How Dealerships Can Efficiently Scale their Vehicle Acquisition Operation with Josh Detzel 

Josh Detzel is the marketing director at C Harper Automotive Group. He’s also a Google partner and a CXO member. He has years of automotive experience in both retail and on the vendor side with CDK and has also worked at previous automotive groups before joining C Harper.

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

• How Josh got into dealership digital marketing 
• The perks of working with smaller technology vendors 
• The importance of working with the latest technologies to improve dealership operations 
• How he successfully created a Vehicle Acquisition Center at his auto group 
• Josh’s predictions for what’s to come in automotive in the next year

In this episode…

Is it possible for dealership’s to effectively and efficiently scale their vehicle acquisition strategy? 

In short, yes. All it takes is some strategic thinking, a willingness to try new tactics, and a deep understanding of how to enable your team with the right responsibilities and technologies to get the work done. 

In the latest episode of InsideAuto Podcast, Ilana Shabtay speaks with Josh Detzel about how he scaled his vehicle acquisition operations into a full scale Vehicle Acquisition Center. Josh explains how in just two months of careful planning, he successfully scaled his acquisition operation from 8 vehicles to 28 by carefully allocating resources, developing internal work processes and leveraging the power of AI. Listen in now to learn exactly how he managed to accomplish this feat and how he plans to continue scaling and spreading his methodology to other dealerships in his auto group and corner the used car market in his area. 

Resources Mentioned: 

• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn 
• Joshua Detzel on LinkedIn
• Fullpath 
• C Hopper Auto Group
• LaFontaine Automotive Group
• AutoNation 
• Jeff Wyler Automotive Family
• CompareAI
• ConnectAI
• Digital Dealer 
• MRC 

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Fullpath (formerly AutoLeadStar).

Fullpath is the automotive industry’s leading customer data and experience platform (CDXP).

Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first-party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional, hyper-personalized customer experiences.

To learn more, visit www.fullpath.com

Episode Transcript:

Ilana Shabtay:

Ilana Shabtai here, host of Inside Auto 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 fullpath.com. Full Path is automotive’s leading customer data and experience platform, CDXP. Full Path enables dealers to turn their first party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional, hyper-personalized customer experiences. To learn more, visit fullpath.com. Today, we’re welcoming Josh Dethel to the podcast. Josh, how are you doing?

Josh Detzel:

I’m wonderful, how are you?

Ilana Shabtay:

I’m doing well. I’m excited for today’s topic. It’s something that we have not touched on yet on this podcast. But just to give everyone a brief intro here, Josh is the marketing director at SeaHarper Automotive Group. He’s also a Google partner and a CXO member. He has years of automotive experience in both retail and on the vendor side with CDK and was at also previous automotive groups before he landed at SeaHarper. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. Super excited to have you. Thanks again.

Josh Detzel:

Thank you for having me. Yeah, excited.

Ilana Shabtay:

So tell us before we get into the meat of today’s episode, we’re gonna be talking a lot about marketing and we’re gonna be talking about all the wonderful things that you’ve built at C Harper. How did you get into automotive? Tell us.

Josh Detzel:

I joined automotive in 2012. had a family friend that was in automotive when I graduated talking about what I was going to do in my career choice and he said I don’t have a single guy making under $70,000 selling cars, why don’t you come and try that for the summer. So I took my swing and never looked back, it’s been just over 10 years in automotive now. Started as a BDC, handling Back in the day when I started, I know that sounds a little corny, but 10 years ago it was 100% commission. So I got paid off of setting appointments for the sales team and kind of quickly moved into helping out the special finance team. This is pre-Google My Business, whatever they called it back then, Google Places or Google Business Profile. At that time, that was my first taste of digital marketing, setting up our Yelp account and Facebook and our Google profile at the time to generate more leads. So the more leads that we generated, the more phone calls that we set appointments on, the more money I made. So that was kind of my first dip in the toe in the water into the automotive digital marketing space and kind of took off from there.

Ilana Shabtay:

That’s awesome. And now you’ve been at C Harper how long?

Josh Detzel:

uh… we’re going on uh… this can be our fifth year coming up uh… spent some time uh… couple different groups in the pittsburgh market uh… sales manager finance manager uh… got recruited by cdk in the chevrolet channel to do some automotive digital marketing consulting uh… mainly with website and uh… dealers started asking you know how i get more traffic what is the best way to get more leads role that I was in and the capacity that GM and CDK wanted me to work in. And it just really helped me dive in and figure out that there’s a lot of dealers that are really being taken advantage of by vendor partners with non-transparent reporting, mediocre service at best and really just kind of copy and paste marketing strategies. So that really got me back into the automotive group on the retail side and really just started figuring out what works best. We can work in with different partners, trying to find the best possible solutions to get the return on our investment.

Ilana Shabtay:

Yeah, and on that topic, and thanks for sharing that, I think that’s a very important point and I think we’re all sort of dealing with that now and how can we make the most transparent reporting and metrics for dealers, right? That should be everyone’s mission.

Josh Detzel:

Right, absolutely.

Ilana Shabtay:

Where is your focus now when it comes to like just stand on top of the most innovative marketing for dealers and what kind of conferences are you going to or what are you listening to? What are you reading? I don’t know, just give us a little bit of insight into how you sort of stay on top of that. And then we’ll move into what you’ve sort of built over there at Sea Harper.

Josh Detzel:

Yes, so you kind of hit on it, I was fortunate enough to be recruited into and invited into the CXO group. We have awesome dealer operators, VPs of marketing, operations directors, executive managers from groups all over the country, right? We even have like LaFontaine and Jeff Weiler and Auto Nation in group one. I mean, really, it’s very humbling. I am by far the 20th or 30th smartest person in the room. When we go to these 20 group meetings, it’s an awesome experience. But we’re going to, past conferences, we’ll be going to NADA, digital dealer, and we’re just looking for what are the new up and coming software companies and vendor partners that aren’t owned by these major big box retailers, right? These major big box… vendors. The reason why I look at that is when you go to a big company that’s been around forever, they are conglomerate. They own the software. They own the DMS. They own your CRM. They own advertising. And usually when you want something and you have an idea, it’s yeah, we’ll get that. That’ll get on the roadmap. It’ll come out in Q5, which means never. So one of the things that I like working with Full Path is when I was in Austin at DMS, DMSE, maybe it was MRC, DMSE. I sat down with Aaron and I sat down with my Calatio and said, you know, these are the things that I need out of Full Path, right? We need to be able to splice our data. We need to be able to segment our audiences. I need to be able to create, you know, kind of toggle on and say, hey, these people came into my showroom but didn’t buy and they visited my Ford F-150 VDPs. And now let’s turn that into how can we create audiences based off of… These are customers that purchased the vehicle from us but shopped on our website or customers that have 10 payments left on an F-150 and 11 and 10 and 9 and kind of create drip campaigns so we can really serve the right message to the right customers. And that’s one of the great things that I’ve gotten from the partnership with Full Path is they’ve listened and they take dealer feedback and they’re actually creating some of the things that we need in-house to be better marketers and more efficient.

Ilana Shabtay:

That’s awesome. I’m happy to hear that. And I’ll say that, you know, us along with other partners that we’ve worked with, anyone who’s committed to the innovation and success of dealers will be pumping out features and making sure that we’re providing the innovation for the industry. So I’m happy that that’s your experience.

Josh Detzel:

Right, true partners, right?

Ilana Shabtay:

Yeah, true partners, exactly. Not just a vendor or not just another vendor. But talking about innovation. Let’s talk about your vehicle acquisition strategy that you spearheaded at C Harper, which was, I mean, Josh and I were talking about this before we got on the podcast and it’s really amazing how you built an entire buying center basically for vehicle acquisition, but it’s so much beyond that. Yeah. It’s how did you build it from scratch? How did you test it? How did you scale it? So talk to us a little bit about that. Introduce the concept.

Josh Detzel:

So, I got the idea from our CXO group. It took me about six months to finally convince our leadership team here. By the way, we have a great leadership team. We have 12 guys on our board of directors, guys and girls on our directors team and very young. Half of us are under the age of 40. So very forward thinking. We’re very fortunate to have an awesome dealer principal who is very young and just wants to be different. I just wanted to give that plug. But I came back with this idea and it kind of took a little bit of time to get the buy-in, to get it off the ground. But back in October, I finally hired a lady to basically be a one-stop shop. We really wanted to figure out, we wanted to clean the house for the guests came over. We didn’t want to launch a website. We didn’t want to start buying KBB, ICO buying centers, any of that. We wanted to kind of figure out what is our internal operations look like first, how do we clean that up? How do we reduce friction in that process? It’s almost like Here, I know. Yeah, I think you had shared with me. You’re Jewish, correct? So you have Shabbat dinner, right? 

Ilana Shabtay:

Thank you for bringing this into the podcast.

Josh Detzel:

You’re you’re welcome.

Ilana Shabtay:

So impressed, so impressed.

Josh Detzel:

So before your Friday Shabbat dinner you do you clean up before the guests come over to you clean up all everybody’s having a Good time and you’re eating right

Ilana Shabtay:

Well, we try our best before!

Josh Detzel:

Right exactly so that’s kind of what our thought process was How do we reduce friction in this process? So let’s get our paperwork dialed in. Let’s get the person trained and AFIP certified on all the financing and titling piece, that aspect of it. And how do we work on our call tracking, or I’m sorry, our talk tracks to make sure that we’re overcoming objections, appraising the vehicles correctly in Viado. So there’s a whole tech stack that we had to master first, right, in the internal operations. We were getting, I think we did, first couple months we were doing anywhere from 8 to 12 with one person, one stop shop, right? So this lady called the leads and we didn’t even have leads at this point. We were basically just pulling customers off of Facebook Marketplace to just kind of test this, right? We didn’t invest any money into it other than the person. And we were doing 8 to 12, so one person calling these people off of Facebook Marketplace or getting their information, praising the vehicles, setting the appointments, bringing the customers in, doing that final inspection and then printing the paperwork and getting a check all within From the time that they walk through the threshold of our dealership the time they walk out in and out in under 60 seconds That was the blueprint then we said, okay now Let’s start getting some more opportunities instead of just scrubbing Facebook Marketplace all day because if anybody’s ever done that it’s a grind right, so We’ve launched sell your car Pittsburgh Which is a website so I went through and we bought up sell your car Pittsburgh sell your truck 20 different URLs, redirected them all to sellyourcarpittsburgh.com. So we’re getting anywhere between 60 to 100 leads per month through Sell Your Car Pittsburgh. And we realized pretty quickly that the ceiling for one person doing everything was about 12 to 15 cars. That’s a lot of correct per month. So that ran for about two or three months. And then I said, okay, this is not scalable, right? How do we grow this department? And I need to get more efficient with what we’re currently doing before I spend more money. So we had an old used car building and we moved the girl who was handling all the leads to the one-stop shop for Sawyer Car Pittsburgh down to the used car building, got her with somebody. Cause my thought process was if I’m setting appointments, for somebody to come in and be appraiser of vehicle, and I think that the range is a little off, I’m gonna be more hesitant to set that appointment and bring them in because I don’t wanna be the bad guy, right, but if I’m setting them for you. Well, now you’re the bad guy, so I’m gonna set as many appointments as possible. Right? So we’re just trying to give our appraiser more swings at the plate. So that started working. So now I have two people, right? One person that’s calling the appointments, calling and sending appointments and printing the paperwork, another person that’s appraising the vehicles. Boom, first month, 18 cars. Right? So just to fast forward a little bit, just a little bit of, I have a little bit of data here because I’m a digital marketer at heart.

Ilana Shabtay:

I love it.

Josh Detzel:

Full month was July. We bought 26 cars. That was our best month ever. And then flipped two people into upgrades, right? We upgraded their vehicles. Yeah, it’s scaled very quickly

Ilana Shabtay:

Not only are you hitting the pain point of inventory, but you’re also bringing them in and you’re also turning them into long-term customers. I mean, it’s an incredible strategy.

Josh Detzel:

100% in and out. tell you what our end goal is here in a second. I’ll just give you a couple more data points. So August, best month ever, 28 acquisitions, straight purchases off of private sellers, and seven customers upgraded into other vehicles.

Ilana Shabtay:

Wow, wow.

Josh Detzel:

So, and the grosses are incredible. So, from our first month, we did 26 cars, average gross, $2,146 average gross, and that’s including wholesale loss, right? So there’s some bangers in there worth $5,000 losses. But we never worry about the singles, individual deals, we’re worried about the full picture. So if we take an L, we get a little egg on our face on a couple deals, it is what it is. We wanna buy as many vehicles as we possibly can. 

Ilana Shabtay:

it’s also just a way to increase your customer database, meaning it’s not just about that vehicle, it’s you’re creating all these new opportunities, which is, it’s genius, honestly.

Josh Detzel:

100% and I’ll tell you that We have expanded that team. So now I brought in a girl who was our senior BDC, a lady, I should say, who was our senior BDC agent, who is just, she was the best person on the phones in our company, right? Over a decade years experience in BDC.

Ilana Shabtay:

Yeah.

Josh Detzel:

And now she said she’s handling all the leads and she’s setting the appointments for the appraiser. And then the appraiser is purchasing the vehicles, overcoming objections. And then the girl that started this, the lady that started this is just printing paperwork. full-time paperwork pusher, right? And cutting checks and collecting steps and everything, like, well, documents. Now I just hired another guy, and I stole him from a dealership that does this whole thing by himself. So he does like how we started it, right? So he’s trained on all three pieces of this. And we’re gonna scale this. And our ultimate goal is this month, we’re hoping to get to 50 cars. We’re well on our way there. And if I can get to 50 or 60, Casey Harper Jr., our dealer principal, We have a couple other locations that we’re looking at but our ultimate goal is by the end of 2024 We no longer buy cars off a smart auction or at the auction. We should be purchasing 150 to 200 cars private seller acquisitions And I’m my goal is so if you look at Pittsburgh Pittsburgh’s here We’re right below it about 20 miles 20 30 minutes below and our next location will be east of Pittsburgh I want to put one north of Pittsburgh and west of Pittsburgh and we’re gonna corner the market from a use car acquisition strategy.

Ilana Shabtay:

1000 percent.

Josh Detzel:

Right now we’re just purchasing vehicles in our backyard, but we’re gonna go bigger. And I wanna steal all of my competitors’ private seller trades and private sellers and we’re gonna feed them right into our locations and hopefully make this its own profit center, its own LLC that will feed cars to become our own auction and sell those cars to our dealerships. you know, add a pack with a pack and a little markup in them. But it’s well on its way.

Ilana Shabtay:

But it’s incredibly impressive. And I think a lot of patience and strategy went into this, which is really what I want to take away from here. It’s not easy necessarily to build this strategy from zero, but you did it right, right? You brought one person in and you slowly scaled it. And now you have a vision for what’s gonna make it successful. And you have KPIs and you have goals. I love hearing about this. I think it’s an incredible process that you’ve built. And it sounds like you’re well on your way to opening many other points like for this, so, it’s incredible.

Josh Detzel:

I’ll tell you real quick and we can move on to another topic, but if anybody is trying to or thinking about starting a vehicle acquisition center. I’ll tell you a couple things number one. It’s incredibly difficult. Okay Um, it is not something that happens overnight um, and in the beginning you will lose money, um, it takes time and um, And patience like you said but in the beginning, you know, we were barely breaking even and fast forward we’re still under a year in the making and um, we are and this is just the beginning.

Ilana Shabtay:

Yeah. Well, well, if anyone wants to talk to Josh, I’m offering your services. So I hope.

Josh Detzel:

Yeah, no worries.

Ilana Shabtay:

The last thing I’ll end here with is if you have any predictions for the beginning, end of 2023, 2024, when it comes to the car market, I’d love for you to share, whether that’s, you know, adoption of EVs or marketing strategies coming out or, you know, vehicle acquisition and inventory. I’d love to hear a little bit about that before we sign off here.

Josh Detzel:

I’ll give you two predictions.

Ilana Shabtay:

Okay.

Josh Detzel:

Number one, there’s going to be, and we kind of hit on this in the beginning, there’s going to be more disruptors in this industry.

Ilana Shabtay:

Mm-hmm.

Josh Detzel:

Dealers are tired of hearing from their vendors that, hey, it’s on the roadmap, or, hey, yeah, it’ll come out, never, right? There are disruptors in the industry now, full path included, AI companies like Impel AI and Connect AI that we are using both, and from a vehicle acquisition perspective, and that’s the last piece, and from a vehicle acquisition perspective that we didn’t even talk about, is how we’re using AI to do certain things things like respond to customers. So I have my team only handling the leads up to seven days, and AI handling up to 90, right? So they’re just handling those low funnel leads, and AI is handling them long-term. And if a customer engages, it’s sending an alert to my team so they can reengage with that customer and set those appointments. There’s gonna be more disruptors in this market that are listening to dealers that aren’t just vendors, that are gonna partner and allow them to integrate, right? There’s a lot of stuff in our industry now that does not integrate together, and there’s gonna be more disruptors coming out that are gonna help us from an AI perspective in automation and really help us grow and partner with us.

Ilana Shabtay:

That’s great. And I fully agree, obviously, just considering where I’m standing. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining Inside Auto Podcast. It’s been so wonderful. I’m sure many of our listeners will be trying to figure out how to open up some kind of new profit center after hearing this, but appreciate your thoughts. And we can find you at digital dealer at MRC at NADA. Correct?

Josh Detzel:

Oh yeah, I’ll be in Palm Beach. I’ll be at Digital Dealer in October, and then November I’ll be down in Palm Beach, Florida at MRC.

Ilana Shabtay:

Awesome. So I won’t, unfortunately won’t be able to make it to digital dealer, but I will see you at MRC. So it will be nice to meet you again in person. Thank you so much, Josh. And if you liked this episode, please tune in inside autopodcast.com. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, Deezer, wherever you like to listen to your podcast. Thank you again.

Josh Detzel:

Thank you, appreciate it.