Latest / Big Talk About Small Business / Ep. 42 - The Essential Guide to Building Relationships and Business Expansion with Matt Lewis

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Ep. 42 - The Essential Guide to Building Relationships and Business Expansion with Matt Lewis · Big Talk About Small Business

• 0:04
  Mark Zweig: okay, everybody.
• 0:05
  Mark Zweig: Uh, this is mark zweig and we're back with another episode of big talk about small business.
• 0:14
  Mark Zweig: That's how my partner, eric howerton, he's not here with us today.
• 0:18
  Mark Zweig: Ah, that was that.
• 0:19
  Mark Zweig: That was good though, mark, that's that intro.
• 0:21
  Mark Zweig: He loves to say it like that.
• 0:22
  Mark Zweig: But, um, but I've got one of my favorite business people here with me today.
• 0:27
  Mark Zweig: Um, someone I can't say enough good about.
• 0:31
  Mark Zweig: Every time I talk with him I learned something new and I have a tremendous respect for this guy, and his name is Matt Lewis of Lewis automotive group here in Fayetteville, and Matt is the vice president and basically runs the show for Lewis, which is a big, big company.
• 0:52
  Mark Zweig: I mean, tell everybody a little bit about the business, if you would, matt.
• 0:57
  Matt Lewis: You bet, you bet, and it's more than just you and I have had this conversation, but it's more than just selling cars, absolutely.
• 1:04
  Matt Lewis: You know, since we've moved and I'm sure we'll get into that but since we've moved, you know our scale of employee level.
• 1:09
  Matt Lewis: We're right now sitting just below 240.
• 1:12
  Matt Lewis: I think it was 237.
• 1:14
  Matt Lewis: As far as employees go, it's a big payroll brother, it is.
• 1:17
  Matt Lewis: It is, you know, it's kind of like there could be a big reward there, but you also have a big responsibility.
• 1:22
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, um, you know.
• 1:23
  Matt Lewis: So our business is scaling and it's exciting, you know it's.
• 1:27
  Matt Lewis: It's put us in some, some challenging areas as well, which is good.
• 1:30
  Matt Lewis: You know, every once in a while you got to get a little uncomfortable, you push yourself, you all, I mean, between your athletic pursuits and your business pursuits.
• 1:38
  Mark Zweig: You are a guy who's constantly going for more, and I love that about you, you know.
• 1:44
  Matt Lewis: No, I would agree with that.
• 1:46
  Matt Lewis: I would agree.
• 1:47
  Mark Zweig: That's the drive there for sure.
• 1:49
  Mark Zweig: So this new facility you have is fantastic.
• 1:54
  Mark Zweig: It's the coolest car dealership I've ever been in and it just looks so great and what a great customer experience you can provide over there now.
• 2:04
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, it's really neat the amount of research that went into.
• 2:08
  Matt Lewis: First, employee centric, so then we could have a better customer.
• 2:13
  Matt Lewis: You know, as far as You're big on that internal customer, internal customer, if you don't take care of that employee first, how do you expect them to take care of your external customer, which is your actual customer?
• 2:23
  Matt Lewis: So a lot of that went into, you know, when we were looking at what do we do with the buildings, what does the size look like, so on and so forth.
• 2:29
  Matt Lewis: We've got to keep it centered that we make these areas and these places for employees to thrive.
• 2:35
  Matt Lewis: And then we wanted to make sure any of the processes can we bake them into the actual structure of the building.
• 2:42
  Matt Lewis: You to make it automatic.
• 2:44
  Matt Lewis: Very cool.
• 2:44
  Matt Lewis: So we found so far with that we can take somebody that's new to the business and really do a leap on where they're at about six months.
• 2:54
  Matt Lewis: So we we closed get up to speed faster, up to speed a whole lot faster.
• 2:58
  Matt Lewis: You know, especially in service.
• 3:00
  Matt Lewis: Sure, if you come into service you'll notice our service drive.
• 3:02
  Matt Lewis: You, the customers, have to pull in the service drive and then where the service drive is it's an entire glass wall.
• 3:09
  Matt Lewis: You know that they see the customer pulling in, they've got to take action there.
• 3:13
  Matt Lewis: Those are just a couple of things that I know we'll get into each of those pieces.
• 3:16
  Matt Lewis: But man, I'm really excited to be on this show and just talk business.
• 3:19
  Matt Lewis: It's fun.
• 3:19
  Matt Lewis: Anytime, you know, we can just sit down and talk about what's going on in Northwest Arkansas.
• 3:24
  Matt Lewis: How are we progressing business wise?
• 3:26
  Matt Lewis: And I always gain something too every time you and I talk.
• 3:29
  Mark Zweig: Well, you're such a leader.
• 3:30
  Mark Zweig: You know you're somebody I see as not just a good manager, because you're also a really good manager and, as you've said before, you can't forget that manage is in the word manager.
• 3:44
  Mark Zweig: So you've got to manage, but you're a great leader because you know, I've watched you.
• 3:51
  Mark Zweig: I mean you move around.
• 3:52
  Mark Zweig: You are a classic management by wandering around.
• 3:55
  Mark Zweig: That was a term coined by Tom Peters, who's probably one of the greatest management consultants ever.
• 4:02
  Mark Zweig: You know you move around constantly.
• 4:05
  Mark Zweig: You've done every single job in this place.
• 4:07
  Mark Zweig: That was part of your sort of training that you went through initially, and and you know, you know what's going on.
• 4:15
  Mark Zweig: People see you, they see you working and and then you know your philosophy of helping your people is is is as opposed to sort of the draconian.
• 4:27
  Matt Lewis: You know, whip cracking, I think that's key and I think you know I'm going to.
• 4:32
  Matt Lewis: I've stole this from John Maxwell a long time ago and he's got a famous quote.
• 4:36
  Matt Lewis: It says people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care, and one of the ways to do that is show them how you're invested on making them successful.
• 4:47
  Matt Lewis: So when I talk to my managers, you know their role is to manage activities, no matter the department.
• 4:53
  Matt Lewis: You can take any department out there and a manager's job is to manage the activities of their employees and the better job they do managing that and a piece of it is how can I jump in the middle of it and fill a gap?
• 5:06
  Matt Lewis: Maybe we're backed up in an area in our business, maybe it's getting the car washed, maybe it's processing the paperwork.
• 5:12
  Matt Lewis: How can they fill that gap to keep it going efficiently?
• 5:15
  Matt Lewis: Because you know, the last thing is we don't want the customer to have to sacrifice not having a great experience, maybe because we've got an employee that's off or they're on vacation.
• 5:25
  Matt Lewis: You've got to fill that gap to make that a seamless process and a top-level customer experience.
• 5:32
  Mark Zweig: Well, you know, you said something very interesting and the subtlety of it wasn't lost on me and that is managing the activities versus the results, because you get the results if you do the activities right, you really do.
• 5:47
  Matt Lewis: Um, you know, and if we're talking sports analogies too, they're focusing on positive yardage.
• 5:52
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, they're focusing on the time of possession and the scoreboard is just a reflection of those activities.
• 5:59
  Matt Lewis: Yes, and it's you and I discussed this it's not been too long ago when we talked about spiffs.
• 6:01
  Matt Lewis: You know ways of incentives for employees.
• 6:02
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, and if you sit down with me and a manager yes, and it's you and I discussed this it's not been too long ago when we talked about SPFs you know ways of incentives for employees.
• 6:07
  Matt Lewis: And if you sit down with me and a manager comes to me and say, hey, matt, I want to run an incentive or a SPF for employees, and I was like great, let's talk about what you'd like to do, and usually they always focus on the results.
• 6:18
  Matt Lewis: Yep, you know.
• 6:29
  Matt Lewis: So they're like in our business.
• 6:29
  Matt Lewis: How many cars did you sell?
• 6:30
  Matt Lewis: How many sets of tires did you sell?
• 6:30
  Matt Lewis: How many engines did you sell?
• 6:31
  Matt Lewis: Today?
• 6:31
  Matt Lewis: I said you got to think about it deeper than that, because what happened, what activity happened to drive that sell?
• 6:34
  Matt Lewis: And it is usually in our business.
• 6:34
  Matt Lewis: It would be appointments or phone calls or text messages.
• 6:37
  Mark Zweig: That's classic sales management training, but so many people don't understand that I think you learn that until you have the chance of stepping back and learning from others.
• 6:49
  Matt Lewis: There there's a a really successful sales automotive trainer.
• 6:53
  Matt Lewis: He's been around for decades.
• 6:55
  Matt Lewis: His name is joe verde.
• 6:56
  Matt Lewis: So joe verde really focuses on the numbers, yeah, and he says show me the numbers, show me the phone calls, show me the lot, show me the phone calls, show me the lot of.
• 7:04
  Matt Lewis: That's the way I was trained.
• 7:05
  Mark Zweig: When I got out of grad school in 1980, the guy I worked for was a former Xerox national sales manager.
• 7:12
  Mark Zweig: It was all in the numbers.
• 7:13
  Mark Zweig: It is how many calls did you make, how many people did you talk to, how many proposals did you send out?
• 7:19
  Mark Zweig: That's exactly what it is.
• 7:20
  Mark Zweig: If your numbers were okay, then they weren't worried about you because they knew the results would bear out.
• 7:26
  Matt Lewis: You know you hit on something key there.
• 7:29
  Matt Lewis: And too many people at the end of the day, when we're doing a recap, you know they'll be disappointed because they didn't sell a car or they didn't sell as much on the service drive as they wanted.
• 7:38
  Matt Lewis: I said but show me your activities, yep.
• 7:40
  Matt Lewis: And they said well, I made a hundred phone calls today.
• 7:42
  Matt Lewis: You know I sent out 50 videos.
• 7:44
  Matt Lewis: You know, they're going to make it and I'm like great job.
• 7:47
  Matt Lewis: And they're kind of looking at me weird, like what do you mean?
• 7:49
  Matt Lewis: Great job, matt?
• 7:50
  Matt Lewis: I didn't sell a car today, I didn't hit my quota in service and I said you keep doing that and we'll have the big successful days.
• 7:58
  Matt Lewis: In fact, when we have a big day, you know, in our business, selling cars, what's called a hat trick is if you sell three cars in a day, sure, and I say show me three or four days before then, show me their activity level, and I'll tell you how that happened.
• 8:13
  Matt Lewis: Yep, you know, because I always ask them like, well, how'd you have a hat trick?
• 8:15
  Matt Lewis: How'd you sell three cars in a day?
• 8:17
  Matt Lewis: They're like oh, I don't know why.
• 8:19
  Matt Lewis: No, start pilling back, pull the logs on the phone calls, on the email set, on all the social media posts.
• 8:24
  Matt Lewis: You know, but too many people miss that.
• 8:27
  Matt Lewis: Yes, so then here's what happens is is they have a hat trick?
• 8:30
  Matt Lewis: They sell three cars and then the next day they just fall on their face right and they're what happened.
• 8:35
  Matt Lewis: What changed?
• 8:36
  Matt Lewis: I wore the same clothes, I had the same attitude, I did the same this and that my special socks I had.
• 8:43
  Matt Lewis: And I'll say let me tell you what happened.
• 8:44
  Matt Lewis: You forgot to do the daily activities.
• 8:47
  Matt Lewis: And we use the word daily.
• 8:50
  Matt Lewis: There is it's not like hey, one day a week when it's the, it's compounding.
• 8:55
  Matt Lewis: Yes, I don't care if we're talking about compounding interest.
• 8:57
  Matt Lewis: I don't care if we're talking about compounding of skills.
• 9:01
  Matt Lewis: If we are an athlete, yeah.
• 9:02
  Matt Lewis: If you're in sales, whatever it is, stay consistent and it'll compound on top of each other and it the probabilities bear out.
• 9:10
  Mark Zweig: I mean, it's really understanding probability theory, and the more events there are, the greater the odds are that it works out as it's supposed to.
• 9:18
  Mark Zweig: You know it's simple it is.
• 9:20
  Mark Zweig: But people don't understand that.
• 9:22
  Mark Zweig: But let's go back to selling for a minute because you know, let's face it, a lot of people don't understand that.
• 9:26
  Mark Zweig: But let's go back to selling for a minute because you know, let's face it, a lot of people don't like buying cars.
• 9:30
  Mark Zweig: The car sales people have a bad reputation being high pressure.
• 9:34
  Mark Zweig: I do.
• 9:35
  Mark Zweig: You have somehow managed to diffuse that, disarm that.
• 9:42
  Mark Zweig: How do you do that with your people?
• 9:45
  Mark Zweig: What is the?
• 9:46
  Mark Zweig: What is it you tell them?
• 9:48
  Mark Zweig: How do you train them to get them to provide, let's say, a less threatening experience to the buyer?
• 9:56
  Mark Zweig: You said you've done it.
• 9:58
  Matt Lewis: I know you serve first and sell second.
• 10:00
  Matt Lewis: Okay but I said both, but I said both okay.
• 10:04
  Matt Lewis: I never lose focus on what the goal is, and it's to sell a car, but I need to serve first, and what I mean by serve is I need to meet a customer, wherever they're at in their buying process, right before I can sell the car.
• 10:19
  Matt Lewis: I need to provide the information they need to make a well-informed decision.
• 10:23
  Matt Lewis: So that comes through a little bit of discovery and, as a sales professional, I'm talking to the customer to figure out what step are they at, instead of the shotgun approach.
• 10:33
  Matt Lewis: Where can I meet them?
• 10:35
  Matt Lewis: You know, is it that we're now down to payments and we got to figure out which payment fits?
• 10:39
  Matt Lewis: Is it we're still trying to decide?
• 10:40
  Matt Lewis: We're going to a car or a truck?
• 10:42
  Matt Lewis: What step of the sell are they at?
• 10:44
  Matt Lewis: Or they decided the car?
• 10:46
  Matt Lewis: They've watched all the YouTube videos, but they want to see does it actually equal the review they watched online?
• 10:54
  Mark Zweig: It's the confirmation of what they already think right.
• 10:57
  Matt Lewis: It really is, but that comes from discovery and I'm sure we'll talk about this a bunch.
• 11:01
  Matt Lewis: But it's really important.
• 11:03
  Matt Lewis: If you're in any type of sales out there, you better be a really good listener first.
• 11:07
  Matt Lewis: Yes, you better ask questions so you can figure out where are you picking up in the sales process, because everybody's different.
• 11:15
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, I've noticed that with you.
• 11:18
  Mark Zweig: Like you know, somebody who's only seen you on radio and TV or social media might think oh, matt is like a super gregarious talker you know, but you're not.
• 11:30
  Mark Zweig: You know, when you're in that mode you're very, very quiet.
• 11:34
  Mark Zweig: I've noticed and, um, you ask a lot of questions and listen to what people say.
• 11:40
  Mark Zweig: And now you, you come and talk to my students every semester and it's always great, but what is that?
• 11:47
  Mark Zweig: Um, tell everybody a little bit about the basic um, uh, get them to to know you, like you and trust you.
• 11:56
  Mark Zweig: You bet formula, because I think there's just pure genius in that.
• 11:59
  Mark Zweig: No matter what you're, selling you bet.
• 12:02
  Matt Lewis: So there's two things there we got to dissect.
• 12:04
  Matt Lewis: It is one, the value of the questions and kind of where that came from, and then I'll get to the no you like, you trust you and, and I gotta be honest, if, if I go back to my 20s and even in my young 30s I wasn't as good as a listener, you know what I mean?
• 12:17
  Matt Lewis: Oh, I was, I was just running a gun and and a lot of people make this mistake is they do the same walk around or the same sales presentation that they did to sell the last item, whether it is vehicle, whatever it may be.
• 12:33
  Matt Lewis: That's farthest from the truth, because now, all of a sudden you're putting this new customer in the same category of wants and needs and motive as the previous customer and that's just not the facts.
• 12:44
  Matt Lewis: Sure you have to become a very good listener.
• 12:47
  Matt Lewis: We were going over this this morning in the sales meeting.
• 12:49
  Matt Lewis: I said I treat, when I go talk to a customer, like I've got a blank sheet of paper and the only thing on that sheet of paper is the heading that says how do I sell them a car?
• 13:00
  Matt Lewis: Okay, and it's my job to fill this blank sheet out before I start selling see, see in our business.
• 13:08
  Matt Lewis: We've talked about this in class, but there's over 20 000 moving parts on the vehicle.
• 13:12
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, 20 000, it's a lot of parts.
• 13:15
  Matt Lewis: How do you decide to go what over with a customer?
• 13:18
  Mark Zweig: because we're all in a fast food mentality well, in your business, your, your customer base is so diverse I mean not every business is going to have the diversity of customers that you would have.
• 13:30
  Mark Zweig: I mean, basically anybody could buy a car, right so you've really got to make an effort to figure out what you're dealing with there.
• 13:39
  Matt Lewis: And this crosses over, selling is selling, yeah, yeah, and managing people's managing people.
• 13:44
  Matt Lewis: But in the art of selling you must know your audience and you must meet them wherever, whatever stage they're at in the process of buying.
• 13:53
  Matt Lewis: That only comes from discovery, by asking questions.
• 13:57
  Matt Lewis: So I fill this sheet of paper out and really, if you kill it out mentally, or physically, mentally, in my mind.
• 14:03
  Matt Lewis: Okay, before I go to start doing the walk around the vehicle, the test drive present figures.
• 14:08
  Matt Lewis: I'm going to know at least two hot buttons.
• 14:11
  Matt Lewis: I need to know the motive.
• 14:12
  Matt Lewis: Why are they here?
• 14:13
  Matt Lewis: Is it because their families get larger, their vehicle's almost out of warranty?
• 14:17
  Matt Lewis: They've got a boat, they've got to pull, they're going to drive more, but they need better fuel mileage.
• 14:21
  Matt Lewis: See, I've got to figure out what's that motive.
• 14:23
  Matt Lewis: If I don't know the motive, what am I doing?
• 14:26
  Matt Lewis: Right, you know I'm just selling scared Sure.
• 14:28
  Matt Lewis: You know I love watching Shark.
• 14:30
  Mark Zweig: Tank.
• 14:30
  Mark Zweig: I do too.
• 14:31
  Mark Zweig: I love the show.
• 14:37
  Matt Lewis: Whenever I'm out of town, it's what I turn on and watch at night is Shark Tank, and more than the products on Shark Tank, I like the process and studying the pitches and you can always tell and for y'all listening, you're now going to notice this.
• 14:47
  Matt Lewis: The people when they start selling scared.
• 14:50
  Matt Lewis: You know, when it feels like the line is going away, they start turning off the sharks.
• 14:54
  Mark Zweig: They do.
• 14:55
  Matt Lewis: You know, a couple of them say no.
• 14:56
  Matt Lewis: They're like, oh, hang on, hang on, we can do that.
• 14:58
  Matt Lewis: Once you start selling scared out of desperation, you're done.
• 15:03
  Matt Lewis: I mean desperation, you're done.
• 15:07
  Matt Lewis: I mean you're absolutely done.
• 15:07
  Matt Lewis: No question about it, people want to buy from people who are confident about their product, sure not that are just like trying to give other incentives to give it away.
• 15:13
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, so you got to listen and you've got to really double down.
• 15:17
  Matt Lewis: Once you figure out the motive and a couple hot buttons, you know, in our industry, you're like, well matt, what would the hot buttons be?
• 15:23
  Matt Lewis: Let's talk about this.
• 15:23
  Matt Lewis: Is it fuel knowledge?
• 15:24
  Matt Lewis: Is it appearance?
• 15:25
  Matt Lewis: Is it performance?
• 15:26
  Matt Lewis: Is it the warranty?
• 15:27
  Matt Lewis: Is it the cup holders, the USB ports, tow capacity, like what is it?
• 15:32
  Matt Lewis: And for you it's different than me, and if we had 10 more people in the room they would all say something different.
• 15:37
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, and it may be different based on I cars for me, and every time I buy one I got a different need right, absolutely so.
• 15:44
  Mark Zweig: Just because the last time around I wanted towing capacity, I may have dumped my RV along the way, and now I don't need that.
• 15:50
  Mark Zweig: You bet you're at a different stage.
• 15:52
  Matt Lewis: Right, exactly, and.
• 15:53
  Matt Lewis: But that's so like we got to pause here because that's so important and it's so basic.
• 15:58
  Matt Lewis: But everybody misses it.
• 15:59
  Matt Lewis: They miss it.
• 16:00
  Matt Lewis: They try to sell based upon what they like or how they sold the last customer, and that's so far from the truth.
• 16:07
  Mark Zweig: I'm sure that's true, that what they like I've been guilty of that before.
• 16:10
  Mark Zweig: I mean even in houses.
• 16:12
  Matt Lewis: When somebody's looking for a house, what are the what's?
• 16:14
  Matt Lewis: Your hot buttons and my hot buttons are totally different.
• 16:16
  Matt Lewis: Sure, and what I wanted in a house 15 years ago and then 15 years in the future, that's going to be totally different, yes, even on the same person.
• 16:24
  Mark Zweig: So, so you have to slow down, to speed up right, I understand that that makes a lot of sense, but now what about the, the no, like and trust?
• 16:32
  Matt Lewis: all right, so let's get to the three there so what you're looking for here is the green light, and until you get the green light, you have no business trying to sell anybody something now.
• 16:43
  Matt Lewis: Somebody won't give you the green light until they answer those questions.
• 16:46
  Matt Lewis: You already hit them.
• 16:47
  Matt Lewis: Do I know you?
• 16:48
  Matt Lewis: Do I like you and can I trust you?
• 16:49
  Matt Lewis: So, mentally, every customer will ask those three questions before they feel confident to go forward with you.
• 16:57
  Matt Lewis: Do I know who this person is?
• 16:59
  Matt Lewis: Okay, do I like them?
• 17:01
  Matt Lewis: Meaning really, can I tolerate them Not?
• 17:03
  Matt Lewis: Am I going to invite them over for Christmas or whatever else?
• 17:05
  Matt Lewis: Can I tolerate them through this process?
• 17:08
  Matt Lewis: Okay, and then, can I trust them?
• 17:10
  Matt Lewis: Now, I can't answer the question about trust if I don't know and if I don't like them.
• 17:15
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, so there's an order of operations.
• 17:16
  Mark Zweig: There's an order of operation.
• 17:18
  Matt Lewis: So the only way you can mentally get those questions answered is by asking questions and having conversation.
• 17:25
  Matt Lewis: And in our business it's not about the car, it's about the person.
• 17:29
  Matt Lewis: What, how do you get somebody to open up about that?
• 17:32
  Matt Lewis: You got to ask questions.
• 17:33
  Mark Zweig: One of the things you said that's just so profound.
• 17:36
  Mark Zweig: It's amazing because you can boil stuff down in real simple terms.
• 17:40
  Mark Zweig: That's one of the things that's really good about you, and you stay with your themes.
• 17:44
  Mark Zweig: But you know, I think you said at one time, if you just ask people a lot of questions about themselves, they'll think you're a great guy.
• 17:53
  Mark Zweig: Exactly, Exactly.
• 17:55
  Matt Lewis: And it's so true and it's like a communication hack.
• 17:59
  Mark Zweig: And you also said if you've ever spent any time with somebody who never asked you a question, they're not really fun to hang out with and you might not like them very much.
• 18:09
  Mark Zweig: And that's true.
• 18:10
  Mark Zweig: You know it's like you get together, like in my wife would have like a friend and then you know it's like we need to get together with the friend.
• 18:17
  Mark Zweig: You get together with the husband and all he does is talk about himself the whole time.
• 18:21
  Matt Lewis: I never even asked anything about you, like where you grew up, what you do, nothing okay, I think that's so important and you stole some of my thunder there, but only because we've talked about it so much and it was relevant.
• 18:33
  Matt Lewis: It's been relevant through all these years is the quickest way to get somebody to answer that question of do I know you and do I like you is by you asking them questions to talk and like, like you said, we've all been in those situations where if that person talked the whole time, you're like man, I don't know anything about you know, they didn't ask anything about me.
• 18:52
  Matt Lewis: I'm done, let's not go out to dinner with them again.
• 18:54
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, so you need to ask questions about you.
• 18:57
  Matt Lewis: Know I'll ask questions like hey, do y'all live here in Fayetteville?
• 19:00
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, I don't know if they live in Fayetteville or not.
• 19:01
  Matt Lewis: The answer is either yes or no and they'll be like no, we don't.
• 19:04
  Matt Lewis: Well, where do you live?
• 19:05
  Matt Lewis: Well, we live up in Bentonville, perfect, do your kids go to school in Bentonville?
• 19:08
  Matt Lewis: Well, I don't know if they have kids or not, but I'm getting ready to find out and they're like no, they don't go to Bentonville.
• 19:19
  Matt Lewis: Which school do?
• 19:20
  Matt Lewis: Asking these questions to get to know them?
• 19:22
  Matt Lewis: Because two things there.
• 19:23
  Matt Lewis: One, they get to start answering the question of.
• 19:26
  Matt Lewis: I kind of like this guy.
• 19:28
  Matt Lewis: He's interested in my wants and needs.
• 19:31
  Matt Lewis: And then two, when I get ready to do my sales presentation, I'm incorporating in their daily commute Sure, I'm incorporating in taking the kids to school wherever they're going, right, so it's a twofold Sure.
• 19:42
  Matt Lewis: I want them to walk away and go.
• 19:44
  Matt Lewis: You know what?
• 19:44
  Matt Lewis: Matt really asked questions and he really got to know me.
• 19:47
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, so check one right, you know so now we know you well, I know you, we like you because we at least engaged.
• 19:55
  Matt Lewis: Yes, so then they can go forward in our business.
• 19:57
  Matt Lewis: Purchasing a vehicle is usually the second largest purchase they'll make, so they better at least trust me handling the money and figuring out the monthly payments, so on and so forth.
• 20:06
  Matt Lewis: That one stuck with me.
• 20:08
  Matt Lewis: I was working for a trainer out of Chattanooga, tennessee, as an internship when I was in college and he taught me those things.
• 20:16
  Matt Lewis: He goes.
• 20:16
  Matt Lewis: They got to know you, like you and trust you before they'll do business with you.
• 20:20
  Mark Zweig: You had very specialized training I mean, you're fourth generation in this family business but you've really turned it on its ear, I mean, let's be honest and transformed it completely.
• 20:31
  Mark Zweig: But you went to a special four-year college for automotive professionals I did and then had other internships that were related.
• 20:41
  Mark Zweig: That's pretty unusual, isn't it?
• 20:42
  Mark Zweig: It is.
• 20:43
  Mark Zweig: Do you think the other people I'm sure some of them you still know I do Do they do things like you do?
• 20:50
  Mark Zweig: Or did they throw all that out of the all that that education out the door and then go back to do things the way their parents did in the old days?
• 20:59
  Mark Zweig: I'm just curious.
• 21:00
  Matt Lewis: Some do, some don't.
• 21:01
  Matt Lewis: You hit on an important fact there.
• 21:03
  Matt Lewis: There's another part to the equation is you can get all the education you want, but if the team you're around does not embrace knowing that, like, hey, we need to be progressive, we need to re-work this, and in our case, just because we've done something since 1946 doesn't mean that that's what we need to do going forward.
• 21:21
  Matt Lewis: Yes, we have to remember that the one funding payroll is the customer, and I tell my employees that all the time.
• 21:30
  Matt Lewis: I'm like your check may say, lewis, but it's funded from the customer, all right, and if the customer's way to buy a car service, a car, changes, we need to change too.
• 21:41
  Matt Lewis: Yes, so that one's.
• 21:42
  Matt Lewis: I don't want to miss that.
• 21:43
  Matt Lewis: Yes, I went to a lot of great training and education, but if I wouldn't have had the support of of my dad and my uncle of going, okay, let's, let's see what this looks like now, let's see what the buying process looks, then I would have hit a dead end, and some of my friends have hit that.
• 21:58
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, maybe their parents or their other family members aren't as open-minded as yours were.
• 22:06
  Matt Lewis: Or they, their other family members, aren't as open-minded as yours were, or they're still in the store trying to micromanage it.
• 22:09
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, you know, I've got some friends in their 40s and they've now been back.
• 22:10
  Matt Lewis: They can't get the parents out of the way.
• 22:12
  Matt Lewis: They can't.
• 22:13
  Matt Lewis: You know they'll try to be progressive.
• 22:15
  Mark Zweig: I've seen that before.
• 22:16
  Mark Zweig: It's very demotivational for them well, then they just stop.
• 22:19
  Matt Lewis: You know, I've got some friends and they keep and they'll have a great meeting about a new process, and you know, then their, their parents or their dad or their mom, whoever's in the business they go back and have another meeting.
• 22:30
  Matt Lewis: But no, no, we're not going to do it this way.
• 22:32
  Matt Lewis: I'll talk to so-and-so about it.
• 22:33
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, and, like you said, after that happens a couple of times and they just stop, which is so bad.
• 22:40
  Mark Zweig: I mean, you came into this at a young age.
• 22:42
  Mark Zweig: I met you right when you first came into the business and I'd had not a great experience at one of your stores and I told you about it.
• 22:51
  Mark Zweig: It wasn't a huge deal.
• 22:53
  Mark Zweig: I don't remember what it was.
• 22:54
  Mark Zweig: It was something silly about.
• 22:56
  Mark Zweig: I bought a car.
• 22:57
  Mark Zweig: They didn't want me to leave it there more than two or three days.
• 23:00
  Mark Zweig: They insisted I get it.
• 23:01
  Mark Zweig: Okay, I was out of town but I didn't want to lose the car, so I bought it and then we were gone, you know.
• 23:07
  Mark Zweig: But anyway, it all worked out in the end.
• 23:10
  Mark Zweig: But they kind of made a stink about it and I told you about that and ever since then you and I've done a lot of business.
• 23:16
  Matt Lewis: But so Hang on but you bring up a point there is.
• 23:21
  Matt Lewis: Usually it's something small like that.
• 23:23
  Matt Lewis: So everybody listening is like what it's?
• 23:26
  Matt Lewis: Just because you couldn't leave the car for a couple of days.
• 23:27
  Matt Lewis: If you pull back the layers of the onion, usually the reason a customer leaves and goes and does business somewhere else is something small.
• 23:35
  Matt Lewis: It's really easy that, monetary wise, it wasn't.
• 23:38
  Matt Lewis: Hey, you missed me by a couple thousand dollars.
• 23:41
  Matt Lewis: It was like you just didn't listen to my needs and how I needed you to help facilitate it.
• 23:45
  Mark Zweig: Well, you know.
• 23:46
  Mark Zweig: That's another thing, though, that I know you've always brought up, and you've said that really, price is not the determining factor.
• 23:53
  Mark Zweig: Now you're in a mature industry.
• 23:55
  Mark Zweig: Sure, it's got its growth periods and it's decaying periods, and there's a zillion auto dealers out there.
• 24:02
  Mark Zweig: You said it before.
• 24:04
  Mark Zweig: All four dealers pay the same price for the same f-150.
• 24:08
  Mark Zweig: So, yeah, and you can get online and anybody can shop and find the lowest price right, but yet you still manage to do the business that you do, and it's not all price dribble in the end.
• 24:22
  Mark Zweig: Talk a little bit about that.
• 24:25
  Matt Lewis: So we have to be competitive.
• 24:27
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, you know.
• 24:27
  Matt Lewis: So we've got all these whiz-bang tools to make sure we're competitively priced in the market, but we don't have to have a race to the bottom.
• 24:33
  Matt Lewis: See, people, they don't mind paying a profit.
• 24:37
  Matt Lewis: They want you to be competitive, sure.
• 24:40
  Mark Zweig: But they want the free service.
• 24:41
  Mark Zweig: I want you to be successful Exactly.
• 24:42
  Mark Zweig: I don't begrudge you making a living on me.
• 24:45
  Mark Zweig: You know what I mean.
• 24:46
  Mark Zweig: That's so true.
• 24:47
  Mark Zweig: I can trust.
• 24:48
  Mark Zweig: Okay, I didn't expect to go to you and every time for you just did not make any money with me.
• 24:54
  Mark Zweig: That's a totally unrealistic expectation.
• 24:56
  Mark Zweig: It really when I've had businesses myself.
• 24:59
  Mark Zweig: I'm not sure everybody thinks like that about their friends or you know.
• 25:04
  Matt Lewis: I would agree.
• 25:04
  Matt Lewis: I've seen some people talk about that of like, hey, if anybody to pay a profit, it should be your friends.
• 25:09
  Matt Lewis: They want you to be successful.
• 25:11
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, so we need to make sure that we are in a competitive, mature business, that we add value, and somebody says like, okay, they're $500 more than somebody down the road, but here's what I'm gaining.
• 25:21
  Matt Lewis: They know I'm'm gonna take care of me.
• 25:30
  Matt Lewis: I know that they're not gonna sell.
• 25:30
  Matt Lewis: They're not building their business up to sell it three or four years and if I have an issue down the road, I'm gonna find familiar faces there because they take good care of them.
• 25:34
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, you know, if there's a gray area, more than likely they're gonna give me the benefit of the doubt exact like I know.
• 25:41
  Mark Zweig: so I bought an f-250 from and the next day I had like a power steering hose go bad or something on it.
• 25:47
  Mark Zweig: You remember that, I remember it.
• 25:48
  Mark Zweig: And boy, your brother and somebody else came immediately within like five minutes of where I had my problem and all I could think is if I had bought that from any other Ford dealer around there you think they would have cared to do that?
• 26:03
  Matt Lewis: No, it would have been.
• 26:04
  Matt Lewis: You'd get in line.
• 26:05
  Matt Lewis: Let's see when you get your schedule.
• 26:07
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, we'll see if we can get a tow truck to bring you over back to the dealership and, you know, maybe we'll give you a loaner when you do, or not?
• 26:15
  Mark Zweig: I?
• 26:16
  Matt Lewis: think that's the value of you know from a consumer.
• 26:18
  Matt Lewis: You got to look at the entire cycle, right, you know, for us it's not just buying the car, but it's like, hey, I got to look forward of when I'm getting a maintenance or I need help with this or that, because if we have two customers come in and we only have one loaner vehicle left, the priority is going to go to the one that's purchased from us.
• 26:34
  Matt Lewis: Of course it has to.
• 26:35
  Matt Lewis: You know it, just like you said it has to.
• 26:38
  Matt Lewis: That's an additional benefit.
• 26:39
  Mark Zweig: Well, the other.
• 26:40
  Mark Zweig: I always think think about like if, when I go to get rid of it, I go to you guys as the first place I go, because you've got that policy where you give people a price, whether they buy a car or not, I think that is like a huge credibility, honesty, trust building.
• 26:58
  Matt Lewis: I think that's a shift in the industry, you and I have talked about it for a few years, yeah.
• 27:02
  Matt Lewis: But that's also doing that now You're seeing a little bit more.
• 27:05
  Matt Lewis: You know, because you've got some online stuff.
• 27:07
  Matt Lewis: You know you've got some Carvana and what was Vroom and you know Carpass.
• 27:11
  Mark Zweig: They're struggling, aren't they?
• 27:13
  Mark Zweig: They?
• 27:13
  Matt Lewis: are.
• 27:13
  Matt Lewis: They are, but so people can get liquid amounts and transparent for their vehicle.
• 27:19
  Matt Lewis: And when we started to scale our purchasing off the road, we said we've got to look at a whole different model.
• 27:26
  Matt Lewis: How do we give people the most money from the get go, whether they trade with us or they don't?
• 27:33
  Matt Lewis: Do we want them to trade with us?
• 27:34
  Matt Lewis: Yes, we do sure, but we want to, because you need stuff to sell.
• 27:37
  Matt Lewis: We need stuff to sell, right?
• 27:39
  Matt Lewis: Um?
• 27:40
  Matt Lewis: So no matter if they buy or they don't buy, here's the amount for your vehicle and it's.
• 27:44
  Matt Lewis: It's none of these funny games of like well, you got to stay on that vehicle to get that much, yeah.
• 27:48
  Mark Zweig: As soon as that happens, the trust goes.
• 27:50
  Mark Zweig: Then you don't know what you're really paying.
• 27:53
  Matt Lewis: It all becomes a mystery, even if you do go forward with that transaction because I had a one-off vehicle.
• 27:58
  Matt Lewis: You remember that as a customer, right, when you're telling everybody else about your experience and when you think about the next vehicle, you're going to buy One of the things we talk about with our crew and then I talk about with customers too.
• 28:11
  Matt Lewis: My goal is not just to sell you a car today.
• 28:14
  Matt Lewis: In fact, it doesn't do me any good if I just sell you a car today.
• 28:17
  Matt Lewis: Sure, my goal is to sell you your next five or six vehicles and all your neighbors and everybody else.
• 28:23
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, it's the lifetime value of the customer.
• 28:26
  Mark Zweig: It really is, and their network is what you're really.
• 28:31
  Mark Zweig: That's why the experience is so crucial, right, because it blow it at any step along the way and the whole stream goes away.
• 28:36
  Matt Lewis: It does, it does, and it usually doesn't happen overnight.
• 28:40
  Matt Lewis: You look up a few years later it's like what's happened?
• 28:44
  Matt Lewis: Why don't we have this downhill trend?
• 28:46
  Matt Lewis: And if we look back to those experiences, they just slowly started chipping away at your market share.
• 28:52
  Mark Zweig: It was funny the other day at your open house.
• 28:54
  Mark Zweig: Shelby's like well, nobody likes buying a car, and then he says, except for Mark's wife, you know, because it's fun.
• 29:00
  Mark Zweig: I it is.
• 29:01
  Mark Zweig: What do you mean?
• 29:01
  Mark Zweig: Nobody likes buying a car.
• 29:03
  Mark Zweig: You know, nothing's more fun than that you get a new car.
• 29:07
  Mark Zweig: It's clean, it's beautiful, it's fun to learn about it and experience it.
• 29:11
  Mark Zweig: I love buying cars.
• 29:12
  Mark Zweig: That new dealership is so exciting over there.
• 29:15
  Mark Zweig: It's like I keep looking at your inventory to see if there's anything I want to buy just to be a part of.
• 29:20
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, just because it's so cool, you know.
• 29:22
  Mark Zweig: But but let's, let's go back to that for a minute.
• 29:25
  Mark Zweig: Let's let's zoom out.
• 29:27
  Mark Zweig: Um, because, as a business owner, you have just made a commitment to radically increase your overhead, not just in terms of the facility costs, which I'm sure is two or three times or more, whatever it used to be at your old location, because you've been there for 50 plus years, but you also have to invest in more inventory in that place.
• 29:50
  Mark Zweig: So you have really stepped up in terms of your overhead.
• 29:55
  Mark Zweig: What's that like?
• 29:58
  Mark Zweig: What is that?
• 29:59
  Mark Zweig: How does that make you feel?
• 30:01
  Mark Zweig: What motivated you to do that?
• 30:04
  Matt Lewis: When we looked at it on where our business was there on college, we were really comfortable there.
• 30:10
  Matt Lewis: Sure, we had the processes efficient, we had margins where we needed them to be, the sustainability was there.
• 30:15
  Matt Lewis: But but you have to look farther down the road, you know and a lot everybody does.
• 30:21
  Mark Zweig: Some people just say this is great, I'll just stay here and keep my overhead low as possible and make money which sounds what's wrong with?
• 30:29
  Matt Lewis: that.
• 30:29
  Matt Lewis: But when you start looking of, okay, our area is at 600,000 people, we're going to a million people.
• 30:35
  Matt Lewis: What does that look like for us long-term wise?
• 30:38
  Matt Lewis: Is our position correct?
• 30:39
  Matt Lewis: And we knew that the position was not correct?
• 30:41
  Matt Lewis: But it's uncomfortable, you know, because, like you said, our fixed expenses are way up, are?
• 30:48
  Mark Zweig: way up.
• 30:49
  Mark Zweig: How long do you think it's going to take before you get your volume to where it needs to be in that?
• 30:54
  Matt Lewis: Right now we're on an 18-month plan for that and I've got it split up in thirds.
• 30:58
  Matt Lewis: You know the first six, 12, and then 18.
• 31:05
  Matt Lewis: Some of those areas will progress quicker and some won't, but on 18 months we feel like we can get it to the capacity close to where we built it for, I see, and the expense is definitely there.
• 31:16
  Matt Lewis: So that puts us in an uncomfortable state, which is good.
• 31:20
  Matt Lewis: At times, you know, to get uncomfortable every once in a while.
• 31:24
  Matt Lewis: That's when you got to kind of get back in the corner and go okay, what does our marketing look like?
• 31:28
  Matt Lewis: You get to look at the whole business again.
• 31:30
  Matt Lewis: Yep, where do we need to scale?
• 31:32
  Matt Lewis: Where do we need to cut back?
• 31:33
  Matt Lewis: How do we get more people in service?
• 31:34
  Matt Lewis: How do we market more of these vehicles?
• 31:37
  Matt Lewis: We're now on 26 acres and 150,000 square feet.
• 31:41
  Matt Lewis: So we've got the facilities.
• 31:43
  Matt Lewis: Okay, we've gone from 170 to 237 employees.
• 31:46
  Matt Lewis: We've scaled the employees.
• 31:52
  Matt Lewis: All of those are expense items unless they're generating revenue.
• 31:54
  Matt Lewis: So then I was telling you before this we just brought on a new marketing director.
• 31:57
  Matt Lewis: Okay, we got the facilities, we got the employees.
• 31:59
  Matt Lewis: Now we got to let everybody know about this and we got to drive the traffic to us.
• 32:04
  Matt Lewis: So it's, in a sense, it's like almost opening a new business, because you're going to a whole new scale, Right, and you're starting going.
• 32:14
  Mark Zweig: What do we need to do now to generate the revenue in the business for that, yeah do you wake up at night in a sweat and go oh my God, what did we do?
• 32:21
  Mark Zweig: I mean, we've got to do so much business with this thing in order to make this thing pay off.
• 32:28
  Mark Zweig: Also, just the move you had to have, like some disruption, oh yes, just you know, just being able to get out of the one place and get over to the other one.
• 32:37
  Mark Zweig: There's a lag there.
• 32:39
  Matt Lewis: There's we did you know we did?
• 32:41
  Matt Lewis: Uh, so two things.
• 32:42
  Matt Lewis: Yes, I do wake up in the middle of the night, but I've been doing that for a while because we were trying to get the construction done at this right, so that was waking you up at night.
• 32:50
  Matt Lewis: So you know, while running the automotive group I was also doing the construction.
• 32:56
  Matt Lewis: So the amount of time that that took, so both of those pieces.
• 33:00
  Mark Zweig: That's a big distraction in itself just going through a project like that, isn't it?
• 33:04
  Matt Lewis: It is.
• 33:04
  Matt Lewis: It is Takes you out of operations, a lot of people will just set to the side and let the planes be built as they're built.
• 33:11
  Matt Lewis: We micromanaged a lot of that, which took some time, but it equals a great customer experience.
• 33:18
  Matt Lewis: I mean, the flow inside is just phenomenal and, like you said, it's a joy to do business there now.
• 33:24
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, so when you walk in, you're like this is not right.
• 33:26
  Mark Zweig: It's so bright and light and pretty, so when you walk in you're like this is not right.
• 33:28
  Matt Lewis: Used to feeling like this is actually fun.
• 33:31
  Mark Zweig: I even saw a Ford Edge or I think it was an Edge on your showroom floor.
• 33:36
  Mark Zweig: It was a blue one.
• 33:36
  Mark Zweig: That was out there the day I was in the house.
• 33:38
  Mark Zweig: Look, I've never been a big fan of the Ford Edge I'll be honest with you, matt.
• 33:44
  Mark Zweig: But that car sitting there in that showroom with that light on it and that beautiful blue color I looked at that.
• 33:51
  Mark Zweig: I said you know what that thing looks really cool.
• 33:54
  Mark Zweig: Can I see myself driving that?
• 33:56
  Mark Zweig: You know what?
• 33:57
  Matt Lewis: I mean.
• 33:58
  Mark Zweig: It gave me a whole new sort of perspective on the car, just sitting in that place.
• 34:05
  Mark Zweig: I know that's fantastic.
• 34:08
  Matt Lewis: It really is.
• 34:08
  Matt Lewis: And a lot of people have asked us like where were all these cars?
• 34:11
  Matt Lewis: Well, they were across town.
• 34:13
  Mark Zweig: We just jammed 26 acres worth of stuff on 10 acres yeah, it's really nice when you have all the laid out, where you can see all of the one thing in one location too, because I was walking around the lot and I noticed that it's very nicely arranged now starting with when you pull in.
• 34:30
  Matt Lewis: When you pull in the the curbs raised up and there's six display pads on each side.
• 34:35
  Matt Lewis: So we have six forwards and six cdjr.
• 34:37
  Matt Lewis: Every time you pull in, so every person that comes in, I get to market to them the vehicles I want.
• 34:43
  Matt Lewis: They're on angle, they're on raised pad.
• 34:45
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, you got the other, the weather trucks on.
• 34:48
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, that's so cool On the rocks up there.
• 34:50
  Matt Lewis: Right.
• 34:51
  Mark Zweig: Hey, tell everybody though, CG day DR.
• 34:54
  Mark Zweig: I don't think everybody understands what that is.
• 34:57
  Matt Lewis: So Chrysler, dodge, jeep and Ram.
• 34:59
  Matt Lewis: Okay, yeah, yeah.
• 35:00
  Matt Lewis: So Chrysler, dodge, Jeep and Ram on the one side, Ford on the other side.
• 35:03
  Matt Lewis: Let's go back to the move and the downtime, because I do want to talk to business owners about this.
• 35:08
  Matt Lewis: It took us a little over a week to like fully move.
• 35:11
  Matt Lewis: Now, behind the scenes, we'd been working on that for a month, getting the shelving rights, so on and so forth.
• 35:16
  Matt Lewis: When we looked at that downtime of a week, we said we can, we can hire a moving company to help us and everybody can just have extra PTO time, right.
• 35:28
  Matt Lewis: Or let's look at the amount we were going to spend there.
• 35:30
  Matt Lewis: And why don't I offer to my employees let's just guarantee their pay based upon their last 90 days worth of average pay, and they can help us move.
• 35:38
  Matt Lewis: That's progressive.
• 35:39
  Matt Lewis: So two things.
• 35:40
  Matt Lewis: Number one it was way more expensive to do it that way than hire a moving company.
• 35:45
  Matt Lewis: You can imagine.
• 35:46
  Matt Lewis: Sure, because I took everybody at every right yeah, they're not all 20 buck an hour.
• 35:51
  Matt Lewis: Physical movers, right yeah so I mean managers sell people 90 day average and then I guaranteed that per day on pay and they helped us move.
• 36:00
  Matt Lewis: So then they had a part in invested interest.
• 36:04
  Matt Lewis: I was moving the stuff over.
• 36:05
  Matt Lewis: They got ownership.
• 36:07
  Matt Lewis: They have more ownership.
• 36:08
  Matt Lewis: Yes, they're excited.
• 36:09
  Matt Lewis: Right in the middle of the move, on a Sunday, sunday afternoon, everybody had gotten out of church.
• 36:13
  Matt Lewis: We said today is a family day.
• 36:15
  Matt Lewis: Bring your family out, show your whole family around.
• 36:18
  Matt Lewis: It was almost like a soft opening in the restaurant business.
• 36:22
  Matt Lewis: So we brought them all by, showed the lifts up and down behind the scenes.
• 36:25
  Matt Lewis: So it was.
• 36:26
  Matt Lewis: It was cool.
• 36:27
  Matt Lewis: Cool to see employees.
• 36:28
  Matt Lewis: I wasn't giving tours at that point in time.
• 36:30
  Matt Lewis: The employees were yeah, because they had already been in the facility.
• 36:33
  Mark Zweig: Yeah that's great.
• 36:35
  Matt Lewis: I think that's very smart to do it like that I'll tell you a goal of ours with a grand opening and you were there, man, we were blessed with a lot of people.
• 36:42
  Matt Lewis: Oh, you were.
• 36:42
  Matt Lewis: It was last friday.
• 36:45
  Matt Lewis: We had a thousand people there.
• 36:46
  Matt Lewis: I'm not surprised at all.
• 36:48
  Matt Lewis: All Saturday was another 600 or 700.
• 36:51
  Matt Lewis: And I told my managers when we started early in the week.
• 36:54
  Matt Lewis: I said I'll at least want a dozen tour guides at each dealership.
• 36:58
  Matt Lewis: So here was an opportunity we had and we could either step up and accomplish what I'm getting ready to talk about or we just did the normal everybody else did and had the cake and woohoo and cut the ribbon and then they moved on.
• 37:09
  Matt Lewis: I said we have an opportunity.
• 37:11
  Matt Lewis: In our case, we didn't know how many people were going to be there.
• 37:13
  Matt Lewis: We had 16 to 1700 people and I had.
• 37:18
  Matt Lewis: One goal is that we walked them around and we showed them the entire dealership like they were a vip in the back on parts room upstairs.
• 37:27
  Mark Zweig: Here's the showers for the mechanics, showers for the mechanics, the gym and the yoga rooms, all of it, the outdoor patios, the manager offices.
• 37:36
  Matt Lewis: And why did I do that?
• 37:37
  Matt Lewis: Because I wanted them to walk away from that grand opening to be a walking talking billboard for Lewis.
• 37:47
  Mark Zweig: That's as basic as you can get in marketing word of mouth yeah, but it's not word of mouth just because you didn't do anything.
• 37:55
  Mark Zweig: A lot of times people say word of mouth.
• 37:57
  Mark Zweig: It's like we don't believe in advertising, we believe in word of mouth.
• 38:00
  Mark Zweig: I'm like, but they got to get there in the first place to give you the word of mouth, so what drives them there in the first place?
• 38:08
  Mark Zweig: But yeah, so you actually had something to talk about.
• 38:12
  Mark Zweig: We did, and I think that's very smart to do it like that.
• 38:18
  Mark Zweig: I was also thinking after that first day of that.
• 38:20
  Mark Zweig: I thought, gosh, I bet Matt and his brothers are like, oh my God, we got to do this a second day.
• 38:25
  Mark Zweig: I was exhausted after that first day.
• 38:30
  Mark Zweig: You know I gotta go out there again and it was do this a second day.
• 38:35
  Matt Lewis: It was definitely exhausting and you need to remember, if you're a leader or manager or a business owner out there, that your employees do fill that.
• 38:42
  Matt Lewis: So it's important to have quick rallies.
• 38:45
  Matt Lewis: So saturday morning we rallied up and we said, guys, we had a little over a thousand people.
• 38:51
  Matt Lewis: Yesterday we had 24 tour guides.
• 38:57
  Mark Zweig: We sold a few cars.
• 38:57
  Mark Zweig: I wondered if, like, how could they?
• 38:59
  Mark Zweig: You know, people were got so excited, they just wanted to buy a car right then and there you bring up a good point on what I was focused on.
• 39:08
  Matt Lewis: So no different than when we talked about SPFs just a little bit earlier.
• 39:11
  Matt Lewis: About the activities Right, I wasn't focused on selling cars.
• 39:14
  Matt Lewis: Now, if we sold cars, great by God, sure, yeah, right.
• 39:17
  Matt Lewis: But what I was focused on is if I could take 1,600 people and equip them to be out there every single day, organically talking about their experience, telling 20 people, telling 20 people Telling 20 people 32,000 now.
• 39:32
  Matt Lewis: And yeah, some of them are going to buy cars right, and then we'll look back six to 12 months later and be like what catapulted that?
• 39:39
  Matt Lewis: Was it the billboard?
• 39:40
  Matt Lewis: Was it the social media post?
• 39:42
  Matt Lewis: Right.
• 39:42
  Matt Lewis: No, it was the organic growth of having all those people tell 20, 30 people they ran into.
• 39:50
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, there's safety in those kinds of numbers.
• 39:52
  Mark Zweig: You know the odds will bear out.
• 39:53
  Matt Lewis: You know it will and you might not see it right now, but again, it's managing activities that equal the results.
• 40:00
  Mark Zweig: Why do you think so many small business owners are such lousy marketers?
• 40:04
  Mark Zweig: Because you know I have my students work with a small business every semester, the small enterprise students in the consulting project and matt.
• 40:14
  Mark Zweig: If I told you like this semester, I probably saw 50 or 60 companies okay if three of them were actually marketing themselves.
• 40:25
  Mark Zweig: Effectively.
• 40:26
  Mark Zweig: I'd be surprised.
• 40:27
  Mark Zweig: Why do you think they don't do it?
• 40:30
  Mark Zweig: I'm just it blows me away.
• 40:32
  Mark Zweig: It's like this is your opportunity and you're not doing it what is that?
• 40:38
  Matt Lewis: they overcomplicate it.
• 40:39
  Matt Lewis: They overcomplicate it and all their media sources are not beaten to the same drum.
• 40:47
  Matt Lewis: Okay, so a lot of times people will try to give too much information, whether it's in a radio ad or it's a post.
• 40:55
  Mark Zweig: Yes, Attention spans are short and they're overloaded with messages.
• 41:02
  Matt Lewis: And most of the time they talk about what they want to talk about.
• 41:05
  Matt Lewis: Remember me telling you about selling.
• 41:06
  Matt Lewis: You got to ask the questions.
• 41:07
  Matt Lewis: We got to figure out what is the motive that people are buying, and that's what the value proposition needs to be.
• 41:14
  Matt Lewis: That's out there.
• 41:14
  Matt Lewis: It needs to be the same on the billboard, on social media, on your google paid ads, on your radio and then in the store.
• 41:23
  Matt Lewis: Consistency of messaging throughout the whole thing we talk about it as a 360 degree marketing approach.
• 41:29
  Matt Lewis: The last thing you want to do is spend thousands of dollars to have somebody come in the store and ask one of your reps about the sale or whatever the offer was, and them not to know what you're talking about.
• 41:43
  Matt Lewis: It's like getting up to the plate and not swinging the bat and it was the perfect pitch.
• 41:49
  Matt Lewis: Sure, you've got to have everybody on the same page and it's got to be a simple message.
• 41:54
  Matt Lewis: It goes 360 degrees around.
• 41:57
  Matt Lewis: All media sources are relevant, right, and this is a news flash to some of y'all, especially if we go back about 10 years.
• 42:05
  Matt Lewis: We're like, hey, the internet, you won't have any other advertising.
• 42:08
  Matt Lewis: That's not the truth.
• 42:09
  Matt Lewis: Oh sure, that's not the truth, because in a, in a world where you can dvR stuff and stuff's on demand Right, then the more the static stuff comes relevant.
• 42:18
  Matt Lewis: So, like my static billboards, Yep.
• 42:21
  Matt Lewis: They can't turn them off.
• 42:22
  Matt Lewis: Yep.
• 42:23
  Matt Lewis: You know, the only way you can't see them driving up and down the road is if you're not looking at the road.
• 42:28
  Mark Zweig: Billboards are actually more effective than a lot of small business owners know are actually more effective than a lot of small business owners know.
• 42:32
  Mark Zweig: Billboard advertising it's interesting you say that, but you've got different types of customers.
• 42:37
  Mark Zweig: They use different types of media.
• 42:39
  Mark Zweig: We do, like old people, sit around and watch the local news.
• 42:42
  Mark Zweig: They do.
• 42:43
  Mark Zweig: Young people never see it.
• 42:45
  Matt Lewis: You know what I mean, and that's okay as long as you understand that, yeah.
• 42:49
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, you got to understand that, that there's different places where these customers are going to be so my you brought up tv.
• 42:56
  Matt Lewis: My tv advertisement is is only during the news, then with some filtered in there because I know I have more of a captive audience, sure, and they're less likely to dvr the news right, because it's current information.
• 43:09
  Matt Lewis: Yeah and then the billboard is really branding.
• 43:12
  Matt Lewis: It's one.
• 43:14
  Matt Lewis: It's not cost effective and it's really hard to read.
• 43:16
  Matt Lewis: If I tried to change like zero percents and amounts off, it is just branding to make the tv advertising or the social media posts more sticky.
• 43:26
  Mark Zweig: That makes sense so they're familiar with it.
• 43:28
  Mark Zweig: So then they yeah, it's familiarity brings they already know you.
• 43:33
  Mark Zweig: Yes, so it goes.
• 43:34
  Matt Lewis: The same thing reduces the risk it really does.
• 43:37
  Matt Lewis: It's like you know what I know those guys.
• 43:39
  Mark Zweig: Maybe we should listen to that, but it's I always like to use the example of um, sam's furniture, because I think in our area they understood the kind of marketing that you have done.
• 43:50
  Mark Zweig: You know, and, and they were there.
• 43:53
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, they stay on message.
• 43:55
  Mark Zweig: They had certain things that they hammered away on.
• 43:58
  Mark Zweig: You know you can buy it and get it the same day, same day delivery.
• 44:02
  Mark Zweig: Um, that was a big thing that they hammered on our inventory.
• 44:05
  Mark Zweig: Sitting here on the floor.
• 44:07
  Mark Zweig: You're not going to wait weeks for it, but you know, um, it becomes instead the.
• 44:14
  Mark Zweig: The response is like subconscious, you know, to that, my, my wife, uh, ex-wife had a friend that bought a new house, five bedrooms, and she's a physician and she wanted to get all new bedding for it.
• 44:29
  Mark Zweig: She goes, brooke, needs, you know, five bedrooms worth of mattresses and box springs.
• 44:34
  Mark Zweig: Where do you think, um, she ought to go?
• 44:36
  Mark Zweig: And I'm like get it at sam's, because she needs it tomorrow, that same day delivery.
• 44:39
  Mark Zweig: You know what I mean.
• 44:42
  Mark Zweig: It it's, it's, it's like that, and I think you've employed that same strategy now, um, as well, very effectively.
• 44:50
  Mark Zweig: And then you eat into the market share.
• 44:53
  Mark Zweig: The other people you know and a lot of these small business owners are sitting around blaming their woes, like, well, you know, the car business sucks and everybody bought a new car during COVID and now they're not buying cars.
• 45:05
  Mark Zweig: Or everybody bought a new RV and now, you know, rv sales are up by 50% or whatever, and yet there are still individual businesses in those markets that do well.
• 45:18
  Mark Zweig: There is Okay, they do well.
• 45:21
  Mark Zweig: They do it by eating into the share of the other people who are not doing what they need to do, though.
• 45:27
  Matt Lewis: It's a mindset.
• 45:28
  Matt Lewis: It's one I do agree with you.
• 45:30
  Matt Lewis: Sam's Furniture does a fantastic job.
• 45:33
  Matt Lewis: On marketing and staying consistent yes, they do Staying consistent.
• 45:38
  Matt Lewis: I had a guy teach me back in the radio days about saying the same message over and over and over.
• 45:47
  Matt Lewis: He's like Matt you have a new audience every single break and people think.
• 45:52
  Mark Zweig: Well, I said that once Everybody got it.
• 45:54
  Mark Zweig: No, they didn't all get it.
• 45:55
  Mark Zweig: Even if they heard it, they didn't all get it.
• 45:57
  Mark Zweig: They're not paying attention at that moment.
• 45:59
  Matt Lewis: They didn't get it and it took a while for that to click.
• 46:01
  Matt Lewis: I'm sitting over there writing new ad copy and this DJ looks over at me.
• 46:05
  Matt Lewis: He's like Matt, what are you doing?
• 46:08
  Matt Lewis: We're going to stay on it.
• 46:09
  Matt Lewis: And he said you have a whole new audience.
• 46:11
  Matt Lewis: We're going to say exactly what we said last time and then we're going to say it again, because when you're first in business and when you first start doing marketing, you think everybody retains 100% of everything you said and that's so.
• 46:24
  Mark Zweig: It takes that sustained disciplined marketing activity for extended periods of time and it's like well, we tried that once.
• 46:39
  Mark Zweig: It didn't work.
• 46:39
  Mark Zweig: I mean, how many times have you heard stuff like?
• 46:41
  Matt Lewis: that a long time and you never know, just like your story, when it's gonna pop up that you can tell somebody hey, if you need to go get bedding or mattresses or whatever you said, get it sam, same day delivery.
• 46:52
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, it's because that had been ingrained into you, that bit.
• 46:55
  Matt Lewis: I've been marketed 10 years before then exactly no different than me telling you about all these tour guides and giving those 1600 people a tour.
• 47:02
  Matt Lewis: Everybody that walks in we're like hey, can we give you a tour?
• 47:05
  Matt Lewis: one, we're proud of it, sure, but then two, we know that interesting even if we don't sell them a car, do we equip them to be a walking talking billboard for us?
• 47:15
  Matt Lewis: We want raving fans, raving fans.
• 47:18
  Matt Lewis: Let's go back to one of the pieces you talked about.
• 47:21
  Matt Lewis: In a declining industry, yeah, no matter the market if it goes down.
• 47:25
  Matt Lewis: There's two trains of thought.
• 47:27
  Matt Lewis: One you either start blaming everybody else and you play the blame game try to cut your costs as fast you can.
• 47:32
  Matt Lewis: Very difficult to do, very difficult to do yeah, very difficult, especially if you're in a, in a business that has peaks and valleys pretty rapidly right, because usually the expense you, you need it back when you get back up.
• 47:45
  Matt Lewis: Instead, why don't we look at it, let's just take a larger market share?
• 47:48
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, you know, we went over this in your class when I drew the pies up and the pieces of the pie, I said if we're going in a downturn, I'll recognize that as a business owner.
• 47:57
  Matt Lewis: But when it comes time for me to put my sales hat on, for my team to go out there and sell, I just said here's how we're going to take market share from everybody else and we'll at least stay the same, if not improve, when everybody else declined.
• 48:10
  Mark Zweig: Yep, and you've done that.
• 48:12
  Matt Lewis: It's a different mindset, it's just.
• 48:13
  Matt Lewis: It's as simple as looking at something differently.
• 48:16
  Mark Zweig: Yes.
• 48:17
  Matt Lewis: No different than managing activities instead of results.
• 48:21
  Mark Zweig: So much of it is mental.
• 48:21
  Mark Zweig: It's like you know.
• 48:22
  Mark Zweig: At the same time, back on selling, I was always taught like you never you don't need any one sale.
• 48:28
  Mark Zweig: If you think you need that sale, you want you may want that sale, but you don't need it.
• 48:34
  Mark Zweig: If you're not, if they're not going to be the one, somebody else is going to be.
• 48:37
  Mark Zweig: That's right.
• 48:38
  Mark Zweig: You've got to have that mentality.
• 48:40
  Mark Zweig: If that one doesn't work out, somebody else is going to come through the door and the next one is that's so important that it's a psychological game.
• 48:50
  Mark Zweig: You know, the quicker you understand the your brain to it, the better off you are I know it's, but that takes professional sales management and training and does to get that message across.
• 49:04
  Mark Zweig: You know, one of my daughters, um, is 33 years old.
• 49:08
  Mark Zweig: She just had our second grandchild here, last week actually congratulations um, but she, she went.
• 49:16
  Mark Zweig: You know she's a classic kid had, you know, four majors, took seven years to get her undergrad degree.
• 49:22
  Mark Zweig: She has worked in every job you can imagine when she was young, from restaurant hostess to dental assistant, to.
• 49:29
  Mark Zweig: I was at a party last weekend and met a guy and he's like, oh, your daughter used to work for me, he's a child's dentist to um bartender, to phlebotomist, to perfusion assistant.
• 49:42
  Mark Zweig: Then she got her degree in child development and she got into physician recruiting.
• 49:47
  Mark Zweig: Okay, cause a friend of hers, she went to Fayetteville High with did, moved to Dallas and was making $120,000 a year, like a year out of college, and she goes, I'm going to go to work there and, you know, start out at like $40,000, whatever $42,000.
• 50:02
  Mark Zweig: She goes.
• 50:03
  Mark Zweig: What do you think about that?
• 50:04
  Mark Zweig: And I said well, most people don't make it.
• 50:06
  Mark Zweig: It's a very hard business.
• 50:08
  Mark Zweig: However, the training you will get will be invaluable to you.
• 50:12
  Mark Zweig: And if business, however, the training you will get will be invaluable to you and if you do succeed, you'll make a lot of money.
• 50:18
  Mark Zweig: Okay, and she succeeded at it and you know why.
• 50:19
  Mark Zweig: She's like I just did what they told me to do, nobody else did.
• 50:25
  Mark Zweig: All these other people are hired.
• 50:27
  Mark Zweig: You know she went to work for that firm.
• 50:29
  Mark Zweig: They all fall.
• 50:30
  Mark Zweig: They either quit or get fired over the next two or three years.
• 50:33
  Mark Zweig: You know, I just did what they told me to do.
• 50:36
  Mark Zweig: That's so true.
• 50:37
  Mark Zweig: And then it works out.
• 50:38
  Mark Zweig: And now true, you know any business.
• 50:43
  Matt Lewis: The statement and story you just walked through is is familiar in any business.
• 50:48
  Matt Lewis: So many people, when they get into a career, all they need to do is what they tell them to do, but what happens?
• 50:58
  Matt Lewis: You're like well, man, that sounds simple.
• 50:59
  Matt Lewis: Let me tell you what happens.
• 51:00
  Matt Lewis: Or, I don't want to do that.
• 51:01
  Matt Lewis: They don't protect who's pouring into them.
• 51:05
  Matt Lewis: You know, and everybody's heard this, you know, show me the five closest people around you.
• 51:09
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, I'll show you how successful you're going.
• 51:11
  Matt Lewis: To be sure you know, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
• 51:14
  Mark Zweig: We've all heard those things and it's true I buy all that.
• 51:17
  Mark Zweig: I like to hang out with other people that I feel like I get inspired by or motivated by, versus those that suck me down.
• 51:26
  Matt Lewis: No.
• 51:26
  Mark Zweig: I agree.
• 51:27
  Mark Zweig: I agree there's enough negative stuff out there.
• 51:30
  Mark Zweig: Let's face it.
• 51:33
  Matt Lewis: So that person starts up and we give them the tools they need and they might be successful for a month or two months, but then they start hanging out and they let people start talking in their ear.
• 51:42
  Matt Lewis: They're below average.
• 51:44
  Matt Lewis: That below average person they're going to keep talking in their ear because they want to drag them down, to bring the average down, to make them feel better, didn't help their compensation.
• 51:53
  Matt Lewis: It just mentally helped them.
• 51:55
  Matt Lewis: So it's really important that they get the correct people pouring into their life.
• 52:01
  Matt Lewis: You know, in our business we say don't go hang out with five-car Fred, and it's really that If somebody's just selling five cars, don't be taking advice from them.
• 52:10
  Mark Zweig: And it's your job, though, manager, to move the five car frets out though, isn't it?
• 52:15
  Mark Zweig: I mean, you can't tolerate them, because they're a cancer they are really.
• 52:19
  Mark Zweig: They drag everybody down.
• 52:21
  Mark Zweig: But where do you think like a typical small business owner gets that?
• 52:25
  Mark Zweig: You know they're out there on their own and you know I it's something.
• 52:31
  Mark Zweig: The other day, I said something about a business I work with my wife's like, oh, I'm sure they they're thrilled that you know you help with that, or whatever.
• 52:39
  Mark Zweig: I said.
• 52:39
  Mark Zweig: Look, I don't really get any credit for that and I don't care, I don't need it.
• 52:44
  Mark Zweig: I've been out there on my own for so long.
• 52:47
  Mark Zweig: I'm used to not getting any credit.
• 52:49
  Matt Lewis: You know what I mean.
• 52:50
  Mark Zweig: But?
• 52:50
  Mark Zweig: But I think a lot of small business owners suffer from that.
• 52:54
  Mark Zweig: They, they, they don't have anybody to talk to, they don't have anybody to inspire them, they don't have anybody to say that was good.
• 53:03
  Mark Zweig: They may get plenty of people taking pot shots at I don't know for sure.
• 53:06
  Mark Zweig: You know, for all the mistakes that they make, which we all do.
• 53:10
  Mark Zweig: But where do you, how do you get that?
• 53:14
  Mark Zweig: I mean yourself as a business owner.
• 53:16
  Matt Lewis: That's a great question and I think at today's day and age it's easier than it's ever been before, and here's why I say that you can go on Google or whatever browser you use and type in a subject and ask for podcasts, just like we're doing right now on a subject.
• 53:33
  Matt Lewis: I did the same thing when I was going through construction.
• 53:36
  Matt Lewis: I wasn't a construction expert, but I had this massive project in front of me.
• 53:40
  Matt Lewis: But I can find people out there that are industry experts that might have 20, 30 years of experience and I can listen and study that to catapult myself there.
• 53:51
  Matt Lewis: The majority of small business let me tell you what happens here because I've been there is you're wearing all the hats.
• 53:56
  Matt Lewis: You're the advertising person, you're HR, you're payroll, you're the inspector, you're QC, you're in charge of hiring, firing motivated, you're the janitor, the bill collector, you're all of it.
• 54:10
  Matt Lewis: So what I encourage people to do and this sounds crazy, but you'll get a multiplier here here you got to step back, yeah, you got to step back.
• 54:18
  Matt Lewis: Whatever it is, you need to step back and, even if it's just for an afternoon free of distractions, put a podcast on and start listening.
• 54:27
  Matt Lewis: It does.
• 54:27
  Matt Lewis: Don't do it in your business if you want to go on a hike, if you want to go out to the lake, whatever, you'll be interrupted, otherwise you'll be interrupted.
• 54:35
  Matt Lewis: Plus, all this stuff surrounds you and you're thinking about what do I got to do next?
• 54:39
  Matt Lewis: You've got some of my most valuable time is if I step back and I get around those people.
• 54:44
  Matt Lewis: So start off by looking at podcasts.
• 54:46
  Matt Lewis: There's plenty of books out there, but you're like Matt, I'd love to read books, but I'm too busy doing this and that.
• 54:52
  Matt Lewis: Well, listen to podcasts in your ears while you're doing it, while you're driving, and then get also get around people in the community.
• 55:00
  Matt Lewis: You know, I know the different chambers.
• 55:01
  Matt Lewis: They have professionals and I have doubts.
• 55:02
  Matt Lewis: They have different stuff at different places.
• 55:04
  Matt Lewis: Get out there and start networking and you can tell pretty quick who do I want to hang out with.
• 55:09
  Matt Lewis: That can pour success and be a good sounding board for me and who should I not.
• 55:15
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, no question.
• 55:16
  Mark Zweig: Well, there's one last thing I wanted to talk about because we're running out of time.
• 55:19
  Mark Zweig: Your family and you've carried this tradition on has always been very active in the community and does a lot of stuff to give back.
• 55:29
  Mark Zweig: I mean, I don't know where you find the time to do everything that you do, but how important do you think that is for a small business owner?
• 55:38
  Matt Lewis: I think it's extremely important, and here's why because the entire circle of doing business and economics comes into play here.
• 55:47
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, besides the fact that it's the right thing to do is, if you support people locally who do business with you, that's another reason they'll come do business with you again, even if you're not the cheapest in town.
• 56:01
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, because they're like well, remember when we needed that t-ball sponsorship?
• 56:04
  Matt Lewis: Remember when your aunt, who's a school teacher, didn't have supplies and she filled out a wish list and lewis automotive shipped it all directly to her?
• 56:12
  Matt Lewis: Yep, you know, remember when this happened, or all those positive interactions and help.
• 56:17
  Mark Zweig: Huh, and it makes a difference.
• 56:19
  Matt Lewis: It's very hard to quantify when you're doing it right, no different than the billboard driving down the road, yeah.
• 56:23
  Matt Lewis: But all these pieces add up and maybe you're a small business out there and you're like, well, man, I can't do a five or ten thousand dollar donation or sponsorship.
• 56:31
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, but there is other levels you can do.
• 56:33
  Matt Lewis: You could start off by volunteering places, right.
• 56:37
  Mark Zweig: And where are you at?
• 56:38
  Mark Zweig: I've seen you.
• 56:39
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, we won't hardly sponsor something if we can't be there to volunteer as well.
• 56:44
  Matt Lewis: And here's a little marketing hack for you.
• 56:46
  Matt Lewis: So if you're looking to sponsor something and you're like it's $5,000 to be the presenting sponsor, that's just not in our budget see what they have for three, four, five hundred dollars and then show up there with a crew to help with your shirts on you'll get more exposure yeah, that's a good advice.
• 57:02
  Matt Lewis: I like that you, you really will.
• 57:04
  Matt Lewis: So when you start looking at those grassroots, then organically, people think of you.
• 57:10
  Matt Lewis: When it comes to automotive, serve first, sell second.
• 57:14
  Matt Lewis: So we're out there in the community, serving, yes, playing those seeds, the brand awareness.
• 57:20
  Matt Lewis: So when the time comes to sell, there's no question in anybody's mind, right, they'll at least give us an opportunity.
• 57:28
  Mark Zweig: Well, I think you know this whole idea that people buy on more than price.
• 57:33
  Mark Zweig: It's you know as a business owner and you said it yourself.
• 57:39
  Mark Zweig: I mean I hardly buy anything based on price in any of the businesses that I'm in.
• 57:44
  Mark Zweig: I deal with the people I want to deal with that I think are going to be there for me when I need them, that I think are going to be there for me when I need them.
• 57:52
  Mark Zweig: So you know, I've been in the construction business, the consulting business, the media business, the motorcycle manufacturing, baby products, whatever.
• 58:02
  Mark Zweig: The price doesn't drive it, it's the relationship with the people.
• 58:06
  Mark Zweig: It is, and I've had long-term, if I have long-termterm relationships.
• 58:12
  Mark Zweig: If something goes wrong with their product, then or service they're going to try to make it right because they don't want to lose.
• 58:17
  Mark Zweig: That that's right, you know right.
• 58:19
  Mark Zweig: That's right.
• 58:20
  Mark Zweig: And and the consistency I mean, if it's just because it's the cheapest, but then you have quality problems or you have delivery problems, that screws up your whole business, how can you afford that?
• 58:32
  Mark Zweig: You?
• 58:33
  Matt Lewis: can't.
• 58:34
  Matt Lewis: You know you can't.
• 58:35
  Matt Lewis: And not only was your margin razor thin, you know the CSI and the experience was really low.
• 58:44
  Matt Lewis: So both of those are just a disaster for only equaling a short-term business.
• 58:49
  Matt Lewis: Yes, you need to be in the long-term game.
• 58:53
  Mark Zweig: Small businesses need to understand that things are as price sensitive as they think.
• 58:58
  Mark Zweig: It's not, because this is what I run into with all my students.
• 59:01
  Mark Zweig: Okay, again, I'll go back to their consulting projects.
• 59:04
  Mark Zweig: Half of them will come back with some sort of a discounting or coupon scheme as their marketing idea for the business.
• 59:13
  Mark Zweig: Okay, and I'm like you guys got to stop relying on that.
• 59:17
  Mark Zweig: I don't want to see it.
• 59:19
  Mark Zweig: I don't want to see coupons or punch cards at Theo's or Bordino's.
• 59:25
  Mark Zweig: You know I'm not going to go, take my wife out on a nice dinner date and say, hey, would you punch my card?
• 59:33
  Mark Zweig: It's the wrong place for that.
• 59:37
  Mark Zweig: It doesn't really is these, these things, the, the, not everything is price driven.
• 59:42
  Matt Lewis: So let's look at the experience.
• 59:44
  Matt Lewis: Instead, let's be competitive.
• 59:46
  Matt Lewis: Let's look at the experience.
• 59:53
  Matt Lewis: This is fresh on my mind, cause we just got done developing it.
• 59:54
  Matt Lewis: But in services is the oil change.
• 59:55
  Matt Lewis: And we said, ok, we need to decrease the time it takes to do an oil change.
• 59:58
  Matt Lewis: But I'm not after a 20 minute oil change.
• 1:00:02
  Matt Lewis: I'm just not OK.
• 1:00:03
  Matt Lewis: The goal is to be less than an hour, but let's provide a better experience and a higher value.
• 1:00:09
  Matt Lewis: Sure.
• 1:00:10
  Matt Lewis: So we said, all right, the goal is to be less than an hour, let's have no appointment necessary, so anybody can pull up and get it.
• 1:00:16
  Matt Lewis: Let's give them a complimentary alignment check so as soon as you pull in through the bay it shows up on the screen as the vehicle enter out of alignment.
• 1:00:23
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, and then let's offer them a complimentary car wash.
• 1:00:27
  Mark Zweig: Oh see, that makes it a lot nicer right.
• 1:00:29
  Matt Lewis: So the customer sitting there thinking they're like I could have gone down the road to some sort of quick service place yeah, and it might have been faster, but this is still pretty quick.
• 1:00:40
  Matt Lewis: You know within an hour I'm good right.
• 1:00:41
  Matt Lewis: Plus, I know if my car's in or out of alignment, right, I know I got quality products going in probably got a nicer waiting room than I'll ever have right, you're nicer waiting room and experience, and then my car's washed too.
• 1:00:51
  Matt Lewis: So instead of saying, give more, value.
• 1:00:54
  Mark Zweig: Give more value.
• 1:00:55
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, instead of just cheapest price and cutting everything out that you can in order to make it so you can survive at the low price right.
• 1:01:03
  Matt Lewis: There's a different approach yeah there's a different approach.
• 1:01:05
  Matt Lewis: It's just small business, there's always going to be somebody who's cheaper than you there is but I do want to encourage all small business owners out there If you don't take time to get around others that can help brainstorm with you and invest in yourself first, there's no way your business will grow.
• 1:01:27
  Matt Lewis: You know, Craig Groeschel said this.
• 1:01:30
  Matt Lewis: He said everybody gets better when the leader gets better.
• 1:01:33
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, so you have to focus, and I know you're busy.
• 1:01:36
  Matt Lewis: Trust me, I'm there.
• 1:01:37
  Matt Lewis: No God should.
• 1:01:39
  Mark Zweig: Nobody's busier than this guy.
• 1:01:40
  Mark Zweig: You got three young kids.
• 1:01:41
  Mark Zweig: It's crazy, this huge business that's open all the time.
• 1:01:48
  Matt Lewis: But you have to take time, even if it's just an afternoon and you go on a hike in the woods or you go sit in a picnic table at a park.
• 1:01:54
  Matt Lewis: It cannot be your business.
• 1:01:56
  Matt Lewis: Put in a podcast, you're like Matt, I don't even know where to start.
• 1:01:58
  Matt Lewis: Go in Google, type in top podcast for leadership, top podcast for handling HR, whatever season you're in, and then get a hold of the chamber and look for those professional nights out and go to other people's grand openings.
• 1:02:14
  Matt Lewis: You can find pockets of time.
• 1:02:15
  Matt Lewis: You might not have a week to go to a whole week long seminar somewhere, but you can find these pockets and your business will benefit greatly from it.
• 1:02:22
  Mark Zweig: Well, you got to be a look.
• 1:02:23
  Mark Zweig: I mean it's a cliche, but be a lifelong learner.
• 1:02:25
  Mark Zweig: You do is basically what you're saying.
• 1:02:28
  Mark Zweig: You're never done.
• 1:02:29
  Mark Zweig: I mean you've got to keep going.
• 1:02:31
  Mark Zweig: The world is changing at a rapid pace.
• 1:02:35
  Matt Lewis: We'll be doing something different next year, yeah, and there will be different sources of advertising.
• 1:02:41
  Matt Lewis: Sure, and that's the thing people need to understand too, and I know we're getting close on time but advertising hasn't changed.
• 1:02:50
  Mark Zweig: The sources have changed, yeah, the media has changed, but the basic psychology works from a consumer especially in a large ticket item.
• 1:03:00
  Matt Lewis: You know a consumer in back of the day would look at the newspaper, see the ad, and they'd either call or they'd come down the dealership.
• 1:03:06
  Matt Lewis: Now they see it on our website.
• 1:03:08
  Matt Lewis: They either send in the lead, they call or they come directly to the dealership.
• 1:03:12
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, yeah, just a different source.
• 1:03:13
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, consistency is the biggest thing in all of this, though.
• 1:03:14
  Matt Lewis: Yeah, website.
• 1:03:14
  Matt Lewis: They either send in the lead, they call or they come directly to the dealership.
• 1:03:15
  Matt Lewis: Yep, yep, just a different source.
• 1:03:15
  Matt Lewis: Yep, consistency is the biggest thing in all of this, though.
• 1:03:17
  Matt Lewis: Yep, it's being consistent and managing daily activities and, when you interact with your customer, getting them to know you, like you and trust you first.
• 1:03:28
  Mark Zweig: Fundamentals.
• 1:03:28
  Mark Zweig: Eric and I were talking about this last week.
• 1:03:30
  Mark Zweig: It's just the discipline that any business owner needs to take.
• 1:03:34
  Mark Zweig: Discipline is so, so critical.
• 1:03:37
  Mark Zweig: It is it's lacking in the majority of companies, I'm afraid to say, because the people that run them aren't disciplined.
• 1:03:44
  Matt Lewis: The good news for y'all that do want to be consistent and disciplined it's easier to win.
• 1:03:49
  Mark Zweig: It is.
• 1:03:50
  Mark Zweig: You know, make the odds stacked in your favor.
• 1:03:53
  Mark Zweig: So good easier to win it is you know, make the odds stacked in your favor, I know Anyway.
• 1:03:57
  Mark Zweig: Well, listen, I could talk to Matt all day.
• 1:04:02
  Mark Zweig: Obviously, the guy's got so much to offer and I've been so impressed watching the success of of Matt and Lewis automotive group over the last 20 years.
• 1:04:08
  Mark Zweig: It's it's really been a been a great learning experience for me and having them in my classes and and and love buying vehicles over there.
• 1:04:19
  Mark Zweig: I got to stop because I I got to slow down, matt, I can't do it like I used to, but but anyway.
• 1:04:26
  Mark Zweig: So if anybody wants to reach you, matt, what's the best way?
• 1:04:30
  Matt Lewis: you bet?
• 1:04:30
  Matt Lewis: Well, let's.
• 1:04:30
  Matt Lewis: When we first tell you our location, in case you haven't seen it, it's on i-49 x65 in fayetteville.
• 1:04:35
  Matt Lewis: Come by for a complimentary tour.
• 1:04:37
  Matt Lewis: We'll give you free car wash while we're giving you the tour.
• 1:04:39
  Matt Lewis: If you want to find us our website, it's lewisautomotivegroupcom, and then, no matter what social source you're on, you can find lewis ford or lewis cdjr on any of those If they want to contact me directly, whether you come by the store or you can find me on Facebook it's under Matt Lewis or Instagram, either way.
• 1:04:58
  Matt Lewis: Great, I think you're also on LinkedIn.
• 1:05:00
  Mark Zweig: I am on LinkedIn as well.
• 1:05:01
  Mark Zweig: That's right, yeah, so follow Matt on LinkedIn as well.
• 1:05:05
  Matt Lewis: Anything I can ever help with if there's business owners out there that want to come through, and I'm more than happy to help them.
• 1:05:10
  Matt Lewis: I've had tons of people help me along the way, and so my duty is to be able to reciprocate.
• 1:05:15
  Mark Zweig: That Well you've always given back so generously and we appreciate that.
• 1:05:18
  Mark Zweig: Thank you All.
• 1:05:20
  Mark Zweig: Right, everybody.
• 1:05:20
  Mark Zweig: Well, this has been another episode of Big Talk About Small Business, and we'll see you next week, you next week.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: Thanks for tuning into this episode of Big Talk About Small Business.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 3: If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming shows, be sure to head over to our website wwwbigtalkaboutsmallbusinesscom and click on the Ask the Host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Big Talk About Small Business.
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 3: No-transcript.