.
So how did you get your initial lenders? I worked very hard. That actually, my first four years in the business, I had zero lenders. And I wasn't doing any financing. It was one random day and I allied up, walked into my office in the smaller store and he offered me ally. I took it and it was my only lenders for the next couple of years. I was back in cap one every day. I called them every day. I sent emails every day and they finally said, yes. And once you have these two, I think the doors open.
I couldn't agree more. Very similar story, very similar story and you know, kind of humble beginnings, right? Chasing the lenders, right? Because I mean, everyone knows this, right? The lenders are your opportunity. No lenders, no business at scale. My business model doesn't even work without any lenders, especially with losing money in the front end. I can imagine.
Now, now fast forward to today, right? What is, what is it like for you, with lending? With the way the banks have tightened over the past year, where interest rates are today, right? How is lending going for you? I mean, are you seeing that as a big issue with customers? You mentioned people under water. What are you seeing there? It's more challenging for sure. So there is people who are more upside down than there's nothing you can do for them. There are 10,000 other upside down and they don't have the income. You can't sell them a car. So you do some opportunities there for sure. But you know, overall, I think it doesn't affect the big picture.
Who are your like, who would you say are your most strongest lenders right now? Like, who are you putting out the most paper on the street with? Ally and California still. Well, that's one of the other. Usually one of them is my top lender. Yeah. And I can't say it's too surprising. I mean, obviously, you know, very powerful lenders in this industry.
Tell me more about on your inventory acquisition side. What do you do with inventory wholesale? Where do you wholesale that? Mostly ACV, actually. Some men have expressed too. But I say, you know, mostly ACV. I don't want to send cars to the lane, transport them and bring them back. ACV and men have expressed make it easy. They come, they do their condition report. You can sell it, not sell it. They charge reasonable things as a tool for the lane. It works for the most part.
And how do you choose at your store? How do you decide what you're retailing or wholesaling or just in general, how do you manage your inventory? Like, are you like a store where at 60 days you send it, shoot it to the auction? Or what's your method? I don't have a hard cut off day. I've never had one. The way I look at it is I don't want a certain percentage of my inventory, say 15% of my inventory shouldn't be more than 60 days old. But it doesn't mean I can't have one here. That is 100 days old. So what do you look at? I mean, are you looking at your equity in the vehicle relative to book value, your cost route? Like, what are you looking at? I want to retail it. My goal is to retail it because I can overcome front end losses, most cases, if I retail a car, by selling a warranty, by getting finance, by adding a dog feed. I'm more likely to recover by retailing the car. So unless I can't retail it, I'm not going to wholesale it. I mean, if a car doesn't have any leads, nobody's looking at the car, then I know I can't retail it.
Okay, so let's talk about that. Speaking of leads, because you're a low margin store, you work on volume, how are you marketing? Like everyone else, really, car gurus, auto trader, cars.com, true cars, all the third party advertisers, we use them all. We also do Google, VLAs, SEM, pay churches, we do it all.
Tell me more about your expansion to Florida, right? Was this like opportunistic for you, right? When you saw the off-least property, or did you, did you have a plan? Hey, I want to move into Florida. I've always had an eye towards Florida. And when we sold the store in North Carolina, I became more serious about it. And when off-least went out of business and had a feeling that these properties would surface. So I went after that, I actually went and looked at all of them. And I picked this one because I felt it was the nicest property of them all, facility-wise. I've always heard about people putting up big numbers in Florida, from off-least to H-drag and others, independent. I think in the vacant door, maybe I can. I mean, I don't blame it. Obviously, Florida's a super booming market. Population has been growing like crazy. Competition has been growing as well. It's not an easy market. What's the hardest part? For me, like now, trying to figure it out because I'm new at it.
What's the best way to do you have the team with you? Are you hiring people like where you are right now? Oh, I'm fully operational. We've hired almost 70 people in the last 30 days. Wow. What rules? Everything. You know, technicians, service managers, sales coordinators, finance, accounting, buyers, detail, the whole night. So when you say accounting, are you operating, are you decentralized? Meaning do you have anything that's strictly at North Carolina? Or are you operating in a way where each store has its own controller and stuff like that? How are you operating? We are centralized in Raleigh, North Carolina for now, but you still have to have people in the ground at every store. And how many people are your entire company total? Close to 200. What do you, what's your outlook for revenue? Like how many, you know, what do you think your revenue is going to be this year? How many units are you planning on selling? Projecting about 600 cars a month combined.
So at 600 a month, you said roughly $30,000 average ticket. I mean, you're going to be, you're likely going to be doing over $200 million a year in sales. Now, yeah, we'll exceed 200. You know, if someone's listening to this, you know, small dealer, maybe doing a couple million in sales a year and has visions and aspirations of growing, to being a size like, to being in a similar scale as you. I mean, what do you have to tell them, right? Like, what was, what has been the most important lessons for you going from, you know, selling cars in the back of a service shop to doing over $200 million a year in sales? There isn't any secret sauce to be honest with you, but the most important aspect of our operation is managing the inventory. Because when you have 40 or 50 million other words of cars, you want to minimize your risk. And that's the most difficult part. And it's been quite difficult over the last few years, a couple of years, at least. But other than that, you know, everybody knows, you know, you got to maximize your PVR, you got to have volume, you got to recondition your car the right way. You can't overspend on advertising, you can't overspend on reconditioning, time to line. These are all important. I mean, it doesn't work unless it's all clicking together.
Yeah, it's the most complicated, simple business in the world, right? Like you said, it's all just about the fundamentals. I mean, you really, if you don't have the right reconditioning team, if you don't have the right, you know, FNI department, it doesn't work. It just doesn't. Everything has to work. Have you ever considered going franchise? I have, actually. You're smiling. Do you have a contract right now? Are you under agreement? There's something in the work. I'm not at liberty to discuss right now. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, I think, you know, doesn't, doesn't surprise me. I feel like you're at that scale where we typically see, you know, lots of independence kind of, you know, starting to sniff around in the franchise world. I never wanted to be a franchise dealer until I saw what happened in 2021 and I was jealous.
What are your biggest challenges right now specifically, right? Like, if there's someone listening to this that can reach out to you, whether it be a potential, you know, sales manager, a lender, who knows what, right? What are some challenges like real tactical jobs facing? Find and find in the right person at the right job is the most challenging part by thought. It's people. It's always people. If you don't surround yourself by the right people, I mean, you'll never be successful. I'm not going to personally sell 607 cars a month. I can't do it. I have to have quality people around me from every department. Otherwise, I think that's by far the most challenging part about it. And I'm going through it in Florida right now and it's not easy. It's not easy.
How have you been acquiring talent? Where have you been defining people like to traditional, you know, in deeds, LinkedIn, stuff like that? Or what are you doing? Yeah, I would say mostly that. And, and, and in this tour, we might have done a little bit different. We, we, we recruited some old employees from off-least and they put us in touch with some others and that helped a little bit. I love to hear it. So tell me more about your plans for the group. I mean, you just opened your third store. You were hinting potentially at a franchise some point down the line. You know, any, any other big plans for you? It's not a solid plan, to be honest with you, but the idea is to potentially grow in the Florida market. Or land though, maybe, and maybe other locations in Florida. But we're focused on the store right now. And we might also have a franchise play coming up. So we're not pursuing that right now.
So selfish question. How did you come across Cardio? Like, I'm just totally curious, you know, what, or what platforms you consume? Like, tell me a little bit about that. Actually, my, my controller told me about you the first time. She was like, do you follow the Cardio dealership guy on Instagram? And I said, nope, I've not been with the Fed. And she said, you need to because I follow him. And I don't know anything about the corporate business, but I find it interesting. So I started doing that same way. I love it on Instagram. On Instagram. Actually, most of us, most of my, most of our staff follow you now. I curse everybody. You know, sometimes you post something about, you know, MSRP discount. And I'm like, well, I'm glad he did that because I don't want to go by a 2023 use one that they just stopped.
Yeah, you get to see, I mean, you know what I call it? I call it the other day, like it's, I'm trying to sort of create this, you know, the collective intelligence of the automotive industry. So with everyone sending me all this stuff all the time, it gives me this crazy opportunity to really filter, like, you know, make sense of it all and push it out to the world in real time. And so, you know, we have, we share recall information before it's published. You know, you see price drops in real time before it even gets to the auction because where you see it already happening on the retail sale. So that's actually really cool. Intel love to hear that. It's definitely working for you. It's exploding, isn't it?
Try my best. And I think the best part is the diversity of guests like on this platform, right? Like, you know, you are a growing use card dealer. Suddenly next week, I may have, you know, a multi-billion dollar franchise dealer followed by a vendor that's using AI to innovate the car. So like, there's so many different, you know, kind of walks of life in the industry. And that's actually my favorite part because I don't want to be, I talk about it all the time. I don't want to just appeal to, you know, one, one sector versus the other. I really want to bring a well-rounded perspective to the industry.
And so, you know, keeps saying, it keeps the conversation interesting. You know, I would love for you guys to come visit us one day so we can show you in person what we do. And be fun, I think. Well, we're going to be doing a lot more of that. We're planning a bunch of in-person, you know, activations. We call it now that again, out in the world. It's a lot easier to commit to these types of things. Actually, you just mentioned Orlando. I think we had an opportunity request down there. There was a couple others, you know, in Philadelphia where I'm based and all over the place.
But long story short is, you know, we are going to be doing more in-person activations. And generally speaking, you know, you should definitely, you know, expect to see us more out there in the wild in the next year. Yeah, I'm very proud of this facility in Florida. And I would love to show it to you guys. I love it. And I'd love to see it. You know, so before we wrap up, just tell me, you know, what's your outlook for the independent dealer? I mean, you've done a really good job at scaling your business. You know, you've clearly been very disciplined. I love your focus on the fundamentals.
How do you feel about the, you know, just the state of the independent dealership over the coming years? How do you think about that? Yeah. The future is right, in my opinion. Big scale independent dealers will be even more dominant in the future. In my estimation, I feel like a new car dealers will go back to selling new cars and they'll focus on that. The small pops and shop stores are just not equipped. I think we have a bright future. I think we're here to stay. And, you know, EVs doesn't necessarily hurt us. I think they might even have.
Why do you say that? Because you can sell a lot of USB-V's, especially when you can get a rebate on. And lots of dealers have taken advantage of that. So, time will tell how it all shakes out. But there's definitely opportunity. And I think it's easy to get drowned into that negativity and like, oh, it's, you know, it's going to hurt this. It's going to hurt service. But you're right. Like it's always, there's always opportunity out there. That's the right outlook. As long as there is demand and the economy stays resilient, will be fine, I think, depending on any major economical setbacks.
I think the market will continue to thrive. Alihana, this was really, really great. I wish you lots of success with the new store. That's number one. Number two is we'll put your website and link in the show notes below. If anyone wants to reach out to you, reach out to the store, you know, is looking for an opportunity in Florida, you know, they can reach out to you directly. And so we'd love to kind of pass on that information. And maybe, maybe soon enough, you'll give us a tour of your facility as well. I'd love to. Thank you for having me on your podcast. I really enjoyed it. 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.