GPS is the system that helps a phone or car know where it is. Here, it’s being used to notice when someone is messing with the car and to trigger the dealer’s process right away.
CBE means “critical business events.” It’s basically GPS alerts that point out when something important is happening, so a dealer can take action instead of watching location data all day.
Big data just means lots of information being analyzed together. The idea is that the GPS system can spot important patterns by looking at more than just one car’s location.
They’re saying that simply knowing where a car is isn’t special anymore. What matters is using that location information to make better, faster decisions.
Impact sensors are sensors that feel sudden hits or hard stops. If the device detects that kind of sudden movement, it can assume there was a crash and send an alert.
Asset recovery is when a company tries to find and get back a vehicle it financed. Tracking tech can help them locate the car faster and respond to situations sooner.
Payment processing is the service that takes the customer’s money and confirms it’s paid. In this case, it’s connected to the vehicle’s disabled state so the customer can pay right away.
Payment reminders are messages sent to the customer when they’re behind on payments. The system can be set up to send them at specific times so everyone gets treated the same.
Repossession is when a lender/dealer takes the car back because payments weren’t made. The speaker is saying that disabling the car remotely can count as repossession under some state laws.
GAP insurance helps pay the “gap” between what the car is worth and what you still owe if the car is totaled. Dealers often offer it as part of a coverage package.
“Buy here, pay here” means the dealer both sells you the car and collects your payments. The dealer uses tools like GPS to help customers stay on track and avoid losing the car.
BlitzPay is a company that helps dealers take credit card payments. The host says it also automates parts of the payment and texting process so collections are easier.
Term
AI
AI here is used to automate parts of dealer outreach—specifically audio/phone calling and potentially texting. The speaker suggests this can reduce manual work and make collections more efficient.
“Credit card processing” is the payment infrastructure that enables dealers to accept card payments. The segment frames BlitzPay as offering competitive rates and an easy interface, which matters for dealer profitability and customer conversion during collections.
“Recon” means getting a used car ready to sell. It can include repairs and inspections, and if it’s not done right, it can cause bigger problems later.
LIVE
Specifically, what the integration allows is, as soon as the GPS in the vehicle identifies
that somebody is at the car trying to start the car, there is an attempt to start what
we call an attempt to start in a vehicle that is disabled.
Integration immediately sends notification to the payment processing, let's say Blitzfee
in this case.
Blitzfee will send a text message on the spot to the customer saying, hey, you cannot drive,
here's the reason, and here's the way to pay.
And as soon as they pay on the spot, they can click a link, they can pay with Blitzfee,
close the loop with it to run, and we send it in Able command to the vehicle.
Hello and welcome to the Ida Pendant Dealer Podcast.
Luke, not often do I get the opportunity to talk to a CEO of a $1 billion company.
I know, and that awesome, and he's the investor relations guy.
So Ida Ron, our sponsor, is a publicly traded company, and they provide the best GPS service
on the planet.
And today we have Ariad, just for a few minutes, to talk to us about GPS technology and what
dealers can do better and what we should be doing, right?
Hi guys, it's an honor, honor to be here.
Yeah, it would be more honorable had you told me back in May of 23 to buy stock, but I guess
we weren't friends back then, I don't know.
Well, I mean, I could have, but then I will be probably in jail by now, so insider trading.
I'd rather stay on there, you know, I like my wife, I want to.
Oh, that's funny, that's funny.
Ariad, no, thank you for joining us, man.
So what I want to know is there's so many new things happening in the world of the
GPS's and I don't have my finger on it, because honestly, I'm kind of a set it and forget
it type of guy.
So I'm probably way, way behind the curve.
So catch me and other dealers like me up to speed.
What is new in the world of GPS?
How have you guys integrated like, you know, the big fancy AI word into things and made
GPS smarter and better for dealers?
Yeah.
Well, thank you for that.
That's a good question and definitely one of the things you said of set and forget, I
want to go back to it later on because that's a soft point that we see in the industry.
But back to your question of what's new in GPS and I'm trying very hard not to use the
titles of AI because we all hear it all the time, but how do we really translate that
into things that we can do on a daily basis?
And that's exactly what's new in the GPS world.
So we're talking about smarter actionable alerts or what we call CBE, critical business
events.
What are the, how can the GPS system identify, you know, through big data, through unfortunately
or fortunately AI systems, how can we identify those actionable items that dealers should
know about and they can take action quicker?
By the way, it's everything at the end of the day funnel into how can they be more efficient
and save money, right?
That's the bottom line.
How can we have less losses, recover quicker, know where our customers are?
You know, GPS is a location only, location is commodity today.
This is old news.
What's interesting today is those unique events that you are able to identify and then take
action upon and only at that point it's become interesting with integration.
If you don't mind, I'll give you a few examples.
Accidents.
GPS should alert you when your vehicles are being involved in an accident, but it's not
stopping there.
It's not only with the vehicle.
Let me ask a question on that.
How does it know?
Are you talking about a GPS that's hooked into like my OBD2 that gets some sort of engine
data or are you talking about like, these GPS's have impact sensors in them and they
know if they have a sudden stop?
Well, it's not only a sudden stop.
You are correct.
There are sensors within the GPS, the device that you're installing your vehicle that can
identify any movement to the milliseconds through a lot of research and different threshold
depends on vehicles and truck behave very different than a regular vehicle, let's assume.
We can identify when a vehicle has been involved in an accident.
By the way, being part of Ituron and you're correctly saying, you know, Ituron is a worldwide
company with over 2.6 million subscribers or active customers all over the world.
A lot of them are coming from different businesses than what we are used to either buy or pay
it.
Fleet management, asset recovery and so forth, so a lot of the technology that we employ
within our buy or pay your product comes from other industries.
So accidental notification, for example, is a great example for that.
So yes, the GPS in the vehicle can identify when a vehicle has been involved in an accident.
Now, what you do with it as the dealer relies on your processes and procedure.
Yeah, because let me tell you our processes and procedure.
And you're talking about this integration, I just get a report once a week and I never
look at the report.
So tell me how I should use that area.
Okay, so, you know, there is on any event there is a first, as you said, notification.
If you don't look at the report, you don't look at the report, that's a problem, right?
But when there are more sophisticated way to triangulate information, for example, if
you triangulate the accident notification with immediately after atoning and then an
impound message, meaning a vehicle was involved in an accident is now told into a specific
impound, you really just have to act.
You call if you have a CPI, I mean, what we see unfortunately a lot is dealers that do
have CPI on their portfolio, but they are not necessarily following up on their notification
only to find the vehicle was either repair or just dropping a body shop not on the under
their CPI, and they need to kind of eat the bill much bigger bill than what they could
have done.
This is what I'm saying the CB those critical business event that you want to be make sure
that your system is alerting you.
Now, how is this alerting you, there are very different way of doing it.
I think I want to touch on on the most important one, which is really integration.
And again, following Jeff question of what's new, the level of integration today between
system in general and specifically GPS and other systems such as DMS dealer management
system or payment processing is what makes a big difference.
If you are integrated, and you are working the account or not even working the account,
it now you can put a person just just like you're working on a queue of the liquid seat,
you can work on on a queue of CBE of critical business event that show me those that were
involved in an accident, show me those customers that tempered with the device and tempered
is not like saying there is a power issue.
We're talking about again, we go back to this triangulate of different data points to understand
what makes an installation problem separate than a temper because you definitely want to
jump quicker on those tempers devices and do something.
I'll give you another one if you if you if we're talking about integration that we introduced
that, you know, probably over a year and a half ago and has a huge success for those
customers that are utilizing it through integration with payment processing.
And we're integrated each one is integrated with several different payment processing,
but specifically, let's let's talk, let's say about Blitzpay, which we are very proud
on the integration with them. When a vehicle is in a starter disabled status, meaning the dealer
decided that from a collection point of view, this customer reach a point where you want to
disable the vehicle. We all know, start disable a great communication tools, you know, that will
make the customer calls you. But utilizing starter disabled come with a lot of compliance
as well. We can touch on that as later on. Specifically, what the integration allow is
as soon as the GPS in the vehicle identifies that somebody is at the car trying to start the car.
There is an attempt to start what we call attempt to start in a vehicle that is disabled
integration immediately send notification to the payment processing, let's say Blitzpay in this
case, Blitzpay will send the text message on the spot to the customer saying, hey, you cannot
drive, here's the reason, and here's the way to pay. And as soon as they pay on the spot, they can
click a link, they can pay with Blitzpay, close the loop with it to run, and we send it in able
command to the vehicle. Wow, automatic. That's, that's impressive. And if you think about it,
it's impressive, impressive in different level. It's not only that you just collect on a payment
without making any collection call without any without bothering any of your people or
investing time into it. You also are able now to collect 24-7. There is no more, I want to drive
it 2 a.m., but nobody the dealership is answering or even if I use an online payment, it will take
time until we get the the enable command sent. That's the problem is someone gets on and pays
and you don't know until the next morning and then you got to go re-enable it. So
from the beginning, let me ask, and this is probably a question I know the answer to because of
compliance, it won't disable if they miss a payment, right? Is it set up to automatically
disable a customer's car if the payment's not made? So you're taking us to a completely different
important chapter in integration called business rules. So the whole, the nice thing about
integrating a GPS system with let's say payment processing is that you can also dictate
your specific business rule. You can utilize the automatic system in the integration just
like you give commands to your collector. So if you are a person that for example would like to
send a payment reminder after one day late or five days late and then a second payment reminder
after another two days or so forth, you dictate that to the integration and now you have the
piece of mind knowing that all accounts are going to be treated the same. It's no longer,
well, I remember this customer, he was rude to me in the past, I want to disable his vehicle now.
They all are treated the same. To answer your question about the disable, yes, you can automate
an automatic disable. I can also share with you without going into details that majority of
dealers do not do the automatic disable. They are utilizing the automatic for the payment,
meaning as soon as the payment comes in, the vehicle will be enabled. But I think it's good
practice to keep the disable into a different level. Sometimes you want to review it, sometimes
you want to give maybe another chance. When you disable a vehicle, as we know, it's an act of
almost repossession and actually in several states it's considered an act of repossession.
So you want to know that you have all your everything is done correctly?
Yeah, that's it. We talked about this, but disable is such a key tool for communicating
patient and it's so helpful for consumers not to pay that repossession fee, right? And that's
where some people get, you know, if you're really willing your people to continue to be in their
car and, you know, I pay here, customers don't like to communicate, use it for that. And I know
with all these features, like I can't imagine a customer not even having to call my office to
to get their car re-enabled. I mean, that's fantastic. And yeah, I didn't even have to
communicate with them. That's what I was trying to get them to do. They pay. It's also, you know,
the legislator and like stack very, very much because in a way you have a system,
a proven system to show that the responsibility is really on the customer. They can drive whenever
they are at 2am, 2am. That's right. Think if they had to go to work or to the hospital and
all of a sudden they can't create their car, all they do is pay and boo.
Hey, sorry to break in real quick, but make sure you guys know about Buckeye,
longtime awesome sponsor of the podcast and who I use for all my reinsurance products.
I can't thank them enough for teaching me so much about reinsurance over the years and
coming up with new products and new ways to get my portfolio secured. My customers have options
of warranties and service contracts, gap. I think it's just been great, Jeff. It's absolutely been
a great way for me to build wealth, put away some money. So if you are a buy here, pay here,
lease here, pay here or retail dealer, it works for all dealers. You can set up a reinsurance
company. You can insure your own stop giving money to those third party providers that aren't
going to cover your stuff anyways. Keep it in house, call the guys and girls over at Buckeye,
risk services and get set up ASAP. All I can think about is that integration with my payment
platforms, more AI, it seems like I'm getting to the point now where I can use AI to communicate
at day one, day two, day three, day five and have a series of conversations. But then by day five,
I have an automatic trigger to your car shuts off. It just seems like I'm really making my one
collector so much more effective because so many of these base level decisions and even the decision
to shut off a GPS, if you get to day 10 without a promise to pay, it just gets turned off. That's
just the rule. It would be really interesting just to automate all of that and take all the human
decision and all the human headache out of it. Absolutely. But then there is even an extra level
on top of it and this is the service that the GPS company provides. Again, I can speak about
ourselves. When you have a 24-7 customer, live customer service, we follow, again, go back to
the business rules, the business rules of the dealers. So dealers can tell us, for example,
hey, if one of our customers is calling and giving you whatever story they want to give you,
doesn't matter why the car needs to be enabled, we authorize you in advance to enable the vehicle
for 24 hours and just let us know in the morning, we'll reach out, we'll make the payment arrangement
if they can make it or make a decision if we want to continue to disable or not. But this
extra layer of protection in a way, compliance protection is also super important. At the same
time, we mentioned that at the beginning, utilizing Star Disabled does bring a more
compliance complexity that a dealer needs to know about. And a lot of time, the system provides
that. For example, I can speak about the e2run system and our compliance module. It won't allow
you just to send a Star Disabled if this location that the vehicle is at is blacklisted. Think
an Indian reserve or you're not allowed just to use it. Your identification, first of all,
the integration won't send comments to those areas. We will verify location first before we
send Automatic Star Disabled. And if you're doing it manually, you'll be notified. Are you sure you
want to send a location? This is the reason why you cannot. Obviously, at the end of the day,
the system could be... Yeah, I mean, that's really neat. I have a rule we don't disable unless the
car is at a known address of a customer, right? Because I don't want it sitting other places,
but this takes that an extra level because I wouldn't even think about
reservation where you can't do it. Yeah, that's interesting. Talk to me because I have an issue
with starter interrupts and we don't need to beat this horse too hard. But I don't like the idea of
shutting off someone's car at their house because I know five minutes later, they're going to have
their neighbor over there with a screwdriver and how to tamper with it. And because they know what
it is, they're just like, well, let's go around the starter interrupt. So obviously, it's a very
fair concern, I think. And a lot of dealers do have that concern. And I'm not here to say that
it's not happening. But again, technology is there to either protect you or at least notify you when
something like this happened. What I mean by that is that in the right system, in our system, for
example, you get immediately notification when somebody is actually tampering. I not necessarily
agree with you. I'd rather disconnect the car at the customer's house. That's actually a good place
to disable a vehicle because you know where the vehicle is, he knows where the vehicle is,
he wants to correct the situation. But if somebody is tampering with it, then first of all, you'll
get the address where the vehicle was tampered so you can verify. But more importantly, the system,
or our system at least, will let you know of what we call an unauthorized drive. So if they do
disconnect the device and are now driving, in many times the technology is built in a way
that people that are looking for the right wires disconnected from the ignition,
but we still can send a message to say this vehicle is now driving and it shouldn't drive.
So you have more abilities to obviously to step in and take action. At the end of the day,
if somebody is tampering with the device, in order to resolve it, you have to take action.
Is there anything about the locations that you're doing? Because I could imagine a world where
if I had some sort of AI just constantly looking at the locations of my customers and saying, hey,
this is out of the normal. Here's their normal pattern on a Monday through Friday,
nine to five, and all of a sudden they are somewhere they shouldn't be, or the car is
somewhere it shouldn't be, and it's still an address, but maybe it's not work anymore,
or maybe something just out of the ordinary. Do you have those like pattern recognition type?
So the whole trends and again, big data is something that is coming up very big and already
implemented in the system. It starts with mileage. Think about just regular mileage driven.
You have, when you look on an account on the snapshot, you really look just to see what it is,
you always see how this vehicle has been behaving in the last three months, in the last 12 months,
and how is it behaving comparing to the rest of your portfolio? They're driving more,
they're driving less, and now we care mainly on those extreme cases, meaning either excessive
mileage usage that can obviously identify maybe it's a car sharing vehicle that you
necessarily want, or the opposite side of vehicle that are not being used at all,
because that means it may be somebody that just dumped the vehicle, a voluntary position that
they don't care. We see a lot of those at the side of the road, so to re-identify a vehicle that is
not moving for over X amount of days, and it's on the side of the road, obviously that's one of
the things that we want to alert on. In regards to parking location, your question, then again,
the answer is it makes a big difference when you know what are the top five parking spots of your
customers are, and if there's any change in those. I always try to show collectors in this aspect,
even when you're just really working the account. You should look where this vehicle
is parking on a regular basis, because it tells a lot about the behavior and the profile of the
customer. If I'm looking at Luke's account and I see that the majority of his parkings are in
his home, and let's say in his office, he's in his regular behavior. I'm less concerned,
he's trying to do the best, but then if we see a lot of stops in a casino, well, first of all,
let's verify he's not working at the casino, but that's something he's not working at the casino,
then it might bring him a higher risk level to the account, especially if they're late or if
they've broken promises and so forth. So the track where their park is super important.
Well, the dump track, yeah, they went out to the dump track and they're there.
Trying to make the money for the payment, but we all know how that goes, right?
Or driving it like crazy Uber or, you know, trash or whatever.
My competitor's locations, you know, are they dropping in because they're trying to trade it
in somewhere like that. So, you know, obviously, this is a very good point that should be utilized
by all dealers, you know, the concept of a geosome and a landmark. So a landmark in our lingo,
you have unlimited locations that you can call points of interest and to be notified if vehicles
are being there or parked there during the day. So we try to help the customers to put their
portfolio, but it's not only the impound lots or the insurance total loss slots or the auctions,
but definitely competitor is one of them. If you identify one of your vehicle in a competitor lot,
it means it will trade it in, probably. And now, are they just waiting for you to find the vehicle
or are they really going to reach out to you and pay you? You know, be the first one to reach out.
Because there's been plenty of times for cars that have left at new car stores and they didn't
bother to pay us all. Absolutely. Yeah, that sure happens all the time.
Well, Ariad, we're taking up a lot of your time. What are some part notes that you think dealers
should really focus on when it comes to GPS use that maybe we aren't thinking about?
You know, when I go around, when I speak to dealers, there is one thought or best practices
that I definitely want to share, but you'll see it actually has nothing to do with
only GPS. It has to do business in general. And that's to audit and to verify processes.
Too often, unfortunately, we see business owners that are spending their time,
they are learning the technology. I go back to my first comment about Jeff's kind of like set and
forget. A lot of businesses work in this set and forget point of view, but there's new people,
there's other people and they're not utilizing the technology correctly. They're paying the money,
but they're not utilizing it correctly. And return of investment is not only what you pay on day one,
but actually what you are able to bring back. So I encourage dealers to either assign a person or
do themselves to ask questions, to audit the processes, to reach out to their vendor. We
encourage, for example, our dealers to reach out to us and say, hey, can we have a retraining?
Let's do it on a quarterly basis. Let's do it every six months. Let us train your new people
to make sure that you are actually utilizing all those critical business event and smart reports
and actionable integration and so forth. So I always like to say that the most dangerous
thing to say in business is, oh, we always done that the way it's, no business owner should accept
that. We always did it that way. Yeah, we always did it. Or what can we run? I like that. Of course
they do it that way. Of course. Of course we did that. They are, but they aren't. I've been in too
many situations, unfortunately, where even things that you thought that people are doing correctly,
you realized they're not. And then you kind of go, oh, why did you not look at it to it?
So let's look into it in a more organized manner, if you will.
Well, that's great. Thank you for being on with us and have a great day, Ariane.
Thank you, guys. Anytime. Happy to be here. Take care.
All right, Jeff. Sorry to break in, but we got to talk about putting money in the bank.
And how do we do that? I do it through BlitzPay. The guys and girls at BlitzPay are
great, amazing, attentive on top of it. I have had little to no issues since I switched over from
that other company. Of course, to me, they're probably the best services when it comes to
answering phone calls and taking care of things that I've ever seen a vendor.
And the back-end automation, I've actually been working with that for a couple of
dealers here lately and going in and changing up these automated texts that go out. Super simple.
They work. The customers click and pay. It's fantastic. And also, they got this AI thing,
Jeff. Pretty cool. Yeah, I'm stoked. They got the audio AI, the phone caller, and hopefully very
soon the texting version of that. So it'll help my collector be way more efficient in the future.
I'm super stoked to see the AI get integrated into the collections process, and BlitzPay is on the
cutting edge of it. So if you're taking credit cards at all, whether you're by here, pay here,
lease here, pay here, even retail dealers can take advantage of this and use BlitzPay for their
credit card processing, incredibly competitive rates, super easy interface, call the team over
at BlitzPay and move your credit card processing today. Jeff, that was a great interview we just had.
Yeah, it really does make me realize that I have been with my GPS company for so long that we,
and it's literally just a locate, and I only use the wireless. So that's, unfortunately,
they are limited in their technology because they are a locate only type device for the most part.
It makes me think, okay, do I need to relook at that starter interrupt situation
because I am getting into a more expensive ACV, but I'm not necessarily getting a better customer.
So I still don't think that these customers are going to be really put out when they know, hey,
if you buy a car from Four Seasons, they have the ability to cut off your ignition whenever you
don't pay. Yeah, I think that's not going to hurt my sales. No, it's not at all. It's just such a
key, that didn't say, well, it's such a key piece of communication, and I'll just say that again.
I'll tell you one thing, people will talk about, and I think Iteron probably has the best, most
reliable GPS out there. I've used several of them, and I think it is the best.
The thing that goes wrong with GPS is, Jeff, are isolations. Yeah, and I talked to Jack Carter
about this years ago, and he's just said something so interesting. The amount of time we take to
put in a GPS is worth every penny of it because we never lose one, and so many dealers are just
slapping them all, and oh, we get hours done in 30 minutes. Well, okay, 15 minutes. Okay,
what's your failure rate? Yeah. So it goes all back to process. So I think that
if you take the time to install it properly in the dash, like really hidden behind the radio,
behind the cluster, buried as deep as possible, you'll never have problems with it.
Yeah, it's really hard, and that's what I struggle with, and anyone listening to this that does the
same model I do, which is a buyer pay here retail hybrid, I'm not installing the wireless until the
point of sale. So my salesmen are just going out there and dropping it in the headliner,
or the door panel, or the center console, and that has its own inherent risks. But for me to go
prewire a whole bunch of cars where I'm selling 70% buy here, pay here, and 30% retail would,
I mean, there's obviously a handful, like an obviously identifies buy here, pay here cars,
but then you start saying, okay, does it have a GPS? Does it not? Does it need one? Do we need
to tell the customer to come back because it takes an hour to hardwire it the right way?
Now I need a technician that's capable of doing that because my guys are already swamped just
trying to get make ready. So the whole concept is very daunting to me, but the payoff on the
collection side is so huge is where I need to stay focused, especially when it's automated.
That automation situation would be incredibly handy because shutting off a GPS scares me because it
creates such a hassle. It's like, do I'd rather repo the car and have them come here and deal with
me than for me to shut the car off and then have to worry about it, then have to check in on it and
then have to restart it so that it's not sitting in their driveway because it blocked in their
husband's car who can't get to work and like all the nonsense that comes with that. It's really
not that much nonsense that you're making out to me, but it's not, I promise you. But you know,
that is an interesting situation. We always, when we were buy here, pay here, we always
wired the car as soon as during the recon it was done. And you know, it's part of our processes
and procedures. And what's funny is we started having an issue where GPS was not working. So
I was like, uh-oh, we have a new guy, a new make ready guy who's installing every GPS.
I know how they're supposed to be done. How are they actually done? So to audit my processes
and procedures, I went out there and I watched him and I go, of course they're not working
because he was just slapping them over there. He was putting them where they could get wet.
We had a couple of them come back just flooded in water and you're like, wow. Oh my gosh,
how many cars have I lost because we didn't take the time. I didn't audit the process and the
procedure to make sure it was done right. Yeah. And so many people tell us just failure rate.
Like, no, they're not feeling like you think they're. So let's talk about that. And we mentioned
that process and procedure, but it applies to, I mean, we could talk about everything in your
dealership. But give me that example of what are you doing to make sure that those processes are
carried all the way down to the front line because I feel like if I just show up and I sit over
someone's shoulder, 99% of the chance they're going to be doing it the right way because I'm
sitting over their shoulder. Yeah. You have another way to make sure these things are getting
all the way to the front line and being done consistently. Number one, you should be training
your managers on the process. And then if you're not a huge dealership, you need to be auditing
all those procedures. And it's not like going out there, you can go out there and watch them
because their manager may have trained them improperly on the procedure, right? You can retrain.
What we did years ago, and this went away when we lost the salesperson, and I finally figured
it out later because the process broken. I had an audit checklist every time you sold a car
that you had to check off. It was about 10 things that you had to check off that you did.
Well, it's easy to go back and verify that what they checked off was actually done.
Yeah. And when we were following that procedure, everything was signed properly.
We were asking for the review. The reviews went up. They were checking the GPS
before it left the dealership to make sure. Oh yeah, like actually pinging it.
Pinging the GPS, disabling the GPS, making sure all this was working before they left the dealership.
And there was four or five other things they had to do. One was best. You know, so these are things
that you can have a checklist to make sure your processes and procedures are being used.
Whoever signs off on the checklist, as you do during recon, the final drive needs to be a
checklist. They need to check everything. It has to be signed off. You can pull those sheets,
go and spot check a few cars yourself, and verify that the person doing the job actually did the
job. Yeah, that's really smart. I mean, we've got a similar thing, and I don't have a deal
jacket here, but on the front of my deal jackets, I just have a big sticker that goes on there and
I've got those little check boxes and initials. And so yeah, the salesman is supposed to
go through and check all those things, initial it. And if you tied that to their commission sheet,
or however you're, you know, if you're doing a commission stub or something like that, guaranteed
that's a way to get it done, or to make sure that it's getting done. But even within that,
you do still need a spot audit too, right? I mean, are you doing something like that?
Yep, you do a spot audit. You do four or five deals a month just to make sure it's done, right?
And you'll find a trend because something's just being done their way instead of the dealership's
way. So you just have to retrain it. Figure it out a way to shortcut something. They always will.
In the shortcut, that's just people's nature. They're going to shortcut it. But the shortcut
is really costing the dealer a lot of money. They'll know it. We're doing a couple of my clients
right now. We're doing post mortems or reposts. Trying to figure out, you know, we all say we
have a underwriting protocol and this is everything it should look like, right? Well, what you find
is that leaks over the years, right? Well, we were six months on the job. Well, you know,
last month, actually, half of your approvals were three months on the job. So something leaked there.
So sometimes you have to go back and do a whole post-mortem on everything. You can do a post-mortem
or repost, do a post-mortem on recon. All these things to figure out where the problems are,
then you just have to go back and retrain. And I know it's terrible and it sounds daunting to a
dealership owner or manager, but it's just what you have to do. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has
been great, man. A lot of good information for me and good reminders of things I need to go back
and do. So I've got my sticky notes here with a bunch of action items. So hope everyone else did
too and excited to talk to you guys next week. See you.
About this episode
GPS tech is shifting from simple location tracking to “critical business events” that trigger real dealer actions. Ariad (Ida Ron/Ituron) explains how smarter alerts—like accident detection, device tampering, and unauthorized driving—can be triangulated with other signals and routed through dealer workflows. The biggest highlight is integration with payment processing: when a vehicle is starter-disabled, the system can text the customer, take payment instantly, and send an enable command automatically. The discussion also covers compliance rules, location blacklists, and why dealers must audit and retrain processes so tech actually delivers ROI.
In this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast, Jeff Watson and Luke Godwin sit down with an executive from Ituran to break down what's actually new in dealer GPS technology — and why most dealers are paying for tools they're barely using. From accident detection to automated payment integration, this one is packed with practical ways to cut repos, improve collections, and get more out of your GPS system.What You'll Learn:How modern GPS goes way beyond location tracking with critical business event alertsHow GPS and payment processing integration can collect payments automatically — 24/7The compliance risks of starter interrupts and how to use them the right wayWhy tamper detection and unauthorized drive alerts are must-haves for BHPH dealersHow to audit your GPS processes and stop leaving ROI on the tableIf you're a buy here pay here or independent dealer who hasn't touched your GPS settings since day one, this episode is your wake-up call.Support the businesses that support the podcast: Buckeye Risk Services - Reinsurance and wealth strategies for independent dealers. https://theindependentdealer.com/buckeye BlytzPay - BHPH payment processing with fast funding and text-to-pay.
