AutoNation’s Senior Director of Digital E-Commerce Talks Strategy

Brian Free is the Senior Director of Digital E-Commerce at AutoNation, the largest and most reputable automotive retailer in the U.S. Brian started his career at AutoNation in the IT department in 1997. Since then, he’s been part of the original team that launched autonation.com and handled building out the entire SEM and CRM strategies for the company.

Brian has held many positions within the company and now oversees all of its digital presence, which includes over 400 separate websites as well as all of AutoNation’s SEO, social media, and lead generation.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• How Brian Free got into the automotive industry
• How Brian optimizes AutoNation’s websites and how their online traffic and sales were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic
• Brian’s strategies for working on AutoNation’s 400 websites
• How Brian keeps up with changes in the automotive industry and how he handles AutoNation’s reputation management
• The future of SEO in the automotive industry
• Brian’s thoughts on the biggest challenges the automotive industry is likely to face in the near future
• AutoNation’s acquisition plans

In this episode…

A good marketing strategy for a dealership often involves the right combination of SEO and CRM tactics. This has only been further proven by the pandemic, which made dealerships heavily reliant on e-commerce sales to drive business.

Brian Free and his team at AutoNation have been leveraging a ton of different marketing strategies to drive traffic to their 400+ websites. For instance, they use social media and Google to ensure their reputation is intact so they can keep attracting and closing online sales. Since they monitor their brand so closely, they noticed an increased conversion rate during the COVID-19 pandemic period as more customers choose to buy cars online.

Brian Free, the Senior Director of Digital E-Commerce at AutoNation, is Ilana Shabtay’s guest in this episode of the InsideAuto Podcast, where they talk about AutoNation’s SEO and digital marketing strategies. Brian explains how he got started at AutoNation, how he optimizes the dealership’s websites, and talks about some of the challenges faced by the automotive industry.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• AutoLeadStar
• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn
• AutoNation USA
• Brian Free on LinkedIn
• Google My Business
• Reputation.com
• “Why Dealerships Should Take Ownership of Their Google Accounts and Reputation” with George Nenni
• Yext
• Peacock Automotive Group

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by AutoLeadStar, a company that helps car dealerships engage quality customers on the web and convert them into car buyers.

Co-founded by Aharon Horwitz, Yishai Goldstein, and Eliav Moshe, AutoLeadStar’s state-of-the-art software automates a dealership’s entire marketing funnel and provides around-the-clock service for dealers.

AutoLeadStar’s innovative technology helps dealerships automate ads, connect with customers, and discover ROI and performance metrics. 

Visit their website at www.autoleadstar.com to learn more about their around-the-clock marketing service.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to InsideAuto Podcast where we feature everyone and anyone you’d want to talk to you in and out of the automotive industry.

Ilana Shabtay 0:14

Ilana Shabtay here, host of InsideAuto Podcast where we interview top dealers, GMs, marketers, entrepreneurs and thought leaders in and out of the automotive industry. And before we introduce today’s guest, this episode is sponsored by AutoLeadStar.com. The AutoLeadStar platform is built on a technology so powerful, it allows you to market, sell and service cars as you would in the real world at scale and online, making one-to-one matches between shoppers and inventory. AutoLeadStar is the only platform that is powered by scale, speed, and specificity to change the way dealers do marketing today. Today, we have a very special guest, his name is Brian Free. For those of you who don’t know him, Brian is the Senior Director of Digital E-Commerce at AutoNation. Hey, Brian, how are you?

Brian Free 1:01

Good, how are you?

Ilana Shabtay 1:03

I’m good. He’s actually, you know, down the road from me in Fort Lauderdale, which is exciting. We could have even done this in person, but, you know, Zoom is the way. Zoom is the way of the world. But just to give Brian a little bit of an introduction, he, like I mentioned, is the Senior Director of Digital E-Commerce at AutoNation where he started his career in 1997 in IT. Brian was part of the original team that launched autonation.com and handled building out the entire SEO strategy, CRM strategy, everything that comes with the.com era. Along the way, he’s had many positions within the company and now he oversees all of AutoNation’s digital presence, which includes over 400 separate websites and all of AutoNation’s SEO activities, as well as social media and lead generation. We’ll get into all of that. Brian, thank you so much. You’re obviously extremely busy, so thank you for being here with me today. So this podcast, it’s a tradition on this podcast, to really understand how our guests got into automotive. It seems like no one gets into automotive on purpose. But maybe your story is different. And I know you’ve had a long ride with AutoNation, but how did you get into automotive?

Brian Free 2:18

It’s a good story. You know? So I live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And for folks who don’t know, you know, back in the day when and this is pre internet. Oh, isn’t it another little interesting piece there? So this was 1997. I, this gentleman, passed away now. But his name is Wayne Huizenga. He was a huge entrepreneur here in South Florida. He founded three fortune 100 companies, he started out with a waste management company. Then he moved into folks who remember Blockbuster Video. So I was reading an article one day in 97. And it’s like, hey, Wayne, a high thing is starting this new company. And it’s going to be in the automotive space and the original model was going to be a standalone used car only, not new cars. And we also purchased at the time national rental car and Alamo, rent a car. And the whole model was like, Hey, we’re going to take your rental cars and movement to use cars, whatever. So I thought it was a really interesting story. So Wayne had begun on the ground floor, this is a great opportunity. So I literally wrote a letter to the HR department. And don’t say, Hey, you know, I live in Fort Lauderdale. And I always admired Wayne Huizenga. And I’d be really interesting, finding something new. So they called me that like a day later. And I went in for an interview and they hired me on the spot. So I was like, probably employed like, number 10, or 11, something like that. That way, way back then. And the company now is actually our 25th anniversary. So I came in, I’m actually 24 years old. So I’m a little bit you know, there were people here starting so yeah, so that’s all just like, you know, when I tell people, you know, I wrote a cover letter, you know, they’re like,

Ilana Shabtay 3:59

wrote it and nailed it in.

Brian Free 4:01

Absolutely, yeah. And you’re dropping right off, you know, and they like, say, I can now move fast. They called me the next day. And I and I, you know, I literally live five minutes from where the office was located and met a bunch of people and they were like, Hi, hi. Hi. What do you want to start out with?

Ilana Shabtay 4:20

And I think it’s great. The Senior Director of Digital E-Commerce, hand, wrote a letter and got his job at AutoNation. That’s wonderful. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. And so yeah,

Brian Free 4:34

yeah, and I didn’t know anything about automotive and I was like an IT consultant. I started my career and on the icy side of the house, I worked primarily in transportation, like aviation and cruise line. So automotive was completely new to me and it’s still a challenge. Automotive is a really unique business and sometimes you’re banging your head every day, so I can leave him alone as long but I certainly can check.

Ilana Shabtay 4:57

Yes, for sure. I’ve been in automotive I think three or four years now, and I’m always asking myself how the industry moves on. But, um, it’s a seat. Let’s talk a little bit about SEO. I know this is a huge area of responsibility for you. And I am really , really happy you joined us today because it’s a topic that we haven’t really covered on the InsideAuto Podcast. Yes, but it’s such an important topic for automotive. So, um, let’s talk about how you optimize, also you have hundreds of websites. So I’d love to know how you prioritize, optimize? And are you using any specific tools that you can share with us?

Brian Free 5:32

Yeah, so we do use a variety of methods, we do some, you know, because there are so many websites. And you know, I’m a big believer in like, not putting all my eggs in one basket. So I have, you know, in some cases, we have website vendors, like the dealer, coms, and the dealer inspires in the world. Some of them, some of our sites, I let them do a little bit of work, you know, I find them you know, you use the same strategy for every deal. Like if a lot of cookie cutter is, you know, a couple of years ago, we went out to find traditional SEO agencies that weren’t in automotive and said, hey, let’s see what they can do that they don’t give us that, that that same kind of cookie cutter approach that every other dealers getting. So we manage that and we also have in-house people doing it as well. So our strategy is very local. It’s brand specific, right? So the, you know, Mercedes, Fort Lauderdale, Mercedes, Miami, and we really have a great story to tell and organic, you know, once the pandemic hit, right, the first couple of months in when we were in lockdown, and all that other stuff, we were just, we expected to worse, right? We were you know, all hands on deck, we felt our pain, social strategy, our paid advertising strategy, you know, we went we went dark on TV, but organic just took off. You know, in the last month, you know, on these 400 plus dealer websites. Last month, we had our most traffic ever, we had 2.4 million unique users on our dealership website, and put that in perspective. A year ago, that was about a million people so literally doubled our traffic. And we also have a list that you know, not when people were like, what do you what do you do? I’m like, this is people like my emphasis is that you’re mostly on websites, of course, but they still want to go out to the ocean, they went on a Saturday, they did test drive, they did all that kind of stuff. I still have maps, and now everything’s being transacted online, you know, you’re on our website, they’re looking, they’re picking the car they want, they know the payments, they do credit app, you know, so all that stuff has just been lifting dynamite now and before, you know, it just wasn’t that story. So also these are market customers that you know, we look at what you’re called closer look at leads and sales. We were always averaging about, you know, maybe in the you know, these are more market customers and somebody on cars.com or whatever, but our close rate is like 15-16%. Now from our organic traffic. It’s just unbelievable what it’s done. The other big story is Google. You know, last year we spent one of our projects pre-pandemic to optimize our GMB profile. So what we did, we went out and we got professional photography done and all of our stores, we took advantage of all the little features that they offer that, you know, besides just connecting to the website, you could do things like schedule service now. Also, Google allows live inventory on all those GMB profiles. We were pilots with them. So all of our inventory is online and now too, and that’s just one another one. I tell people that your GMB profile is really another website. It’s just we added in a month once we get an attribution in January of 2020. We had about maybe 2000 unique leads that came from GMB for the website. Last month we had 18,000 leads that were generated off of GMB close rates, or stores. Or on GMA Oh, so are all of our GMB profiles, just people clicking from their website and we follow them through 23% close rate. I’m just telling everybody, I’m just I’m like these people are in the market that are ready to go. So it’s just incredible. And it is free. Right? Yeah, organic traffic on my Hey, you know, so what we’ve done is, we’ve dialed back a lot of our pain. We’ve also dialed back a lot of our third party because I’m like organic is filling the bucket, you know, in touch with the inventory challenges that everybody is facing right now. I’m just like, why are we spending money to attract customers when I can do it for free and highly optimized? So it’s been a really great story.

Ilana Shabtay 9:35

Wow. And of that, going back to the first part of your answer of that 2.4 million from last month. How do you know the percentage that was organic? That is organic. Oh, wow. Wow. And do you know, do you know roughly what the percentage of like what percentage of your total traffic is organic?

Brian Free 9:56

It’s about 65-70%. That’s very impressive. Absolutely. And also you the other big thing we did, you know, in terms of my world was another big one, which I encouraged all of us at was just optimizing. Right? So we really worked hard on both desktop and mobile just to, you know, clean navigation, clear, simple CPAs, not 15 different CPAs. You know, it’s confusing the customer, we just want them to come in, you know, and we’ve done focus groups. So we said, well, you know, what are people? What are people doing to get to the website, they want to look at cars, that, like, they immediately go to new gardens or research builder series? That’s what they’re doing, you know, and, and, you know, so with all those optimizations, you know, like, that’s another thing is our conversion rate, your conversion rate a year and a half ago, was probably about 3.4% or so our conversion rate now 6%. Can’t leave phone calls and chat guiding industry meetings, I’m super happy with that number. And then, you know, run around New all day and tell people about that, because it’s a great, it’s a great story, and people need to understand it.

Ilana Shabtay 11:05

Yeah, no, are you all the websites? And again, let me just remind our listeners over 400 websites tip Brian is optimizing and managing right now. Do you streamline all of that? So for example, you know, the way that the CTAs lie on the page or the certain language? Or? Or are you taking the opportunity to relate a B test between your sites? What does that look like for your strategy? Yeah,

Brian Free 11:28

great, great question. So we definitely strive for consistency, right? So that as much as I can, you know that we use the same terminology rtta, we have the same layout strategy for like a homepage. But with tiles we’re using, you know, in addition to the inventory, like things like, you know, we’ll buy our car scheduled service. So we do a lot of AV testing on that to see which ones are getting traction, there’s a little bit of a play in there in terms of that the OEMs manage these, they have a big say in these sites, too, right. So they do things like look and feel, and color palettes. And even some of them just drive us crazy, like, the fonts and the language we can use. So we also have, so basically all of our sites, you know, whenever we build unique content ourselves, we always run a bio and compliance to make sure they’re on board. But that’s one of the other things in the SEO world that we do is we build lots of custom landing pages. So you know, the specific make and model pages, you know, we pepper in all of our locations, also to things that are interesting that we would never expect with and when we build landing pages, but things like we build a landing page for, like how to set up Apple CarPlay. And how to, or how to set up Android is amazing the traffic that those pages get that people are just a quick way to find out how to do this. You know, we know, it’s just the most convenient thing to have. But we also do a lot of which gives a lot of traction as we’ve really built a lot of likes, not as much now with the inventory challenges. But previously, like all of our specials that offer great finance offers and missing offers, you know, build dedicated pages for them now and then we move into service. And we know we have service coupons though. We built dedicated pages for that and we got really you’re getting it’s a really another way that customers can come in multiple doors on a website. But ultimately we you know, once they get there they’re converting and that’s that was that was our mission accomplished.

Ilana Shabtay 13:24

Yeah, that’s a really smart strategy. And on that I’m interested in knowing how you kept up with it because automotive is so it changes by the minute. I mean, OEM disclaimers will change pricing, incentives will change month over month, when you have those special landing pages. How are you keeping up? Did you have some kind of API that was changing in real time and hooked up to these data sources or

Brian Free 13:47

not? We’re heading that way for certainly for specials and finance offers and lease offers. And service specials. We’ve definitely built out an API for that because you know, they expire every single month. And you need a disclaimer language. So we literally have another team that builds and manages those, but we extract those also. Another cool thing we did was in Google My Business. There’s a Google post. So we built a little engine and we post those specials. So every week, Google disappoints, right? We want to make sure we end up in, you know, in the map pack or we end up on page one, you know, so when they look at our GMB like, are you answering your views? Are you putting photos up there are you and so we have now we have this natural cadence that we’re handing out all these offers every week, and that just raises us as well. And they sound like a douche of accolades. Like we have 64 dealers that were JD Power dealers of the year. We put that on a Google post. We have 140 dealers that are CarFax. recognise dealers we’ve put out you know, we wait a month to put out another post. So we’re really expanding that area and putting out really neat data you mentioned earlier. I know that we’re gonna talk about what social media was really big about like, okay, you know, here’s our reputation score, we put that we do that as opposed. So it just really consistently puts out information that draws people back.

Ilana Shabtay 15:11

That’s all. And that’s all manual.

Brian Free 15:15

pseudo manual. Like if we have a developer team that kind of build that you have to do an API to get an offer and to have to do a post on Jambi, but pay up automated, we are trying to go faster. Yes,

Ilana Shabtay 15:27

yes, I’m sure that is the direction and and you mentioned, the reputation management. And I’m glad you brought it up, because I wanted to give you a big kudos on that I saw a press release earlier this month, that AutoNation has like 90 to 95% of the reviews are four or five star reviews, which I it’s such an amazing thing, because I was just talking about this on a different podcast episode where I don’t know what this what this how this shows me as a consumer, but I’m so inclined to leave a review when I’m angry, or when I’m not happy. So the fact that you’re you have set up the culture and the infrastructure to push happy customers to post reviews. That’s really the key to success. And so I was really happy about that. And a huge kudos to your team. How, how did you build that kind of culture with the auto Yeah, so

Brian Free 16:13

we actually have a partner where we use a reputation calm. So it’s really that you hit right on it is building that culture, to make sure we ask for reviews, right? Because you’re right once you get right of that super happy to have you in on their own. And then super annoyed, people are going to do it on their own too. But we really want to get that big sweet spot in the middle. So you want to get the building a call to the store to ask for reviews. We also leverage other channels, like we have all of our websites here. We have another partner actively engaged who runs our chat. Um, so they help us as well. So when someone comes in and says, Hey, I have a good experience, they’ll shoot them away, and say, Hey, you know, share with us and show us more. We’ve also now moving to think it is really important because it also gets a lot of unfortunate and a lot of negative reviews of service. Right, that’s a, you know, we have a separate GMB profile for every one of our service centers that were really working hard to make sure that we’re building our score there as well. And really, revenue did not comment, they had what they call it, we call it a reputation score. And so we kind of went around for a couple years. And you know, hey, that’s what matters. And it’s a combination of things that most consumers don’t know, our reputation scores, they’re looking for the stars, right? That’s what they look for, they look for five stars, right? And say, Okay, this is going to be a good experience. So we kind of moved ourselves off of that just to keep reinforcing the five stars. That’s what matters. And that’s going to draw, and I think that’s a big piece of what draws eyeballs not only just to our site organically, but then driving to convert but like, hey, people were telling about a great experience they had that makes me more confident to give you my personal information and and engage in a conversation to the sales assistant.

Ilana Shabtay 17:53

Yeah, course. And that feeds into your whole organic strategy. And that’s probably a part of the reason why you have 2.4 million organic visitors. And yes, that’s a huge number. Yes. And what do you think about when I think about the future of SEO and automotive, the thing that comes to mind? And I’m not an SEO expert, although I wish I were. I think about voice and search, Voice Search. Are you thinking about that at AutoNation? And how are you guys going to set up for success?

Brian Free 18:26

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s a big, big part. You know, a year or two ago, I thought I was going to be just huge, right? I thought everything was gonna be searched, you know, Voice Search activated, but it’s kind of like it’s plateaued, I think. But there’s a steady stream. So we use a business listing service. So right now we’re currently using yaks. So they have a pipeline directly into my Alexa and Google search. So things like if you did like, you know, Mercedes Benz Fort Lauderdale, you know, Alexa is gonna come up and it’ll, it’ll tell our store hours, or service department hours and our phone numbers. So that’s really the way we get the most out of that driving directions comes up quite a bit as well. So always looking at that. I’m sorry,

Ilana Shabtay 19:11

What did you see that was called Yext?

Brian Free 19:14

Yeah, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. So they’re like a directory listing service, when they do for us is that, you know, like, they manage all of that third party stuff like Google, we still manage ourselves. They can automate it for us, but we just think it’s too critical that we don’t want to hand that off to a third party. But they do, they do power being a power like things like yellowpages.com. So any of those or motor slices, websites that are out there 260 locations, you know, we change store hours all the time. It’s just they kind of keep all that data clean. And then when one button like, you know, we’re just we just opened a new store on Friday to literally just, you know, you load in a store and push, push you publish. And AlphaGo is, you know, an alpha waldos website and it’s a one stop service. It’s super helpful for us.

Ilana Shabtay 20:01

Great. Yeah, that’s, that’s something that everyone should be looking into for all of our listeners. And before we sign off, let’s talk about what you think some of the biggest challenges in automotive will be in the next, let’s say, a year, two years, we obviously just came out of a very aggressive year and a half. So what are you seeing in your bottom line?

Brian Free 20:20

Yeah, well, our biggest struggle, like everybody’s having his new card inventory. to kind of put it in perspective, it’s an eye popping number, but so may of 2020. We had 76,000 us cars, I’m sorry, new cars online. Yesterday, we had 21,000 new cars a month. Wow. So it’s just, it’s a Super Challenge, right? So, you know, we’re, we’re doing everything we can like, literally not even 24 years, I have had multiple general managers call me up and say, stop sending traffic, stop sending me customers, because I have nothing around. And I’m like, this has never happened ever. So we were talking about two ways. There’s one and obviously we’re always offering up used car alternatives that are actually in decent shape and used cars were probably about 10%, under what we were, you know, a year ago. So we’re in decent shape there. So we put a lot of traffic there. But also to is, you know, we’ve adapted, right, so now we’re literally selling into our pipeline, which we’ve never done before, right. So we made sure we put all of our in transit inventory online, which wasn’t before. And now the team is literally selling cars that don’t arrive for three months, people are putting the boxes out. So it’s really up to how we do our business. But so that’s our biggest challenge. But by far, because we don’t see, you know, anything good on the horizon, the chips are still really short. And you, I’m sure you heard, like what manufacturers are doing like they’re, they’re building cars with less options that the less chips, they’re building our cars without the chips and storing them in places. There’s upwards to like 420,000 pre pre built vehicles waiting for just the storage all over Detroit. So we think that we think that the bottom is coming there, we think because we don’t think we’ve hit it yet. We’re now thinking the bottom is going to be July and August where we’ll absolutely be down into the teens and new car inventory. And then also we start to build our way back. So I think that’s our biggest challenge. And as I said, we’re just adapting and figuring out ways to sell around it. The second piece is what everybody else is doing. And the manufacturers have begun to do with digital retailing, right like buy online AutoNation has been in this business for quite some time you know, we build out our original byline on AutoNation.com probably about six years ago with all the components I credited out, make an appointment value your trade all those components. So generally, our strategy has been to we if you go to any of our dealer sites, is that you know, when you’re on the vehicle Detail page and you see the buy on button, we drive the back to autonation.com and let them transact there and do that digital piece there but unfortunately the OEMs what the hell they are is they’re they’re getting in this space right and and they’re really challenging us in some cases, like our two biggest brands are Audi and Hyundai they just came out and said hey look, you have to use additional resources we show them AutoNation.com. And they’re like, this and that. And but you know, they you know, those two particular brands, they gave us a choice and said hey, you can use one of your website vendors, you can use a roadster or modal or something like that. And they put them there, they’re getting aggressive. So what is the title behind it? And my folks like Han die, they mandate and they put $300 a car a month and I’m just like, I can’t say no to that I have to use that solution. And then ality so the things that hey, if you’re not certified or you don’t pick a certified tool you’re going to lose out on and now where they’re going, they’re going to hear one and they’re like hey, if you don’t use a certified digital retailing tool you may not show up on my say Honda comm right? And that’s a no no for us. So we’ve got our toe in the water. We probably have about 65 ish stores on a digital retailing platform. So it works right if they’re good closers, we get leads we see anywhere between 20 to 25% close rate, but it’s just being destroyed and why it’s on my radar now is just that because they you know, they, they we’ve been talking to everybody and I keep saying you know, hey, if you tell if you like our roads, they’re brand new it conflicts with like our CRM strategy, right that we want to have. We have one CRM. We want to have one showing the selling process, right? And all of a sudden we’ve got this hybrid on a certain brand, using a different tool, right. And roasters. Most folks are trying to get into all those businesses, CRM in store selling, and we just like this just doesn’t work for us. It just makes our life complicated, but it’s gonna force us into it. So I just have to play by the rules and see who’s out next year. I think Chrysler is going to be very close to making a decision soon, Honda, BMW, they’re all like, you know, kicking the tires. So I think that I’d have to, I’d have to play that game with them. And you know, and move on when it comes. The other big thing for AutoNation, kind of on our radar for about a year is we’re in acquisition mode again. So we’re in the middle of acquiring the Peacock Automotive Group. It’s got a role. So it’ll be our engineering into our 18 states that are based in South Carolina, that’s a new state for us. But we’re in my world, right, I need to stand up 16 websites and one day, it’s been a lot of work. I also I mentioned, we opened our another Rebecca, the standalone use our business is called autonationusa.com, we just opened a store in San Antonio on Friday, we’ve got five more stores coming this year in AutoNation, let’s say we also have a standalone arisen center of work for Porsche, we’re going to be the first dealership in a country that our damage just that it’s just a Porsche service that are no showroom. And then 24 of a service center, probably about it’s going to be in McKinney, Texas, about 20 miles my retail store went next month. So you know, all that stuff on top of my day job is just you know, acquisitions. And, and you know, getting these new stores onboard and into our ecosystem is always a challenge. I thought people were out here, I said, it’s gonna be a long summer for everybody on my team. But that’s what we do. And we’re excited about getting started. So it’s been about three years since we’ve done any acquisition activity. So we’re super excited about that.

Ilana Shabtay 26:39

Wow, congratulations on all of that. That’s really exciting. Back to the manufacturer stuff, we can have a whole nother podcast on regulations that we should, because I just send you a piece that I just wrote for dealer marketing about this, because I basically broke down everything that is wrong with OEM regulations, and how it should literally just be like, do you have an LP open API? Good, then you can be Honda approved, and it should just be nothing else. And I think we totally are aligned with that. And it frustrates me that, you know, that data integration isn’t a first priority yet for manufacturers? So we can have a whole nother discussion on that? We will?

Brian Free 27:25

Probably, I’ll tell you one more question. Also, we don’t care. Like they don’t get digital sales. You know, like, like, when we’re doing these acquisitions, they’re like, you know, when it’s good when a deal should go through a buy, sell, like, they force us to stand up the website? And they’re like, Well, you know, we will give you the key to the code until the day of the by myself. And you know, a couple of years ago, that doesn’t mean like, we will go dark for like two weeks. I’m like, how could you read this? How can this be acceptable to you guys that we can’t build a website ahead of time and have it ready to go on the day we do it by ourselves? It’s just a creative thing that happens, they don’t care. And I’m just shaking my head just saying how that’s not a part of your site or that you have to wait a week and a half until we enter into our GM OnStar system. Before we’ll approve it. I was just like, how can you work in a week? seven business days out and this kind of digital world? It’s just unbelievable to me that silica?

Ilana Shabtay 28:24

Oh, for sure. Thank you for sharing a challenge for automotive and I and I assume it will be transforming in the next couple of years. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today. And for all your awesome stories and your content. It’s been such a pleasure. And if you liked this episode for those that are listening, please tune in to insideautopodcast.com. We are on all mainstream apps, Spotify, I heart Apple, you can find us there. Thank you, Brian.

Brain Free 28:52

My pleasure. That was a great meeting. You have a great day now everybody.

Outro 28:55

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