¶ Intro with Paul J Daly, Kyle Mountsier and Michael Cirillo
You know, we, the three of us, are very busy, right? Multiple companies, multiple things we're doing, which means we're always looking to start something new.
This is Auto Collabs, because
we have so much free time always. And we were texting early this morning before a lot of people were going up and out, you know what's coming. And Michael is sending us cover art options of his face for his dealer playbook podcast. And then I drop in, I'm like, I've been thinking about this, right? And I drop one in, and then Kyle's on, like, oh yeah, I've been thinking about this. And he's got a full on Home Page built, and so I guess this is the official
announcement. I mean, Michael dealer playbook, podcast and Og podcast and automotive. You know, I'm firing mine back up, clarity, compress. Kyle is going to start a new one called you're smart, which is so applicable. I sent him my version of his cover art he didn't like.
What was that five pound face?
But? But, you know, I bring that up because our today's guest is someone who is always starting something. He's the one person that can't sit still. Colby Joyner, he's been on the show before. He's been a long time friend, and now he's working for one of Michael's company's lift kit, which, you know, Michael couldn't, he wasn't planned, but he couldn't be on the on the episode. But, yeah, so we asked Colby, what's it really like working for
Michael? Well, I guess, I guess, I hope we're not gonna ask him that. We're not gonna ask him that I know. Well, the reason we can say like we've already recorded the episode, because Michael's not on it, that's right. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Have fun. Have a fun. Listen. This is our conversation with COVID. I have a big time question for you. We've been we've done a lot
of content together. We were just talking about where you you have some of the most og ASOTU merch of anyone that we know, including the signed hat from the party, including the PO app, which is an NFT that we issued. But the question is, can you give us your very best? Michael Cirillo,
very best,
just, I'm so curious. I mean, what I'm gonna say? I'm nervous. I know. I think we just done. I know how I would start mine, aside from the fact that your boss, in
the landscape of retail, automotive, this sort of the dealer playbook, sponsor, ah, I thought, I
thought you were gonna come out with so I'm curious. That's a good one. I would do that one I was expecting. Just hold my hands up like this. Go.
God, well,
Colby, it's awesome to have you on the show. Um, you, you're just very well plugged in around the industry. You share our heart for the industry. Um, you're doing some new and exciting things. Nada, show is right around the corner. So we're excited. We get to see you in person, but just tell us about the last, you know, six to 12 months of what's been going on, or what you've been observing in the auto industry.
Let's start there. We'll talk about what you're doing now and all that, but, but I would love to hear your observations on the state of the automotive union.
¶ A Year to Build: Colby discusses why 2025 is a pivotal year for the auto industry to focus on preparation and foundational growth for future success.
You know, it's, it's funny, the if you were to say the last 12 months, I would probably focus on the first six. If you're going to say the last six months, I'd probably say next question. You know, it's been crazy. You know, I'm calling this like a rebuild year. You know, 24 is almost up. 25 is going to be huge, and both in my life, and both in my career. And, you know, I think in the industry as a whole, what I feel like the industry has been is, for lack of better
words, kind of distracted. You know, there was the CDK thing that happened in the middle of the year, and then, you know, that's coming back up. And now you have, you know, other companies that are trying to jump in and replace what CDK was for them. And then you had the tech young CDK thing that was a couple weeks ago with that, you know, the non mentionable stuff. And, you know, I feel like there's a lot of, hey, look at
me. Distraction on the outside and on the inside, they're not looking outside like they are plugged in trying to figure out, okay, how do we secure how do we be more efficient? How do we build in a time that we should be building? You know, there was a, I hate to go on on this, but there was a thing that many years ago, my mom told me, Hey, you're gonna have good days, bad days, good weeks, bad weeks, good months, bad months, good years, bad years. And it's a cycle. It's gonna go over and
over and over again. And I was talking to my son about that recently, and I kind of added to it, and I said, Look, in the good times, you have to build as much as you can on that foundation that you have so that you can weather the bad times when they come. If you do not build in the good then when the bad times come, you're going to have no walls to surround yourself with, to protect yourself. So I think right now, good
man, as you say that, I'm thinking about the podcast, the clubhouse rooms, the events, the the webinars, the all of the things that happened over the last like, we'll call it three to five years, talking about that exact thing, right? Like build the wall, set up the structures, train your people now get get good reserve funds so that when, like, all of these things that were in all of this good in all this craziness, inventory shortage leads to high
profitability. You know, all of those things, used car pricing is, is, is leading to profitability, increased turns and everybody there was all like the rage to talk about it. But I think right now, we're starting to discover who actually did the work, right?
Yeah, that's whether who's
trying to be about it, right? Now,
that's a really, you know, I was reading this morning I have this little kind of, like morning readings I do, and they're about, it's about the book of Proverbs in the Bible, and it's a book about wisdom, and it's like morning readings about wisdom. And one the thing that today was very appropriately aligned with what you just said. And it's basically that the premise is this, like, you only get wisdom from experience, right? You can try to learn it, but you get it
by doing, right? And you can't, in the same way that, like when hard situations come, if you haven't been building the well of wisdom, you're not going to have the wisdom you need to deal with the hardest situations, right? In the same way you can't, you know, train for the Olympics by working out a lot for two weeks before the game,
right? And so I think what all of you're saying, what we are about to see in the next in 2025, to Kyle's point is, who's been doing it, who's not been doing it, and, and you're right, Colby, like the this is a year to build. It does feel like that in every sense of the word, when there's when there's a sense of abundance and a lack of, like, restraint and constraints, like we've been dealing with for the last three and a half, four
years. This finally feels like, okay, like the the runners, like swimming athletes, they'll swim in, like, in, like, a sweat suit, right? And then they'll like, sweat suit comes off, and you feel like he can swim twice as fast as you ever did, right? And that maybe that is what 2025
is good? Yeah, I definitely think great episode
guys. I mean, what else are you gonna say that's better than that? What else are you gonna say? What
a mess. Yeah, no, I definitely think that, you know, over the last several years, everybody had the ability to just kind of spend at will and say, oh, I want to do this. I want to try this. I want to do this. I want to do this. And they did, and they got tons of opportunities. They were working on their processes at that time, so they were maximizing as best as they could at the time those opportunities. But now that spend, it will. Mindset isn't there? You can't necessarily do
that. You kind of have to go back to a structured Hey, we have this much money to spend. How are we going to benefit from it? The best what are we going to get the best opportunity? What kind of opportunities are we looking for? It's no longer just hey, fill up the bucket.
It's which ones do we need? And now I feel like a lot of people are getting far more detailed and specific on, hey, I want to, I want to sell more of this specific trim level of Silverado, because it does the best for us, and we can be the market leader in that. Or I want to, you know, focus on, you know, our service department and increase our, our service, our, you know, Ro count, or dollars per RO, you know, with, like, the UVI stuff, you know, in any of these things. So I think right now
where, like, I think, like, I'm gonna go back to, like, 2008 2009 websites are really starting to get there. We're starting to get, like, more and more people are understanding the digital advertising ecosystem and and it's like, everybody's like, at some point we'll have the data to know what to do next. And then we spent the next 10 years going, what is this data? Where is this data? How do we find this data? How do we report on it? What does it what does the
reporting look like? How do we match it up and do all these things to kind of like, connect advertising or connect, you know, even inventory purchasing to action, and we're starting to see reporting match actionable insights, where people can actually make movements based on what they're seeing in like either historical or future facing data, where there's predictive modeling on what might make sense for their business. Are you seeing?
Dealers start, and even industry partners start to adjust their thesis on, like, more predictive analytics that that tell them, like, where to move next.
¶ Smarter Inventory Strategies: How dealers can leverage predictive analytics and data to optimize their inventory decisions and marketing efforts.
Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing people talk about mixed media modeling, you know, and trying to figure out where's the best place to put funds, you know, taking a look at historical data and being able to project out, knowing month, day, year, you know, seasonal. This is the way it should be, so that there isn't a reaction or an overreaction to a result. You know, that result could be
perfectly fine. It may be lower than it was two months ago, but it's 10% higher than it was year over year in the same period. You know, I think it's, I think there's a lot more people that are becoming educated about that data and saying, hey, it's not just an instinctual like, Oh, that looks bad, or I want more. It's like, okay, well, let's take a look at the past. Let's take a look at what we could see in the future. And does this make sense? Is there growth here, or is there not growth?
And is there not growth because of something? And is that something that we can change?
Yeah, you've, you've, obviously, you've recently made a move and into a platform that is managing inventory for people in kind of a unique way. And I talk a lot about how merchandising is kind of the first step in marketing, right? If you can't get that right, if you don't know what you have to sell, where you have to sell it, and merchandise it, right, then, like the rest, you're just wasting dollars on the other end, when you think about this, like, Okay, we
understand the data. We understand how do you loop that back into an inventory plan, an inventory strategy that actually allows this new data model, media mix model, understanding your KPIs for business outcomes. How do you loop that back into inventory strategies? And what kind of strategies are you kind of seeing dealers take on?
Well, I think the interesting thing, especially with lift kit and what we're doing and, you know, and I told you guys kind of at the beginning, like, this isn't a pitch, this is just what we're
doing. But is the ability to AB test, is the ability to say, hey, I want to send a specific, customized mapped feed to cards.com versus a mapped feed to Auto Trader with maybe different descriptions, maybe different photos or backgrounds of photos, you know, or maybe different pricing, or, you know, like to be able to genuinely AB test it in the smaller environment that's outside of your OEM site, you know, where you're spending money out there, like, Hey, I don't want to spend
$7,000 on cars.com right now, because they Want to list every ounce of my inventory. I just want I know that I can sell the
trucks. I just want the Traxxas, and I want the EVS on cars.com so I'm going to send them just a specific syndicated feed of just that, and that's what they're going to put on there, and that's how, that's how I'm going to So now, instead of spending seven grand, I'm spending 2500 bucks, but getting the same kind of traction results, or better that I can get, you know, by doing it that way, I think the being able to specifically AB test it and send out customized items to know that if you go in
one place and you put the price or description or you have all the appropriate information that you need to have on that vehicle, with all the photos that you need to have. And it, you know that with the click of a button, it goes everywhere, the way it should be, and you have faith and trust in it. And if it fails in one spot, you are aware of it. Know exactly who to get a hold of and switch it on.
You know, we in this industry, this is interesting. I haven't talked about this a lot, but we in this industry, kind of like, there's a lot of people that will tend to hate on the third parties, right? The auto traders, the cars.com the gurus, the admins, all that type of stuff. And for the life of me, I don't really understand why, because we all shop third party listing aggregators all the time, every in every other industry, right? Amazon, Google, flights, price
line, hotels. Google hotels like these are third party aggregators. And if we only take the hotels, and this is where I'm getting somewhere at this, because you brought up something that I don't think we've thought
about a lot. If you only look at hotels and even flights, these Hoteliers and airlines have actually started syndicating specific rooms at specific price points to specific listings providers because they know they either perform well or the traffic on those is demographically Yeah, and you actually get like, because that's and that's how you get these different prices, and then that's why you get Google aggregating like, here's, here's what you can find on Priceline
booking.com, all that type of stuff, because different providers, different people, different shopping behaviors, different incentives for even pricing or how the listing looks. And. This is like, this is an opportunity to think about that, like, by platform, what performs? What am I sending there? How do people shop on that platform? Like, oh, car gurus is a Pricing Platform. Auto Trader is a whatever platform for us in this area, this is the behavior that's a
really like. It actually aligns to what that plot, to what those platforms are actually going after,
¶ Platform-Specific Marketing: The importance of tailoring vehicle merchandising to specific third-party platforms for better engagement and ROI.
right? I mean, think about it. You have so And mind you, I'm not, you know, putting any other company down, like you have evn, right? You have evn. That does the GM, you know, the digital representation. They do Kia, they do Genesis, they do other ones. When that's pushed out and syndicated out, you have the typical background, digital background of the dealership that's behind it, right? And that gets to syndicated out
everywhere. So if you go to auto trader or cars.com or car gurus, or anywhere that you're going to do, you know your search that's what it is. Doesn't it all look the same at that point, you're you're just saying, like your your eye is catching that it's blue and that it may have the lowest price. So there, at that point, you're not building any what they used to call ether, in the excitement of that vehicle, it's just like, I need to find blue, lowest price. Blue, lowest
price. But now you're able to go and say, hey, I want that, like the same vehicle can be out there, but instead of that background that is the classic dealership background. It's Christmas time. I want to do that background with lights on the on the building, where I want to do that background, if I'm in the forest with, you know, Santa, or, you know, the Coca Cola bears, or, you know, something, it can it can be as silly. Doesn't really matter what you want.
Actually, with all the new generative tools out there, it's going to be easier than ever to generate differentiated backgrounds.
So as you're going flexible, all of a sudden, your eye is automatically going to catch that. Something's different about this one. It still looks good, but something's different. It makes you just take that half a second longer to take a look at it. And if you build value props, and you build name and brand reputation in that, especially in the local area, you are more likely to get that click on that individual, you know, on that SRP, where your vehicle is. Then you know, if it wasn't changed,
same thing with social. You get it pushed out on social, you have the carousels running, or whatever it may be. You can be specific about what campaign you want to run with specific backgrounds for Facebook that have to do with whatever's going on. And so I think that allows in a in a world where there's, in a digital world where there's, you know, everybody trying to capture the attention and the eyes of the consumer, and everybody is saying, Hey, you just need to be everywhere
all at once. Yes, you can be everywhere, but you can be very specific about where with what and how it looks. So,
so that's, that's one application of what you're doing, right? Actually, it's bringing some flexibility to bring creativity and art and brand into something that has become standardized, you know, by some OEM requirements, etc, or not requirements, but easy to use content, I guess, generated. What are some of the other what are some of the other painting points in the merchandising process? Right? That that you see an opportunity to improve the
how long it is taking, on average, for somebody to have a trade photoed and put up and have some kind of visual representation of what it is, instead of the coming soon. Like, let's be honest, guys. Like, why do we still have coming soon photos? I mean,
if it's coming soon, it's like, it's leaving my screen as fast as I saw it. Yeah, right, coming soon. Nada. Let me know when you have something to sell, right? Yeah. It's like, why you had it on there?
If it's coming soon, like, I'm not gonna buy or even call about something if it's like
that. But because it feels better than nothing, I guess, yeah, right. On our side, we
¶ Solving the "Coming Soon" Problem: Colby's take on speeding up photo uploads and improving vehicle presentation to eliminate unappealing placeholders.
have, like, we put in and developed a mobile uploader. It's nothing fancy, but it works incredibly well. It's a mobile uploader. You go and take the photos of the vehicle. It has the stencils, just like all other companies have stencils, not knocking them at all, yep. But you take the photos of the vehicles with the stencils, you can go and get that car put up. It tells you exactly what to take right there on your phone, your used car manager can go and do that as
soon as it's traded in. You can do it the next morning in a lot walk, knowing from a report that's in lift kit that says, Hey, these are the photos. These are the vehicles don't have photos that are now in stock or in inventory. Pull them out in a lock, walk, have, have everybody take a, you know, take their photos around. And the way that lip kit works is, as soon as they're pushed and uploaded, it will replace the background.
It'll auto adjust where the vehicle needs to be in that background, and it'll place it on the site before lunch,
so it's up. And maybe they're not your studio quality, fully detailed, pristine, but that's eons better than you have. Yeah, you held showman's blanket over the vehicle.
And the good thing is, is the because you want the cleanliness that uniformity on the site with the right. Background, and the cars are spaced right, and they're, they're, they're zoomed in right. It's not like that weird, odd angle, or you're just getting a tail light for whatever reason. You know it's like when you get those cars, as soon as they go up, they're up, and they look and match everything else that's on your
website. As soon as possible, there's, there's no more need for a coming soon photo.
And this is where, like, speed of turn, speed of inventory turn, increased profitability, like all of these things down the line. And I think this, this is going back to the whole like, what were we doing over the last five years? We were looking at the blocking and tackling of the
business, right? What are the things right now that we need to set up so that, like, the hard stuff, when it gets to interacting with the customer in person, to you know selling when you know interest rates are high and pricing is still high and inventory demand is still high, like, You got to get this blocking and tackling stuff out
of the way. And it's like, get your cars photo, get them online, make sure that they they stand up straight, and put them in the right places for the right people based on the shopping behavior, the platform. These are things I think, in this day and age when, when every interaction starts digital, are just table stakes for being in business. You know,
it should be easy, but it hasn't been easy to do that. Yeah, it should be, but it hasn't. I
think, I think every great business starts with those, those two premise, this
should be easy, but it hasn't, but it hasn't been welcome till now. So let me ask you this. Let me, let me
just take the conversation a little bit of a different direction, because I know you're someone who's always dabbling in the new technology. You like to get your hands dirty. Like to get elbows deep in it before everybody else does. We've kind of like run this course now, of the last 18 months, the people who have started dabbling in an AI 18 months ago and beyond, when the first tools were starting to drop, right? You were one of those. And now here we are.
We're hitting this we're gonna hit like a much more mass adoption type curve sometime in 2025 recent stats show that still, only 26% of professionals are using AI tools in their everyday life. What are you using? And what is your perspective on how dealers can be leveraging AI dealers or tech companies or whatever? Because you're always, you're always kind of ahead of the curve in
these things. So, you know, we have our AI newsletter now, and like we're trying to bring this conversation to the front. Hopefully a few people will hear this and like, try something new. See,
¶ Lawn Care AI, Anyone? Colby unveils his experimental AI that helps homeowners tackle lawn challenges with step-by-step guidance.
you need to have that little YouTube subscribe being that goes off, you know. And so I'll start off with this outside of automotive, outside of work and all that stuff. Yeah, I still play around. I'm no Ben Hadley when it comes to, like, creating an AI for of Ben Hadley. You know, no one is, let's just put that out there. But I did, like I did create, and it's, I'm testing it right now with everybody,
real quick before you say that. I thought you were gonna say, but I did say in a holiday and express last but I did finish your finish your actual phrasing.
I'm just missing the boat on some of these opportunities there
for you. They're just bumping set. Yeah,
no, I did create a lawn care ai, Oh,
no. Okay, see, have you, if
you don't know this about Colby, hold on. We got to give him some of the backstory. This man is the most obsessed lawn care advocate you'll ever meet, and a savant all at this. Oh, and he's good at it, and he's good at it. Okay,
it's winter, and it sucks that I can't be doing that. All right, right, but
so you're creating, so, right? So you're creating a lawn care ai, tell us about
this. Like, I already create. It's created. You know, it's just not public, because I'm testing to make sure that all the responses and everything the way it should be. But it has to do with you jump in and you say, Hey, I got a problem. And it's like, cool. What kind of grass Do you have? What season is it? What season is it? What is this? What is that? And ask you some questions. And then it will go through, give you step by steps. It'll it'll email and send out
PDFs of how tos. It'll tell you what to buy, how to buy it, exactly what the amount of product that you may need for it, based off of the size of your lawn, and that products specifications. But come on. So I created this whole thing, and then I also had it to where it does conversational voice and so like this over the past. Right after Christmas, I was with my dad and said, Hey Dad, can you check this out and look at it? And he was doing the button to talk into it to then have it,
type it and send it out. I was like, no, just click that button. So we click together, and the other person was like. The person was like, Oh, hey, Chuck, it sounds like you want to do it on voice. Now that's amazing. And it just he carried on a legit, full on conversation with my lawn care ai. And he was like, Well, I have these brown spots in my yard. And he's like, yeah, that's that's bad. You're probably over watering a little bit like, you may want to check this blah, blah, blah. You know
what? I can send you a whole list of things that you want to look at. Is that? Okay? Yeah, that's fine. Okay, cool. That's email. But you have any other questions,
and it's just, like, amazing. So what platforms Did you leverage? Just give us a quick list. It's
just chat. GBT. I just created a GPT in chat. GBT, the
I don't realize that can email stuff,
yeah, well, there's other prompts and things that can get tossed into it.
Okay, yeah. Oh, okay, okay, yeah, no, that was zappy here. Okay,
that idea. I think the prompt, the prompt sequence and everything, is like 8000 words long. Yeah,
told me, that's amazing. It's clear that you are thinking about not just the basics, but the expansive nature of technology. And always excited to hear what you're thinking about. And thanks for chatting with us again and telling us a little bit about what you're doing. And thanks Auto Collabs. I
love chatting with you guys. I appreciate it. And to let everybody know that if they want to experience some kind of cool, innovative inventory system, here he goes, Yeah, I know. I'm gonna do it last second. I'll have like, hey, 50 people message me, send me a DM, and I'll get you on the beta for free. I'll snap
Michael. Or did you know episode? Actually, you don't know how it went. Did you know about Colby lawn care? Ai thing i
i know that he loves lawns. That's true. I know that from his social media posting of his lawn the founder of, like, a real mower company in South Africa sent him a real mower, yes, like he's now officially the first person I've met in real life, or that I know in real life that actually got a free product because he posted on social I want to do that. And then the AI thing just makes, I mean, obviously,
yeah, smart, yeah. I mean, what I love and, and I think this is anybody that like, we're obviously all three founders together with ASOTU, but also outside of this, and what I love about most of the people that are in startups, whether they're the founder or they're early on, or they're they're also creative, right? Yeah, there's no stopping, like, this new thing I'm making on the side. I tried this this weekend. What do you think about this entrepreneurial activity that
I'm doing? I mean, you just look around the halls of like, so do more than cars and like, people have like, side gigs, and they're they're creating on the side, or they're part of nonprofits and and so I think, like that energy actually is what provides the energy in the day to day to think of like, what's the new thing that needs to be built? What's the thing that didn't we didn't have before, maybe as an industry, or whatever, that now, if we'd have access to it would just be
¶ Creative Energy Fuels Innovation: A look at how entrepreneurial spirit drives fresh ideas in automotive and beyond.
better.
I mean that. I mean like that, that literally is quintessentially a great way to summarize why lift kit exists. Yep, right. It was like one of those things, and there was some creative energy and rolling around in Michael's head. And he's always look, if you don't know this about Michael Cirillo, if he's not like building a company, he's rearranging and tearing apart his desk and then literally lamenting about it in real time. What have I done as
he's taking wires out? It's happened on so many calls, so many calls, and then building it right back up. No, but that, that is why lift kit came to be Michael, right? You saw a thing, and you're like, I gotta. I can do something about this. But enough about me, guys, let's talk about you. Wouldn't you know this is funny. What do you think about me? I think that everybody's gonna
love your new cover art on your podcast. I think that everybody's gonna continue to love the Auto Collabs episodes. We just love sharing stories in the industry, our stories with you. Thank you for listening. On behalf of myself, Paul J Daly and Kyle and Michael Cirillo, not Kyle, that's me.
Thanks for speaking about Himself and the third person now
Collabs See ya.
Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and automotive retail media and pop culture. You can get it now@asotu.com That's asotu.com if you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Welcome to. Monica, last recording you.