People, Process, & Technology: The Bright Future of Automotive with Kyle Mountsier

Kyle Mountsier is the Marketing & Business Development Director at Nelson Automotive Group. He is a passionate automotive professional that has over 11 years of experience in every aspect of the dealership space, from fixed ops to variable ops, and marketing to process training.

Kyle is the host of the Contagious Podcast, a husband, and a father. He is also a Pastor at Resonate Church and Founder/Treasurer of The Roadies, Nashville SC Supporters Group.

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

• Kyle Mountsier talks about networking and managing data
• The changes and shifts brought about by technological advancements
• How Kyle became a pastor, what he does, and how he juggles it with his day job
• The importance of living in a community—and how social media is a threat to that
• How Kyle got started in the automotive industry
• Kyle shares his advice on how to transform the automotive industry for the better
• The right way to use OEM programs and monetize data and results
• Where to find Kyle’s podcast and get in touch with him

In this episode…

The automotive industry has been experiencing a lot of changes in the last couple of years, mostly due to advancements in technology. These have forced dealers and other players in the industry to change the way they do business if they want to provide better services to their customers.

To transform the automotive industry and make it attractive to young people, three main things need to be considered: people, processes, and technology. Dealerships have to be creative to improve their company cultures and offer good leadership pipelines and training to their people. They need to create a culture around people, not processes. They have to create systems that make it easier for people to do business with them. And, they have to adopt the right technology to manage their people and processes—and offer better services to clients.

Kyle Mountsier, the Marketing & Business Development Director at Nelson Automotive Group, joins Aharon Horwitz and Ilana Shabtay in this episode of the Inside Auto Podcast to discuss his strategies for transforming the automotive industry. They talk about advancements in technology, using OEM programs, and Kyle’s work as a pastor and community leader.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• AutoLeadStar
• Nelson Automotive Group
• Contagious Podcast
• Kyle Mountsier on LinkedIn
• Aaron Hill on LinkedIn
• Joshua Lee on LinkedIn
• Clubhouse App
• Tesla
• Carvana

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 you in and out of the automotive industry.

Ilana Shabtay 0:15

Ilana Shabtay here with Aharon Horwitz, co-hosts of Inside Auto Podcast where we interview top dealers, GMs, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, marketers in and out of the automotive industry. 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 in weeks. We are the only platform that is powered by scale, speed and specificity to change the way dealers do marketing today. Aharon, it’s so great to be back with you today. How are you?

Aharon Horwitz 0:53

Been a while hasn’t it, Ilana?

Ilana Shabtay 0:55

It feels like it has been. Yeah.

Aharon Horwitz 0:57

Yeah, at least a week. Ah, so I am just so excited for our guest today for so many reasons. Someone that we appreciate and enjoy talking to you here at AutoLeadStar. And we’re very excited to have Kyle Mountsier here with us today. Hey, Kyle, how are you?

Kyle Mountsier 1:14

Hey, doing great. And really excited to hang out with you guys. Because I love the conversations always.

Aharon Horwitz 1:23

Absolutely. Yeah. So we’re excited to have you on. We love him. We have people who’ve been in kind of every corner of auto and you know to kind of give your bio here it really describes that you’ve spent an 11 over a decade in pretty much every aspect of the dealership space fixed ops variable ops marketing process training. Right now you’re doing your leading marketing and biz dev at the amazing Nelson Auto Group. Is that right?

Kyle Mountsier 1:50

Yeah, yeah. So it’s been quite a journey through all of the different spaces and now I get to have my hands in all of them. So it’s really fun.

Aharon Horwitz 1:59

That is true. And on the side, you are the host of the Contagious Podcast, which everyone should check out on Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. And you’re also a husband, father of two wonderful kids. You’re a pastor at the Resonate Church, founder of the Roadies, which we want to hear about. Oh, down in Nashville. And a really interesting just bio for us to talk about. There’s a lot to get into. Right? We could take this podcast in so many directions, Ilana? Right.

Ilana Shabtay 2:30

So many. Yeah. I’m so excited that you’re here with us today. Kyle.

Aharon Horwitz 2:33

We also discovered in the pre in the pre-convo that Ilana visited one of your stores in 2017. And you were chatting you guys were you know, you kind of knew each other before we knew each other, right? Yeah.

Kyle Mountsier 2:45

Yeah. No, it was funny because we looked it up. And I looked and it was a group with a little Google Hangouts between me and another employee. And we were shooting back and forth. And he said, check out our new marketing company. And we didn’t ever communicate with AutoLeadStar until five years later, but it’s okay.

Aharon Horwitz 3:04

For a lot of there was a breakdown in our process, wasn’t it?

Ilana Shabtay 3:06

It was a breakdown. Yeah, it’s all about the following. I always say, Oh, it’s all about a follow up

Aharon Horwitz 3:11

that logical or is that just like your personality? Or is that just the fact that like, why would I ever delete anything in this day and age where storage is what it is? What’s kind of the non delete thing? Like does that say something about you or not at all?

Kyle Mountsier 3:24

Yeah, maybe it does. I have not many, well, so one is yes, storage is you know, we’re on G Suite. And so it’s really easy to not delete anything, as all of my stuff is on iCloud on my computer. So I just pay for more storage because I’m weird like that. But also, it really it lets me go back and like continue networking and remind myself of old sometimes I’ll just go search like a process or something that I was doing prior and I’ll go pull up this old Word document where I had no clue how to like format anything, but had one nugget and I pull that forward into something new. It really is about having that archive of knowledge that either someone else has poured into me or that I’ve poured in, and then there’s like a third piece which is probably the the terrible side of me which is like always have receipts kind of thing, which is terrible but also it’s good because sometimes you just need to be able to go back and show like what someone said or what you said so that everyone can be on the same page and so that’s why

Aharon Horwitz 4:28

Do you feel like I’m this? I’m just fascinated by this stuff. Do you see it? Part of it is like an external mind, like an off grid archive so to speak for yourself. Do you use a system for that use like Evernote uses anything for yourself where you kind of keep that stuff or or it’s in your own email inbox?

Kyle Mountsier 4:46

Yeah, I mean, I’ve got a I do I’m kind of a systems guy. So a lot is just in my inbox. I do use folders pretty frequently in my inbox for certain like subject matters so that I can peruse those. I am very diligent about cleaning up my documents, desktop, Dropbox, Google Drive into manageable folders that are recognizable. I try a lot of times, I will before writing a subject line to an email, I’ll think about my future self and how I would search that email. Like this email subject is not just for the person that’s receiving it, but it’s for my future self and how I can get back to it.

Aharon Horwitz 5:25

Really, this is fantastic. I love this a lot. This is a discussion we have all the time, right? Yeah,

Ilana Shabtay 5:29

it is. Well, there’s two things here, right? Because I also don’t see anything. Also on my iPhone, I transfer from phone to phone. Literally everything in Arne and I are talking about the time we were stuck in Medford and we had to drive a Mustang to Portland at 3am. Which happened, which is a great story. I’ll be like, Oh, yeah, no

Aharon Horwitz 5:50

major lesson being that even though it has a button where you can open the roof. If you’re driving on the highway, you should not be doing that while you’re driving. No. Yeah, we didn’t go well. We tried to also close the roof. Like while we were driving at Navigant idea

Ilana Shabtay 6:07

in 2016, or whatever that was. But anyway, we’ll talk about it. And I’ll just be able to pull up a picture from it like that. I appreciate that. And I need that in my life. Yeah.

Aharon Horwitz 6:17

But Ilana also likes a part of it, dude, like your memory, like Ilana names documents in a way that is impossible to ever discover, because she has a very good memory. Whereas like, I need my documents to be to pre think every possible search term I would use cuz there’s no way I’m gonna find it. Otherwise, it’s just, it’s just lost and gone. Yeah.

Aharon Horwitz 6:34

So yeah, I’m getting, I also think, like, you know, when I sometimes think about this time in, like the world, I mean, first of all, there’s all that discussion over like, to what extent are we, you know, are all these bits and bytes actually, preserved going to be ever be preserved for like, future generations, you know, down the down the line, right, there’s that whole discussion over the kind of ephemeral era, which is what we’re living in, because of just the fact that all the information is digital. But I do think a lot about like, a lot of the like, little transfermate, all the transformations that we went through, and kind of this transformation into a digital universe. They’re all just preserved in these email exchanges. And these conversations, and these, like, you know, LinkedIn posts from a million years ago, and there is something like historical about it, I feel. And sometimes when I’m, like, you know, interacting in a certain way, I’m like, oh, wow, that’s like a really interesting artifact of this time. Because, you know, we were talking about, like, how major processes in the world are transforming, and like, here’s now the nuts and bolts of how that’s going to happen in this particular process. And it probably won’t ever go back. And I kind of think sometimes see those that are important in that context, as well.

Kyle Mountsier 7:37

Yeah, I mean, even like, if we talk automotive, like, like 10 years ago, is like every four to five years, there was a kind of major shift. And then it was like, every two to three years, we’re shifting, and then every year, and I feel like I mean, this last year, has the proof concept for it. It’s like every single month, the change management that we have to go through because of the digitization of the world is insane. And But yeah, I like how you said like the ark, the archive nature of what we have digitally. And I think some, you know, some software providers, like, Apple has done a good job. And even Android is starting to come alongside that and like pulling in the memory type thing and, and archiving data, using AI and allowing you to see that as a stream of consciousness and, and tag certain things. But yeah, this is interesting. So my mom, when we had kids, so we had our first kid, she goes, are you gonna do a first year photo book? And we’re like, oh, yeah. And we got like four months in and quit, which is my poor daughter. But on our second, we realized because by the time my daughter’s like two or three on my phone, I told it like three or four photos to attach to her face. And here’s what’s crazy. It now memorizes her face all the way through it. So like every change of her, it captures and so I literally have a, like, I could fill 15 photo albums with my daughter’s face because of the technology. So where am I where my mom might think, oh, that’s unfortunate, because you don’t have these physical photo albums, that we go back on my daughter’s birthday, which was just a little while ago. And we get to go and just roll through these photos and videos. And it’s and it’s all right there. So the digitization for me, as long as it’s managed well and put in its rightful place really gives us a structure as a culture, again, managed well and put in its rightful place to have some real added value to what we can remember.

Aharon Horwitz 10:01

Beautifully said, I think that’s a really beautiful idea. And I think that they’re just there, they’re also just very different experiences, you know, the physical and the digital. So that experience of a photo album when you were a kid, maybe like taking that dusty photo album off the shelf, and seeing your parents when they were younger. I’m not like, I don’t know, maybe like, I guess I could envision my kids one day looking back and sort of stumbling on something but I’m not it might not. I don’t know. I feel like there’s value both in a different way, though. I haven’t. I haven’t really teased it out. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m like a Sabbath, Jewish Sabbath observant where we don’t use electronics on the Sabbath on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, right. So we, like Mike, like I used to remember at home, you know, it’s all books. And when I was a kid, there was anyway, like a computer, right? There wasn’t like a phone that you could go scroll through and look at stuff for Facebook yet to be on or whatever. But like my kids don’t use any electronics on Saturday. And like, I sometimes want to show them like photo albums. And we have like two so we keep looking at the same ones over and over again. I’m like, oh, man, I need to print some more photo books, which I’m just gonna go into an app, you know, one of the many apps I can use and just like, you know, auto generated Yeah, a bunch of photo albums, because it’s kind of nice to have that off grid offline time when you can like experience the, the those pictures and stuff. Who knows? These are all really interesting questions. Because the other thing that blew my mind was I was watching this video, I think it was from 2007. on YouTube. It was a Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together being interviewed by what’s the guy’s name Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, and maybe Kara Swisher I think it was Kara Swisher with him. But the quality of the video when I was watching it, I’m like, oh, man, it’s like from the 70s. I mean, this is terrible. Like, it was like an 80s video call? No, it’s 2007. I mean, we’ve the quality of life, the media has gone so far. In the past, you know, 1015 years. Unbelievable. How will you know what we can do on our phones now compared to what people would do with hard, heavy equipment back in, you know, in the first in the arts, and in the early part of the second decade of the 2000s. It’s just mind blowing how far the Tech has come through. It’s really insane. You’ll have videos of our kids now are just unbelievable. They’re like movie quality, you know? Oh, okay. So, Kyle, like before we get into cars, to your pastor, tell us about that. Like, tell us what that is how you became a pastor. What that means is that most of you will probably know what a pastor is, but like, pretend like we don’t and give us the whole to give us the background.

Kyle Mountsier 12:35

Yes. So the really great thing is, like most people, I did not go to college to be in the car business, I actually went. I was a church music major. And so I wanted to be a worship pastor and help plant and plant means to start a church in downtown Cincinnati. My wife and I moved to Florida, and I wasn’t directly involved in the church, although I was helping, you know, playing music, lead worship, things like that. But then when we moved to Nashville, we have a real heart or myth because looking at the volume of churches in the US, it’s severely and most of the world population, it’s severely outnumbered. And so growing the church through planting in unique areas, with unique people and unique purposes, is a really important piece to us. So we connected with a gentleman named Shane that was starting this church in our, our, the city we now live in, and it’s a resume church. And so I was installed as an elder a couple years later, elder pastor meaning the same thing in our church family. And so we say it like this, we say we’re family missionary servants. That is that’s practicing the way of Jesus for the renewal of ourselves, our city in our world. And so it’s really it’s, that’s what the leadership and pastor on shepherding is, is connecting to people and growing in Christ’s likeness. And then so it does, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of phone calls, it’s people in our houses, it’s preparing for gatherings together on Sundays, which is when our church meets and it’s an up and down thing. I tell you what it’s if you don’t know any pastors you you need to just because a lot of people see the the smiling or the shiny pastor with the fancy suit and for the majority of pastors in the world, it’s much more in the trenches, it’s dealing with pain and hurt and suffering and sorrow which is all around us. And so I like to be a pastor, I get to be with people, you know, and, and that’s, that’s my heart is to be with people and to, to learn and hear and listen and be present, be present emotionally and physically with people and point them toward Christ. So that’s, that’s me as the pastor and I get to do that in the margins of not having a full time gig as well. So yeah,

Aharon Horwitz 15:24

but it’s not it’s, you know, it’s not a Sunday thing, right? It’s an all week thing, right? People are calling you when they need you. And you’re weaving that in with your, you know, so to speak day job, right, which is clearly a major part of your life, meaning that that’s the, that’s got to be that’s got to be, in some ways complicated, maybe in other ways that helps you be a pastor more effectively, to have sort of, you know, those dual roles, but how do you handle that?

Kyle Mountsier 15:49

Yeah, it does make it tough. I will say that, having, you know, having to dedicate time and energy and not being able to be, you know, present with people at all times. But it also gives me a greater perception for, like, what everybody’s in and involved in on a daily basis. And what I love is like, I’m not just, you know, the pastor that’s like, oh, there’s the pastor, and he does all this stuff, like my wife is an instrumental part in what we are as a church family. And so she gets to be in our community daily shopping, and, and going on playdates and being involved with, with people in our community. And so it is, it’s about like, all of life, and we have a lot of people, our dinner tables open. And, and there’s sometimes when we close it down, we need that family, but our dinner tables open, because that table and that communication and that conversation, and that being a family and really not just being a family, but people so many people’s version of family is so distorted, and so is so painful, that reframing the family in the way that we’re the way that God sees family is a lot of the work that that we get to do and and the passion that we have, is allowing people to step into a new family in a way that that’s supportive and loving and messy and honest about our messiness, and all of the above.

Aharon Horwitz 17:18

So yeah, I think that’s such an important counterbalance, in just the notion of community of family, the family of friends of loyalty, of understanding complexity, of being able to sit with people who you entirely disagree with, and still understand that they’re humans and, and, and sort of need the same basic things that others need. There’s something that I see sort of happening in digital today, you look at the online world, right, the twittersphere and whatnot. And it’s, it’s so reductionist, and everyone is, so get, it gets so vicious. And I just think like, unless we build, unless we really can figure out how to counterbalance that, in our day to day lives and sort of remind ourselves what it means to like, you know, live with other humans, and appreciate that people were in a lot of trouble, you know, the more we go, you know, the more we go VR, and the more we go remote, and the more we go, it’s just, it’s gonna be very, very real, it’s gonna really kind of minimize our humanity. And that’s, yeah, I think that’s the biggest one of the biggest threats to sort of the digital world, along with everything else. But that’s a very big challenge. Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier 18:29

so I have a new Clubhouse/LinkedIn friend, his name is Joshua Lee. And I absolutely love what he says, because, okay, I’ll set it up. So, like, we go to the bar, or the restaurant, or we’re in someone’s house, and it’s like, oh, we’re humans sitting across from the table, and we have conversations, then we get to know each other, and we share life. And we do that really well. And then we get into the business world, and we have these terms like b2b and b2c, and e-commerce and customers and things like that. And Josh, Joshua Lee says, Can we return all this thing to h to h? So human to human? Like, every part of life is human, the human, whether you’re in business or in sales, or accounting, or at the bar or at a family’s table, you’re interacting with other humans, so just be human with them. Yeah, stop trying to like perpetrate and be something else, you know,

Aharon Horwitz 19:28

ya know, it’s like the ultimate common denominator and nice. Okay, that was great. I learned I learned a lot there. So thank you for sharing that. We appreciate it. Appreciate the learning, learning more about what kind what you’re doing and sort of how you position yourself as a pastor.

In terms of Nelson Automotive, and maybe just in general auto tell us a little bit about and we like to kind of hear this from all of our guests because we there’s like there’s no template for how you get in the auto industry. As you mentioned, in university, you weren’t like I’m going into departments tomorrow, but maybe some people are I mean, I last time I was talking about like an awesome, we have a really great customer group whose principles are the automated and he was, he was sort of, you know, telling me about his journey for like MIT economics engineering into the auto grid. It’s just interesting, it’s just interesting to hear everyone’s story. But I would love to. So we’d love to hear your story. Like, how did you get to the auto business? What brought you here? What kept you here? And, and then Nelson in particular, how do you get there?

Kyle Mountsier 20:28

Yeah, so like, the, the, the real origin story is, of course, I was trying to find a job in church music. My wife, then fiance, was moving to Pensacola, Florida. She was a professional ballerina, if you can imagine that. There’s not many in the world. And so she has to kind of go where the job takes you. Right. And so I was looking down there, and we needed separate places and couldn’t find anything. So I was thinking about restaurants, I’d served for a while. And I don’t really want to do that. So I see the sales job. And someone like early back in middle school had said, Oh, you would be a great salesperson one day, I was like, That’s crazy. So I applied. And it was one of those I fogged the mirror and got a job. That was great. And it was definitely a job. The first five months, I applied to a bunch of places and tried to get out. And then a wonderful friend of mine, Pete Harrington got me the job at Sandy Sansing Nissan, and a guy named Aaron Hill, who is now running some stores in Central Florida. took me under his wing, he was the GSM at the time, and really showed me what it was what it looked like to be in car sales and to do it the right way and do it to do it the honest and upfront way and to and to do every process and check every box and ensure you were doing the business the right way. And I went from like a nine car salesperson to like a 20 car salesperson within a month. It was crazy. One day, I’ll tell you the story of how I wanted a TV that month and it was really crazy. So that like that trajectory then took me. I was there for a little over a year and a half. And then my wife and I wanted to move to Nashville, I transferred to a Nissan store here kind of shop with the stores and was there for another year and a half. That was where I moved through management pretty quickly and was running the new car side of the store there as a new car director. And then I got a call. I got a call late on a Saturday night from my current boss. And he had gotten my name from someone else. And I hadn’t applied for anything. And it was kind of one of those perfect timing things really honestly. I was again in this mode of potentially trying to kind of get out of the car business, was looking at banking, and, and called me and we spent I think seven hours together the next Tuesday. So it was really right. And so I’ve been with Nelson Auto Group for eight years this month coming up in just a few days. So Brown University. Yeah, yeah. So that’s, that’s really cool. And then through this group, Finance Director, sales manager opening a spur a lot of same business development from operations, software systems, and I’ve really been given the freedom to explore and learn and, and grow and learn with others and serve and lead others. So it’s been a really big blessing to be a part of this group and and now getting to getting to kind of have a platform because of my experience for for, like, I’ve got this really crazy dream, I got this crazy dream that one day, there’s gonna be college students graduating, going, does anybody know of any open jobs in the auto industry because I just can’t find them because we’re so packed with the absolute best people in the world. And, and so that’s my dream for my son, he’s five. And so I’ve got I’ve got 15 years to make that happen.

Aharon Horwitz 24:05

I think we can go quicker.

Kyle Mountsier 24:06

I think we can make that adjustment. So that’s the reason for the podcast. That’s the reason for my passion behind you know, the automotive industry. And I really think it’s a place where, where we can make it where people want to be a part of the industry and do business with us, that it’s a desirable thing to do.

Ilana Shabtay 24:26

So. Yeah, I agree with that. Are there specific holes in the industry or anything right now that you feel like, we need to kind of get over those challenges to get to that I know, you know, you’ve been bringing people together on platforms like Clubhouse and your podcast and we talked about this briefly before we started. And I’ve been in some of the rooms that you’ve moderated and it’s really amazing. I mean, you did a room about diversity and inclusion in the industry. And I think that’s a big place for change in automotive, so I’d love to hear where some of the areas You think automotive can really transform so that people will want to come and will become that industry that every single college student will say, Hey, I’m going to automotive?

Kyle Mountsier 25:11

Yeah, I think um, so for me, it’s that kind of three words, people process and technology. So when, when it comes to people, that means the type of cultures that we’re creating the type of leadership pipelines that we’re giving the type of leadership training that we’re giving, not just how to do a cardio, or how to write an ARO, but how to lead and serve and lead other people. So creating a culture around people not around process, which is a different mindset that you have to have instead of creating a culture around your process, you kind of create a culture around your people. So that’s, that’s one. The next is the process. So we’ve got to overhaul how we do business. And what it takes is us asking the people that we want to do business with us how they want to do business. So we’ve got to create processes and structures that allow them to do business with us more often and easier. So whether that be in variable or fixed Ops, we’ve got to create those processes. And then once we have that kind of figured out, we figure out how the culture fits and how the process is managed within that culture, then we have to bring along technology and for the longest time, and really, I’ll say, in the last three years, we’ve done a lot better with technology. But there’s still a lot of gaps. And I know you all know that, you know, the majority of our technology is based on FTP file sense, you know, in the automotive industry, and we’ve got to move forward, we’ve got to talk about single page application websites, we’ve got to talk about API integrations, we’ve got to talk about open platforms, we’ve got a buddy of mine likened it like this. So someone graduates college, when they went into college, they were required to get a Mac, to do all of their coursework. They were on Blackboard, they played around in the stock market, they created new apps, and a plethora of other things to be in whatever industry that they’re in. And then they couldn’t find a job anywhere. And they said, Okay, fine, I’ll try the sales thing, and I’ll get into automotive sales. And then the very first day, they’re given a set of logins. And they’re given the login to their dr tool, which is really fancy and gorgeous and beautiful. And then they get a login to Reynolds. You know, I mean, like, blue green screen of shift f5, shift J, Command S, right? And then they go, so wait, what, and we sell 30,000 60,000 $100,000 machines using this. So we’ve got to innovate, innovate there, and get everybody on board from a technology standpoint to attract that type of employee. So that’s how people process technology.

Aharon Horwitz 28:00

Yeah, it’s really well said, I think that the, there’s, um, you know, I was like, now that we’re for the first time getting exposure to OEM programs. You know, I always I, we talked about internally, here in the office, we say, like, wow, like, with all these restrictions, and the audits we have to go through, and the, you know, in every other vendor, if the only requirement was that there was a proper, you know, function REST API that others could interact with, that would make the OEM program infinitely more valuable than all the layers of, you know, stuff that is built up there for the year. And again, you I always try to understand why people do things and not just come and be all critical, it’s like, doesn’t help anyone, it’s entirely obvious to me now, why the OEMs have standards, why they want to, you know, want to actually know what’s happening in the best way they can, because there’s a lot of challenges with sort of the way things have been done, you know, say, in particular, say, the advertising world and whatnot, but, but at the end of the day, like, if there was just a requirement to have a good API, and if you want to be a CRM that’s approved by the OEM, if you want to be a website approved by the OEM, if you want to be a vendor, your data has to be accessible and and, you know, whatever within whatever framework leverageable. And that will just make so many problems go away over the next five years, because innovators and entrepreneurs would be able to do things that are frankly, big companies would just be able to do things that today is just extremely extraordinarily difficult to do.

Kyle Mountsier 29:33

Yeah, and unfortunately, the way that the way that that technology has been gated is because the data has been monetized in a poor way. And I think if we restructured and instead of monetizing the data, we monetize the results greater we would be in a lot better places in industry. So it’s gonna take a lot of fear right now that we won’t have the monetization from it. Data perspective. But unless you are distinctly in advertising on Google or Facebook or anything like that, the majority of the rest of the world isn’t monetizing data. They’re monetizing the results. And so we’ve got to shift as an industry to understand that we can monetize results and not and not data

Aharon Horwitz 30:19

results are or, you know, a piece of machinery that is useful meaning there’s a lot of ways to approach it, other than as you pointed out, getting the data that’s really critical to take that big step forward when it comes to the technology.

Kyle Mountsier 30:36

Well, and here’s, here’s the crazy thing, right? And you guys are a fairly new startup. The reality is, the startup that has the greatest Okay, so Clubhouse, right, something like Clubhouse in the world that blows everyone’s minds, that’s incredible. That’s though, like nobody’s seen anything like it from a website provider or a digital marketer or anything like that. Now, the gate is so high, that I can’t, I can’t, I can’t open the door to the gate. And so now my technology doesn’t get in the hands of the places where it can be useful. And so so now, you’ve actually stifled the franchise’s capacity for growth, because you’ve limited the access to their data and your data from third party providers. And so I think there’s a and this is where this is where a lot of the challenges in the industry are beating us, because they don’t have those gates. There, they have open access to technology to build that, that we don’t have yet. And I there’s some challenges to that. I think you all are, you know, there’s some, there’s some DMS challenges to that there’s some CRM challenges to that. So we’re getting we’re tiptoeing into that. But again, like you said, it’s going to take buy in from the OEMs.

Aharon Horwitz 31:58

Primarily, you know, I was looking at, um, you know, I always think about the industry. And if you if you did like a, you know, if you do a Google search on news from automotive, say, over the past six months or past two years, right, the majority of the news is gonna be around, you know, kind of, you know, Tesla, and then it’s carvana, and broom shift and the digital, that’s where all the buzz is, right. And if you look at their market cap, you know, it’s astounding, meaning carvanha has a 50 $50 billion plus market cap, and I just think about, but when you look at car sales, right, you see, those folks are selling 2% of cars in the United States, 98% of non private transactions are still happening in the, in the more traditional automotive retail environment. And so, you know, for automotive to like see itself as a sleeping giant that’s gonna wake up and sort of establish its ability to continue to generate the societal goods that it generates, right to be that industry that actually employs people who don’t necessarily go to, you know, Stanford, and who you pay that pay, you know, where you can make a good living and actually employ millions of people, directly and indirectly, for that to be successful. It’s, it’s, it’s almost like a, it’s an imperative. It’s a mission to reform the tech side, before it’s too late. And, you know, the folks that can, again, access what you were describing come in, they just continue to eat away at the margin. Like, this is a beautiful thing that exists. And it’s very lucky that the regulations that were laid down in the 30s, and 40s kind of gave it this, this moat that is protecting it right now. And it’s it’s a huge opportunity, I think, yeah, but that

Kyle Mountsier 33:35

was allegedly been broken. Yeah, it’s been broken, because they’ve, they’ve figured out the state context, you know, and so, we’ve got to play by the same rules. And we’ve got to, you know, we’ve got to get to the states and the governments and have the same capacity. I’ve heard this 2% thing, and a lot of people have been using it for like, we shouldn’t be afraid. It’s only 2% of the market and represents a huge business that way. It’s massive. Think about the weighted nature of that 2% massive for, for companies getting 2% of the market, we’ve got 16,000 franchise OEMs getting massive, well, not 98%, but a large percent of it. You got independence there, too. But yeah, we’ve got it. Yeah.

Aharon Horwitz 34:20

But a trillion dollars a car sale, I mean, the fact that look, you know, other than Tesla, they’re eating away at the used car sales, but you see exactly what they mean. That has to be a major warning flag, but there’s still an opportunity. And I think that again, as you pointed out, we need to understand that like some of the models that got some of the big tech players in the industry to where they are today, they’re only going to ultimately help the industry move into the future and hope that we and others are gonna be part of that process because it really does have, I think, a very important place and kind of making the case that capitalism has some value still when when you look at the world, you see why gap between, you know, widening wealth gap and it’s just automotive actually still makes the case and I think that that’s an important thing for for society as a whole are how we typically keep it short. That’s what we’ve done. So we can keep talking basically for hours, Ilana right? I think that would be, that’d be our preference here. But um, so Kyle, where can people find your podcast?

Kyle Mountsier 35:22

Yeah, so it’s Contagious Podcast. You can go to contagiouspodcast.com or contagiousauto.com and find it. And we’re just searching wherever your podcasts are. Sometimes you gotta throw the word automotive in there because we’re fairly young. But you’ll find it. And then you can follow me on LinkedIn. I’m literally the only Kyle Mountsier in the world. So if you do a Google search, you can find me wherever I need to be found. And yeah, so that’s a pretty interesting fact. And it’s hard to spell my name so contagious is a lot easier to go that route.

Aharon Horwitz 35:53

Well, we learned it’s Kyle Mountsier, we can do that. So a lot of this was fantastic. Kyle, we really appreciate it. Thank you.

Kyle Mountsier 36:03

What a pleasure. Thank you so much Ilana and Aharon for having me. It’s been a pleasure and I hope that hope that y’all are y’all are on the on the train and I know you are so

Aharon Horwitz 36:15

yeah. 100% or do you want to wrap us? Yeah, thank

Ilana Shabtay 36:18

you so much, Kyle. We learned about everything from what it is to be a pastor to what it’s like to be, you know, 10 plus years in automotive so we appreciate all the content and your leadership in automotive. So, for all of our listeners, I know you enjoyed this episode, please tune in Inside Auto Podcast. You can also find it wherever you listen to your podcasts, and insideautopodcast.com. Thank you so much.

Aharon Horwitz 36:44

Till next time.

Outro 36:50

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