#407 - 5 CRITICAL YEAR-END TASKS FOR DEALERS BEFORE 2026
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Term
buy here pay here
Buy here pay here means you can buy a car and make payments directly to the dealership instead of a bank. It's often for people who might not have good credit.
Term
post-sale inspections
Post-sale inspections are checks done on a car after it's sold to make sure everything is working properly. It's a way to catch problems before they become serious.
Term
service contracts
A service contract is like an insurance policy for your car that helps pay for repairs after the original warranty runs out. It can save you money if something goes wrong.
Term
collateral protection insurance
Collateral protection insurance is insurance that protects the lender's investment in a car if the borrower doesn't have their own insurance. It's important for dealerships to make sure their cars are covered.
Concept
builder
A 'builder' is a car that needs a lot of repairs or parts to be usable again. People who like fixing cars often buy these to work on them.
Term
engine issue
An 'engine issue' means there's something wrong with the car's engine, which can stop it from working right. It could be a small problem or something much bigger.
Term
repo
'Repo' means the bank or lender took back a car because the owner didn't pay for it. These cars can often be bought for less money.
Car
Dodge Ramps
The Dodge Ram is a big truck that can carry heavy loads and is often used for work or towing. The 2024 version has updates to make it better and more comfortable to drive.
Term
days in inventory
Days in inventory is how long a car has been sitting at a dealership without being sold. If a car has been there too long, it might need a price change to attract buyers.
LIVE
we've got about what four to five weeks left in the year so we're going to give you guys our five
top tips top top take tips Tuesday Thursday whatever it is for the end of the year because
if we wait and we just sit around and we get all fat and happy on turkey and stuffing
end of the year is going to happen and we're going to realize there's a bunch of stuff we should
have done and for the end of the year some time-considered stuff that needs to be tackled before
December 30th first
hello and welcome to the independent dealer podcast luke we are coming up on the end of the year
man it is crazy 2025 is blown by i i can't even believe it can't believe it yeah it's nuts and
i'm actually out there with you this week oh well that's weird we should have just recorded
this together then i know it'd be nice nice to be together so if you're listening to this episode
it's going to come out just barely before Thanksgiving we've got about what four to five
weeks left in the year so we're going to give you guys our five top tips top top take tips
Tuesday Thursday whatever it is for the end of the year because if we wait and we just sit
around and we get all fat and happy on turkey and stuffing end of the year is going to happen and
we're going to realize there's a bunch of stuff we should have done before the end of the year
some time-considered stuff that needs to be tackled before December 31st yeah and you know
it seems like as business owners i talked to especially in the car business i talked to other
business owners they'll take the last week or two of the year off and i'm like man how can you do
that like i've got so many things i got to get accomplished well hopefully by listening to this
episode jeff people will be better than i have been for the last 10 years and waiting to December
30th and 31st to make it happen yeah yeah yeah your account's not going to love you when you're
talking to him in January trying to retro a bunch of charge offs and right now some things like that
so that is our number one tip first and foremost this over arches everything number one is meet
with your accountant i already have it on the books actually by the time this episode comes out
i will have already done that good so hopefully you have your third quarters wrapped up you've
got a pretty good idea of where the year's gonna end and you can sit down with your accountant and
say hey did i make any money did i lose money what do i need to do here before the year ends to put
me in the best financial position sometimes that can be selling more cars well i think the answer
is always to sell more cars sell sell sell sell more cars or you know for me i don't think i'm
gonna have much of a tax burden i'm not sure i made a lot of money this year uh thanks to my
insurance company i put aside a good handful um thanks to my charge offs i uh i had a lot of a
lot of my charge off money to take against my income but there are some things that still need to be
done yeah there's so many you know so many people just take and look at their um their p&l and they
go oh well i made a lot of money or look at them and say oh i lost a lot of money but you know what
they forgot new jeff they forgot to reconcile their balance sheet and because what can happen is for
some reason you get your mapping's not right from your dms or uh somebody entered something wrong at
some point next thing you know a lot of your profit or a lot of your loss can be sitting on that balance
sheet and you really need somebody that's a tax professional and a cpa professional to make sure
that you're doing things the right way um and those of us i've i've come to the end of years several
times and made way more money than i thought i made and we had to start back on them and
figuring out ways to to fix that and without a good strategy and without the month of december
to figure that out sometimes it's impossible to get it done so let's talk about some of those
specific things you're going to do first off i would say um if you're a buy here pay here dealer
you're going to want to clean up the portfolio you know unfortunately it's it's a sad thing to do
um it's bittersweet for me i hate charging off accounts i hate writing off skips i hate looking
at you know insurance checks i'm never going to get i hate looking at side notes that are
never going to be paid out people that have ten dollar balances that just won't pay their car off
and i'm sitting on a title so there's all these little things in your portfolio that you can just
bite the bullet man and and it feels good yeah it feels good because um it shows you
where you actually stand in your portfolio now there may be some covenants you're trying to
to skip around or things like that but this also might be a good time to talk to your lender and
say hey we actually have about a hundred accounts that that are non-performing that we really would
like to get rid of can we do that or if you don't have a lender to worry about you can just go through
rip the band-aid off get back to basics on january one and then you know where you can move
forward during that time also you get to analyze uh where your problems are you could have a you
could have a collections problem and if you have a collections problem you should actually come to
my boot camp on december 10 right yeah hey just to jump in real quick and make sure you guys know
about buckeye risk services still a great sponsor of the podcast and a great partner to have at any
dealership yeah sure retail buy here pay here no matter what tax planning is so important and using
a reinsurance company not only helps you with your tax plan it also helps with generating wealth and
when you get toward the end of your dealership you need something else to to pull money out of
and it's a great way to just force savings account right jeff that would yeah yeah forced savings
account so if you are a dealer buy here pay here retail and you're doing 20 to 30 cars a month
haul the guys at buckeye you will not regret getting a reinsurance company set up you can
sell your service contracts you can sell your ancillary products you can reinsure for your
post-sale inspections you can of course set up your cpi collateral protection insurance if you're a
buy here pay here customer massive opportunities to build wealth and uh forced savings for rainy
day funds yep good give the guys a buckeye call yeah of course and a lot of them are just kicked
down the road um bankruptcies that have that have fallen off you know your your your collector
amount of moved into a bankruptcy status and they're just sitting there forever being ignored
for months um obviously skips it's a good time of year to just say hey we're never going to find
this guy let's charge him off or he's made too many promises so those are all great things that
we like to clean up the portfolio now along those lines one thing i like to do this time of year
is i like to do what i call my in my account audit so i'll print out every single account that i have
and i'll have different columns and i'll say okay i want you to go through and just check
make sure we have a deal jacket make sure we have a gps make sure um we have a title and
maybe a spare key i used to keep a lot of spare keys and what would happen is i'd find a lot of
deals that were missing something pretty crucial you know sometimes i'd have a whole deal jacket
missing like where did that go but what it helps me to do also is clean out the ones that shouldn't
be in there any longer i mean we would have a bucket of keys that we could clean out of our
keybox that was just cluttering things up you know we would have titles that people never picked up
or that somehow got paid off online and i never see they got paid off and the customer never bothered
me we're sitting on a title and a file that has never been delivered so doing these these physical
audits of your deal jackets and however your system works i think is really helpful just from a
housekeeping standpoint do you also uh when you're do you pull the location of the gps at that time
jeff to make sure that they're actually working and things like that yeah we make sure it's there
we make sure it's had a ping within 24 hours okay yeah yeah and those are action items that you can
then create throughout the year and say okay you know we do need to get uh susan back in here her gps
died the battery went out or it stopped working next time we get our hands on her car let's put
a note on her account you know so a lot of those things some are time sensitive some really aren't
for year end so i could see if you wanted to put this off till july this might be a good thing to do
in the drag days of summer but it feels good to start the year out with a clean filing cabinet
no i agree but you know even if you're even if you're looking out to july for some of these things
the idea of actually writing it down and putting it in place um at the end of the year so you can
have a fresh start going into the new year is a great idea because uh you're right you know who cares
if you do this in december but it needs to be done once a year yeah we used to do it twice a year
we were pretty good at it but um i've dropped the ball there luke um one other thing you do
in addition to cleaning out the accounts this is a good time to clean out your inventory yeah i mean
jeff was the last time you did a physical uh inventory audit the last time i walked a lot
and did an inventory audit it has been years um the last time my people have done it hopefully not
that long this is a regular thing that i encourage but i do understand that i've got a lot of cars
that are sitting in what i call the uh scrap uh you know bucket like my pool of scrap cars that
are bones and they're they're back there in the back lot that they probably don't need to be here
anymore they probably just need to be sent to the scrap yard i'll be willing to bet you retail
dealers and buy here pay here dealers have this problem where um you have you have just cars you
know you traded them in and they were crap that guess what sometimes you never even go pick them up
it's a sight unseen and you go i'm not worried i'm not worried about that car but it's on your
balance sheet and so why carry an extra three hundred dollars and and pay taxes on it when you
could or five hundred dollars when you just write it off right and so going out there and doing a
physical audit of your inventory is a great idea print the inventory list out walk out there
check them off one by one you'll find maybe a car missing which can happen they can be left at
auctions they can be left at shops um you could run out of gas and leave them somewhere i did that
one time and didn't realize for like two months that i left it somewhere um but there's all kind
of different things that happen and i mean honestly you could find a three or four thousand
dollar car somewhere you might even find a twenty thousand dollar car sitting somewhere now don't
give me a wrong it it happens but you don't want to have 20 of those sitting somewhere so make sure
that you're putting your hands on every single one of maybe if it's not you you you assign somebody
to do it but make two buckets right uh or three buckets retail ready already getting ready for
repo and then we need to do something with it we need to do something with it we need to do something
with it and and then let me just put a pin in that because that's the key do something with it we all
have the cars that no one will make the hard decision on it's a builder it needs an engine the engine's
too expensive just make the decision either go get the engine and spend the money at this time of year
or send the car out to scrap or wholesaler and let someone else deal with it but just stepping
around it for another 365 days is going to do you no good it hurts the morale it makes your
place look ugly we had one this was a different story but i had a buddy that had a repo in the
area and he had the repo brought here to my car lot and it had an engine issue and it sat in the
back of my lot for almost two years because i'd forgotten it was here my dealer buddy forgot it
was here and the shop just stepped around it for two years because they didn't it wasn't in their
inventory list they didn't even you know they just ignored it for two years so there are cars back
there you might not know we're back there yeah and it it's like you said it makes your lot look ugly
i hate cars out of place it drives me insane uh one of the first things i do when i go out to
the consulting gig it's like okay what's your what what is your lot map and then be like well
we've done my lot map and then you go well where does everything supposed to be parked well
you know Dave parks them over here sometimes and Jim parks them over here sometimes and
and i don't know who parks them over there and you're like no no no no this organization is key
and uh you want to declutter you know start the new year with no clutter and you want to make sure
they're all there because if they're not all there you need to find them or or charge them off
or get rid of them and then you want to be uh speaking span on day one so you can focus on
selling and making money in 2020 everyone just a moment here to talk about blitz pay blitz pay is
my payment process provider ppp ppp ppp whatever it is but they're wonderful they get the money in
the bank and that's really what matters and it's simple to use Jeff it's so simple and it helps us
with our collection process yeah you know what i've really liked and and i'm gonna fine tune this
even more is their cash pay network which is a crucial component because we do have a lot of
customers that want to pay cash but i don't want to take cash in the office it's dangerous it's
scary i got to make deposits so we're pushing it more and more and more and then there there's
you know there's always the few customers that don't quite understand technology and push back
but we're educating them uh more frequently and it's really making my anxiety go down because
i don't have large cash deposits in the end of a friday yeah i'd hate for you to lose anymore here
yeah yeah it's stressful but the self-help options are really what makes the difference you don't have
to have customers calling you hey run this card run this card run this card no they can help themselves
because the portal is so easy it's mobile friendly it's all right they're on their little phone which
everyone has and they can take care of their payments themselves that's the most important
yeah everybody's called let's pay get them to hook you up so so luke let's talk about this situation
i have what about what about my aged inventory and the stuff that's just out of book right now
is this i know an inventory write down it's pretty common and i will do that on a handful of vins
i don't do it on every car i don't run every car through rebook everything and write everything
down at your end it which strategy is is it at all or nothing is it a pick your worst offenders
and just try to rebook them so that they become attractive from a retail standpoint again like
it's all strategy do it all especially if you need to find uh some tax advantages um
we would typically when we had we would carry into the new year 1.45 million dollars in inventory
and we would typically find two hundred thousand dollars worth of write downs
now you'll take it back a lot of times at the beginning of the year because some of them you
you know especially in buy here pay here you don't really need to adjust the price you're just
adjusting your book value or your your your cost your cost of car and so it's a good tax advantage
way to to save some money to save cash flow this year and a lot of buy here pay your stores
need to do that um if you don't need to do that and your retail or you've got old units
and and you write everything down it makes them more attractive to sell especially if you can
reprice them which you need to do if you're in them too much uh reprice them also it gives your
sales people if they're paid on on uh on margin yeah it gives them a paid on gross it gives them
a reason to go sell that car again where they decided not to sell it because there was no money
making it there there's a lot to be said and we talk about that throughout the year as far as
turn time goes and and making sure things are marked to market and and into it right your salesman
your sales manager and your f and i guy who were paid on gross front end gross guaranteed you it's
not because that car is a turd and nobody wants it it's not being sold because there ain't no money
in it for them 100 when you flip those metrics and say okay you know let me think i've got this
dodge ramps in out here forever this 2024 thought it would go in a dude i feel like i have a price
to great it's not it's been stepped around for the last six months because i'm in it what it's worth
so i need to take it to the back i need to get a detailed again i need to put new stickers on it
i need to reprice it i need to reset the days in inventory somehow right that's what i do typically
when i write these down is i say okay this is now acquired january 1 2026 so the days in inventory
start over i reprice it from a cost standpoint and a retail standpoint and now voila it's a new
piece of inventory and it sells immediately it's it's amazing it's amazing how that works right
so do it look at every single one of them that's what a lot of things i used to do
on december 29 31st is i spent a lot of time writing down my inventory and really getting real
of what the car was worth because cars move a lot especially at the end of the year they go down a
lot in value not to not to say they won't come back and you may not lose a dime but just to reset
them out of everybody in the dealership it goes a long way yeah yeah just don't write them all up on
december 31st and then bring them all back on january 1st i think that's uh you can't do that you
can't do that you could take you know i think is and this is definitely something you should ask
your cpa about uh that we talked about to start with but you should you have to use the same exact
book for everything um and you know you could that could be jd power clean trade or rough trade or
whatever you want it to be but you have to use the same exact one to make sure and you got to
write them all down to make it to make it fair this makes me think we should have added one of
those legal disclosures at the beginning of the episode so we can put it at the end just listen
we are not cpas not tax professionals this is opinion not advised please consult with your
professional blah blah blah do not sue luke or i um speaking of not getting sued um reinsurance
this is the time of year to have a chat with your rep and make sure your reinsurance company
is buttoned up correctly you are funding it the proportionate and the correct amount you have
the correct amount of claims so that it is a legitimate standalone reinsurance company
sometimes i have an issue for myself i'll admit you know on on my cpi claims it's hard you know
it's sometimes hard to just remember to document it all and take it in and sometimes it's like okay
well maybe it's my my vsi contracts was this a repo yes okay do i need to claim it against
my vehicle because or was it a cpi claim and and are my ratios right so really really good time to
talk to your reinsurance rep and make sure that your ratios are accurate is that is that's a great
way to put it yeah i think so and and definitely talk to bulk our uh dealer risk because they're
great sponsor of the podcast and and we're glad to have them but this is definitely something
when you're talking about tax planning that you need to do and also compliance
if you have cpi and you're using cpi and a customer wrecks a car you need to make a claim
that's simple if you have a vehicle service contracts warranty and the customer's car breaks down
and you fix the car in house don't pay for it in house use your warranty money because if you don't
and you get audited by the irs you're going to be in trouble and so make sure you're doing it the
right way super important same with vsi all these things it's just such a key process to to have
installed in your dealership uh reinsurance in general but to make sure you're using reinsurance
the right way yeah it is super important and that's one thing a couple years ago when i was up against
a large tax burden as we said hey you know i didn't have a vsi product of people vendor single
interest something insurance product on my portfolio so i was able to go back in and retroactively
put us an insurance product on my entire portfolio for the year and it was a big it was a big dollar
amount right and a big check that i had to cut over to my reinsurance company to pay for that
luckily once it you know once it sat in there i could borrow it right back out so you know we had
that set up to legally move the money in move it back out um so that i could have this insurance
policy set up on my portfolio but it was it was great i mean yeah we did it in 2020 yeah we did
it in 2020 i think it's kind of the same time it kind of got got it going vsi um but it it saved us
hundreds of thousands of insurance of taxes so um yeah it's it's a great that's a great product
but if you're not using all the products you can and you need tax deductions you need to use it
yeah so let's before we get into our final one um again on the on the deduction standpoint
you have a rollback um does does your dealership own the rollback did you buy that and then
depreciated it or does it sit in your inventory as an asset no uh the answer to that is i have a
rollback and a snatch truck repossession snatch truck both of those are owned uh by another entity
and yes you can fully depreciate those well i'm not a tax professional but according to everything
that i know they weigh over their their right amount yeah the section 179 i think it is um
allows you to fully depreciate that that asset and um rollbacks are not cheap jeff and um repo
trucks are not cheap so let's just say you spend a hundred thousand dollars on a new rollback or
two hundred thousand dollars on the rollback or a hundred thousand or fifty thousand dollars on a
usual back either way you should be able to appreciate that entirely and that you know it's a
great tax advantage a way to to have something you already made and so you know we talked about um
those assets so obviously if you have something over six thousand six five hundred pounds you
have the full depreciation in the year you bought it um from what i understand you can actually go
finance it so you don't necessarily have to cop up the hundred grand or whatever it is that's the
beauty finance that with your bank that's the beauty of it jeff and still right off the full amount
you know how much money uh i paid out of pocket for the rollback when we bought it how much zero
so you got to finance bought it brand new or bought it near new somewhere
financed it took the depreciation now when you sell it you'll recapture some right i mean that's
you guys got to understand this isn't just like uh it's gone forever but but if you do it right
use it forever yeah i mean there there's a reason there's not a lot of used rollbacks for sale
um at times it's because you use them to the tires fall off and then they're worth then there were
10 to 12 thousand dollars right but you fully depreciate them all you have to recapture is
that 10 000 and then if you buy a new one that year it's it's right out the door so um the idea is
on that type of equipment is to buy it and use it to it dies and then you don't worry about it
and there are smaller things you know certain shop equipment yeah that'll have a depreciation life
jeff we are right we're right around uh black friday yeah yeah man pretty exciting uh what's
going on with tax max yeah oh tax facts yeah i'm shopping for all the deals um obviously tax returns
are a huge one people have got some money they're out buying and we're saying hey we've got our fourth
quarter program going on for all of our current customers folks that want to upgrade their car
folks that want to get into a second vehicle that have been great with us this is the time when we
can estimate their taxes and do a deferred down i mean i know it's 60 90 days out till they're
going to have their money but when it's a good customer and it's a deal that works anyways i'm
going to get some of that money in the future as well yeah it just brings it forward and it takes
some of that pressure off of tax season and some of your great customers can get some really good
cars for a little bit better price this time of year so make sure you're pushing that fourth
quarter deal and also the consulting groups for the retail side start next week and so i know the
ones from the buy here pay here groups have been going but this isn't just for buy here pay here jeff
this is for retail as well and make sure you reach out to them use the discount code VIP
to get 20 off the VIP package um that's yeah that's for podcast listeners and and
call if you got any questions you reach out to bill if you call them they pick up on the second
ring if you email them they email you right back they are crazy intended so give the guys a tax max
call i don't know which ones specifically have a you can depreciate the hundred percent you know
probably depending on the usage but but other things you know i i always like to in december
i go out and i stock up on things i'll stock up on gps's i'll stock up on office supplies i'll
stock up on marketing materials and free pay any kind of marketing bills i need to try to
pull those forward you know because who knows next year's i might not make any money and i might not
need any write-offs right and and always save a few checks you pay for it in the new first of the
year post-dated checks that we're trying to post post-dated checks or no not post-dated pre-dated
checks pre-dated checks yeah that's another trick yeah i don't know okay that sounds great and also
jeff the one thing we didn't didn't talk about especially with tax planning is there are so many
if your company is big enough or or you have set up iras
or 401k's you can superfund those things and really not you know if you have the cash available
yeah you can superfund those things and really lessen your tax burden yeah i hope you fully
funded your ira by now that should be a january one thing get that money in that account earn
an interest as soon as you can um to close out luke um well there's one last thing yeah
there's one last thing um strategic planning for the new year okay um so roadmap it's so important
uh forecasting whatever you want to call it it's so important um this is this is the end of november
and i would like to already have it done by now but that's okay if you don't have it done you've
got all of december and you really want to forecast what you plan to do next year if you don't have
a plan you will not succeed um it's that simple um if you have a plan i'm not saying you will
succeed but you're much likelier to succeed if you have a roadmap to follow yeah and let's talk
about that from a logistics standpoint when we say strategic planning it can be as simple as you
sitting down with a spreadsheet and modeling this out or get on the phone with luke and have it him
help you or it can be as big as a lot of the dealers we know that are larger operations and even
some smaller operations a physical offsite and they'll take themselves and their number one
or them and their management team and they will go offsite for a day two days whatever it is and
they'll sit down and say hey here's how we did here's our goals and let's let's really map out
what we want to do month by month next year how is our cash fill going to handle it how is our
collections going to handle it where are we getting the new inventory where are we getting the mechanics
from what kind of production do we expect like really laying all that out so you have a very
detailed roadmap going forward yeah i'm actually facilitating one of these meetings in january and
we're going to go offsite and we're going to sit there and we're going to we're going to hammer it
out and this is something we may do every quarter with this dealer but it's something that everybody
needs to do you know even if it's just you and your wife are you and your your number one you
know if you're a very small organization go somewhere for a day don't stay at the office it's
not going to work right whiteboard it write it down take pictures of the whiteboard whatever you
need to do but man hitting those KPIs make you feel so good and setting those goals and hitting
them makes you feel so good yeah it's it's really as if simple as like go to a go to a buddy's
co-working space go to their meeting room see you can borrow their conference room anywhere
turn your phone off put it on do not disturb let everyone in the office know you're on vacation
go fly to vegas for the weekend rent a local meeting space in a hotel
yeah just you really do have to disconnect and you and you need to lay out okay these are the
things we did good this year these are the things we did poorly this year these are the things we
did average this year and let's look at all these and see how we can do each one of them better
and define processes where you don't have them all these things can be done to really lay a
roadmap for a very successful 2026 yeah and a lot of this comes well the the little pieces
I've taken and tried to implement come from the EOS system yes the traction book so we've recommended
it multiple times before if you haven't read it get it read it listen to it today tomorrow it'll
have you fired up ready to go but that is a great set of rules and systems to put in place for
january 1 if you can start running that EOS system in your dealership again even if you're a small
operation there's still a lot of value in those pieces and all the different you know stuff that
happens at those strategic planning meetings to get the people in the right seat on the bus
to look at your scoreboards and see what you're going to be doing in the future
you know even just getting your vision down and making sure you have the right vision for
your dealership coming up over the next year yeah it'll help lay the foundation for the culture
you won't not the culture you have um and that's kind of that's that's where we're going with this
excellent Luke excited man stoked for the end of the year stoked Christmas come around
still coming to town next weekend and do some hiking so yeah yeah last thing is come to our
collect my collection boot camp december 10th dallas love feel contact me if you want to register
hopefully they can slide it in here somewhere so you can just click the button and register
it is filling up jeff um we uh we don't have many seats available hopefully that'll still
be available by the time you hear this and uh get signed up yeah and and let me put in my own
two cents here i know luke's head's already big i don't mean to make it bigger we just came back
from buy here pay here dealer forum in nashville and i got into luke's session and i sat there you
know just with my arms folded like a grumpy old man in the back thinking i've already heard
everything luke has to say he's not going to tell me anything new or exciting or i've talked to this
guy multiple times a week for the last seven years and actually i got notes from the session you did
so and honestly the feedback through the week was it was the most valuable session that anyone
had i don't want to say the most value we had a lot of great sessions that happened right one
of the most valuable sessions that people attended during the week and all weekend long people were
coming up saying oh luke i learned so much all this all that uh so if you think you're going to send
your guys to collections bootcamp and they're not going to learn anything that's not the case if you
think you've heard everything luke has to say not the case um you have to go back through all 407
episodes they're still going to learn something if you send them so you go or send your collector
you're going to learn something thank you buddy i really appreciate that no problem had a lot of fun
out there all right guys talk to you next week
About this episode
As the year winds down, the hosts share five essential tasks for dealers to tackle before 2026. Key advice includes meeting with accountants to assess financial positions, cleaning up portfolios, conducting inventory audits, and strategizing for the new year. They emphasize the importance of proactive planning to avoid last-minute scrambles and highlight the benefits of reinsurance and tax planning strategies. With practical tips and personal anecdotes, this episode provides valuable insights for dealers looking to end the year strong and set themselves up for success in the coming year.
Original notes
End of the year creeping up on you? 😅 Don't be that dealer scrambling on December 30th!In this episode, Jeff and Luke break down the 5 ESSENTIAL year-end moves every independent dealer needs to make before December 31st. From tax strategy to portfolio cleanup, these time-sensitive tips could save you hundreds of thousands.🎯 What We Cover:✅ Why you need to meet with your CPA NOW (not January)✅ Portfolio cleanup: How to rip the band-aid off and start 2026 clean✅ The inventory audit that reveals missing cars and hidden money✅ Inventory write-downs: The "Voila Method" that makes cars sell immediately✅ Reinsurance compliance checkup before year-end✅ Equipment depreciation strategies (rollbacks, repo trucks, and more)✅ Strategic planning: How to map out a killer 2026💡 KEY TAKEAWAY: That car sitting on your lot for 6 months? It's not a turd - there's just no money in it for your salespeople. Learn how to reset it and watch it fly off the lot.UPCOMING EVENT:📍 Collections Event with Ai - Dallas, TX - December 10Godwin Consulting Group is putting on a Collections Event in Dallas on December 10, don't miss it! http://www.godwinconsultinggroup.com/...📢 WANT MORE DEALER INSIGHTS?✅ Subscribe to the Independent Dealer Podcast💬 Drop a comment with your biggest collection challenge👍 Like this video if you're definitely NOT waiting until December 30th to do all this... right? 😅⭐ Leave us a review: www.theindependentdealer.com📧 Email us: [email protected] 🔗 CONNECT WITH US:Website: www.theindependentdealer.comInstagram: @theinpendentdealerpodcast/Facebook: @theindydealerLinkedIn: @independent-dealer-180160225🙏 SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:Blytzpay - Your credit card processing and text communications partner. Tell them IDP sent you to get 3 FREE months!www.blytzpay.comBuckeye Risk Services - All your education and reinsurance needswww.buckeyerisk.comTaxmax - Flexibility with your tax returnswww.taxmax.com🎧 LISTEN TO ALL EPISODES:Anchor: @theindependentdealer Social Links:/ independentautogroup/ jlukegodwin/ sendtojeffwThe Independent Dealer Podcast is brought to you by real dealers, for real dealers. No BS. Just actionable insights from the trenches.---⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Jeff and Luke are not CPAs or tax professionals. This content is for educational purposes only and should not be considered professional tax or legal advice. Always consult with your qualified CPA or tax advisor before making financial decisions.
The Independent Dealer Podcast
Jeff Watson & Luke Godwin
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32:53