Buy Here Pay Here is when the car dealer sells you the car and also helps you finance it. You make your payments to the dealer instead of a bank, which is often designed for people who have trouble getting regular car loans.
This is a podcast segment where they ask real people in the business what’s going on. Here, they interview car dealers to learn what problems they’re dealing with day to day.
It’s a way of saying the problems never fully go away. You solve one thing, and then another problem shows up right after.
Concept
20 group
A “20 group” is a dealer peer group—other dealers who meet and share what’s working. The speaker’s point is that joining helps you handle problems better.
“Collections” means getting paid—following up to make sure customers make their payments. If collections go poorly, the dealer’s money flow can get strained.
“Recon” means getting a used car ready to sell—fixing issues and doing the necessary work so it looks and drives right. It can make the difference between selling the car quickly or not.
“Buy here” is a car-selling setup where the dealer also handles the payment plan. The speaker’s point is that even if it’s easier to sell, you still have to manage the process carefully or it can hurt the business.
Brand
bootcamp
A “bootcamp” is an intensive training course. Here, it sounds like they’re signing up for a program to learn dealer business skills.
A Honda Civic is a popular Honda compact car. It’s the kind of car dealers often buy and resell because lots of people recognize it and it’s usually easier to find parts and service for.
They’re asking how a car dealer can promote their business to get more customers. It’s about getting people to notice the dealership and then come in to buy.
They’re saying most of their customers are coming from social media apps like TikTok and Instagram. The conversation is about using those platforms to sell cars.
Concept
$1,000 down to $150 a week
They’re describing how the deal could be paid off: you put some money down, then pay a set amount each week. The weekly number alone doesn’t tell you the full cost—what matters is the total deal and how long you’ll be paying.
A warranty is a promise that if something breaks within a set time/miles, the cost of repairs may be covered. Dealers may bundle it to make the purchase feel safer.
GAP helps cover the “gap” between your car’s value and what you still owe if the car is totaled or stolen. It can prevent you from being stuck paying a loan on a car you no longer have.
A retail dealer is a normal car dealership that sells cars to customers. The host is saying the same kind of insurance/risk help can apply to them too.
An auction is where cars are sold to the highest bidder. If the auction is far away, it can be hard and expensive to go often, which makes it tougher to keep enough cars in stock.
Inventory is the cars a dealership has on hand to sell. If you don’t have enough cars (or can’t get them easily), it can hurt your ability to make sales.
Online bidding is buying cars through an auction website. Instead of going to see the car in person, you bid and hope the car matches what you expected. The speaker says they had bad experiences, so they switched back to buying another way.
Concept
in lane
“In lane” means the dealer is back to buying the cars in person at the auction. Instead of bidding online, they go there to inspect the cars themselves.
“Touch them” means the dealer wants to inspect the car in person. They believe it’s the only way to really judge the condition, not just rely on pictures or listings.
A debt lender is someone who gives you money that you have to pay back, usually with interest. For car dealers, it can help them fund inventory, but if they borrow too much and sales slow down, they can get into trouble.
“Over their head” means you’ve taken on more responsibility or payments than you can manage. Here, it’s basically borrowing too much money for the dealer’s sales to safely cover it.
“Too much debt” means the business owes more money than it can comfortably pay back. If car sales don’t bring in enough cash, the dealer can get stuck and eventually fail.
Brand
Team Eziata
“Team Eziata” is the name the dealer uses as their business identity. It’s like a brand name for the dealership, not a car model.
Brand
Team A
“Team A” sounds like a label or category tied to the dealership’s branding or group. It doesn’t appear to refer to a specific car or car part.
Company
NI80A
NI80A sounds like a group or association connected to the auto industry. People get involved in these kinds of organizations for networking, support, and industry information.
ACV is a shorthand number dealers use to describe the typical value of a deal. It helps them see whether the cars they’re selling are bringing in enough money per sale.
Concept
Diamond in the rust
It means finding a used car that looks bad on the outside but could be a good deal once it’s cleaned up or repaired. The “diamond” is the hidden value under the “rust.”
Here, “infrastructure” means the dealership’s whole operation—staff, systems, and processes. The point is that you can’t keep squeezing profit without changing how the operation is built.
“COVID hangover” just means the problems that didn’t go away after the pandemic. Here, they’re talking about dealers hiring too many people and paying too much, and then not being able to fix it quickly.
A “pay plan” is how employees get paid and what they’re rewarded for. If the dealership changes how it sells cars, the pay plan often has to change too, or people won’t perform the way the business needs.
Concept
hybrid business model
A hybrid business model means using a mix of different ways to run the business instead of just one. In this context, dealers are trying to blend strategies, but it’s not always clear how to make the money.
Concept
retail dollar
“Retail dollar” means money the dealer makes from regular retail-style sales. They’re saying it may be better to focus on BHPH instead of trying to chase the usual retail profit.
Cash flow is whether the money is coming in fast enough to pay the bills. If payments come in slowly or unpredictably, the business can struggle even if it looks profitable on paper.
BHPH is just short for “buy here, pay here.” It means the dealer is the one financing the car and getting paid back, so dealers have to watch deal-by-deal numbers, not just the overall total.
“Per deal” means looking at each car sale separately to see if it made money. Sometimes the total business looks okay, but some individual deals are losing money.
“Overhead” is the day-to-day cost of running the dealership, even if you’re not selling cars that week. If sales slow down, those fixed costs can hurt profits.
The labor market is basically how hard it is to find workers and how much they can demand in pay. For dealerships, it affects whether employees stay or leave for better jobs.
Concept
headhunted
“Headhunted” means being actively recruited away from your current job by another employer, usually with offers meant to lure you to switch. In dealership staffing, this can drive up wages and increase turnover if employees feel they can earn more elsewhere.
LIVE
This is Jeff, would you like to do a quick interview?
No, no.
Alright, you're gonna be fine.
Hello and welcome to the independent dealer podcast, a very special episode today.
You know, Luke, I say that a lot. I probably need to stop saying very special because then nothing special.
Well, you know, Jeff, you are special.
I'm special.
Yeah.
Every episode is special because of you.
I should say this is a different episode.
So we just barely got back from Buy Here Pay Here United 2026 down at the Sneezer's Palace in Las Vegas.
It was eventful, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
It was a lot of fun.
I tell you, I just love talking to dealers and, you know, I was exhausted there.
I can tell you if most of the if not if I probably was not as nice as I normally am to dealers at times.
So that was just tired.
I had been working all weekend and then roll over there.
You wouldn't let me get to sleep.
I had to go out partying all night with you.
Yeah, bet.
Yeah.
Next thing I know, I don't even know my name.
Most people go in like they leave Vegas beat up and tired, but you actually rolled into Vegas already beat up and tired.
I did.
I did.
And so I was trying to get some rest out there and it just didn't happen.
I think everybody did.
And it was great.
I mean, honestly, we had a lot of good feedback, talked to a lot of dealers, a lot going on in the industry right now.
What I found interesting and what we're going to talk about in this episode just to set up what you guys are about to hear is our what we call our man on the street segment.
So if you're not familiar with the podcast, when we go to these conventions, we like to just interview dealers.
Find out what is going on on the ground level.
What are dealers struggling with?
Why would you fly across the country and show up to convention?
What are you hoping to learn?
What are your takeaways that are going to pay for this trip?
So really the practical stuff that everybody's dealing with day to day.
Yeah.
And there's always the same questions, Jeff.
And I was going back and forth with somebody that wanted me to come do some consulting.
And I told him, I said, man, this is whack-a-mole.
Our business is whack-a-mole.
And it's however quick you can get that hammer on top of that mole is how good you're going to be.
And unfortunately, dealers that don't come to convention and don't go to a 20 group and don't interact with people.
They don't have a big enough hammer to fix the problems.
And it's the same problems as inventory, it's recon, it's collections and sales are easy when it comes to buy here, Jeff.
But they'll put you out of business if you don't do them right.
Absolutely.
Speaking of, I just barely today signed my collector up for your bootcamp.
So Wendy's going to come out to Atlanta next month.
When is it?
It's the 14th of May, Thursday, May 14th at the Holmwood Suites at Atlanta Airport.
I just can't wait.
I love training collectors.
It's so much fun.
Yeah.
Was the hotel like a bargain?
It is like 150 bucks, something like that.
And that's an interesting decision.
Well, hey, there's a way we like to do it.
Holmwood Suites was good for us because we're able to bring in our food.
It keeps the call staff.
That's true.
The rooms have kitchens.
So we all go to your room.
We're cooking everyone breakfast, lunch and dinner, how to loot a hotel.
You know, a lot of these places, they have these huge minimums.
And what we want to do is make sure that it's affordable for dealers.
And I think the price for it's right at 300 bucks, might be a little less than that.
I don't know, getting later now, it might have gone up.
But the thing is this, it's affordable, it's close.
If you go to these other places and we've all been to convention and see what the food
setup is, I mean, it's fantastic.
But you start to listen to what it costs for you to be there.
It's just not feasible.
So we like to not do it on the cheap.
We like to do it at nice hotels and bring in our food and just really be there to interact
with the dealer at a low cost, easy in, easy out type situation.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's great.
Atlanta is a good spot to do it because it is almost a direct flight from the entire
anywhere in the country.
Almost from the world and it's drivable for so many southeastern dealers.
And that's what really makes sense.
Go to godwinconsultinggroup.com, get signed up Thursday, May 14th.
We are almost full Jeff, so you need to get on it right now.
Yeah.
Collections Bootcamp with AI.
With AI.
We're going to learn all about AI and the title of anything.
And it's like, boom, everyone's there.
It's like .com from the early 2000s, man.
No, but.
.com.
It must be.
If people aren't using AI in every portion of their business, you're going to be so
far behind and you're not going to be able to catch up.
Yeah, awesome.
So we, back to our episode, you are going to hear stuff from dealers all over the country,
what their pain points are, what they're struggling with, what they hope to learn at
convention.
So hopefully you can relate.
Hopefully it gets you excited to come to more of these with us and show up and meet people
and find the answers to your problems.
But Luke, anything else before we get this started?
Really take the heart what dealers are saying because you know what's interesting is that
most dealers are going through the same thing.
And if you don't get to these things, you may feel like you're on an island, but you're
not.
All dealers are suffering.
And the best way to, the best way to get better is to interact with other dealers.
Don't commiserate.
Don't be like, oh my God, this guy's bully.
I can't fix it.
You can fix it.
It's just whether you want to fix it or not.
Absolutely.
All right.
Here it goes.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Hey, Jeff.
We got some friends again.
Yeah.
And these guys are super social.
They are.
Yes.
It's a familiar face, man.
I see these guys on my Instagram all the time.
Joshua Milley from All Rich and Autos.
Where are you guys from?
What's the name of your dealership?
So, hey, guys, we are Josh and Billy Alvish.
Alvish Auto ATL out of Atlanta.
And you love these guys as well.
We've been following them for a while now.
I'm happy we finally made it to the show.
We get to see y'all a bunch.
And I do follow you on Instagram.
Y'all are doing great things.
Why are you here this time?
Man, we're just trying to get the knowledge.
We're soaking up the game.
And we come to these things every other year.
And I feel like this year has been so different for us
because we actually know what this business is about now.
And we have our own experience with it, been around for so long.
And just to get this knowledge from everybody else,
like this last session we were in about knowing the numbers,
that out right there is like, we're going to go back and kill it.
I got a good one for you.
When I first started the business,
I was selling for my apartment.
I said, watch you guys.
I take my walks every morning.
I said, watch you guys.
I'm like, man, one day.
I kept talking about buying your pay here
and all this other, the car and business.
We finally got a lot.
And then we took off from there.
Billy, what'd you do before buying a car?
I was an entertainment business.
Entertainment? Of course he was.
I wasn't in the entertainment business.
You had my entertainers.
I got fired and said I would never work for nobody again.
And then I thought I went to the auction one time
and fell in love and never turned down.
He would buy my first car.
I bought his first car.
I bought a lot of college.
Honda Civic got it for $2,500.
He had it for a few months.
And then he had to go to college.
I sold it for $3,500.
Off to the races.
I love it.
Man, we just kept buying and selling.
What I love about Billy is he's like a,
this guy's like a database, man.
You asking what car he sold last Thursday
and how much miles and what he paid for it,
what he sold it for?
He knows.
Man, I remember those days
and a customer could walk him a lot.
And it'd be 10 years ago.
So I could tell him the color and make him a car.
Something like that.
It endears you with your customers, didn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
You have to be that way.
I'm still that way to this day.
There's nothing on our cars.
I have everything in my head.
You got to talk to me.
I'm very personable.
I want to meet everybody, shake everybody's hand.
Another thing is I love the business.
I'm getting this for free.
What I don't.
But I'll give you an idea for free.
I can do it for free because I get up in the morning.
I want to make America see how much money we got.
See what I can buy, what we can sell.
We keep in place for y'all.
I mean, y'all are professionals at marketing.
Can you just tell the audience what's the, like,
best thing you could do today
to market yourself and your dealership?
Yeah, well, first of all, this tax season,
we had about 60 days.
We had about 130 cars.
And the majority, about 90% were from TikTok and Instagram.
Every dealer is like, I don't know.
Oh, I don't want to be on there or whatever,
you know, TikTok and Instagram.
You don't have to go on there.
My dad didn't show his face.
I'm on there, but I've had people that work for me
and I've created their own personalities just from it.
And it's like, whoa, you got to focus on cars.
So even if, like, I almost troll in a way where I'm advertising
my 200,000 mile car for 1,000 down to $150 a week.
Then the customer.
So I always advertise my customers.
You see a lot of, you go to all rich auto page,
you don't see a lot of happy customers.
And you can kind of get a personality
for who we are through Instagram.
And every dealership should be able to do the same thing.
Yeah, I think the key phrase there is show your personality
through that's the whole point, right?
Because they endear to you through the videos they see.
And then when they show up, they already know you.
People want to buy from someone they know in life.
I've seen you before, like, who are you?
I'm shaking the customer's hand before they even come inside.
So they're like, hey, John, I mean, I'm just happy to be here.
I'm just happy to be buying from you.
So I was like, hey, I can sell them anything.
But I'm not going to, I'm going to still put them
in something that's going to work
because if it doesn't work, you're not going to pay me.
So yeah.
I love you guys.
Thanks for being here, man.
I love the energy.
Appreciate you guys.
Keep on doing what you guys doing.
Appreciate it.
All the new dealers.
Hey, sorry to break into real quick,
but make sure you guys know about Buckeye.
Long time, 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 ensure 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.
Cool.
Yeah, I got that.
Let's take you there.
It's the most simple.
It's in the gym and I want it.
Where you tell them that.
Here, Mary-Louis.
We're just going to ask you who you are,
where you found some, why are you here?
Who does?
Who you look to like.
Look at what you've already lost.
That's it.
You got the absolute limit zero.
So here we are with Mary-Louis.
Mary.
Hi.
She's scared, y'all.
Tell us where you're from, your dealership.
Carmichael's Pennsylvania.
Okay.
And what's the name of your dealership?
Michael's Otter 6.
You're not Michael.
Who's Michael?
Michael.
Michael's somewhere in another class.
Okay.
So Michael's somewhere else.
Michael's not lost.
She's the brains.
Michael's just the name.
So Mary, what do you hope to learn this weekend
being here by your Bay Area United?
Something on collections mostly.
Collections.
Collections and tightening up accounting.
Good.
That's very important this time of the year.
Did you sell much cars in tax season?
Not too bad.
Not too bad.
But now it's time to figure out the collection process
so you can collect all that money you lent out.
Yes.
Okay.
Give us one thing that you're like specifically struggling
with on that area, like collections.
Like is it your recency, delinquency?
We just got repos on the side of just...
First quarter.
So first quarter repos this year was one of the biggest
times I've ever seen it in the first quarter.
So you're not a little Mary.
Don't freak out because it seems to be happening to everybody.
Cool.
Okay.
Well, hopefully you find those answers.
Thanks so much for your time.
Bye.
Bye.
All right.
You're going to be fine.
All right.
See you later.
Hey.
Hey.
Look out.
Abram.
Abram?
Abram.
Abram, Calhoun.
What?
Where are you from?
Louisiana.
Louisiana.
You have the best food in the world.
It is.
It is.
We see it makes you have big muscles when you're from Louisiana.
Little...
Little black.
Hey.
We're going to come back.
We're going to cut back in here and we're talking from Abram, Calhoun from Louisiana
and you're all...
You made it all the way out here to Las Vegas to the Buy Here Pay Here summit.
What are you here to...
To figure out?
Well, can't get some knowledge.
Even though I'm missing crawfish seeds right now.
Come up here.
I'll see some for you.
Yeah, yeah.
So I can't get some knowledge.
You know, I have a lot of breakout classes.
We had a great session starting off with compliance.
So, you know, kind of catch up on everything.
What's your one pain point in your dealership right now?
For me, I'm always four to five hours away from the auction.
So for me, you didn't get an inventory.
I have to be on the road three or four days out of, you know, a week.
So that's my pain point for...
I mean, that's it.
You know, everybody talks about the pain point being an inventory and it can be.
Do you not trust online bidding or...
I do. I did a lot in the beginning, but I kept getting burnt.
I've gone back the other way.
I did a lot of online bidding.
I'm back to in lane.
Okay.
So you have to drive somewhere and you walk the cars to really get to touch them to feel them?
Yep.
What price car are you buying?
Right now, we're probably at six to seven, seven thousand.
And you hear that from a lot of those buyers in that market.
They want to touch them.
They want to feel them.
They want to drive them if they can.
Yeah.
Cool.
Have you found any answers so far?
Any good take home notes from the first half day?
Hmm.
It's so many.
It's hard to pinpoint on one.
But I will say...
Calhoun's always dressed so nice from California at his PH.
Oh, Tim Lawrence.
Yeah.
Hi, Tim.
Yeah, yeah.
He was talking about dead and how creating all that work.
We kind of resonated.
Yeah.
That's a good one.
It was a really good one.
And what's funny is he's a debt lender.
But he does understand that dealers shouldn't get themselves over their head because it's
a surefire recipe to go out of business and have too much debt.
It is.
Well, cool.
Thanks, man.
We'll see you out at the end.
See you.
Have a good day.
Thanks, man.
Hey, guys.
Real quick to interrupt the episode and make sure you know about a great sponsor and supporter
of the podcast Blitz.
Blitz.
I love it, Jeff.
That is kind of like goes from the Facebook to just Facebook.
You're going to reuse that joke, aren't you?
It was funny.
You all will get that reference in a future episode.
But Blitz has changed their name a little bit because they're launching more products.
You know, they're not just a payment platform, not just a processor, but they're also a
collections platform and analytics platform.
And who knows what else Robin and the team are going to get into.
But they've got the technology.
They've got to know how to help dealers in a lot of aspects of their business.
Yeah.
Data is hard to process from just everyday dealers, but Blitz is going to harness that.
They're going to harness AI.
They're going to combine that with payment platforms and payment process, which is amazing.
So if you need a payment processor, you need a friend in the industry or a partner, Blitz
is the only company out of the record.
Okay.
Here we are with Chris Martin.
Chris, where are you from?
What's the name of your dealership?
Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Team Eziata.
Team Eziata.
I like that.
Team A.
And you may not, you may not know this.
Chris was the president of NI80A what year?
Oh, that's an excellent question.
I think ten years ago.
I think just about.
Yes, sir.
Yeah.
I've been involved for a long time.
In 2016.
And his dad was a famous race car driver.
That's his royalty we have here.
Yes.
So Chris, I got to ask you this question then.
You've been obviously front to back in the industry.
You've been around forever.
You're here by your pay or United.
What do you think you're going to learn or take home?
What are you trying to learn by being here?
Just, I mean, so many things to learn.
The seminars have been great.
Networking is always phenomenal.
Just, I mean, every time I get to have a conversation with one of these guys, including, you know,
you guys.
You feeling you're still learning?
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
What pain point do you have right now on the dealership?
Well, I have to limit it to all.
Give us your worst.
Probably the worst right now is just finding the right inventory.
We heard that a second ago.
Yeah, I didn't really tell.
It's really tough.
I mean, you know, we were a little soft this tax season.
I think it would have been a lot better if we had the right inventory.
Yeah.
You got to have them to sell you right.
More of your right inventory.
More of the cars that are affordable.
Correct.
What's your ACV?
Right around seven.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's a hard place to buy.
Bottom.
But you're somewhere where there are a lot of auctions in there.
There's inventory.
What do you think?
Why is it so hard to get them?
Well, I mean, same fight everybody else has.
Finding the reasonably priced car that I'm not going to have to spend $2,000 or $3,000
reconditioning.
And that will last the night.
Yeah, exactly.
It'll run the night.
Diamond in the rust.
That's right.
Yeah.
So what's the one good thing you believe that you're doing at your dealership right now
that you can share with their body?
You know, we're working real hard to take really good care of our customers, provide
great customer service, build relationships and, you know, just...
How long have you all been in business?
I know it's been a while.
33 years.
33 years.
Wow.
Cool.
Yeah.
You got to be doing something right.
Jigs.
Jigs.
All right, Chris.
Appreciate your time.
Yeah.
See you around.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
You never know with her and the camera.
You never know with her and the camera.
Hey, you guys.
Here we are, our first vendor of the convention.
We have JP and Chad, familiar faces of the podcast many times.
Gentlemen, you're here.
You're always here.
You give a lot of value to the industry.
You're always helping dealers.
What are you seeing as the hot topics this weekend?
What are the issues dealers are dealing with that has got you guys kind of like here putting
out fires?
I think it's still a little bit of the same where, you know, dealers are shrinking.
They still have kind of their same, you know, workforce overhead that they haven't adjusted
to.
They haven't found kind of new and unique ways to continue to squeeze the lemon to get
as much profit out of their infrastructure as possible.
And so it's kind of this downward spiral that they can't get out of.
Are we still in the COVID hangover of we, we, we ramped up and started paying everybody
too much.
We over hired and now are we still there?
I think so.
Yeah.
No, I think a hundred percent.
And I think everyone right now is chasing that next idea instead of focusing on what
the dealership has been strong at.
You know, from the beginning, they're seeing what everybody else is doing.
They're seeing those success stories and they think that's what they need to now go do.
But they're really just getting their hands in too many different things.
And I think that's actually hurting their profits.
They're leaving their, they're leaving their core mission and going off into EVs or whatever
or even becoming the hybrids.
I think there's, I think there's some, some value there and there's, there's something
there for hybrid that you just don't take a retail and all of a sudden say, Hey, go
sell some buy here, pay here or vice versa.
You don't have the right manager in place or the right pay plan to incentivize one or
the other.
And I think dealers are just, they're searching, but they're not really taking the time to
throw it all on paper.
And the hybrid ideas come across and we're not done with a hybrid cars, not with a hybrid
business model.
Jeff, Jeff runs it pretty well, I think.
But you know,
I don't know, Luke, to that point where we step in there, I even myself have been questioning
over the last six months of whether I just need to steer completely back into buy here,
pay here and stop chasing retail dollar.
I did this years ago.
I kind of tried to do it and realized I couldn't do it.
So I turned in about face and went straight back in to buy here, pay here and it worked
out for us because that was our core business, right?
But people are chasing this because of cash flow, right?
Right.
Well, I was just going to say, yeah, no, I completely agree, but I think it's tough for
dealers not only to run that hybrid, but also to understand what is making the money, right?
We've done some analyses lately where we're, you know, we're finding like, okay, I got
a retail structure that has always done well.
And but, you know, my buddies have always done BHPH.
I want to start rolling that out.
And then you drill down, you look at it on a per deal and they're losing money and they
never realized it because it's, it's all kind of lumped together in a financial and you
think, oh, my bottom line is okay, but something's not quite right.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Where's the profitable deals?
Where's the unprofitable deals?
And to your point, the overhead aspect and just pairing that down as sales slow or profitability
slows, it's been a long time since I've had an employee ask me for a raise.
I think about that weekly.
Interesting.
It's coming, bro.
But to that point, I think the labor market is there where it wasn't like it was back in
those days where people were coming to you constantly looking to jump ship or find a better
pay raise.
I think my employees are happy they have jobs and they're happy.
They're getting paid what they are.
I don't think that they're getting headhunted.
I don't know if you're seeing that.
Yeah.
So this tax season, what is the one thing that, that y'all saw in the market that dealers
probably need to improve on in the second quarter?
Oh, go ahead.
If you know something.
That's a good question.
I mean, we saw pretty, pretty lucrative tax time for most dealers.
Obviously they had inventory issues two to three weeks in, right?
Sold too many cars quickly.
Sold too many cars quickly, right?
We don't know yet know what the aftermath is, right?
In the months to come, what the blood bath, the tax time high down, kiss of death will
produce.
But, you know, just that thought that came to me earlier is, you know, I feel like we're
seeing a clear line of delineation between success and failure for those that have at
satellite locations or multi-location sites, you know, the active owner operator that's,
you know, living, breathing his business versus, you know, someone passive and they
don't have strong leadership, you know.
Now we just got somebody walking through our camera here and that's our cue.
Guys, thank you so much.
It's been super informative and we look forward to chatting some more.
Yeah.
Thanks guys.
Thank you.
About this episode
Dealers at the BHPH summit trade practical answers about what’s hurting right now: collections, accounting, inventory sourcing, and overhead. Several speakers say tax season was strong but inventory dried up fast, while others warn that dealers are spreading themselves too thin with retail, hybrids, and EVs instead of focusing on core buy-here-pay-here operations. The discussion also highlights how social media is driving leads and how active owner-operators are separating from more passive businesses.
Jeff Watson and Luke Godwin hit the floor at the 2026 BHPH United Summit in Las Vegas to ask dealers one simple question: what's your biggest problem right now? The answers? Honest, unfiltered, and exactly what you'd expect from a room full of operators who've seen it all.
What You'll Hear:
-The challenges keeping BHPH dealers up at night in 2026
-How operators are responding to tighter credit, rising repos, and shifting customer behavior
-Real talk on compliance, collections, and customer retention
-Why BHPH United has become a must-attend event for serious independent dealers
If you couldn't make it to Vegas, this is the next best thing.
