Consumers, I believe, will continue to shift to buying their car online, but the tools are still just not perfect and they're not fully ready to transact. This dealer doesn't just sell cars to some of the biggest software CEOs in Silicon Valley. He's a true tech visionary and is building some of the most exciting technology in the automotive industry. Today, I'm speaking with Jeremy Beaver, CEO of Dell Grande Dealer Group, a 17-store group from the heart of Silicon Valley. Don't forget to click subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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Jeremy Beaver on the CDG podcast. Jeremy, welcome. Oh, welcome. Well, thanks for having me. It's going to be a great time. Yeah, it's going to be great. I never thought I'd have someone come on the pod. The first thing they tell me is, look man, I'm not a car guy. I don't love the cars. And then I tell him, I'm like, me and you both. No, but I always talk about this. I always say, I love the business. That's what always attracted me to this industry. But the cars was never, to me, I always viewed it as like metal. It was the thing, like we're in the relationship business.
And so, but there's definitely the two different types of dealers. There's the dealers that, and I have lots of friends like this who are obsessed with the car, obsessed with the metal. Like they're passionate about it. Exhaust, and then there's me, I'm like, do you like, let's find a good customer for this thing? That's right. Well, you know, first of all, the cars are cooler today than they've ever been, right? With the technology and all the items that are there. But for us at DTDG, culture, technology, modernization, better consumer experience, that's really what we're focused on. Now, there are a lot of cars around here.
So we do got to sell them in service them. So we got to love them a little bit. But I don't have a huge collection of cars at home. So sorry for everyone waiting to hear like, you know, what I got in the garage. Well, give us your story. I mean, you've been over 15 years with the group. You've had quite a tremendous rise from e-commerce director. Now you're running the entire group. Tell us a little bit about your background in your story. Yeah, well, I'll give you the quick elevator pitch. But I started in the car business at a high school. Both my parents are relatively well educated. Dad was in tech startup. Mom was a teacher. And I told him, hey, mom and dad, I don't want to go to college. I got this job making cold calls in a BDC, trying to get people to sell cars and buy cars at an old Dodge dealer here in San Jose.
And worked my way up from there. Then went to a tech startup called Jump Start Automotive, which powers a lot of the online behavioral for road and track car and driver, all that fun stuff. And then I joined Shondale Grand 15 years ago when we had three dealerships in 2008 and have been able to really help the group grow with really what is a wonderful team here, supporting every single day. And now it's become a pretty large scale business here in the Bay Area out in Silicon Valley.
Yeah, how large scale? Give us a sense of your scale numbers, units per year, service revenue. Yeah, we sell about 25 to 30,000 retail units a year. So I guess depending on the year and inventory and COVID, that'll excuse. But we do roughly about $1.3 billion in sales and have over a thousand team members here, all local in the Bay Area. Since you joined the group, right? How much have you guys grown since that, your early days in the group? Yeah, when I joined, we were selling roughly 3,000 cars, had about 150 people here.
So it's been quite a journey over the 15 years. And it's been a really, really wild ride and pretty neat. We never thought we were set out to kind of build a brand here, especially as a car dealer. And I don't know when you become a group, but I guess maybe it's when you get to like four or five or whatever that is. But now, you know, DGG, we have a yellow license plate and our brand really stands for a lot here, not only for consumers in the Bay Area, but also just who we are with our team.
And so it's really neat to be able to experience that, see that, but also just share in all of the growth and the opportunity that's been created for so many people in the organization. You know, for many of us that came into this industry, I always have this conversation, right? Like the classic, I never planned on being a car guy, right? I never planned on saying an industry. What was it for you that just kept sucking you in and like, you know, tech guy, father's a tech guy, right? But you stay in the car dealership auto-retailing business.
What was that for you? Like, why did you get sucked in and how did you endure over a decade? And I mean, let alone with the same group, right? And the same organization, what was it for you? Yeah, I think for me, you know, I was not really like, I was good in school, but I just like, it wasn't really like exciting for me. And so what I really just loved is I love to go to work. And what I found is that the more that I put in, the more that I'd actually get out of the car business.
And so, you know, I could spend 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week at times and be able to, you know, outperform others. You know, maybe I wasn't the greatest in my job, but I could just outwork or outperform or learn and grow and be able to be coachable. And so what that really just provided was a platform for me to, you know, be able to, I guess be where I am today. I mean, I guess when you're a 16 year old kid making cold calls, you're not thinking about being a CEO of a large dealer group. And even when I joined with Sean DelGrand, who's the principal here, who's amazing, that was really never the path to start, but then has really evolved into this much larger situation, which is guiding tech, leading people, having opportunities for people to live and grow in the Bay Area. And so it's been a really cool journey. I definitely, you know, I'm still definitely not the smartest guy, that's for sure. I make more mistakes here than anyone, but to be able to do it in a team environment, have a lot of wins and celebrate them. It's just a really cool business.
And there's so many different verticals. It's changing so much, especially with technology and consumer trends and marketplaces and A to Z online sales and the directions at that. That's really going. And then, you know, probably for me at the end of the day, like we're in the heart of it all. If you're in Silicon Valley with Google, Apple, Facebook, you know, everything, EVs, we can probably talk about that a little bit today. This is where it all starts. And so it's really exciting to really challenge yourself to modernize what has historically been a little older school business and modernize it as fast as possible because the consumers not necessarily only want it, they now expect it here in the Bay Area.
I have to imagine that your consumer is very different than most of my guests on this podcast, right? Like you are in the epitome of tech and innovation and startups, right? Silicon Valley, SF. I mean, what is it like, just like very broadly speaking, what is it like running a dealership in such a place? It's something different every day. That's for sure. There's no dull moments around here. You know, I think the first thing from the consumer is they expect the experience at DG-DG to be like everything they already do in their life in Silicon Valley. So heavy tech, heavy speed, heavy efficiency, world-class guest experience, everything on an iPad, like it's just like that is like the barrier of entry to start. So that's like a very tricky thing because there's cost, there's all these different things.
And then for a business, right? This is a very expensive place to do business. Cost of real estate, cost of team members, you know, all of the things that go into running a business on a major metro and then in the state of California and a very, very educated consumer. So very high FICO, a lot of cash, a lot of stock options stuff that goes on around here. And so you just need to be very versatile in the business and then very nimble. And so we really pride ourselves, you know, to be able to, you know, move and jive while we're still a, you know, we're a small, still a small business compared to, you know, the large publics that are out there.
But for the Bay Area as a family-run operation, you know, I'm not part of the family, but I guess I've been here 15 years so I've pretty much an adopted son. But, you know, like we really pride ourselves on being large-scale, but still very quick to react to market conditions and trends. So that's a really, really important piece while you have a business at scale, right? So in 30,000 cars and servicing a couple hundred thousand, there's a lot of guests that come through these facilities every year. Yeah, look, I'm checking out your website as you're speaking, man, and look very clean, right? I see what you're saying, right? Very, I mean, very airtight, very thoughtful about every single call to action.
I can tell like you don't overdo that. So you pass the smell test. Thanks. That's a good start. All right. So yeah, right. By the way, you said stock options. I'm curious, like how does that play into like any of, you know, just deals, financing, right? I can imagine you get a lot of that around. I'm kind of weird because, you know, like it's not something that we really would like track back in the day, but now when, you know, you have companies like NVIDIA that are here and that stock goes through the roof or, you know, Apple stock as well. I mean, you see these people buying cars, which is pretty crazy. And so it's a really, it's kind of a little bit of a bubble in the economy, which is great. So there's never, you know, a dot-com boom. It stays pretty level, but again, a very educated consumer. And so prices have big sensitivity. They know more about a lot of these cars than, you know, some of our product specialists because they're just very smart and educated. And not that that doesn't exist across the country. You just have very concentrated areas in each one of those pieces where they know what they know and, you know, what they're used to.
So I want to talk a little bit about just from a tech perspective, right? Give us an overview of what is it like, like how are you operating your dealership and really keeping it? Like you've just mentioned a lot of tactical things you're doing to meet the modern demands of, you know, the consumer. But give us a, I want to get a little bit of an overview of how you're really doing things differently. Given the fact that you are in this hotbed that is so receptive to tech, I can only imagine, right? Like I think the beauty of being where you're at is that you can really test things and you'll probably get adoption very quickly, right? People will try. People want to, you know, experience, right? If you try to sell a car online and maybe an area in the country that's a bit more rural and the average age is, you know, older, maybe people are not going to be as receptive.
So what are some of the things you're doing at your store differently, right? Like just tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So let me just kind of, we have a couple of different thoughts on tech. And the first one is kind of like our overarching strategy, which is why can't you buy and service your car with just like you do anything else in your life? So pick your favorite brand, whether it's Starbucks, or it's Carlton, like whatever experience you like in a retail environment, why can't buying, selling, and servicing your car be that easy? And so we really focused on that efficiency through technology.
Now we do really need the people still because they're the performance driver and they're dealing with our guests, which is awesome, but you need a technology that's going to be able to integrate and do that. So we really have three options. We can buy out of the box kind of platforms. And so we could buy things that are automotive tech today. A lot of those are legacy platforms that aren't kind of modern day tech. So they don't have what consumers call their APIs, their data integrations to have consumer flows. It's really, really tough.
Number two, we can go invest in some companies, right? And we can be partners with them, we can beta with them, and we can take automotive tech or non-automotive tech. Or in step three is we actually go build our own tech on things that are on the modernization scale for a consumer flow. And that is really around how do you take everyday tools? So think of things like a Salesforce or a Microsoft Azure or even Office 365, and how do you bring them in to the automotive industry so that then you can create efficiencies in processes with people and with our guests.
And so we do all three of those. So our team today looks like we have roughly 10 in-house people just on our team that are actually at DQDG, from project managers, UX UI designers, consumer experience designers. We have a full-time CTO, we have a product manager to help us shape projects. And then we have a whole engineering team that's overseas that helps us build a lot of these. And then on our technology marketing team, we have 32 people that are on that team that run from social to online experience, to our own search and remarking company.
So we have a lot of different, what we would call economies of scale that help us move faster, quicker and then meet those consumer demands on those pieces. Some of the things that I think consumers don't see is we also, we focus a lot on automotive data. And so this industry is always changing. Supply, demand, inventories, pricing. We're not a one-price organization when it comes to selling cars new and used. But what we manage to is what we call a price-to-sale gap.
And that's what we price the car online at, to what we sell the car. And our average transaction is under $200. From what we have the car online to what we sell the car, we really believe in having that right price up front. And some people want to come in and negotiate and do all those things. Our entire team is on our sales team. They're called product specialists. They're all non-commissioned. So they're here to help the right person find the right car that fits their needs. They're not paid on if they charge you more for the car or charge you less for the car.
So to do that properly, we got to use a lot of market data to make sure that it aligns with what the consumer is seeing. When they go on KBB or when they go to cars.com and they go look at those marketplaces, which we really believe that they're seeing the same thing when they get to DGGG. All right, so a lot to unpack there. OK, number one, you have this team of, you mentioned like over 30, 40, just individuals working on tech, on mark tech. I mean, everything to do with your product. What are they doing? But more importantly, what's the net result? What is different? That's a big investment to make annually. I've hired tons of engineers. I've hired hired engineers overseas. It's not cheap, and it's a lot to manage. What is the net result of all that?
Yeah, the first one is just efficiency and scale. And so when you think about growing a business, so we've gone from three stores to 17 stores, we need to have platform type strategies that allow us to buy a store and go in and put our tech and be able to operate it overnight under the DGGG platform. In our stores, we have essentially standardization that we have across the entire group. So a consumer has the same experience, and our team has the same experience. So that's like the kind of the highest level.
When you use technology through efficiency, there is also what is called SG&A, so expense strategy, that we really try to maximize the expense reduction strategy using technology because costs are so high in the Bay Area that we really focus on that from those pieces. On a manufacturer level, so think about the brands that are out there, guest experience is critical for them. So our customer satisfaction scores, we really target to be in the top 10% of the country in all of our stores. So with that, it really makes us be able to have a strategy to empower with the guests that are there as well.
And so we use it in many different functions. In a day-to-day operation, we try to remove any manual reporting or manual guesswork. Everything is run from our data reporting engine, what we call dg-dg-dash. And so instead of having 40 different people doing Excel sheets and all that stuff, it's 100% automated and delivered to the proper people to do, really understand what's going on and make the proper changes on a day-to-day. And what type of reporting are you referring to? Everything, anything from time cards for our team to daily sales tracking, to inventory strategies, to search demand for vehicles on websites, to leads, appointments, financial statements. You name it, we probably have a report for it. So we're kind of, I guess we're car guys, but we're probably more data geeks than anything, but it's really important when you're using data as not just having the data, but how does it actually become usable in a day-to-day operation?
Take us deeper into your tech stack. I think it's one of the things I'm most interested here is you mentioned the combination of building versus buying and everything in between and just a ability to of course extract more efficiency, especially given the fact that you're a large group. You have many, many different stores and you want to standardize everything, right? What does your tech stack look like? I mean, just break it down for us kind of piece by piece. Yeah, I think today in the strategy, it starts with receiving all of the data sets into a Azure data lake using Microsoft platform that we then use business intelligence tools to kind of structure the data the way that we want it.
Some of the large challenges, not emotive still, are being able to one, just get the data from our partners, so from the big box partners that are out there and then getting it in a way that is actually consumable for our team to use. So we focus a lot on data aggregation to start and that is really through the Azure platform. We use a Office 365 platform for almost all of our communication internally and then from our consumer views, over the last couple of years, we have built a in-house Salesforce tech stack.
So it's called Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud for our consumer data platform and that is where we see all the consumer views of all of our guests so that we can track who, what they've done every single time, household purchases. Do they have open recalls? Are they coming up for their lease? Like all of those different items, but all of that data is really fed from the one repository, which is the data lake which gathers it from 40 different sources for us to operate our business every single day. So definitely more like not a normal car dealership operating that way.
Normally a car dealership has a DMS and we have a DMS as well, but we use that more as an accounting function that we report the way that we need due to our manufacturers and certain items. The consumer facing tools are historically, our strategy is a much more modern format of one system if we can. Man, it sounds like everything you've built in our building that alone could just be licensed out as an entire platform. Could be.
All right, so Jerry, talk to me a little bit about consumer, right? Again, given the fact of where you're at in my experience with online retailing, right? Where do you think the market is headed? What do you see from a consumer demand perspective and do people want to still buy online or 100% online, you know, hybrid of in-store? What do you kind of see as the future for this for online car, for car buying in general? For sure. Well, we could probably talk on this topic for an hour on the trends in this scenario. So I'll give a kind of a quick background. When COVID happens, the dealers really shift to a model where it's digital retailing, it becomes the hottest thing ever, buy your car online, COVID, all those different things.
As it really shifted then to really low supply, high demand, the dealers were like, well, you know, like everyone's got to come find a car and all these different things. And now we're more into what is kind of a normal transaction besides high interest rates for consumers and some of those functions that are there. Today, there's still a lot of work to do in the entire automotive industry. Consumers, I believe, will continue to shift to buying their car online in a fashion more and more every single day, but the tools are still just not perfect and they're not fully ready to transact.
And so while there are, there's been tremendous progress. So companies like Upstart, who have really gone out and tried to figure out AI-powered financing and online financing and the ability to take the consumer A to Z, but also pick up in the dealership where they left off with iPads, which is a very important process here at DGG. But at the end of the day, not many customers are going online, buying their car and fully signing everything, including DMV, getting their loans in the normal retail world across the United States. And so there's a lot of work to do still with DMV, with forms, with banking relationships, where a consumer can go buy a new or used car online and make that process as easy as anything else. And so we've made a lot of progress, but there is still a lot of work to do. And that involves partnerships with our manufacturers and with all of the other kind of vendors that goes along.
But the consumer, just like they do anything in their life, they're doing it more online. What I do believe a trend really that has been a kind of an age-old car business trend for a long time is this lead submission. And what happens is in the world, the customer goes on to a website and they go like put their phone number and email and then like all these people call them. It's really like antiquated if you think about it. I don't know for you, but I don't know when's the last time you went online and gave all your information for someone to call you back, but I haven't done it in a while. I think that what you see consumers are still doing that today because they're just not still getting enough of the fully transactable information to just complete it online.
And so that's really our goal. And especially here in the Bay Area, we think that we should be early, early stage to bring that on fully adopted. But today in our stores using our Upstart platform, we have the customer either start online or finish and store on the iPad over 85% of all transactions at DG, DG. So tech usage is extremely high here in the Bay Area. This episode is brought to you by my very own car dealership guy, industry job board. 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. This free job board is for anyone in automotive vendors, dealers, lenders, manufacturers, auto tech, everyone. Already over 100 companies have posted open positions including lithium motors, recurrent credit acceptance, Vero's credit, cars commerce, shift digital plug, full path, Westlake trade pending, you get the point. The best part is that when these companies hire through CDGjobs.com, they are hiring the most informed candidates in the marketplace.
So don't hesitate, you can add your open roles today by visiting CDGjobs.com or clicking the link in the show notes below. That's CDGjobs.com. It seems like you're just a culmination of lots of feedback from your customer and continue to kind of build on top of it. How are you systematized that? How are you actually getting feedback from your customers and creating a better car buying experience that suits the need of your specific customer? And I think this is very relevant to people all over the country because it doesn't matter if your customer is extremely tech savvy or after a lot of the, at the end of the day, they have some needs and you want to morph to those needs or give them what they want.
So how are you doing that? Well, I couldn't have said it better. I think again, I'm going to talk from Silicon Valley out here but you can take any of the anecdotes and you just make it fit to however it fits in your business, right? And I think that's really critical and that's how the car dealerships really operate. And so I think for us, we just do a lot of testing, get a lot of feedback, use a lot of listening tools. We take, you know, when you sell that many cars and service that many cars, there's going to be a heck of a lot of good experiences, but there's going to be a lot of experiences to learn from as well. And so we're a retail business. We do make mistakes. We're not perfect. Cars break, by the way. So there's not fun, you know, not enjoyable times for app consumers.
And so we just do a lot of whether they're case studies, whether they're UX UI tests, so user studies, where we see what people click on, what they use. We take, you know, adoption rates. And then again, we also, you know, good or bad, we watch, you know, a lot of the leading and top performers. And so, you know, Tesla's a big market share here in the Bay area or the Rivians or any of even the startups. You know them all. We watch and we see what's working for them, what's not working for them, and, you know, how can we fit that into our own business model? And so we're just, you know, we live with the thought of we're always want to be getting better. And so we're not, we're never going to be stagnant. We always want to improve.
And we also don't know what we don't know. And so we're very open to learning, very open to change. And, you know, as always, you know, sometimes we try things that don't work. That's a part of life. So we built some tech that doesn't work and we scrap it. Or we, you know, we've had a new process and it sounds great. And we're like, yeah, that was not such a good idea. And so, fail fast and then, you know, pick up and move on. And so we're just, we're not set in our ways. And I think that that mentality throughout the entire organization really then helps build a better consumer experience because they know that we are always thinking of them.
And at least we are really trying, if that makes sense. When you, you know, any little restaurant or you go to, you know, pick anywhere and they make a mistake, but they care. And they're like, oh, hey, like, we'll fix it. And it wasn't like, that's all people really want, right? Like they know that this is real life. And so we just really have an attitude of, you know, being able to take care of our guests and each other every day.
Man, you're quite a nigma. I want to, I'll tell you, let's talk some brass tacks here, right? You do all this fancy stuff. I mean, you're running a tech business. You just happen to sell cars. That's clear to me at this point. How does your profitability stack up with other dealers, right? Like give us a, your profit for vehicle. I mean, how does that rank?
Yeah, I think in the Bay Area, we're probably level. I think, you know, I think that there's again, many different ways. I think we talked about, you know, some of these costs that we have today in our business, we think about them more as investments. So a lot of they do show up as, you know, an expense. It's really an investment for us to have a better, brighter future for, you know, consumers and our team. It's also been, has been what has enabled us to grow to the size we are.
So maybe there's some dealers that have had, you know, three stores and they now they have four and we've, you know, gone from three to 17. So maybe there's, you know, a higher, a higher total dollar there. But, you know, I would just tell you, you know, I have, you know, I get to shout out to, you know, my boss, who's the chairman, Shondo Graham, but like his, his mentality is really, you know, really cascaded through the organization. We are a for profit company. So we got to pay the bills and we got to pay our team and all that stuff. But this is not, we don't run this business like we need to squeeze every last dollar out of it.
And we really, you know, are mindful of our team and growth and partnerships and, you know, not squeezing vendors and all of those things. And so, you know, could we probably make a little more if we wanted to go do some different stuff or not have a, you know, a team here that works at DDDG and all the fun stuff we're talking about. Yeah. But you know what, for us, life's too short. We want to have a lot of fun. We want to bring a lot of people along the way. And so I've been very blessed to, you know, be able to be part of this.
But I also have, you know, I have a lot of free rain to, to do a lot of this fun stuff. So that's what makes it really exciting. But I think that's what drives what you see here at DDDG every day. So, yeah, probably, you know, there, I'm sure there's way more profitable car dealers than us. Like that is, you know, and that's, that's okay too. And that's, you know, everyone gets to do it their own way. And that's kind of the beauty of the franchise system in the United States. So I do want to talk about AI, which has, you know, has been making waves in our industry.
Lots of conversation about it. You mentioned that you're doing some stuff with Upstart on AI, Upstart as a partner of the podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about what are you doing there?
Yeah. So, you know, when we found the original platform from Upstart, it was actually a different company called Prodigy. It was a startup in, in like a garage room in San Francisco, we found it. So this is the one that we partnered with and then ended up doing some deals with. And so we helped build their digital retailing tool, which was the consumer facing part of how you would buy your car online. That company then got bought by Upstart, which is really a, AI powered lending solution, that they spent a lot of their career from the business in the personal lending side, some Google executives, a really, really neat executive team over there.
And so they did a lot of personal lending using AI. And now they have brought that into the auto lending space. So today, if you're at DGDD and you're a liner in the store, we actually use their lending platform to offer using their lending platform to offer them, you know, a loan from one of, you know, 100, 200 banks across the nation all real time using, you know, very sophisticated, you know, AI technology, which is verifications of identity, residence, income, and get them the absolute best rate from a bank that they may or may not ever have heard of before, because at least in our belief, while we do a lot of business with our captives, which is where the manufacturers, that's the banks they use, we do tons of relationship with that. But you need a secondary tier for financing.
They are our number one secondary tier lender because consumers just love the process, which is really neat that we can say, hey, here's the iPad, here's the lowest rate available to you and the customers absolutely love it. They don't necessarily care as much that it's a main bank, right? Like if you can save some money, like let's save some money, you know, they'll fund your car loan.
So let's do it, right? Which is really, really neat. And so they're, they align a lot with us because they are a tech company, by the way, they're a large market cap out and they're a public company. And so it's really cool that with our tech mindset and then working with a tech company, we get to move stuff pretty quickly between the two. Talk to me about talking about AI. I mean, you did mention AI lending, but I'm curious to hear your take on the state, first, like the state of AI and automotive today. Secondly, actually, let's just start there because I have a bunch of follow-up questions to that. Yeah, I think it's really, really fragmented. I think it's like everyone wants to throw around that word and then they don't even really know what it is, but it's like a tagline for a product or a service right now.
And again, so what is it in your mind? What is it in your mind? I think that they're trying to take modern items that are essentially like doing human work and being able to like create efficiencies into these car dealerships. Yet most of the car dealerships don't have the tools or resources to utilize it in a proper way. So, you know, CRMs aren't fully designed to be able to write things, even AI chat or, you know, predictive analytics for business behavioral tools. Like they don't have systems that are going to actually take that data and then deliver it in a usable format, which by the way, it will get there. But it's not like the engines that these car dealerships operate on today.
They're still very, very legacy and not tech forward. So what we're trying to do is take like 1990s to 2000s tech and then bring in like 20, 20, 30, 24 and trying to like do let them do some of it together. Yet there's 40 different companies that are down here. And so again, I've seen a lot in our modern stuff, like our sales force stuff. We can use it at certain times. I just think it has a long way to go for scalable platforming in the auto industry for the future within within no doubt.
It will happen. It's just a matter of time in my opinion. When you say it will happen, right? Like what's going to happen? Is it going to replace people or is it going to make them more efficient or go? I think that I still believe this is a very human business. But I think if you like, let's just take very small examples, let's say in two examples. Let's talk about in sales.
Well, if a product specialist can go from selling 12 to 18 cars, like that's better for all of us. They make more money. They have more opportunity for growth. Maybe it becomes more all appointment driven. It does more efficient follow up. So there's less waste. There's just all of those different things that I think are better for the consumer experience and the team member experience. Maybe on the tech side, like maybe instead of them, like handwriting all notes about cars, it like reads what all the work is done and it creates them from typing, you know, 47 different lines on every repair order.
And so I think that there's those types of efficiencies. There is for sure on the marketing front going to be like, you know, just think about have every normal company markets to you. That's where there's, you know, a lot of efficiencies in marketplaces and all of those. And I think those are the easier ones because they have the largest change of spend and those other companies are very, you know, they're just, they can move at a different pace than trying to get 17,000 franchise car dealers to do the same thing.
And that's, that's kind of one of the challenges in the industry, right? If you're a public group, you want to do it a certain way or if you're DTT, you do it a certain way or if you have one store, which, you know, there's 9,000 dealers that have one store, then they do, they all do it completely different. And so to get continuity in this, in this automotive industry, we still have a long way to go to work together. And it's what we believe should happen. Mm hmm.
What parts of our business do you think are going to change the mode? I mean, you mentioned marketing, which is, you know, a certain segment, but any other specific parts that you think will be like really severely impacted. Um, positively, of course, but, you know, impacted by just better technology, more efficiency, anything specific come to mind. Yeah, I think these marketplaces are really going to change.
So think of like companies like cars, commerce, or, you know, even auto trader, true car. I think that there's just so many shoppers online, right? They have tens of millions of uniques and they can really continue to focus on that consumer experience of finding the right car and then being able to transact on that car in a more meaningful way. And I think that is really going to create efficiency in the system for the dealers, the marketplaces and the consumer, almost like a three sided marketplace, um, which, you know, we really believe in.
And I think that that's going to allow them to compete with, you know, companies more like the Tesla or more like some of the startups. So, you know, Caravan has done a really good job, um, on use. And you've seen that they've just, you know, they've proven a lot of these models, um, you know, full disclosure, their friends of mine. So, um, but I just think like what they've proven is consumers like these experiences.
And then, you know, at the end of the day, the dealers have a lot, you know, mostly all the new cars and a big chunk of the used cars. And I think that there's room for everyone. I really do. Like, you know, some people that's probably not a, you know, a, a popular thing to say. They're like, you know, Carmana or whatever. But like, I think that, you know, they can still continue to grow, but the dealers still have massive opportunity to sell more cars through the private party system on use and all these different things that at least in my lifetime, like we're going to have awesome opportunity. That's for sure.
Where do you think a company like Carvana fits in the marketplace over the, you know, the upcoming future here? I mean, you know, a couple of years back, it was all deraged, you know, throughout COVID and, you know, now things have subsided, you know, Carvanas still, they're still growing, but where do you think they fit in the marketplace? Yeah. I just think they, you know, they determine how they want to have what they want to have, you know, an economic growth or they want to have volume growt.
You know, where does that business position from, you know, the future of, of scale of markets? Um, I mean, that team, uh, I'm not sure if you ever had them on your, on your set. Yeah. But I mean, you know, Ernie Garcia, I mean, he's a, he is a extremely, extremely built, brilliant man plus that leadership team that's there. So, you know, I do believe that they're going to be able to figure out a lot of things. Um, and they have, you know, very similar to what we're talking about.
I think if we just said like, how do you boil it down and why do you say that? Well, I think they're focused on the same thing we are, that consumer experience. Like how can you make it more modern? How can you make it better? Car buying doesn't have to be, you know, difficult. It should be really fun. And, you know, so I think from our Holy Grail, we're all focused on that same area.
And so that's why it's always cool to see what they do now, you know, I would do. We want to, you know, grow in some more cars and all that stuff. Yeah. Uh, you know, absolutely. So, um, you know, I guess that's to be seen on Carvana. That's the, the crystal ball. Maybe I don't have. You know, so when you're, why are you speaking, and I was still on your website, I saw that dealer inspired at the bottom of your website, put your website. I was curious. I was trying to understand why you decided to work with a third party for your website, given the fact that it's such a critical component. It's your, it's your storefront. Right. It's like, it's so important. It's where everyone lands. And so why did you go with a third party? In this case, dealer inspired who is again, phenomenal websites. And I'm a part and they actually did my website as well. Uh, so go ahead. Why did you decide to do that?
I think I'm going to go back to just the very beginning, which is, uh, what we focus on when we choose, when we're, when we're talking about partnering with tech, uh, they have been an unbelievable partner. And so we've known Alex veteran, the team over there at cars, commerce for a long time, uh, pretty much my entire car business career. Uh, you know, everyone, I don't, you know, I think maybe they want to talk to me. You probably, do you have stock in all these companies? Are you what's going on? Carvana. Then I'm going to say to you as my new negotiator, this is what I'm going to do. It's going to be perfect. I'm telling you, everyone that's on the podcast, they seem to be like, you know, affiliated over here. What's going on? Well, I think I think it's about me. We'll see. But, um, no, so anyway, so, so, so we have done a lot of like technology usage and stuff with cars, commerce. And then when dealer inspired, which was a startup in neighbor bill, uh, with Joe Chura and the team over there, um, we connected and they have done so much. We do a ton of custom dev work on that website. You see, so they allow us to do all those things. It's very, very dynamic. It's not like the car dealer website.
And then they allow us to push us, but this is a perfect example. We don't need to go build website platforms. They have one that's perfect. We just want to customize it to make sure it's like crazy modern. And thank you for saying unbelievable things about the website. But by the way, like we're already on like wait till you see the new version, like that thing's about to get scrapped and it's already great. Um, we're going to do some really, really cool stuff in the future with them. And they want to push the boundaries as much as anyone else. And so that is like for us as, you know, being tech guys or being, you know, modernization on a mode of guys, finding awesome partners, like, like, all of them over there to like try stuff and break stuff and push them out of their comfort zone. That's why that names on that website because like we're proud. Like that is like amazing. And so it's really, um, it's really, really cool. I love it. You know, you, I was thinking as you were speaking about, um, earlier, you were mentioning the fact that your consumers are, you know, all work for these tech companies. And you might already be doing this, right? Uh, but as a marketing campaign, like imagine just sending emails to people that like, like whoever has the biggest spike in the stock, it's like, oh, this stock is up a hundred percent in the last three months automatic. Let's send an email. Hey, you're rich now. Like I'm buying art, like not actually like using that language, but it's like tracking the stock performance of tech companies in your region and targeting them with, you know, language that resonates. It's like, Hey, we know you have money now. Come by a car. So anyways, just put it on the marketing team. This is perfect. I mean, this is exactly. I'm trying to bring some value. Yeah. I love it. Um, all right.
So before we wrap up, I want to know, um, talking more about the market side. Um, what are you seeing in your market in your market today? Right. I have to imagine that you have a lot of EV buyers in your market. Uh, EVs have been the prices have gone slashed over the past year. Lots of people, you know, underwater. So give us a little lay of the land of what you're seeing in the market. You know, by the way, we're super pro EV. We think it's going to be, you know, it's going to be a really important dealer in the Bay Area over the coming years. Um, but we're in a very weird gap of time. And that's really how we deal with it. We deal with it kind of in the, you know, we'll call it control what we can control. Um, EVs have been hot. Um, now EVs are, you know, there's a lot of negative press out there for, um, charging across the country and hybrids are now really hot. And so it's really like Evan flows. Um, Tesla plays a major part.
Um, they have a massive, massive market share here larger here than anywhere else in the country. um, you know, 30% of your high twenties of every single car sold as a Tesla, um, which is unlike anywhere else in the country, um, the entire area is 40% EV or plug in hybrid, um, in a market share. So, you know, think about those compared to seven, eight percent in the entire nation. This is where it all happens. Um, but with that being said, um, there's a pretty strong price point situation going on where some of our manufacturers qualify for federal remades. Some of the manufacturers are incentivizing their cars, but the average EV is still 40 to 50 to $60,000 in a lot of our brands where a model three and a model Y is 30 to $35,000, right? And so you have these large gaps in pricing still, which is, you know, again, Elon, uh, they've done an amazing job building that brand. Um, there's just a, there's just a price discrepancy on where they're at today. Um, and by the way, that's going to get solved. There's going to the OEMs are going to build cheaper cars. They're going to figure out, you know, where the, where the world's going.
They're going to get the tax credits with the batteries. Who knows what change of office does, all that stuff. So today, um, we're still selling a lot of EVs. Uh, margins not great. Uh, on those EVs today is, uh, in the, what do you mean by that? Like, you know, what do you mean by margins? Like, right? What happens is, you know, it, when we have a, you know, a high supply of cars, um, then, you know, you have two options, the, uh, manufacturers, they incentivize the cars from themselves or the dealers have to drop prices. And that's, um, there's, um, in cars, there's, you know, I think everyone like the, the, the, I don't know what the, the world thinks, but it's like that every time we sell a car, we make, you know, so much money on every car.
That's not how these car dealerships work, especially here in the Bay area. Um, we need every department to work. We need sales, service, uh, parks. We need all to work to have a successful business. We don't, we don't make $10,000 a car around here. Um, so I think, you know, and it just really, it goes into the margin strategy that's there and especially, um, car dealers, um, have to hold cars and we pay interest on those cars that we're holding. And, uh, you know, you know, interest rates are not, uh, not in an all time below today. So, um, we really try to move the inventory efficiently, but all in all, positive EV OEMs are definitely coming.
So many new models out so much better range. We have an infrastructure here in the Bay area that can support EVs, which is great and carpool. Um, but, uh, we're in a gap of time where, uh, you know, it's all, depending on what the news says on how the consumer feels today. Mm hmm. That's true. What do you do in the service side? Right. Like I have to imagine you do something different there as well or more innovative modern. What do you do there? Yeah, I think for us, um, you know, it was just probably use of technology, iPads and every drive online payment systems, um, you know, videos, um, you know, text messages with photos, just more of like, we try to focus on not taking the tech too crazy there because it's like, it's already kind of a stressful piece of like, you're getting your car, there's a bill, like we try to just make the communication simple and easy and not like what you're used to over, you know, life cycles of cars.
And that's really, that's been the majority of our focus, um, to create streamline. Again, we sell 25, 30,000 cars. We service a couple hundred thousand cars. So simple processes that are just better and more efficient are better trying to do like. Evolution at least in our stage today. So before we wrap up, I mean, anything that when you think about just where the car business is headed, right, anything specific that excites you, how do you just think about these next couple of years? Yeah, I think for a, you know, a non car guy who's a car guy, um, like, I think the cars are just cooler, like they connect to everything in your life. They, you know, they have like bigger screens. They're like easier to drive. They're like, I mean, cars are cool. I mean, which is great because, you know, you go back and look at cars 10 years or you're like, that's not cool at all. Right. Um, and so I think that that's really exciting. I think there's, um, significant strategies ahead on the consumer. Buying experience and servicing experience through technology, which I think is going to make people love the car experience even more.
So like finding out what their car is worth every day or getting notifications that are really valuable to them on a one to one basis. Um, so I think there's a lot of new stuff that's coming along, um, because the world is changing so fast that I believe the industry has changed faster in the last five years than it did the last five years in the last five years. And I think those gaps just keep getting shorter of evolution. And so for me, and Silicon Valley and with our team and with everyone here, like why not? Like how cool is it that I get to wake up every day and like push the needle and try new stuff? Like that's what's probably most exciting for us, um, that we can, you know, have not the same old, same old. That makes sense.
Jeremy Beaver, great having you in the pod. Dude. This was awesome. Awesome. Well, excited to spend more time together and, uh, been watching you from a far. So great to finally chat with you and, uh, keep up the amazing work and gosh, all the, all the people following you every day. It's amazing the brand you've built. yeah. I appreciate that. Thanks for coming on. Really enjoyed it.
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