NADA Stories, Part 2

Rum slurpees on the Strip 0:00

Steve Shaw: Dave, we're back again. How you doing today?

Dave Rogers: I'm doing great, man. I'm doing fantastic. How are you?

Steve Shaw: Awesome. I'm counting down the hours. I'm leaving a little early for the convention. I've got to fly out to LA, meet some clients, and then go over to the convention. So here's my question for you, getting started: tell me your favorite NADA story.

Dave Rogers: Favorite story? I don't know if I could say all my stories. I've been pretty good. By the time I get done at the end of the day, I'm so exhausted, it's ridiculous. I really don't have any funny stuff. I'm an idiot. I go out there and I work.

Steve Shaw: Well, a guy said to me the other day, "I don't go out there to party." And I go, shoot, I haven't had a cocktail in almost six months now, probably five months. So for me, it's not really the parties. I've been invited to every party, and I love it when I get the invite. It makes me feel good. But at eight or nine o'clock at night, I can't do it. I can't make it.

Dave Rogers: It's the time zone change, too. The first night I fly out there, I'll try to stay up as late as I can to acclimate a little bit more to their time zone. But I'm used to getting up at four o'clock here, which is one o'clock there. It's terrible.

I'll tell you one thing I did, and it has nothing to do with the convention. I got out there a day early, and I was walking down the Strip, and I discovered those rum slurpee stands, the tubes with the slurpee in them where they'll put Bacardi 151 in it. I'm not a real rum drinker, so I tell the guy I'll get a medium one, and I get like the three-foot one. I start walking down the Strip drinking it. It's like 11 o'clock in the morning, I'm just hanging out by myself, and I get down to the Mirage and turn around, and it's free refills. So on the other side, I get another refill, and I'm fighting off brain freeze.

By the time I got back to my hotel, I was pretty tuned. I hadn't eaten lunch. I think I was staying at the Wynn and the Encore. So I lay out back by the pool in the shade, and I pass out. It's maybe one or two o'clock in the afternoon, the day before the convention, no big deal. I wake up like three hours later. It was shady because the sun was behind the tower, and now I wake up and I'm in the sun and I'm fried. And as I'm waking up, one of the waitresses comes by: "Want anything to drink?" And I'm like, "You just gave me something with rum in it. I need something quick."

Steve Shaw: Give me some aloe vera.

Dave Rogers: I was like, I'll never do that again. I think I had two or three of them. I was pretty lit.

Seeing everybody, and a polite email to NADA 3:07

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I don't drink cocktails very much anymore, not like that, because of last year. My favorite thing at the convention, no matter what, is just walking around and seeing everybody. I've told you before, and this is where I'm very opinionated, probably like yourself: just get to the point. Does it integrate or not? And I told the story about the Hunter guy, it wasn't the tire profile guy, it was the Hunter guy, who threw me out of his booth because I was pooh-poohing the drive-over rack.

But I think the best thing about the convention is the same as the car business: I love people, and I love the people in the business. Getting to see everybody is absolutely my favorite thing. I've texted a couple of guys already, "Hey, you guys going to the show?" And a couple of guys are like, "I can't do it this year."

You know what's funny? Last year New Orleans got snowed in, and I live in Tampa. So I'm like, well, I'll just drive. But then I found out I-10 was closed, so I couldn't get there by flight or by car. So I canceled. I'd paid my $1,300 vendor cost to come in. After the convention, a few days or a week later, I emailed whoever runs the show for them and said, "Hey, is there any kind of credit you'll do?" And they go, "No." They were flat out: "You didn't make it to the show," and they weren't going to do any refunds.

So I sent them an email in Steve Shaw's very nice, polite, professional fashion. I said, "So what you're saying is, you guys are the NADA Show, you're NADA, you're supposed to be who we all look up to. You teach customer service and all this stuff, but you're basically going to say, blank you, we're not going to do anything for you. What kind of message does that send?" And I got a nice email back that said, "You know what? We're going to go ahead and give you a credit for next year." So I've been saving the emails I've been getting all year long, and a while ago they said, "Please click here to get your free ticket." And I went, wow, how about that?

Dave Rogers: That's great. I like that. You tortured them a little bit.

Snowed in at New Orleans 5:42

Dave Rogers: Last year was interesting. It really was. There were a couple of us on the airplane, and when we landed, it was Wednesday at about one o'clock, and we were the first plane to land after it snowed on Monday, I think it was, right down there. We walk into the airport, and it was empty. There was nobody there. Walked outside, and there's a line of cabs. No wait at all. I get in the cab, and this poor guy's driving a Dodge Caravan, and he can't get on I-10 because the entrance ramp has the red bars across it. You could see it hadn't been plowed yet, the whole entrance ramp from the airport onto 10. As you're driving along, you could get glimpses of 10, either not plowed or maybe one lane plowed.

And this guy's driving down the streets in the tire tracks, and he's panicking, his ABS kicking in. I'm looking out the window, and it was so fascinating. I saw the greatest snowmen I've ever seen in my life down there. These people had built snowmen eight feet tall. They were perfect, with carrots and hats. It was amazing. So finally I said to him, "You want me to drive? Because you don't look like you're having a good time." He goes, "I don't like this. You're my first passenger and you're my last. I'm going home. I can't do this."

It took us so long to get to the hotel. The streets downtown, where the hotels were close to the convention, weren't half plowed. There were cars still on the street with snow on them. And this guy goes, "I'm going home." So I gave him a nice tip and sent him on his way.

Steve Shaw: That's probably the best place for everybody in a deal like that. I remember you told me it took somewhere around two hours to get from the airport downtown. What's the name of that street everybody goes to? Bourbon Street. I had an apartment down there for a while once.

Dave Rogers: Bourbon Street, yeah. I walked to Bourbon Street. It wasn't too far. That street was clear, but it was right after that terrorist attack, so it was still closed. They had all those people die, unfortunately. They had the streets still blocked off last year. It was a very weird trip. They were on high alert, and it was sad being there. It's kind of crazy that they actually held the convention, with the snow and everything else piled up.

AI that actually knows the customer 8:40

Steve Shaw: Yeah, exactly. Is there anything else you're looking forward to this year going down there?

Dave Rogers: Yeah, again, the normal tools. Maybe something easy to use that could be rolled out into some of the stores. We use the service tools, whether it's CDK, Dealer Logics, myKaarma. There's always something new or better out there, and I want to take a look again. Those tools are okay. They work well, and the reporting is decent, but every single one of them has a glitch that seems to aggravate somebody. It's like a paper cut. It just irritates the crap out of everybody.

And then AI data mining. I don't think we talked about that last time. I think that's where it would work really well, as long as it integrates with your DMS and you can feed it information: look for the last time this opcode was done, look for the last time that opcode was done. There was a program a few years back, Conversica. It was a bot, not AI, and it worked okay doing that. But if somebody was texting back and forth with it, it couldn't answer a question other than "Can you schedule the appointment?" So it'd be nice to have some real AI that can work with somebody who has a question. Obviously we want it to make the appointment, but to entertain the customer a little better than "Do you want to make an appointment? Do you want to make an appointment?" Because that's what it does.

Steve Shaw: Well, I think AI should be able to answer general questions. And even better, if it's real AI, it can data mine. "Hey, I've got a Jeep Wrangler. How often should I change my oil? Can you tell me the last time I changed my oil?" And it looks into your database and says, "You were here at 94,000. You need to be back at 99." Things like that would be pretty amazing, answering customers' questions on the telephone or on the website. From a consumer perspective, I would certainly like something like that.

Dave Rogers: I think it has to be that way. That's one of my beefs. We do have a pilot going with a couple of MIT students who have broken off and are trying to build AI for car dealerships. Real sharp kids, and very open to making things work. It's a phone one. I said to them, "What if somebody calls after hours and wants to ask what cars you have in stock, or about towing capacity?" And man, they made it work. If you call at 10 o'clock at night and want to know the towing capacity of a Range Rover, it'll ask you a couple of questions and tell you. I think all these things need to be able to do that. It's got to be able to tap into the database with the information you need.

That's part of the problem with some of them. Like we talked about earlier, if it doesn't integrate with your DMS but integrates with Xtime or a scheduler, how much information can it get? One of them, we had a hard time because it didn't have caller ID. You called, it asked your name, and then it asked for all your information. It should know that. "Steve, I see you're calling from this phone number. Are you calling about your '89 Wagoneer, your '97 Wrangler, or your 2020 Wagoneer?" Whatever it is. That's what it should be asking. That's where I think it needs to get better.

Steve Shaw: And I see that on other tools too, even social media. You click on an ad, and at this point in life, I expect it to know who I am. I shouldn't have to fill out this form. Maybe it's one click: you click the ad, hit submit, and it has your information. I don't need to fill out my name, address, phone number and email. And I recently got myself into a trap where I had to do it a second time. After that, you just hang up. I've given you my name and email once; we should be done right here. If your ad can't do that correctly, what would make me think your program is going to work?

Dave Rogers: Yeah. I'd tell anybody who wants to have some fun with AI or some kind of online thing: go to your local utility company and watch how lame that is. When I moved, trying to change my address was probably a 14-hour affair by the time I was on hold, because I couldn't get the online thing to work. Then recently I wasn't getting bills, so I went to their chat, right through my account, and said, "Hey, I'm not getting your bills." Of course, four days later, they email me back: "Well, we need your account." I was in the account when I messaged you. You'd think you'd know that. It was probably a month later that they fixed the account. It hadn't been billed since I moved in, and of course the bills pile up, and they don't give you any goodwill adjustments. It's amazing how the AI works.

And I think that's why, when people call the AI, you get a high hang-up rate in some cases. No matter how good it is, they hang up, and you hear them on the recording: "I don't want to talk to no computer." So you have to be careful with it. And like I said, I went through the list, and there are a bunch of new vendors out there. So I'd like to take some time to get in and see what else is new besides the stuff you're hearing about, because there's always something out there that piques your attention.

Why the show still matters 14:29

Dave Rogers: So besides that, meeting old friends, seeing all the old pals, and reacquainting with some of the vendors I've been doing business with to see what's new with them. Sometimes it's better to look at it that way.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, I think so too. From my perspective, it's getting to see a lot of people. Now that I have a lot of trainers out on the road, I don't get to see the decision makers as much as I used to. So it's nice to catch up with dealers, dealer principals, or even fixed ops directors I don't chat with every day. A lot of our stores just pick up the phone and call my trainer: "Hey, Craig, I need you here." "Hey, Bob." They're bypassing me, which is great. I appreciate it. It's almost like my own AI. Skip right over me; I'm the roadblock in the whole company. Call my trainer, and they show up.

And there's a handful of guys I'm going to meet who are brand new. That interaction is so important to me. We need to have that dealer presence. I need to make sure I'm still in tune with them, and it's important for me to get there. I was really disappointed last year because I couldn't. I would have walked there if I thought I could make it. That's how much I love it, and how important I think the show is to me as a third party.

Dave Rogers: I used to go to some of the educational workshops they had, but they've become 45-minute commercials, so I stopped going. I used to run into a lot of guys I knew there years ago, when I first started going. But I don't go to the commercials anymore. Forty-five minutes. Sometimes it's just too tight.

1980s content in a 2026 workshop 16:25

Steve Shaw: Well, this will be a shameless plug for myself. I was looking at some of the people speaking, and I'll just speak about fixed ops, the NADA speakers. I shouldn't bash anybody, but I was reading about the whole thing, and there are still a lot of people talking about 1980s and 1990s behavior. We're well beyond the eighties, well beyond the nineties, and quite frankly well beyond 2021 and the COVID event. If it's just going to a commercial, that's great, I can learn all about your tool. But NADA is supposed to be where you learn something. What am I going to learn? What can I take back that's bright, fresh and new for 2026? I always like to say we were the first people talking 2021 stuff, '22, '23, and now all of a sudden it's 2026.

I'm literally a madman. I'm in my office researching, reading, always studying human behavior. And I hate to say it, but some of the people speaking this year are talking about the eighties. What are we going to learn from the eighties?

Dave Rogers: Yeah, I think that's NADA, the organization, in a nutshell. You still send people to NADA school, the general manager candidate program. I did it many moons ago. It was a great program, and I learned a lot. It was one year out of your life, and it was a lot of work while you had a full-time job: the week in school and then all the homework and the pre-work. It was great. But 26 years later, it can't be the same agenda. And people I've talked to say it's the exact same agenda. It's okay to learn the fundamentals, but at a certain point we have to get to the next level.

Steve Shaw: Exactly. That's what I say. The fundamentals are the fundamentals. We still run a car dealership, and you and I talk a lot about getting back to the basics. I remember you brought that up once: the things we learned coming up through the business were so important to manage, run and execute the fundamentals of our dealerships. But there's got to be new things that keep us at the forefront. You and I talked about hospitality, from the hospitals and the people doing that, and we're still doing eighties hospitality instead of what people want right now.

I guess AI is a big part of that. It's so important to have AI you can build, that can be customized to you and learn your data, instead of just saying, "We have AI," or "We have this program." How is it going to benefit my particular dealership? There's one AI tool I'm looking at from a training perspective. We're going to sit down with them and see how we can take our training and build their AI into our system, so a dealer can actually role play and practice the things Steve Shaw teaches. I'm really excited about that. Hopefully it's very customizable to our university, to everyone's university. The thing is, if we can build that into our university, there's less and less need to have someone in the store, because that's what they're doing in the store: the practice, the one-on-ones. So I'll be interested to see if they can pull that off.

Reviews and AI search 20:14

Dave Rogers: Yeah, that's one of those things where you can use AI to your advantage and multiply your efforts and your scale without extra people. Then your people could be doing a higher level. Instead of one-on-one, they could be doing the two-on-one class. And I've been reading a little about some of the other products, like reputation management, and AI like ChatGPT and Gemini, where people are using it now to search for your dealership. They'll talk into Gemini and say, "Find me a Honda store in this area with Google reviews over 4.6, and tell me what the sentiment is." As those tools evolve, we've got to combat that. That's all there is to it.

The more I read about people using AI to shop you and find you, the more I think we need to be smarter in our reputation management and the tools we're using. I read something a couple of weeks ago that said some of these AI tools, when you tell them to go find a dealership, are using Google, using Bing, using all these things, but Google put something in place where the AI only looks at the first page. It doesn't go to the second page. So if you're not on page one, is AI going to skip you? That's interesting when you think about it. Why wouldn't AI be able to go to the next page? But Google is gearing everything up for Gemini, not for ChatGPT or Grok. So I'm interested in that part of the business too, and what we can do there.

Steve Shaw: Yeah, and we've talked a lot about that on our side as well. You just said, "Go find a dealer that has X, Y and Z stars." And I still talk to people right now who aren't even looking for social media reviews in their store. They're not asking for social media reviews. I don't do it that much, but if I'm painting my house or looking for an oddball thing, I'll look for social media reviews. But more and more, like you said, if people are searching for it, then on our side we have to do it. We've got to be doing the job. We've got to be delivering five-star service, and then we have to make sure our customers get out there and rate us. That's a huge effort on our part this year: getting those Google reviews, getting our advisors to actually ask the customer to do a social media review for us. It's hugely important.

Dave Rogers: Yeah. CSI is the manufacturer's little scoreboard. We have to be cognizant of our manufacturer, our franchise agreement, our partners. But in the scheme of things, it really doesn't mean squat. It's just another hammer over you. As far as real life goes, the Google reviews and your reputation management probably mean a lot more. And again, I'm not a guy who goes out and looks at this stuff. I'm not a big review fan, and I've never been. But it's not about me.

Just like videos. I don't really watch a lot of videos. I don't sit there on TikTok. I'm just not a video guy. But that doesn't mean my customers aren't. The newer generation, and it doesn't even have to be younger, people in their thirties and forties, are on YouTube looking at videos. Thank goodness, because otherwise they'd never see our handsome faces. Just because I'm not doesn't mean I shouldn't embrace it. So that's the other thing I want to look at, different tools for videos, because I think our sales department isn't doing a good job with videos through the CRM. They should be doing a much better job for the car buyers and the people who put in leads. Instead of just sending an email, how about sending a video? "Hey, I know you were looking at this car," and do a little walk-around, whatever the case may be.

Videos as quick as a reel, and a tip: get the free trial 24:36

Steve Shaw: Yeah, and that could lead us to another topic for another day, video multi-point. If I'm scrolling or watching reels that are 30 seconds long, and that's what I'm used to, we really have to be doing those types of things. If the attention span of the consumer, the end user, is a reel, then our videos have got to be very reel-like. They've got to be what the customer wants, not some five-minute video where I'm walking around the car doing my thing. I've got to get to the point. So maybe one day we'll talk about video multi-point. But the point for everybody right now is that Steve certainly has his own opinion of how things should be, but I always try to look at what the behavior of the consumer is right now, and that's who we have to deliver our message to. Not "How do I like it?" It doesn't matter what Steve likes. It doesn't matter at all.

Dave Rogers: Right. And I would say to anybody out there listening, if there are some things you want us to check out at NADA, shoot us a note. If you're interested in something and your boss won't let you go, "I heard of this technology, I heard of this company," send us a note. I'll go look at it. I don't care.

Steve Shaw: Absolutely. We'll do a product review. I think after the convention, we should do a show on what we learned. Of course it'll be worth the trip out there, because it is Vegas, and it's very behavior-centric, seeing everybody. But it'd be interesting: were there new tools? What were our takeaways? We should do a takeaways show from the convention.

Dave Rogers: Yep, we will do that.

Steve Shaw: That would be awesome. We probably ought to wrap up here. Anything you want to leave everybody with from a tip-of-the-day perspective?

Dave Rogers: Well, like I said, if you have some ideas or some things we didn't talk about and you want us to take a look, let us know. And as far as a tip of the day, to piggyback on last time: do your due diligence and check these things out. And if you're going to try something new, maybe keep it to a 30-day contract so you're not stuck in something for two years. That's the other thing. You've got to work the free trial.

Steve Shaw: Get the free trial!

Dave Rogers: Or be like Steve: send an email to the boss and the owner and say, "Let's get some love here. I need something."

Steve Shaw: And if everybody's there, look for me and Dave. We'll be wandering around, sometimes together. Make sure you stop by and say hi to us and to Fixed Ops Focus. Maybe we'll do an on-the-spot interview. I'll have my portable setup so we can do some quick reels while we're there.

Dave Rogers: How nice. We'll do some reels walking around the convention. Perfect.

Steve Shaw: My favorite thing is just sitting out there and watching everybody walk through. So we'll probably see twice as many people doing that. Awesome. Well, let's get out of here, Dave. I'll catch up with you. See you at the show.

Dave Rogers: Yep, see you then. Talk to you later, Steve.