#438 - How To Buy Out Your Dad (And Your Biggest Competitor)

#438 - How To Buy Out Your Dad (And Your Biggest Competitor) The Independent Dealer Podcast · Jul 2, 2026

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Term

floor plan

A special type of credit card or loan that car dealerships use to buy the cars they put on their lots. When they sell a car to a customer, they use that money to pay back the loan.

Car

Toyota Prius

A very popular hybrid car made by Toyota that runs on both gasoline and electricity. It is famous for getting amazing gas mileage and lasting a very long time.

Term

A club of about 20 car dealers from different parts of the country who don't compete with each other. They meet up to share their business secrets, look at each other's financial books, and help each other make more money.

Term

reinsurance

A setup where a car dealership creates its own mini-insurance company. Instead of paying outside companies to cover car warranties, the dealer keeps that money and pays for repairs themselves, pocketing the extra profit if the cars don't break down.

Term

GAP insurance

A special insurance that pays off the rest of your car loan if your car is totaled in an accident and your regular car insurance doesn't cover the full amount you still owe the bank.

Car

Tesla Cybertruck

A futuristic, wedge-shaped electric pickup truck made by Tesla out of shiny stainless steel. It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie and runs entirely on battery power.

Concept

buy here, pay here

A type of car dealership where the dealer loans you the money to buy the car directly from them, rather than you getting a loan from a bank. You make your car payments directly to the dealership where you bought it.

Place

The Villages

A giant retirement community in Florida where over 100,000 seniors live. It is famous for being so big that residents use golf carts to go almost everywhere, including the grocery store and restaurants.

Term

recon

The process of fixing up, cleaning, and detailing a used car so it looks and runs like new before putting it up for sale on the dealership lot.

Term

KBB ICO

An online tool by Kelley Blue Book where you type in your car's details and get an immediate cash offer. You can then take your car to a local participating dealer, who will buy it from you for that exact price.

Term

MMR

A giant database that car dealers use to see exactly how much specific cars are selling for at dealer-only auctions. It helps them figure out what a used car is actually worth.

Term

full self-driving

Tesla's advanced software that allows the car to steer, brake, accelerate, and navigate roads on its own. Even though it does most of the driving, a human still has to sit in the driver's seat and pay attention.

LIVE

How are you funding that many buyer payers?

I've always been self-funded.

I've never had a floor plan.

You know, that comes from 45 years in the business, right?

When I was a buyer with Dad,

there was a small amount of capital,

but I tell this to people all the time.

I was taught my whole life that leverage can be

a sitting under block tied around your ankle

while you're trying to swim.

And so it was beat into my brain

that leverage is a method of last resort.

And I really did build things organically.

It blows my mind that that feels so difficult

to people to do.

And I didn't start with nothing.

I know that that's not the position I was in,

but I did drive a Toyota Prius with 300,000 miles on it

for six years, buy a bigger car,

put everything back in the business,

put it back in the street.

I've delayed a lot of big financial purchases

to reinvest in my business over the last 10 or 15 years.

And now I can do what I want

because I've made those decisions

and I didn't over-encumber myself with leverage.

Hello and welcome to the independent dealer podcast

for the third time.

We have Byron, he is the FIDA dealer of the year for 2025.

And we are gonna be hanging out this weekend in Denver.

Is that where you're driving right now Byron?

Are you driving to Denver from Florida?

I'm not that bold brother.

The fight's long enough as it is.

I actually, Jeff, I actually was on the phone

with someone this morning who was driving through Kansas

on their way here to Denver for NI-88.

I was like, bro, what are you doing?

Well, I had one guy in my 20 group that he wouldn't fly

anywhere, he would drive to all of you,

like something about airplanes, I don't know.

But Byron, regardless of how you're getting there,

we are gonna see you this weekend.

So by the time this episode airs,

we'll already know if you won national,

but we wanted to still have you come on

and talk about your story because it's super interesting.

And we've been talking a little bit in the pre-interview

about what you've been through

and it's kind of an interesting story.

So we're gonna get into all of that.

But first off, introduce yourself to the listeners,

give us a little bit of backstory about, you know,

where your dealership is, what kind of an operation,

business model, things like that.

Yeah, man, the name of our store is Honest Otos.

We're located in Central Florida.

Got two locations.

I acquired those through two buyouts.

The first buyout was my Pops.

The second one was another competitor of ours in town

about a year or two ago.

We sell roughly 700 cars a year,

so anywhere from 50 to 100 units a month,

depending on seasonality.

My dad started the store in 1980,

so grew up picking up cigarette butts on the lot,

detailing cars like most of us

that are second generation guys did.

And it's basically all I know.

I had a brief stint in the advertising world,

so brought some of that over to the dealership world as well

when I came back home and started working for the family.

Yeah, that's great.

And Jeff, I'm right that he's been on the podcast before,

correct?

Yeah, it's been a while. It's been a while, guys,

but you've had me on a while back.

Jeff, do you have that number?

Yeah, you're looking for the number.

I'm gonna look it up here in a second,

but while we do that, Byron, that's interesting to me.

So when you bought out both, and I don't remember,

I'd have to go back and listen to the old episode

if you've already addressed this,

but how does that, how do you buy out your dad?

Because that's a tough year, man.

I mean, it sounds like he's got a couple of different lessons

learned here, but how did you do that?

Because that's a lot of cars.

Yeah, that one was the hardest to be very clear, okay?

So, you know, my situation was my dad had,

he was an early buyer-payer dealer.

My dad is 78 years old, 76 years old, somewhere around there.

He's, you know, he was at the sunset of his career.

So he had his heyday, and it was kind of a symbiosis.

He was either gonna close the store

because he owned a real estate and said,

hey, I can lease property,

I can do something less taxing on myself at this point in time.

It's not generating what it used to.

And, you know, I didn't have capital.

I didn't have a physical location.

I didn't have all the things that he kind of had

to jumpstart on.

So I said, hey, I think I can trade in my corporate job,

come back, give this a shot, and that's what I did.

So I worked for him for a couple of years.

And then of course, you know,

eventually I'm running the store.

I negotiated some terms.

I, you know, basically had a conversation with dad.

I said, hey, you're gonna, I'm running this joint.

You're either gonna sell it to me

or I'm gonna have to be a competitor, right?

We gotta figure this out.

And I think he knew competing with me at that stage

in his life was not a great idea.

And again, this was a, it was a symbiosis for both of us.

So it worked really well.

And, you know, that was about 10 years ago.

So just completed a second buyout last February

with another competitor in town

that had competed with our family for maybe 10 or 20 years.

It's a very similar situation.

Guy was the same age as my father.

He had been looking for an exit for a couple of years.

As we all know, this industry is really hard to exit.

We're all, we're all kind of key man operations

when you're, you know, under a certain scale of size.

And I think he tried to sell it and maximize it

in a few different ways and realize that him and I

could also have a symbiosis.

You know, we brokered a deal

where he could maintain all his accounts.

I would, you know, my employees would collect

on those for him.

And so it gave, it gave him a lot of benefits, you know,

taxable benefits and ways to wind it down over time.

And for me, I got a customer base that I acquired

and inherited, I took a competitor out, you know,

so I really just happened to be kind of right place,

right timing in both instances.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I, not everybody gets a chance to do that.

A lot of times we're both sides.

A lot of times you're left to wind down

the operation yourself, which I'm currently doing

or some bigger operation comes in and buys it out.

And as a competitor, you miss an opportunity.

So I think that that's awesome that it worked out for you.

And you're just, you're collecting out his portfolio

while you're ramping up your portfolio.

I think that's kind of the way,

the best way to do that situation, right?

That's right.

I basically double my collections team

and we absorbed his portfolio day one.

So we had 700 new accounts to collect on.

I paid a very small rev share on those.

It does not generate any profit for me,

but it does offset some of the capital cost,

human capital cost.

And I viewed it differently.

I viewed it as one, I knew that was important to this guy

to get the deal done.

And I also viewed it as a future stream of customers, right?

We're gonna collect on these six, 700 accounts he's got left

and we're gonna re-roll those people in our portfolio

when they pay off.

So, you know.

Did you keep the name of his company

or did you label it as your own?

Yeah, I did not keep the name.

And there was a, I had a lot of trepidation

with kind of what we were gonna do there, right?

He had a good business.

And so there's something to be said

about continuing that name.

It's close enough to my store

to where there would have been a lot of advertising

and branding synergies by changing the name

and having both stores be the same name.

So ultimately we went that way.

You know, that helps from a perspective of,

you know, repeat customers coming back

and say, hey, I'm buried in this car.

You know, we're able to say, hey, frankly,

that's not, that's not our alone.

We don't need it.

Just roll it out on the freeway

and come get this one.

Well, you know, we play nice in the sandbox.

That was part of your dream.

And hey, I'm, you know, we talked about some of the things

I wanted an opportunity to buy some of the repos, you know,

we're not gonna pipe cars and do the wrong things.

I mean, we have a longstanding relationship

me and this gentleman.

And certainly there's things that don't always go well

in any type of acquisition or buyouts.

It was not easy.

It's still not easy all the time,

but you know, I think it was really the best case scenario

I could have put myself in.

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 gonna cover your stuff anyways.

Keep it in house, call the guys and girls over

at Buckeye risk services and get set up ASAP.

I'm gonna ask you a personal question.

You can, of course, dodge it if you want to.

It doesn't have to do with the three car seats

in the back of your Cybertruck there.

You're selling 100 cars?

Not every month, not every month.

I mean, we sold 80 to 100.

Yeah, we sold 92 cars in tax time between both stores.

Is this buy here, pay here?

Is this retail?

What's the combo?

I'm a real hybrid, man.

I mean, we really, I will carry something from $5,000

up to $50,000 in price.

I very heavily buy here, pay here.

That's what my business was built on.

I've been a weird demographic guys.

I live, you know, our store is right next

to the largest retirement community in the world.

It's called The Villages.

There's 120,000 retirees that have pension funds,

very good, stable, you know, income.

And so we can retail some cars to those folks.

We buy a lot of really good cars from those folks.

That's the biggest key.

You know, we've got a huge buying program

where we go to their house, offer it as a service.

So, you know, I'm able to do some things

you probably wouldn't find in some other markets.

And really my buy here, pay here portfolio

is the supporting cast for all of those folks,

you know, the yard guys, the teachers, the nurses

that work for those 120,000 retirees.

That's my BHPH book.

And, you know, we try to play both sides of that.

So, what do you say to percentages?

You know, it varies greatly, which is funny.

We try to put our finger on it and say,

why are we half retail or half cash last month?

And, you know, it's hard to identify those things.

Sometimes the market does things

and we think we're smart enough to figure out why,

but we're not.

But it's probably 70% BHPH, 30% outside finance retail.

Well, with the retirement community,

it's all those folks with their retirement pension funds.

When the stock market's up, they have money

and they go out and buy a second vehicle

or whatever they need.

But my question that was going to be personal

was how are you funding that many buy here, pay here's?

With buying our dad, did you have to go get a line of credit?

Is this dad giving you a line of credit?

Are you just self-growing at this point?

Like that's a lot of capital.

Yeah, man, I've always been self-funded.

I've never had a floor plan.

You know, that comes from 45 years in the business, right?

Dad, when I went out to buy out with dad,

there was a small amount of capital,

but I tell this people all the time,

I was taught my whole life that leverage can be

a cylinder block tied around your ankle

where you're trying to swim, right?

And so it was beat into my brain

that leverage is a method of last resort.

And I really did build things organically.

And it blows my mind that that feels so difficult

to people to do, you know,

and I didn't start with nothing.

I know that that's not the position I was in,

but I did drive a Toyota Prius

with 300,000 miles on it for six years.

And, you know, I think those are the decisions

people just don't make to generate that cash.

I mean, you know, buy a beater car,

put everything back in the business,

put it back in the street.

I mean, that's what I inevitably want to do.

And I've delayed a lot of, you know,

big financial purchases to reinvest in my business

over the last 10 or 15 years.

And, you know, and now I can do what I want

because I've made those decisions

and I didn't over-encumber myself with leverage.

Yeah, I, yes, I mean, I've lived that life

that you're talking about to stay debt-free

and watch my dad live that life to stay debt-free.

And I, and looking back,

it is the single most important thing he did

that led to the successfulness of our business

is staying debt-free.

Yeah.

And the funny thing is, Luke, it's like in your DNA,

like my dad still drives a Prius today

and he could buy whatever car he wanted to, of course, right?

So, you know, it's kind of like the ethos of our family.

And I don't want to act like I'm a, you know, a frugal,

you know, I buy what I want.

And then I'm sitting in a nice Tesla right now.

But, you know, I think when you're trying to grow the business,

you really have to make smart financial decisions

and reinvest in yourself and your business.

Yeah, because once you get to that point

where you're leveled out,

you can then start spending money a little differently.

But to get to that point,

it takes real dedication and real discipline to get there.

So, good job.

I hope to someday arrive there.

That's inspiring from both of you.

What, Jeff?

20 years later, I still feel guilty

every time I buy myself a vehicle.

I should say, but, Jeff, you've deleverced a lot

since I've known you.

Well, yeah, it's going somewhere.

I don't know where it's going, but it's going somewhere.

As a side note,

I just want to say the flip side of that is

there's probably times I could have poured

a lot more gasoline on the fire if I had some more capital.

And I didn't do that, you know?

I mean, there were times after this buyout last year,

my cash position was extremely tight

and I've never had to operate that way.

And that was alarming, but I still thought, you know,

I'm not doing it.

I will keep my inventory at cost a little lower.

I won't have 200 cars, you know, in inventory

and we'll rebuild this organically again.

And so that's kind of what we're just coming out

of the other side of doing.

Yeah, yeah.

One quick question on this before we move on, Jeff.

There are times where I regretted that we didn't take capital

to grow when the market was prime for us to do so.

And maybe the display that we had hindered us at that moment

cause, you know, $200,000 or $300,000 of extra inventory

would have really increased our portfolio.

It sounds like you've seen that situation

and just not done it.

Have you ever thought about having a way

to get the capital if you needed it?

Yeah, I think you're exactly right.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

You know, there's been a few market times

where I thought I probably could have taken an LOC of 500 grand

and turned that into seven or eight, you know?

Yeah, it goes both ways, right?

It can really fuel and accelerate what you're doing,

but it can also be a burden at the same time.

I think the smartest dealers are being smart about it,

about the use of capital and the smart about it

when to hit the line of credit

instead of making it a continually thing that you do.

Yeah, it's like a drug, right?

You get on it, it's hard to get off, man.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, moving on, sorry.

No, I was gonna say it's similar to, you know,

when you're gambling, if the deck's hot,

you gotta go all in.

And hopefully you're right about it.

So we have seen dealers who go all in,

but it wasn't the right time.

It wasn't the right time.

Market corrects and they get tanked.

And other dealers have gone all in at the right time

and boom, you know, rocket ship during those periods.

And then other times you pull way back

and you're just betting the minimum, but that's right.

I was talking about this yesterday with someone

in our industry and we were talking about how

they had decided, in the last year, decided not to grow

and how that there's so many dealers

that you have to grow every month.

If you're not adding on receivables month over month,

that it's not, you're not successful.

And that's really not the case.

The case is how do we grow smartly?

How do we keep our business afloat

when the times do get rough?

And sometimes a lot of times

that means you don't grow next month.

And dealers just need to know that.

So Byron, let me ask you this.

To do 80 to 100 cars a month,

which I guess is kind of your goal or your target,

is that split pretty evenly between both locations?

And what kind of a staff does that take?

Like how many employees are you currently have on payroll?

Yeah, not split evenly at all.

I, you know, my legacy store probably does 80% of that business.

You know, so that's something that we're trying to fix.

I kind of had, you know, grand oise plans

that we could kind of get them both to parody.

And it just hasn't worked out that way.

It's just, you know, different stores.

I'm not as familiar with the area that the other store is.

And there's, you know,

we don't have a revolving customer base there.

So, you know, I think that there's some juice

to be squeezed there

that we can continue driving some more traffic and sales.

The staff wise, you know,

we kind of bone that one out a little bit.

We absorbed a lot of staff.

That's problematic in and of itself.

These are people that you didn't hire.

You don't know a lot about them.

So there was a lot to work through there.

You know, as I mentioned before we jumped on,

the previous owner I bought the store from

still has an office location.

That was a little bit of a learning curve for both of us

to figure out how we all fit in

and the employees answering to a new boss and new regime.

But I'd say, you know,

all of my mechanics are based out of this new store.

So I'm heavier with service over there.

We've got an office team of three.

It's pretty light.

You know, keep one or two sales guys there.

My other main store, probably about a dozen people

working it out of there every day.

So you didn't have a service department

prior to purchasing this location?

I did, Luke, I did.

But this service department had double the lifts.

It's like a smaller store,

but the service center was double the size

of my service center.

So we kind of made that the hub for service.

That was one of the benefits of getting this store

and moved all of our technicians out there,

saying one tech, we keep one at the lot for B-backs

and you know, a little lot stuff,

but we've got, you know, five technicians out there

just cranking away.

Nice.

Yeah, but it's almost the modern buy here, pay here setup.

Your service footprint is twice the size

of your sales footprint.

Yeah, just, I would have built this store

completely differently had I understood that.

Yeah, right.

It's a recon is so vital to making the machine work.

You don't need, you know, we talked to Melissa last week

and you don't need a lot of space to sell the car.

You need a lot of space to get the cars to the front line.

And you don't necessarily need frontage.

You know, that's kind of an old-

Not at all, yeah, yeah.

You got to be on a highly visible road

and that's not necessarily the case anymore.

Byron, you talked a lot when we were discussing earlier

about your sourcing and you mentioned it a little bit.

You've got the Kelly Buying Center there

and being located next to retirement community.

It's probably a fringold, man.

I know our retirement community,

I try to market to them all the time

because all of a sudden, you know,

your grandpa takes a fall, your dad takes a fall

and you're like, sorry, buddy, I'm taking your keys.

You're not driving no more.

You got a 50,000 mile caddy that you can buy.

Yeah, the old driven church every Sunday Cadillacs

got to be sold.

So what else are you doing to get that many vehicles

in and through your shop quickly?

Do you have a lot of guys out buying?

Do you go buy?

Yeah, I mean, so it's crazy because my buying team

is now larger than my selling team.

And, you know, that probably started 56 years ago

when COVID hit.

We had some natural, you know, we were doing some novel things.

We created a buying center within the villages

and we created a standalone website.

It's called the Village Car Buyer.

And so effectively we just, we advertised very heavily in there

for, hey, if you moved in and you're selling your car,

you're downsizing, you're going to a golf cart,

it's a golf cart community, right?

So a lot of these people move down and realize,

I don't need a car anymore.

Or you can't have a car in the driveway

so you have to get rid of it, right?

And so there's a lot of people offloading inventory.

And so we just have to go compete against Carvana.

We do, we do house calls because these people are old,

they don't really trust, you know,

some guy showing up or bringing it down.

They think that they're going to go down there

and you're going to offer them three grand less

than what you talk about on the phone.

So they're a little guarded

and we just hold their hand through it, man.

Like you said, there's a lot of estates.

There's some, you know, weird stuff with probate

we have to go through and deal with

but we've just gotten really well versed

with dealing with those type of deals.

And we get a great car.

So I have a KBB ICO, you know,

I'm an instant cash offer buying center, big cost to that.

You just got to really monitor the numbers

to make sure you're acquiring, you know,

enough cars for it to make sense.

But we've allocated a lot of resources

to both of those programs, the Village Car Buyer

and the KBB ICO in the last decade.

And how many cars your wholesale in a month?

We will pick up a couple from the ICO that will wholesale.

You know, if I get a great car, I want to sell it, man.

I mean, you know, but I'll tell you what,

I'll wholesale, I'll wholesale that $40,000 car.

That is not my lot car.

But I say, hey, we're going to buy it two grand back in MMR.

Let's get, let's go flip it, you know,

help offset our KBB ICO costs this month.

Yeah. And that mean, and also Jeff, they're in, you know,

the car capital of the world, Orlando, or near Orlando.

So you can, you could go to an auction morning

and afternoon, every day of the week, I think, right?

I'm pretty sure, brother, within about a 60 mile radius.

Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Man, that's crazy.

So a business idea I was going to mention,

because you're at the villages

and you obviously are interested in Teslas,

I have had a weird influx of seniors coming to buy Teslas

because their kids want them to have a vehicle

with the full self-driving.

Interesting.

And so that whole full self-driving support and trust

is opening up mobility for all these seniors

that technically they shouldn't be on the road.

They're not super quick, you know,

they're okay behind the wheel,

but their parents don't trust them anymore.

So they're flipping them over to Teslas

to give them a couple more years of independence.

I think if you set up one of those little, you know,

Tesla sales lots right inside the villages, man,

I bet you'd get a whole lot of those people

that are moving that direction.

And that's wild.

I saw an article about that, Jeff,

but that is the need that you could put someone

who you wouldn't trust behind the wheel normally,

behind a Tesla with FSD, and you're okay.

Yes, pretty well, man.

Yeah, yeah, much, much better than them on their own,

that's for sure.

Oh, gosh, yeah.

Better than me on my own.

I was on the way here this morning

and had 500 things going on

and thinking it's the car to where I was going

because I was not paying attention.

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 gonna reuse that joke, aren't you?

It was funny, yeah.

Y'all will get that reference in a future episode,

but Blitz has changed their name a little bit

because they're launching more products.

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 gonna get into, but they've got the technology,

they've got the know-how to help dealers

in a lot of aspects of their business.

Yeah, data's hard to process from just everyday dealers,

but Blitz is gonna harness that,

they're gonna harness AI, and they're gonna

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 I would recommend.

Byron, talk to us about, just real quick,

what you see the future for your dealership.

Are you looking to pick up another store,

another location, do you feel like the two is like,

hey, this is all I can handle,

I'm just gonna optimize here?

Or what's kinda your mentality around

moving forward over the next five years?

You know, I feel like I got to a weird place

where I had just too many employees

and not enough layers of insulation

where I pushed myself really hard

the last year or two with this acquisition,

so do I wanna do it again?

The answer is a resounding no.

Am I a capitalist opportunity?

The answer is a resounding yes, right?

So I say no, but if the right opportunity presented itself,

I know another dealer, 40, 50 miles away,

he's talked to me a couple times over four or five years

about exiting as well.

I don't know, guys, I would have to put

some more things in place.

I have three young kids, and it's really important to me

right now, I focus on them more than anything else.

You know, when you say long-term,

this business, for the exact reason you just mentioned,

I think autonomy is gonna be extremely disruptive.

It might take a decade or two.

It's not gonna happen instantly,

but the math equation on autonomy

makes owning a buyer pay your car really difficult.

Yeah.

When people could just call up a self-driving cab

at any moment, there's no reason for them

to have someone sit in their driveway all day long.

That's right, cars are dormant 90% of the time

that they're owned, so you've got a huge fleet

with a lot of downtime.

If they become autonomous, you've got cars

running people everywhere.

It all boils down to cost per mile, you know,

that's what I think about.

What's my customer paying for the car payment,

their insurance, their gas, and their maintenance?

And you take an electric autonomous vehicle

and it flips that equation drastically on its head.

Yeah, you know, you're talking about the usage of a car,

but by here, pay here, car usage is like 90% of the time,

not the 10%.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll be right on that.

That's true.

They're going constantly.

It never stops.

They are the family cab.

So, and then Byron, let's wrap this up with,

obviously we're gonna see on Sunday, Monday, out in Denver,

what does the quality dealer of the year,

not only being that for Florida over the last year,

but like going to national, like why?

Like why?

It's not easy.

You have to fill out a whole lot of paperwork

and submit everything and you're going up against

a bunch of other great dealers.

Like, well, why even, why even deal with that?

You know, it feels surreal to me, guys, to be totally candid

that I'm even in the caliber of some of the dealers

that are up there.

I remember a guy in my 20 group winning the Florida Quality

Dealer Award in 16, 17, probably a decade ago.

And I thought, holy smokes, this guy's the best dealer in Florida.

What a aspirational thing that I could try to gun for

and achieve one day.

And I just, I got involved in the FIADA back then

and I just really can't believe I qualified and won the award

and I can't believe I'm going to national.

So, it's really cool.

My family's been in this business forever.

I love the car business.

I love what I do.

So I'm kind of smitten with the whole thing.

I've got a little imposter syndrome, you know, but it's really cool.

It's cool for my dad to see his legacy be continued

and not only continue, but grown to a different level.

That gives me a lot of fuel to keep doing what I'm doing.

And I think we're all working a little bit to impress dad

until the day that he dies.

And so, you know, that's a lot of fun for me.

Well, yeah, I mean, y'all have been in business for what,

50 years or 46 years?

That's I mean, that's an achievement on its own.

Is there is there like one thing that your dad maybe did

or that you are doing that that really gives back to your community

or that you would maybe talk to other dealers about, you know, being involved?

Yeah, yeah, you know, this is a community business.

If you know by here, pay here, you understand that.

If you don't, that might sound weird,

but you are involved in these people's lives and it's thousands of people.

And my small 25,000 person town and, you know,

it sounds cliche to say you're changing people's lives.

But when somebody gets a car repossessed and they cannot get to work

and they cannot feed their family and they can't get their kids to school,

you are making a huge difference in their life.

And you say, I'm going to loan you what you need to to carry on with your life today.

I don't care what happened with your last car.

And it means a lot to people.

And so you've got to give back.

This community has given us so much.

It's a lot of our family to do a lot, you know.

So my dad was heavily involved when I was in school.

You know, he did a lot of things for the high school.

He's got a foundation.

So that's always kind of been core to us.

And not only my father, my family has been in Lake County for 100 years.

So we were Floridians before anybody was in Florida.

So we're just old school people have been here a long time

and we believe in taking care of the people that have taken care of us.

Oh, that's awesome. So cool. So cool.

Byron, hey, man, appreciate it.

We'll let you get back on the drive.

You've got to make it to Denver by Sunday night.

So you've got to really step on it, buddy.

Charging stops. That's going to get you.

I'll be there about when the conference ends.

See you guys soon.

All right, right.

Have a good one.

Take care, guys. Have a good one. Take care.

About this episode

Byron, the 2025 FIDA Dealer of the Year, shares his unique journey of scaling Honest Otos in Central Florida through two major buyouts: first his father's dealership, and later his biggest local competitor. Operating near a massive retirement community, Byron explains his hybrid buy-here-pay-here and retail business model. He discusses the logistics of absorbing a competitor's portfolio, the advantages of organic, self-funded growth, and why he strictly avoids financial leverage. It is an insightful look at succession planning, local acquisitions, and disciplined dealership cash flow management.

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Original notes

In this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast, Jeff Watson and Luke Godwin sit down with Byron Oldham, owner of Honest Autos in central Florida and the FIADA Florida Independent Auto Dealers Association Quality Dealer of the Year for 2025 — who, at the time of recording, was preparing to head to NIADA nationals in Denver. Byron built his two-location operation by doing something most dealers never get the chance to do twice: buying out his own father's store, then turning around and buying out his biggest competitor. He's done both without ever touching a floor plan.

What You'll Learn:

-How Byron negotiated the buyout of his dad's dealership — and why the conversation came down to "sell it to me or I'm going to be your competitor"

-The rev share structure he used to acquire 700 accounts from a competitor without a taxable event, a giant upfront check, or inherited headaches

-Why his buying team is now larger than his selling team — and how being located next to the largest retirement community in the world changed everything about how he sources inventory

-How he's stayed entirely self-funded across two acquisitions, two locations, and 45 years of family legacy — and why he drove a Prius with 300,000 miles on it for six years to make it happen

-The honest truth about what goes wrong when you buy a competitor's store and the previous owner still has an office on your property

-Why autonomous vehicles might be the biggest long-term threat to the buy here pay here model — and how he's thinking about it with three kids at home and a decade of runway

-What winning state quality dealer means to a second-generation dealer trying to carry his father's legacy — and why a little imposter syndrome comes with the territory

If you're an independent dealer thinking about buying out a competitor, exiting your own business, or just trying to grow without drowning in debt — Byron's story has more hard-won lessons in one conversation than most dealers get in a decade.

Support the businesses that support the podcast:

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Follow & Connect:

Website: www.theindependentdealer.com

Facebook Group: @independentautogroup

Luke Godwin: @lukegodwin

Jeff Watson: /sendtojeffw