Crush Dealer Marketing While Still Being a Good Corporate Citizen with Matt Lasher

Matt Lasher is the Director of Marketing at West Herr Automotive Group and has over 14 years of marketing experience. Currently, West Herr Automotive Group is the largest automotive group in New York with 26 (soon to be 27) locations. Matt manages and facilitates marketing for all of the group’s stores and is responsible for overseeing the company website, social, content creation, online reputation management, and much more.

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

• Matt Lasher talks about how his company, West Herr Automotive Group, has helped their community during the pandemic
• How Matt got started in the automotive industry
• Short-term and long-term automotive marketing challenges
• How technology is impacting the car buying experience
• The relationship between a dealership and its OEMs
• Matt discusses how his marketing team has evolved over the past 10 years

In this episode…

As technology continues to advance and influence the car buying process, dealers need to make sure they are still cultivating relationships with the people in their communities. Matt Lasher, the Director of Marketing at West Herr Automotive Group, believes that consumers still want to buy a car from someone that they trust, so dealerships need to focus on the customer experience now more than ever.

Tune in to this episode of Inside Auto Podcast as Aharon Horwitz and Ilana Shabtay are joined by Matt Lasher, the Director of Marketing at West Herr Automotive Group. Matt shares his career journey and how he got involved in the automotive industry. He also discusses the marketing challenges that dealerships face, talks about how technology is influencing the customer experience, and provides his insights into the future of automotive marketing.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Matt Lasher on LinkedIn
• Matt Lasher on Twitter
• West Herr Automotive Group
• Scott Bieler
• AutoLeadStar
• Aharon Horwitz on LinkedIn
• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn

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

Ilana Shabtay 0:14

Ilana Shabtay here with Aharon Horwitz, host of Inside Auto Podcast, where we interview top GMs, dealers, marketers, entrepreneurs and thought leaders in and out of the automotive industry. Before we introduce today’s guest, this episode is sponsored by www.autoleadstar.com. AutoLeadStar is pioneering marketing automation in the automotive industry with sophisticated machine learning that future proofs, dealerships marketing operations and replaces traditional marketing methods.

Aharon Horwitz 0:44

Alright, Ilana, thank you Welcome, everyone to another episode of Inside Auto Podcast. We’re super excited to be here. Super excited to have Matt Lasher on the show. Matt, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Matt Lasher 0:56

Hey, thanks so much. really a pleasure to be here.

Aharon Horwitz 0:58

All right, awesome. So Matt is a very exciting guest for us. Everyone who checks out our podcast page sees the folks that we have on conversations are very interesting, very casual, very free flowing, but very informative. And Matt brings with himself over 14 years of experience in marketing. And he manages and facilitates marketing for all the West Herr Automotive Group stores, the largest group in New York with rep 23 stores, Matt,

Matt Lasher 1:23

is that right? 28? Well, 26, about to be 27 in December here. So

Aharon Horwitz 1:28

growing, growing in it here, since since we went on air, so 23 to 26 to 27 also includes www.westherr.com, social, content creation, everything around the more kind of technical connected sides of marketing and online reputation management. So Matt, we’re super excited to have you here. Thank you very much. And welcome. How are things in Buffalo,

Matt Lasher 1:52

you know, things about flow are good. So we were talking a little bit off air about this. But over the last four or five months, really, we’ve had record financial results within our company. And it’s been one of these interesting challenges, because the world around us has not uniformly been experiencing this uptick. However, you know, we just are trying to take each day as it comes and be grateful. And really, you know, it’s a testament to our team, how, you know, hard working individuals, our fixed ops team who’s been essential from day one, but our sales teams are operating at a at a throughput capacity that’s much higher than we typically run at. So, you know, everybody’s really contributing and doing their job. And, you know, things have been going well,

Aharon Horwitz 2:35

well, so on that topic, let’s let’s talk about this for a minute. Um, you know, you guys, look, this is such a massive global challenge, and, you know, the the economic aspect of the pandemic or whatnot, but, or has West Herr as an organization had a chance to do things in the community? I know, obviously, you know, we can only do so much a small individuals in this companies, but what sort of things have you guys tried to do for your team and for the community around you, um, you know, as this pandemic just dragged on?

Matt Lasher 3:02

Well, I mean, I think the first thing we probably tried to do related to the community was just set a good example. So we’ve been very aggressive and proactive with respect to PPE. And, you know, trying to make sure that we’re doing all our social distancing and mask wearing and trying to reinforce that as a culture and, you know, making sure that we set the right tone, you know, we have over half a million customer transactions a year, people that come in through our buildings and sort of cycle through our, through our facilities. And so with that comes a responsibility to present ourselves in a professional and responsible way. And obviously, in this era of COVID, it’s even more, you know, important that we follow the protocols set forth by the government, that sort of thing. So, so that’s step one. But, you know, coming up here, and for Thanksgiving, obviously, I mentioned the financial success we’ve had over the last few months, we are doing a thing, unusual, or different Thanksgiving way where we’re 5000 people in western New York, so we’re working with various agencies, in Buffalo, and Rochester, to distribute the turkeys. And and so that’s just sort of a nice little gesture nod towards the community that, you know, is experiencing some challenging times. So, but but there’s all you know, every day, it’s a part of Western culture, we’re always contributing to nonprofits, we’re always participating in fundraisers, and, you know, some of these virtual fundraising events that have happened now. And, you know, it’s just part of what we do we spend, you know, seven figures a year on on things, things like that.

Aharon Horwitz 4:25

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s an amazing example of why kind of the local dealer and the community routed dealer makes such an impact. And, you know, sometimes we think about where the world’s going and, you know, you look at, kind of, let’s call it like pure play tech platforms that are, on the one hand, you know, valued by the markets at $40 $50 billion in aggregate, yet they represent a small percentage of car sales, but but there’s something about that disassociation from a local community that in that inner essence, which is so different than a dealership which has to contend with the people that walk in the door every day. And I think that that’s what you just described as a real powerful example.

Matt Lasher 5:04

Yeah, I mean, I obviously the the tone is set by the leadership. So Scott Bieler’s our President and CEO, and he gets all the credit for sort of this, I would say, somewhat overly generous or over indexing on sort of our philanthropic efforts. These things don’t always pencil, right. Like, they’re not like, sometimes I engage with some of these folks. And they’re like, Oh, I’m gonna make sure you get your advertising value out of it. And I try to explain to them often we’re not doing this for any sort of advertising value, whether our logo is on this event or not, isn’t really material to our advertising or brand consideration. But it is over the long term writes over the short term, I don’t think it pencils from like, an efficiency perspective. But over the long term, you know, I think doing this thousands and thousands of times over the last 40 years really right, as we’ve continued to grow, and, you know, we’ve been in business over 70 years, but, you know, really doing a lot of things in a lot of different ways. You know, that adds up, right. And we’ve had all these little micro moments where we’re encouraging or making connection with somebody, that person that’s on that board, or that person that did that fundraiser at the school or, you know, whatever, and those people were having individual impact on those, those people. And and, you know, ultimately, I think that serves as well, in the long term. Absolutely.

Aharon Horwitz 6:17

Well said, very well said. So Matt, tell us in we like to hear people’s personal stories a little bit just because, you know, it’s all about the people in the end, and the folks who listen, also want to know who they’re hearing from. So tell us with yourself, and I find that everyone has their unique story, what brought you to the industry, kind of what’s your like, you know, immediate prior position before you suddenly found yourself in automotive and automotive marketing, and what was the state of the industry’s marketing when you entered it?

Matt Lasher 6:47

So I got started, I went to University of Colorado and happenstance, a Nissan North America recruiter came to our school and I interviewed with that person and got a job in Los Angeles, working for Nissan and sales and marketing endeavors. Was there about five years,

Aharon Horwitz 7:03

it was right out of college. Yeah, right

Matt Lasher 7:05

out of college. So 1 800 Nissan Consumer Affairs was my first job out of college, a great learning experience, I was dealing with dealers in the northeast, and sort of that rough New Yorker sort of attitude and talking about warranty claims and customer disputes and things of that nature. So really learned some custom really valuable customer service skills that I still use today. Love that job. Because of the people that I got to interact with, there was a bunch of young kids, we were all sort of fresh out of college and living in Southern California driving 350 Z’s is pretty cool. But, you know, after about five years, I looked around, I didn’t really want to be any my bosses. So I quit my job, I had about $10,000 to my name, and I was selling t shirts out of the trunk of my car playing poker full time to pay my bills. So every month, you know, I was I was getting by earning enough in the poker tables to pay my bills. And I did that for about two years. And I wanted to get married and have kids and settle down. And I was bouncing between LA and San Francisco and Vegas and had an opportunity to try automotive retail back in my hometown Buffalo, New York. And so made that decision. And it was supposed to be a two year experiment. And you know, I think we’re 12 years or so in into it now. And, you know, I did all the all the retail side of the jobs and you know, sales and f&i, and I was a sales manager and a used car manager for a few years. And all of those experiences have really helped, you know, shape how I think about marketing. And also, I think, the effectiveness with which I operate internally. Because my organization and the people within it, also understand that I did some of their jobs, right, like I’m not finger pointing or demanding, or asking them to do anything that I didn’t do, you know, when I was on a desk, and so I think that, that helps give some credibility and help, you know, connect the dots between the sales and the marketing functions, which are very different. And I don’t know if our industry talks enough about that. I think marketing as a discipline is underserved, under invested in at the retail level in terms of skill set, and teams, right, there aren’t that many people in the industry like me, you know, relative to the size of the industry, oftentimes, or my, my experiences, often it’s somebody with a connection to leadership or ownership is often the marketing person, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they’re intent on, you know, pressing into the discipline, and building out the skill sets necessary to have effective functioning marketing teams, which is challenging in a sales dominated industry. Right. So it’s a it’s an interesting spot to be in because you have to be in the fire, right. I think CMOS have like, the most documented short tenure of any C suite executive in the US at least I don’t know if that’s a worldwide thing or whatever. But and it’s largely because there’s so much opinion in marketing. There’s so much like Well, I think I think this is the way, right. And I think and we all fall victim to that I fall victim to that. But what I try to do is be very self aware, when I’m in that space, when I’m giving an opinion, I want to recognize that that’s what it is. It’s my own opinion based on my own perceptions in my own sphere of influence. And sometimes that jives with leadership, and sometimes it doesn’t, right. And so I think marketing as a discipline can often be sort of undercut by what I call the hippo syndrome, or Highest Paid person’s opinion. Sometimes people have no marketing skills whatsoever. They’re very short sighted or short term thinkers. So it’s a balancing act, right? It’s a very fascinating space to be in. But automotive is one of the best places to do marketing, because you get to do all the things, right, you have access to all the technology, you can experiment, you got budgets, you got things to do. If you’re like a marketing person at a struggling law firm, right, you have a limited budget, you got like $36 to experiment with on Facebook or whatever, like, you might not have the resources that automotive has. So as long as the organization the retailer has, provides enough cover for the marketing team, right, sort of air cover political cover, to try experiment, fail, push, learn, you know, and rinse, repeat and do it again, I think you can create some really successful, interesting dynamics.

Aharon Horwitz 11:19

Yeah, and I actually see that like, the groups that we see that are most, um, kind of evolved, when it comes to their marketing, they tend to be where the marketing director and the owner have a an extremely tight bond of trust. And, and, and that’s a, you know, that that’s what gives them that example, you put it that cover to work with, to work with the GMs and work through challenges and concerns the GMs have, when you know, there might be marketing wisdom that the GM is necessarily plugged into. And sometimes you have to make a tough, you know, have a tough conversation and say, like, Look, it’s just the way it has to be, even though you want it this way, it wouldn’t be smart for us to do that, you know, we would do damage ourselves.

Matt Lasher 11:54

I seen that the balance of short term thinking versus long term thinking like, we’re not as a 30 day business. So you got to get beyond it’s such a month to month business. And there’s so much like on leads and like sales, short term sales results, market share things of that nature, which is really an executional challenge at the store. Regardless of how many leads that a marketing team may create to a dealership or not how effective they are in the short term is based on store leadership and store, follow up and store thoroughness, and store execution, right just in customer service and getting after it. But the long term marketing challenges technical tech stack challenges, database challenges, vendor management issues, some of these things that are really hard to deal with that do take time they take years maybe in terms of change management, and sort of behavioral management within the organization. These are really challenging issues that without the appropriate cover will never succeed. Because it’s really it’s too easy to finger point two marketing on a bad month and say, you know, they suck this month,

Aharon Horwitz 12:54

where I don’t really see that those kind of winners have that vision and they’re plugged into that. Yeah, by the way, I knew I could tell buffalo was not just where you were because of your seemingly like, you know, Cleveland Browns, Cleveland, Cleveland Browns level affection for your football team. That was the that was my clue I the the when you go to your Twitter, it’s just all Buffalo Bills. So

Matt Lasher 13:14

you know, we’ve had some fun. So you know, I’ve gotten to know some of the Buffalo Bills, players personally, we’ve done a few things sort of like influencer campaign style things and gotten to know some of the players. So 10 years ago, if you would ask me, if I cared about the Buffalo Bills, I would have said no. Wow, at a human level, I really am rooting for these guys. And it just so happens they happen to be pretty good. So like you have this fanfare and this enthusiasm in the community for it. It’s fascinating. So it’s Yeah,

Aharon Horwitz 13:40

my father was a high school and college coach, so I always appreciate when a post as an accident knows, it’s a it’s a wonderful thing to Yeah, to go into, um, you know, I guess like, when I think of you, when I think of your like, I there’s just some, there’s, it’s kind of like if I had to sum it up, it’s a probably the single most acute exposition of just the complexities the the challenges the sophistication of the industry, yet the kind of immaturity of aspects of it, or the over maturity of other aspects of it. And I think like you know, you look at some of the things that you’ve written about and you know, the, you know, like these like amazing like lines that you put out there with a single email I can ask my vendor to crank up the spend $15,000 and magically it disappears some of my websites that might even go up unfortunately sales calm doesn’t or um, you know, when you’re talking about the the propaganda war in Detroit and how kind of essentially we are all just a product of these big kind of, you know, corporate Titan battles to convince us of what’s working, what’s not working, and to own the attribution meaning. The vendor that owns the attribution of the CRM to the to the induct inducted will win the account month, every month, that may have nothing to do with what’s actually driving Right. So I think that that just leads me to this like, feeling of like, what’s a dealer to do when I finished all your writing? And it’s very interesting. But I asked you that meeting? Yeah, go ahead.

Matt Lasher 15:13

Well, I think, you know, obviously even listening to you sort of re-paraphrase my perspective, I would say I have somewhat of a anti corporate bent, right. And by when I was at Nissan, Nissan moved the headquarters from Los Angeles to Nashville, Tennessee. They did that to cut payroll costs and to get tax savings. They basically eliminated or and or forced people to move to Tennessee who had gotten them out of bankruptcy from 1999. So I saw sort of like this corporate callousness that I believe multinationals operate within because it’s a ruthless, constant efficiency game. What’s nice about being in retail, especially being a privately held company at West Herr is the ownership cares deeply about the employees. That’s one of the fundamental truths of the company to the point where many of the positions are overpaid, potentially, you could create that argument. But it’s done because of loyalty and commitment to the people within the ranks. And so I think I do have that bias within my own perspective of the industry. But I have this luxury or privilege, or whatever of representing over 20 OEM brands. So we have this fascinating relationship with OEMs. It’s somewhat tense at times, it’s somewhat favorable at times, but we always have to recognize that we don’t make the cars. So we have this responsibility to be a good corporate citizen. Right. And so often decisions are being made now, with increasing frequency lately, of what’s the correct political play. So if BMW wants to do this shift, digital heavy up campaign that we’ve done several times with no measurable results, no meaningful attribution, no usefulness? Well, we still do it. Right? It may be the incorrect play from a monetary resource persons.

Aharon Horwitz 17:08

As a citizen, you do it, I mean, your citizen as a

Matt Lasher 17:11

citizen partner,

Aharon Horwitz 17:12

as a quality, meaning you must like that’s part of the kind of dues you pay to be a citizen.

Matt Lasher 17:17

It’s part of the game, right? So I think you have to play by the rules of the game that exist within, you know, this franchise structure and all of that what how we go to market with our used cars, how we did, you know, do our in store process, I think is largely up to us, however, it at it is at competing odds with some of the required technology that we have to use within the industry. And so some of my ambitions from a customer service and consumer perspective, is to eliminate friction wherever possible. But unfortunately, we have siloed sets of data, we have a bazillion tools and companies that we work with, none of which work together. So to create a seamless customer experience, it’s challenging, right? Like if Carvana builds their own tech stack from within, or, or CarMax, even because they just are operating more on a used car basis, and they don’t really need to abide by, you know, obliged the these OEMs it’s easier, what have you. Yeah, right, it’s easier to pull off. So, you know, I think we find ourselves now in a spot of like, what do we do now that we know what we know? Do we build our own tech? Do we invest in that ecosystem? We’re a big enough company to do it. And so now we’re having fascinating conversations about Well, look, we have this perspective of what can work and what should work, right. But we’re entirely reliant on these big tech conglomerates that really don’t have the same vested interest. We are not aligned in our business objectives. The Tech, the tech companies really are milking the cow, so to speak, right when Dealertrack or Dealer.com sold to Dealertrack sold to Cox for $4 billion. What does Cox want? They want their $4 billion back, right, right. You’re incentivized to get that money back and to get reoccurring revenue on a on a go forward basis. They’re not incentivized to revolutionize themselves. And this was very apparent with vinsolutions versus the Dealer.com CRM. Admittedly, the boardroom at Cox said, DDC CRM was better, it was technologically superior, however, vinsolutions had 100 million dollar year, a year reoccurring revenue portfolio, they did not want to risk the disruption of that. So what did they do? They shut down the 10 or 15 or $20 million a year product, right? Under this guise of efficiency of innovation, and we’re just going to focus on one CRM or whatever. And what’s changed vinsolutions very little, right? superficial reporting or whatever, but really nothing. I mean, it’s the same thing that it was 10 years ago. So you get these fascinating decisions being made at a corporate level Cox, that’s maybe to the disadvantage of a retailer like West Herr, right, who could maybe benefit from a different type of technological solution, a customer first oriented solution. And so I think that’s a really clear example of how you know and look, we pay. By and large Cox employs a ton of great people, we’ve had a lot of, you know, good things that have happened as a result of our relationship with Cox, but we pay them an inordinate amount of money every single month, right? Yep. And for them not to be aligned perfectly with where we need to head with respect to our customer experience is dangerous for retailers like West Herr. As we become these, you know, these big regionalised dense groups, we have more and more opportunity and leverage, you look at Walser, or you look at Herb Chambers, or there’s countless groups like West Herr around the country now that have this regional density, that really, really need to care about this ecosystem of customer experience. And it’s not OEM specific. So it can’t OEM dependent on how Chevy wants to go to market or Ford wants to go to market, or how the in-store process should be with a genius or not a genius, or, you know, whatever, like all these different experiments that are happening. So it’s a really interesting tug of war right now that we’re in.

Aharon Horwitz 20:57

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting sign of like, a market that that has some challenges on the healthiness of it, if the interests of the, as you pointed out, kind of the technology infrastructure is not aligned with the needs of the retailers. There’s also an element just of, you know, I think I look at these regional groups or groups that have regional density, and you look at the competitive dynamics are changing. I mean, there are people who are trying to sell nationally. And you know, that the pure play digital are trying to pull the power maxes and the lithium and others they have to go national compete. Well, what happens to that single point, what happens that, you know, three points, what happens that regional group, there has to be thinking around, how do you compete and really fortify your regional position, but then also understand how you’re going to be you know, protecting your business from all these people or be pouring in, you know, troops in arms from from the outside, it’s a

Matt Lasher 21:47

it’s a, it’s a real phenomena, getting InstaCart, right, so I get my groceries from a grocery store that’s 30 miles away, or 15 miles away, right, I have a grocery store, one mile from my house, that never would have thought that that grocery store 15 miles away would be the competitor, but I go there because their produce is better. And they just do a better job with expiration dates and things of that nature. Right. So So Instacart, has basically created this platform and this opportunity to lose business for the local the local retailer. So I think the same thing can happen in auto with Amazon. If I’m if Amazon buys 10, four dealerships 300 miles apart across the whole country, they can deliver new Fords to everyone in the country. And yeah, like, what do I do with that? You know, so, so So, but I think this relationship and where West Herr is where our sustainable competitive advantages, I think, is in the relationships that we have with people and in the community. So we have 350 salespeople that know, however many thousands of people that you know, right. And so people buy from people and trust, at least in our market. I know there’s a lot of documented evidence of loyalty waning and people moving on and young millennials not caring about that stuff. But it’s still a big decision, it’s still something that you want to go to, for somebody that you trust, as long as you continue to facilitate that relationship. So I think that’s where, you know, technology really should be aimed squarely at making it much easier. You don’t switch your bank account because it’s a pain in the ass, right? But you can switch car dealers, it’s relatively easy. But if you just had your portfolio of ownership experience, credit cards on file, seamless service experiences, you know, predictive scheduling, you know, whatever. Equity, real time equity alerts, like all sorts of things that can make the consumer experience better, right? I think dealerships like West Herr then can have a really interesting built-in advantage, because why would you go anywhere else for making it so easy for now? Yeah, you can go buy your thing at Amazon If you want, I guess. But if you have a problem with the car, and you got to go deal with a one 800 Amazon number, or you can just come down the street and deal with us. And we’ll try to make it right. So yeah, no, it’s but I think for the foreseeable future, you know, that’s what we’re, you know, hanging our hat on.

Matt Lasher 21:52

It’s a platform you could build on. Right.

Ilana Shabtay 24:01

And, Matt, I know you spoke a little bit about your marketing team and what that’s been like to build that at West Herr. Can you tell us Can you give us a little bit of insight into what that team looks like and how you kind of strike the balance between playing the game and, you know, moving forward with all the bureaucracies that that you have to with all the brand 30 plus brands that you that you work with, and then also being creative and being able to utilize your marketing team for, you know, more business more sales ready prospects coming into West Herr?

Matt Lasher 24:31

Well, so we we have a senior leadership team, we have three variable directors that sort of chop up the 26 stores that we have. So I would say the variable directors one of their primary jobs is to sort of maintain that OEM relationship, it’s not feasible for me to have a deep, meaningful relationship with every OEM. There’s just too many people, not enough time, not enough meat, right. So sort of diversify that through the variable directors, however, so the marketing team hired me prior to prior to you know, 10 years ago, whatever West Herr really have a central marketing department, we had several specialties, we had an e commerce person, we had an advertising person that was really the like the newspaper, we had a different person that was sort of like direct mail or TV stuff, you know. So it was really this like fragment thing. And they were all sort of working independently. So, you know, it started with, you know, me just kind of trying to be this Tasmanian devil and get some gravity around marketing and get some consistency of messaging, consistency of imagery, just kind of caring a little bit about all of that. And then realizing that we’re going to need a team to sort of continue to operate and service the network, right. So I view the marketing team as a service department for the company, not too different from like, an IT department. Right? So we’re trying to listen, we’re trying to hear what’s happening operationally, we’re trying to be empathetic to the needs of each sales department and sales team, as well as being aware of macro trends and what’s happening on the consumer side, as well as technology and how do we deliver messaging to people at timely, relevant moments, right. So I think we have all of those things. And then as I look at our team, and how we operate, there are sometimes weaknesses where we don’t have maybe, you know, enough resources deployed. So maybe you’d like right for right now, top of my mind is website management in general, we have so many websites that, you know, that’s a position that you don’t think about filling just to sort of manage, you know, is our SEO up to date is our what buttons are broken on a website, you know, like just to get through 35 websites or whatever that we have, is a work just by itself, right? So it can’t just be one graphic designer, it can’t just be one social media person as we grow. We’re growing in Rochester. So we have Buffalo and Rochester to communities. How do we sort of think about that now, right. And so we’re going to continue to evolve our marketing department to the best that we can service our leadership team, right. And, you know, my role within that is to stay very close to the leadership team and make sure I’m on the pulse. Right. So I can’t be outside of that pocket otherwise, and we’re just alienating ourselves. And we’re just doing what we think we should be doing or what we believe is to be right or whatever. And we have to balance both consumer and internal team demands. And so it’s grown over the last 10 years, right. And so we have a variety of people working within, we also have some freelancers that we deploy, as you know, workload gets higher. And we have a lot of like creative little call ninjas, right? these sort of predator producer, editor, people that sort of can film some stuff for us can edit some stuff for us can create these like mini content things for us and social. And you know, that’s something that I’m pretty proud of that that we’re doing.

Aharon Horwitz 27:35

Awesome. That sounds great. Okay, Matt, this was a really good conversation. We really appreciate it. We know how busy things are, especially during these crazy times, doing these calls from home. So I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for all the conversation. We definitely look forward to staying in touch and hopefully have you back around Inside Auto Podcast. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Lasher 27:54

Appreciate it, guys. Thanks so much for the time. All right,

Aharon Horwitz 27:56

everybody, take care. You can check out our Inside Auto Podcast on www.autoleadstar.com/podcast or on our podcast website or on Stitcher. Apple podcasts. Everywhere you get your you got everywhere. We’re all over. Alright guys, thanks so much.

Ilana Shabtay 28:13

Thank you, Matt.

Matt Lasher 28:15

Welcome. Thank you.

Outro 28:19

Thanks for listening to Inside Auto Podcast. Check out our other episodes with top entrepreneurs and industry leaders.