Business Innovators Radio - Jeff Griffith’s Journey in the Auto Industry: From CarMax to Triton Auto Group

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

In this episode of the TurboPassUSA podcast, hosts Marco Salinas and Ken Jarman sit down with Jeff Griffith, Vice President of Triton Automotive Financial Services and advisory board member for TurboPass. Griffith shares his extensive experience in the auto industry, having worked as an early employee for CarMax and now Triton Auto Group, and discusses how TurboPass is revolutionizing the way auto dealerships conduct business.Griffith explains how Triton Auto Group is different from traditional dealership models, with a focus on building an organization that is “built by dealers for dealers.” He highlights the importance of economies of scale and how Triton Auto Group is able to achieve this through its unique structure.The conversation then turns to TurboPass, a digital platform that streamlines the auto financing process for both dealerships and customers. Griffith praises TurboPass for its ability to reduce paperwork and processing time, making the financing process faster and more efficient. He also notes how TurboPass helps mitigate risk for both parties involved in the transaction.Salinas and Jarman ask Griffith about the future of the auto industry and how TurboPass fits into that future. Griffith emphasizes the importance of innovation and adapting to changing consumer behaviors, and how TurboPass is at the forefront of that innovation.This episode provides valuable insights into the auto industry and how TurboPass is disrupting traditional models and revolutionizing the way dealerships conduct business. Listeners will come away with a better understanding of the importance of innovation and the role that TurboPass plays in shaping the future of the industry.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgriffith62/TurboPassUSA Podcasthttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/turbopassusa-podcast/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/jeff-griffiths-journey-in-the-auto-industry-from-carmax-to-triton-auto-group

The TurboPass USA Podcast. Bringing you conversations with industry leaders and influencers. And welcome back to another episode of the TurboPass USA Podcast. We are back at it again with another fun, exciting episode. And as usual, I've got my favorite co-host and co-pilot here with me, Mr. Ken Jarman. Say hello. Hello, community of Turbapass USA podcast. And we like to remind Ken, as we begin, not to be bashful and to feel free to ask any questions to our special guests that we have on the show today.

And that is my segue into my introduction for our very special guests today on the TurboPass USA podcast. Joining us is Mr. Jeff Griffith. and Jeff is out in Alpharetta, Georgia, as we were just discussing, prior to the beginning of this podcast, in beautiful Georgia, of course. And it's my understanding that Mr. Griffith here is currently an employee of Triton Auto Group. And prior to that was an employee of another little small company called CarMax that no one's ever heard of, right? And the other cool thing about Jeff, and this is definitely worth mentioning, is that Jeff is also an advisory board member for TurboPass. So Mr. Jeff, welcome to the TurboPass USA podcast, my friend. Thank you.

Thank you for having me. We are very excited to have you joining us, and we'd like to learn a little bit more about you and learn about your background as customary on our show. we like to highlight different people from different walks of life, all of which tend to have some type of a connection to TurboPass. So if you don't mind, in your own words, can you introduce yourself and give us an overview of your current role and your current responsibilities and what you're up to these days? Sir, I'm glad to be a part of the advisory board. I've been a big fan of the TurboPass products for many years in my prior life at CarMax, but currently I serve as the vice president of prime automotive financial services here. So the big question is because we are the

biggest duo group that you've never heard of because of how Traiting Auto is structured. So let me give you just a little bit of a background. Think about Training Auto. Who we are. How do we can't eat? You've got the traditional models that you may be very familiar with and we'll just use auto nation as an example. You get an automation. You get a couple of guys with big roles of money who are interested into the car business. They go out and they start acquiring dealerships. They brand them all automation, run them centrally. Great organization, right?

So you get the economies of steel that you get with having a large organization. But, you know, they're going out and buying up the dealerships and they run them their way. Okay. That's kind of the model for them. Triton is a, it's a whole lot different. Our tagline here is by dealers for dealers. And what that means. is you get a group of dealers who initially got together and formed a Trident automobile.

And they were looking to get the economies of all the nations of the world's have, that the Lithuas of the world, some of the other sides. The big publics that are out there, how can we get the economy to sell that these guys hang? Well, the only way we can do it without selling out to some of the big players out here, the big publics, is we can combine forces. and we can build a management company that will go and provide these white label products and services and negotiate contracts and things on our behalf. But we will still own our own dealerships, right? They will still set up our names on and we'll still run them our way. But we will own the management company, which on our behalf will go out and do all of the big public to Central. That's how I got involved in this, a couple of years.

years ago after I have retired from Carmex after 23 years. These folks interested in building a finance channel. What, what CarMax is, not quite as closed loop as what Carmex is, because it is, you know, completely organic. Everything internally. Don't use Route 1. Don't use dealer track. Don't do any of these things. They literally build everything themselves.

All the activity between the stores and the finance sources and these kind of things. but the thing that makes it work so well is the partners who are going to be on your platform and you get to earn fees and this kind of thing from the folks that are on your platform. These are very interested in that. So they had a couple of different ideas, a couple of things they wanted to explore all the ways to build your own company, to engaging somebody to do a white label for these companies for us, to the bare minimal, which is where we started, which was just enter into some, some relationships with a handful of finance companies and start in and start trying to

concentrate contract volumes with them to not only earn a C on having them on the platform, but to also start building those relationships. And as I like to call it, get more impact out of each of the finite sources that you have there because the more business that you do with somebody, the more they're likely to do for it. That's where I came in because, you know, look, when you work at CarMax, you are typically everybody's largest customer, right? You are the biggest one out there on the block.

So I had a leg up there in being able to get to the right people at the right finance. You should get introduced to this whole concept of Triton Auto and what that might look like. So they hired me out of retirement. I'll stay retired about 60 days. I did not get to improve my golf handy at all, even though I'm cooling four in a week. They drive me right back out, putting me right back to work. But it's been great fun.

We've gone from having our original eight dealer groups and out of 16 dealer groups that we represent here with the management company. We've literally doubled inside. And we actually sent to put pen to paper here a few, about a month ago, looking at the automotive news reports on number of sales, number of repiles. You know, when we are the largest group you've never heard of, we actually placed in both roof stops, number of, of thousand total number of sales every year. Numbers in the nation. But nobody's ever heard of us. Not too shabby.

It's awesome. Not too shabby at all. So, you know, the brinkly about the, about trying this. You know, this is by invitation only. I like to, I like to equate us to or, you know, people like Frame of Reefords, the most, it slips costo that you could join. So unless one of the family members reaches out to you as a, the dealer of group owner and said, look, we would like to fight you to talk to the

means to come up to see if you're in. And being a part of Triton, then you don't get it. It's just as simple as that because at the end of the day, the family members all want to make sure the people who are part of our group or people that they can get along with the owner-daily mates is people who do business the way that they like. Everybody is a board. Everything is what people well respected in their communities and all these types of things. So it's been a great thing for. I'm thrilled to death two and a half years later to be here and doing this. And we just added our favorite funding to our preferred lender roster this week.

As a matter of fact. So, you know, we go all from nothing to drive and are seeing a great thing. And what we're trying to do here from the teams at stores. So it's all in the right direction. Absolutely. Sounds like a pretty productive retirement, first of foremost. most for you. And second of all, I'm really impressed with the whole, it's kind of like you guys are kind of a humble giant over there, you know, you're bigger than what people realize, but you're

still kind of somewhat low key about it, but you're moving behind the scenes. They're making some big moves, right? That's exactly right. That's really exciting. Really cool stuff. How about this, Jeff? Take me back to the very beginning of your career. Were you always an auto industry guy? Did you do some other stuff. What did that look like? How did your career evolve from the very, very early stage of that? And how did you kind of get into this? If it wasn't the very beginning, then how did you lead up to getting into the auto industry? I'll be happy to tell you, because it's been it. Because I'm not a young man anymore. So it was a long time ago. Let me say well I can. Can recall them. I went in the military in 1984, joined the Air Force, 19, and stayed on active duty until

in 1890. So when I got out of the service, my, my dad, who was the consummate salesman, and was a former Marine, and only a former now, but I don't know with us. They're very peculiar about that to Murray for his. And I had a great love, one, for people, for automobiles, and I love to talk. So my dad says, look, we need to get you in sale some somehow some way. And since you love cars, you have any interest in. going to work in a car dealership. At that time, my day was the general manager of the Honda store in my hometown of Rock Hill, South Carolina. You probably picked up on the Southern accent here, and a handful of words that I've told you here so far.

So I said, yeah, look, I'd be thrilled to go give out a world. So this was in the early days, Hendry called a Movedere. So I went to work for Honda there in my hometown, learned about, selling cars, learn about Infini, learn about all the things that you have to learn to be successful. There in the auto retail business was a great organization

who can't say enough things about the good group. They were firm believers and training and making sure that people you know, answer customer questions they could do it in really a very complying way. And they were very serious about that. And I thought it was great

because not to be a part of anything that was even the slight. It's a bit shape, and they were anything but. So I was thrilled to death to work for Hendert for a couple of years, and then all of a sudden, 1990s, a little small startup company that nobody really gave much of the time of day, showed up in Charlotte, North Carolina, by the name of Carmich, showed up on Independence Boulevard in North Carolina. And I said, you know what? They are doing something interesting here. So I went up there to take a look at what CarMax was all in and was blown away, one, by the, and the amount of vehicles that were there

in having a sense of customer appreciation that you yet walking through the thing. And I knew right there that this was going to be a place for me. So I left Hembrook, went to work for CarMax as a part-time salesman. Wow. Found out I had a background in F&O, and they were in a used car leasing test back. back then because at that point done a car max so we had 11 store open and actually at that point

and they've never done anything like used car leasing or anything along the line in a car max store so I had a very unique skill set. The gentleman who I wound up going to work for who I worked for him for 21 years until he retired, I actually came from the automobile industry as well.

So they hired me to go with the used car leasing. That worked out really well only for us to find out over time that it wasn't repeatable unless you have somebody who has it feels it. And as a dual rule, car match just had hired many people that came from the auto retail. It was a culture. Wow. Really was a clash for a down. So the used car leasing was only successful if you could do it. We did in a small

number of locations for a very short period of time. And they rolled it sidewall on that one and decided we were going to do something a little different, which was create a centralized finance office. Run this thing out of our offices down in Loud George where CarMax ultimately. So I went from Sun Cars part-time for them to the U-S-Far leasing to run the U-S car leaseings to running what turned into a centralized infanize shop that we did there at CarMax. And my career grew from there from simply doing the, doing the Pinai functions there, how a version of it, which really was just, you know, teach your people how to rehash deals and teaching how to sign up on stipulations and doing these kind of thing,

where I got all my introduction to the remote workforce doing these things like things. And then it evolved into fraud and risk mitigation because, you know, I was in a very unique position. A current re-operated not only as the rebate, also as the capital finance stores, but we all to me and this is a third-party financial relationship with outside finance company. So I've literally got to be in the middle of all three of those things. That's what I, you know, the next 20 years of my life doing there until the time that I retired in 2020.

So I saw as grow from 11 stores selling 100,000 cars a year to the, in 2020 when I retired, we had, it was 226 locations. And we sold 832,000 cars. My gosh. And another 500,000 in a whole. So we went from being really small and did a really small to be in really big. and be able to with all of it. So it was a great opportunity for me to do a skill that I needed to transition after retire and to do a job like that.

Correct. Yeah. Wow. What a cool journey, Jeff. I mean, just being able to be a part of something that, I mean, CarMax is a household name now, you know, and when you got involved with it, probably very few people knew about who CarMax was, right? And so.

It was very funny. The gentleman that I worked with there at Hendr, Honda there in my hometown when I told them where I was going to where I was going to do, they said, you'll be back in 90 days. They said, it's not going to catch on. People like to have. People want to get a good deal. People don't want to say, no, you can't negotiate there, so you can't negotiate. Isn't that something?

Yeah. Golly. Not true. People do like to have a nice, good experience without a lot of the, you know, some of the relatives that you can. get in a traditional, you know, transaction. 100%. 100%. There's no doubt about it.

I've got another question. And then after that question, I know Ken has something lined up for you. But this is a question that I, this is one of my favorites. It might require the gears to crank just a little bit, but take your time. Sure. The question that I have, Jeff, is can you share a notable achievement or milestone that, you know, throughout somewhere throughout that long career that you had, in the auto world that you were particularly proud of,

something that really kind of stood out to you somewhere along that long journey. Sure. Well, we had a lot because, you know, obviously being Carmis, we are inventing everything. Right. I think if I had to look back on my whole career there and say that really, when I look back on and go, man, that was really a big deal. I had no idea how big deal was. But I can look back on it now and certainly the environment,

that I'm in now where everything is so decentralized. Yes. Not only the deal of groups, but the individual rooftops themselves really strikes me. When you're in the role of trying to fraud and risk, that the ability to be able to put your hands on the pulse of everything that goes on, everywhere, all day, without having to really be conscious of what's going on, that you've really done something. So the thing that I look back at is a system that we put in place at Carmack

that literally listen to every credit application and every transaction that was going on in real time. It would the capability of identifying people that it had seen, sending applications from a place over here and now there's applications for a place over here did the information line up between the application? These kinds of things. We call it the Ragnar systems for risky activity, detection, and risk. And it literally listened to everything that went on there in real. So if you're going to hold on a fraud and risk mitigation program,

this was the best that you took over because you literally knew everything was going on at every store called. Wow. And I think it was probably one of the things that I look back only. you know, man, I was really glad I was part of that team. They put that thing together, obviously, it was a huge effort to make all of that work. I bet. It really paid off. Yeah.

And what they were able to do or what we were able to do with it to minimize the risk that we face. Because, you know, being an actual retailer and you're, you know, so many locations and selling so many car. Without the ability to be able to in real time see what's going on everywhere, Yep. You're going to miss a lot of things. And the criminals note. Correct. They would get out there and trying to take it back.

Wow. Incredible achievement. And what a cool project to be able to build out for, you know, again, for such a big company like CarMax. Ken, you're up, my friend. What's on your mind? What's on your mind for you enough today? Yeah. You know, the thing that always struck me about CarMax was the fact that they put the building in front of the cars.

Can you tell me. when that happened and how that happened or what i would think that was part of the original design you go back to the beginning of car mac for the who may not be aware of this carmance was wholly owned by circuit and it was a certain brain jumping and really they got they got started or carmacks was born out of the idea that service as big a circus city could right there was literally nowhere left to to build any more stores than this got so they wanted to find some other venture to get into. Lots of great ideas came up, but the one,

they sort of all clearly, became the used car retail space because it was so big. And it was one that the barriers to entry weren't going to be all that great because at that time, there were lots of cars laying around. Right. Like it had a couple of years short. But it was also an area where you could get in here and you can make a name for yourself and you could be different by doing it. were much more customer-friend. That was the whole thing.

How can we make this a transferer being customer-friendly? You make this honest-this. This is the way we used to speak. Was we want this to be like walking into our circuit city and you're coming to buy and apply. So you're looking to buy a refrigerator. We've got 22 refrigerators here, how much they cost.

You get that one. You know that what you're going to pay. It's the way they wanted car mix to be. So part of what they did, did to exture. And I thought this was just a stroke of jeeps for whoever thought this. More than make sure that we could get in front of consumers to tell them that story. So the only way that you had, and because consumers were accustomed to going to a car line, drive there where the cars were,

jumping out of their own car, looking at a car or two, looking around to see anybody's coming to talk to their own the lot. And if they saw somebody telling them that they could jump in their car and they could jump in their car and they could. get away. Yep. When they design car and say, look, let's put the cars over here where you can't get to them. You can't drive out there to them at all. So, well,

honestly, that helps you with potential insurance claims. Those are those things. People have an accident in your parking lot in this sort of thing. But if you force everybody, three, the billing, then you have to make a turn to get out to where the cars are. You have an opportunity to be able

to stop a consumer. Hi, welcome to carmen. Let me take just two minutes of your time. Tell me what this is all about. They're going to turn you loose and let you go out there and look at all the cars. By doing that, the consumers, all of a sudden, their guard would let down. As soon as you tell them here, we're going to let you go look at whatever you want to, well, actually I do want you to call and open up because we kept all the cars locked out there too with the keys.

And lockboxes is on the window. So, I mean, it was just literally little things that made it really a great experience. for the consumers because people from the inside and get keys, do this kind of thing. But because of what, there was no pressure in all. People rarely even gravitated to her. But that's where the design for the building came from was,

how can I get in front of the consumer, keep them away from the cars, just blowing down long enough to explain why we're doing. That is the coolest story I've heard in a long time. See, it seems like I spent my whole career trying to get people in the building. And CarMax sort of did it just through Finquity who was setting the place up correctly.

And it's pretty awesome. With floor plan design. Yeah. Jeff, is there some is there, I'm sorry, Ken, let me just ask this one of a little bit of a motion and then you go into that. Is there any kind of a, for lack of a better term, a patent on that process, Jeff, and the way that's set up so that others can't replicate it or,

because I don't really see that anywhere else. It seems like... As far as I know that there's no intellectual property on the laid out of the buildings and other things, look, one of the things that you find, there's been a couple of people.

Because remember back in this time, this was 97 when I came to work here, Alderman Nation was full-blown trying to build big super stores like Carmack's was, only they continue to run them like a traditional dealership, you know, which is not how we get things there.

But no, as far as I know, there's nothing that would preclude somebody from doing that. It's just, are you willing to make that investment to change your sales processes and do this kind of thing? Most people just aren't willing to. Right. Because what they've done has worked for a long time in the environment that they do in, which is fine. Makes sense.

Great. Go ahead. But what else you got? Well, yeah. So it's cool. You transition from used cars to new cars, car stores, right? Because the tag. Now, that's a brilliant acronym, too.

tag. It's awesome. And our logo here, got a little car. Yeah. Love it. So you transitioned from used to new, and I'm wondering now, we're midway through 23, and you're, I'm sure, talked to a lot of the, you know, the principals there at the dealerships in the Trident Group. What's kind of, what are the concerns right now?

What problems are you guys trying to solve or the new car dealers, try to solve. Well, there's a couple of things that are very prevalent out there for anybody in the retail space right now. One is availability of vehicle. You know, they're just now starting to see inventory levels starting to come back. Right. So now you've got to get out of the mode of being, well, look, I've got one truck here,

eight people who want, who's willing to pay the most for it, right, sort of thing. To now I'm getting 10 trucks and six customers. And we're having to get back to actually selling a little bit. Good problem to have. Well, after that, you've got some inventory to be able to sell, but now you've got to best off your salesmanship chop and get out there and do something. The thing that really is starting to become a concern for everybody, and this is where we come in within the private and auto financial services piece,

is available to credit, and then how expensive that the credit is now. Because you look back over the, what's saying like every month, federal rate heights and the buy rates on everybody's consumer offers going up. So you take a combination of fewer vehicles, people pay more for them. Now the money's more expensive as well. It creates a real squeeze for the consumer out there. So that's one of the things that's really a concern for, you know, for everybody new is can consumers afford the payment because of, you know, the lack of availability of

inventory, which, you know, start slowly, picks itself. But also, you know, what the finance companies are having to charge in buy rates, you know, to the consumers because of the cost of that you pay income at this point. So credit has gotten and, you know, obviously as Lation goes up, so does losses out there, you know, for our finance companies and, you know, people are going delinquent more often. People are defaulting more often. And so it's become kind of a perfect storm of rates going to continue to rise in and credit availability continue to shrink.

So it's very concerned. Yeah. Those are huge issues for sure. Yeah, I think that's kind of the elephant in the room right now, right? And we've got a lot of economic uncertainty out there. And so everyone's got these things on their mind. So I can certainly understand that. You got another follow-up question, Ken?

Well, going back to CarMax a little bit, I'm, you know, I'm sure I know they, it seems like they started with some pretty impactful innovations like no haggle pricing, the way of the layout of the dealership. What did you see them over time, you know, what other, you know, how did they evolve with the times as, you know, because that was 97, right? And it does seem like the car business hasn't changed that much, you know, maybe. Right. The thing you know, I think that they have done a really great job with, and we were in full-blown transition mode in 2020 when I retired from there, is trying to make sure that we could meet the customer where the customer wanted to be met, whether it's 100% online, deliver the car to your home,

or the traditional customer who wants to come. them in, drive-side cars, think about it, bring phoenix some outside, use for the instruments and we wanted to make sure that we were able to accommodate whatever the consumer want, and however they wanted to interact with us. So, yeah, back in 19 and 20 and 21, we were making the transition to the what we called customer experience center. You had people who were dedicated and trained to do nothing but the digital interoperations. for the consumer, whether it be email, whether it would be chat, whether it would be

phone call, these kind of things, as opposed to trying to have people at the store level that were good at all of them. We had people who were very good on the phones, very good with email, and we had other people who were very good with a demonstration in face-to-face interaction. And we let people gravitate towards the thing that best, that their personalities these and their skills. And I thought that was a great use of the Hewin capital that they had because, you know, you wind up giving the consumer the best experience possible. So if they wanted to do everything online, that's great.

We can do it. You want us to deliver to your home. We can do it. You want to come into the store. We got you covered there. You want to transfer vehicles from one place to another. That's one of the pieces of the secret sauce there is once you reach a certain size, you got the availability to put your entire inventory online.

Look consumers know you can look from here to here. And within this radius is three. And we can have it there for long of it. It does something to people's minds it. So they don't have to look at something here. Well, that car is blue. But you've got a rainbow over here that I would really like to have. And it's only an hour away.

And you can get it here tomorrow. If you'll transfer that car here to me, I want to come a little. that was just into real game change it's awesome definitely that's great stuff go ahead cam what were you think yeah no i mean it's been an awesome conversation i mean i've been in the car business you know as long as you have and i don't even someone younger than me i don't understand me you must well i'm not that much younger than you actually but no it's been it's been an awesome conversation. I, you know, I started with a little, you know, working for my dad at a car lot and his buyer payer dealership. And I just love history. So yeah, I feel like I got a little history

lesson today on the boys in the auto industry. There's no doubt about it. Let's start wrapping it up here a little bit, Jeff. I just have a couple of a couple more questions here as we start to wind down. Obviously, a lot of what you guys are talking about is kind of the evolution of the auto industry and things that have changed. And there's no denying the fact that technology has played an enormous role in these changes, especially since the 90s till today. I mean, it's kind of crazy to think that in the mid-90s, there was no internet. So, I mean, it's just, and now here we've got, you know, chat GPT and all this crazy AI stuff. And I mean, it's, things have moved so quickly. And I, obviously, I just can't help but to mention the fact that Turbo Pass is obviously playing a big role in, I think

the evolution of how the technology is being handled within the auto space. Could you just speak a little bit on your experience with TurboPass and maybe what you like about and why you chose to kind of be a part of it as an advisor? Absolutely. So when I was mentioned earlier, the transition that we had from doing everything at the store level to moving these big customer experience centers and being able to meet the consumer where the consumer wanted us to meet them to to train business. one of the things, you know, from you know who your customer is, sort of a mindset, I really saw some of the things that TurboPank offered at that point in the suite of tools has gotten clearly better over time. I saw a real opportunity there for some identity validation

and things that we can. And certainly, when you think about to get as much of the transaction done before you have to physically interact with a consumer. Certainly when you have proofs that are required income and residence and these signs of things, was there a way to be able to get your hands of all these things quicker and easier than having a consumer to take your home or seeing an email and these kind of things. The thing that I really wanted to try to get away from was helping people have to you get in and do manual

calculations on income and other sense of them, right? Miss some of the nuances. But every single company is a little bit different. They all look a little different. And I thought, if we, if there was a tool that was out, one could be very

easy to eat, that they could give us the information that we need, that we could take and send information directly to a finance source without me having to rely on somebody that either may have a really great skills or a really bad looking documentation of being able to sign the holes on it

and say, yes, this is good, this mixed requirement. If I could tell that person out of this process that's directly to financials and let them tell you whether it was going to be good or not, that was going to be a win for me because one thing I would tell is people get good at what they do a lot of, right? But if you're a typical manager in a store, you may not look at documentation from a consumer once every couple of days. If you take the days off and you come back,

you haven't seen a few days in. You're attunedness to one, Hokie, as I like to call them hokey documents, things that make you cook themselves or download from a novelty website or some of the other things that are out there is really not that good. But if you're doing these sounds of things every day, this is all you do every day. And I thought that was going to be a game changer for us in the auto.

Because that allows you, certainly with some of these remote tools like with TurboPax, where you can help you remotely doing these things if you can get them to do it. Or you can bypass this all together. You go straight to the plant, which is a super alternate. So I definitely wanted to get the turbovettes installed at CarMax before I retired, but did not do it done before then. So here I am. I see the value.

I see the value. And I've been friends and acquaintances with many of the guys on the turbo pass team for years. And it really kept up with what they've been doing and how things are going for in the marketplace. And so when they approach about this, I absolutely, look, I believe in what you guys are. I see a universal application for this thing. even outside of auto repair. Right. How many other avenues of business can you make something like this easy for a consumer to use?

And something makes them feel better and more trusting the entire process of what's going on. And you reduce sales. You make for many people. There's literally no downs. Yes. Correct. That's right. Man,

very well said, Jeff. Beautifully spoken. And we both Ken and I really appreciate all your feedback. And you know what? we may actually, we may have to bug you a little bit about getting one of your, one of your little CarMax friends over as a future guest on the TurboPass USA podcast. So don't be surprised if that comes down the line somewhere. I want to close with this on a lighter note. What does Jeff Griffith do when he's not working? So you almost retired. You got this close to

retiring and then they pulled you back, but you seem to be really enjoying yourself. But what do you do if you're, you know, it's a weekend and you finally logged out of the computer and you got some free time. And who do you typically spend that free time with? So it's a heap of all of my hobbies begin with the letter G. I keep doing it. There's no. There's guitars. And there's guns.

Nice. Love it. I can't figure out how to get motion to in there with letter G. I do love to ride in my, I do love to ride on a motorcycle. I probably play. I play golf. any you know it's a age appropriate i have a lot of presupprens we go out there to give us opportunity to

ride around on top of trash to each other and enjoy so for me while we're on the plane that is fantastic my friend can you got any final parting words before we let mr jeff get back to his triple g activities no we really appreciate you on the show man that it was awesome love talking to you love love hearing your southern accent too man Well, I appreciate. The 10 and I, we talk all the time. He calls me up and I being his ear for much longer than he ever intended.

I love it. I could listen to you all day. And he listens. I got a meeting of 45 minutes and I die off the phone before. It's one of the real names of working from home all the time. So the only person I got to talk to around here is a doll. And he's left the room. So when I get the opportunity to talk somebody,

I like to take full advantage. gentlemen. The kids into the ring from time to time. Good, but I enjoy. I love talking. Well, I'll tell you what, Jeff. You are the epitome of a Southern gentleman, and we really do appreciate your time today and all your feedback,

and you've left us with some great information and some golden nuggets. And who knows, we might have to invite you back here another time one day. Well, I'd love to, love to join. Glad to. I'll let me help again. Aguilus Prada. I think you got a very long runway. for all many different senses of the retail work.

This is just the beginning going after, you know, what's happening in auto. So, thrilled to be part of the team. Fantastic. I think that about does it, gentlemen. And that's a wrap for another episode of the TurboPass USA podcast. We will catch you here next time. Thank you for listening to the TurboPass USA podcast. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show,

or to listen to past episodes, please visit turbopassusa.com forward slash podcast.