0:00 / 0:00
Car Guy Coffee Podcast Live from NAMAD 2025: Vegas. Special Guest Atul “DJ” Sardana “Continuous Learning” Welcome to the Car Guy Coffee Po

Car Guy Coffee Podcast Live from NAMAD 2025: Vegas. Special Guest Atul “DJ” Sardana “Continuous Learning” Welcome to the Car Guy Coffee Po

Car Guy Coffee Nov 06, 2025 18 min
0:00
0:00
Immersive Mode

About this episode

Live from NAMAD 2025 in Las Vegas, the Car Guy Coffee Podcast features special guest Atul 'DJ' Sardana, who shares insights on continuous learning and the importance of community in the automotive industry. DJ reflects on his first speaking engagement at the event and discusses the unique culture of NAMAD compared to other conventions. The conversation touches on the challenges dealers face with change, the significance of relationships in business, and the value of cohesive digital marketing strategies. DJ's personal journey and his book are also highlighted, emphasizing the importance of representation and hard work.

Topics: continuous learning community culture digital marketing relationship management fear of change self-branding representation in automotive personal growth networking at events
Select text to request an explanation
Hello and welcome to the CarGuy Coffee Podcast.
This brew has been brought to you by Certified Solutionaries.
And if you want to consume more brews or want more information
about how to build your brand on our podcast
and want to see how you can sponsor the brew,
go to CarGuyCoffee.com.
Let's brew!
What's going on, Car Guys and Car Gals?
Welcome back to the CarGuy Coffee Podcast.
We are at NAMAD in lovely Las Vegas having some fun.
Fred, we have an incredible guest on the show
who is a frequenter to one of these events
and for most conventions.
We are so thankful to be hanging out with our friend,
the one, the only, DJ Sardana!
What's going on, DJ?
Excited that you're here.
Brother, I appreciate you.
This is somebody that we met at our very first convention
that we worked together.
And he was there, loud and proud, doing his thing.
But he came by.
We even interviewed you during that event, didn't we?
Yeah, and it was one of the very first interviews
we did there, so he's like bookending it for us right now
in a sense, and I always appreciate you, your energy
and your realness, man.
Realness.
It's always fun.
We run into him in the halls every time.
He's one of the first people we always see.
We always take a selfie, and my favorite thing
he says after he's done, he always says, tag me.
That's my guy.
I love him, his family.
He's a family man.
He's a hard worker, and he's one of the best
over at C4 Analytics, if not the best.
So I love being having you here, brother.
I'm so glad you had a chance to talk.
I know you just came off the stage.
How exciting was that for you?
It was amazing.
Yeah, I know this event's big for you.
First time in 24 years.
No kidding.
Wow.
When I spoke in high school and stuff like that,
but never had an opportunity.
Wow.
Honestly, that's something I didn't realize,
and I'm so glad that you got to do that here,
and what a great place to kick it off for you.
I have a feeling that's the first of many,
especially now that you know that you brought something,
and I'm sure you're excited about bringing
some more to everyone out there.
The one thing that you do bring
is you bring the realness when
it comes to what analytics and data, right,
with your people and your clients.
And this is something that's happening here.
They're bringing the realness to their people
and making sure that they're getting everything they need.
That's why they had people like you speak
and so many others.
So far, the highlights, who's somebody here
that you're excited to watch speak on stage?
It's all of them.
Yeah, I hear you.
So just being here is just a different world.
I met so many vendors out here that told me
what's my first name at and what's my fifth name at.
And they said, what should I expect?
And I'm like, this is just compared to,
I've done 27 shows in seven years.
Yeah, that's him.
Every NADA and digital dealer and all in between.
But coming here is a different field.
It feels, what I told somebody yesterday,
it feels like going to a family reunion.
In automotive, all these people, we made the second family.
And when you come here, their love is different
than when you go elsewhere.
You go to other shows and people hide their badge.
You're right here.
People cover their face, act like they're on their phone
and don't want to give vendors time.
Well, when you come here, everybody comes over.
Everybody stops by and the new people give you 60,
120 seconds to at least learn about you.
They give you an opportunity.
There's opportunities here more than I think all.
That's true.
So true.
Different culture.
I agree and I think it is the culture
and what it is that we're finding people that look like us,
talk like us, feel like us, right?
We don't feel so foreign.
They can actually explain things to us
in a way that we understand.
And that matters, right?
Being able to have representation inside that.
I know that I like to team up with people
that are different to people that sit,
not necessarily minority,
but people who fit in the same seat that I fit in, right?
When I feel that with them,
I feel something, a common bond
that I know that they have the same struggles,
the same ideas and the same like work ethic
that I may have, right?
Because I know that where they came from.
We all come from somewhere different.
But one thing we all have in common
is we all work our butts off.
One thing about minorities is that we do things
a little bit different because not because
we have a chip on our shoulder,
but because we have a chip on our shoulder.
You know what I mean?
There's something extra we want to.
Sometimes it feels like we have to work a little bit harder.
Well, sometimes we do always have to work
a little bit harder, I'm being honest.
But at the same time, that's what makes us special
and I think that's what makes us stick out.
And especially when it comes to automotive.
I care.
Knowing that there's different things
that help us stick out,
for you particularly, this event,
being that you've gone to so many different events,
what is it that you think makes this event
more dynamic being in Vegas?
Because being inside of Miami
probably has its own vibe.
You don't have all the casino action
all over the place.
What is it like having it actually here inside of Vegas?
We're only on day two.
So I'm still-
It's early, it's early.
Still trying to figure it out.
But from having done five of these,
and this is my fourth trip to Vegas
and I have two more this year,
Vegas is Vegas.
I personally think that this show
is better suited in Miami.
Because of that family and that togetherness,
there's a gentleman I was talking to last night
that said, when we're in the fountain blue,
there's that one main bar.
Everybody from the whole conference is there.
There's that togetherness here.
There's too many places people can be.
It's too spread out.
It's too scattered.
So it really is the opposite of that family.
It's everybody just doing their own thing.
So, NADA here, yeah.
Just so many more people, fine.
But with this tighter community,
I think Miami is a better vibe.
Yeah, I'm with you.
The idea of making sure that
you do accommodate a lot of people,
you do have options for a lot of people
to be able to eat
is something that I'm sure plenty of planners
look at and consider that.
But actually being present,
being here during this particular event,
I do love that it isn't as clickish as other events.
A thousand percent.
But there is definitely some notes to be taken
on being able to have a singular place
for everybody to gather,
everybody to come together.
Take some notes on that.
But that's really great feedback.
Speaking of great feedback,
there's been some awesome sessions,
great stuff brewing around right now.
What is it that you have had the chance to jump in?
I know, again, still only day two.
What have you had the chance to actually jump in
and hear from and actually maybe learn?
It's harder for me to do that
because I'm manning a booth.
So when we come here, our purpose is different.
So it's really about generating new business,
building relationships,
and meeting with dealers
and seeing how I can better their business.
This show for me,
I was interviewed on a podcast session yesterday,
which was awesome first time.
I got to speak today, which was awesome.
I think Miami is in a different place.
This show is really about,
I guess, a little bit of self-branding.
I like it.
Self-branding.
You, brother, not to catch off.
But your self-branding is very strong.
One, because you're always rocking these awesome sneakers.
I don't know if we can get this into the shot,
but he's always got these lit up shoes
where everybody sees you glowing,
coming down the hallway.
So that's definitely working on building your brand.
Everyone has to have their stick
or their differentiator,
something that makes them stand out.
Everybody's got, Fred's Fred.
When you see Fred, you know it's Fred.
You've got jackets, I got shoes.
I love it, I love it, I love it.
I love it, man.
You, as an individual, is special.
C4 is very blessed to have you in their team.
And I know you've been blessed by C4 too.
I know it goes a two-way street.
But as an individual, man,
this is a great event for you
because, again, other people like you
who are doing things and taking it to the next level,
you get a chance to speak for the very first time
at an event like this is an amazing opportunity
to be able to tell your story
beyond what you do inside C4, right?
It's what you do as a person.
Look inside market,
how you can help them do things
beyond even just the data that you have with them.
What I love is what's inside the market.
What do you think for you inside dealerships right now
is the biggest thing
that needs room for improvement inside most stores?
Ah, man, it's so big.
I hear you, man.
There's a lot.
I think fear of change is what a lot of dealers are facing.
A lot of dealers are just running
with what they've been doing
and they're afraid to look at other opportunities.
And sometimes it hurts their business.
One thing I keep running into this year
is a lot of dealerships are like,
oh, I'm friends with my marketing guy
and we hang out on the weekends
or he takes me to dinner and this and that and the other.
I don't want to cut them, I'm friends with the guy.
But then the problem is, okay,
so we looked at an analysis of your store's online presence.
We looked at your sales.
You're not hitting your objective.
You're not checking all these boxes
with your friends with the guy.
So because of that, you don't want to change.
That is a big thing we're running into this year
is a lot of dealers just afraid to look at something else
because they don't want to hurt that relationship.
But you can still be friends with the guy
after you make changes.
You don't have to cut off your friendship.
And the question is if you do make the changes,
if they cut off the friendship, were they really friends?
Exactly.
And that's the question you need to ask yourself.
And that's a tough cookie.
We dealt with owners ourselves that we worked with
that stuck with same things because they had relationships.
And yeah, I get relationships.
I totally agree.
Where do you draw the line?
There is a line.
All the success of my business
Facts.
Versus a friendship.
There is a line and there has to be results.
No matter how good the friendship is,
if there is no result or no growth
and there's nothing there for them
to really be able to help you get to the next level,
then they should be excited to help you find somebody
to help them get to the next level
because they're your friend again, right?
So we got to make sure that
we understand what that relationship really is there.
Is it a friendship or is it a business friendship?
And if it's just a business friendship, I get it,
but you need to explore it.
I'll tell you one thing's for sure.
If you let that person know you're looking
at other options, they may step up their game.
Maybe they'll do some things,
but if they don't even make a shift for you
and they know you're out there looking,
that means that we're going to stay flat lined
with you the whole time.
It's a good time to actually implement something else.
And I think that you're right on the money with that
is that we get too caught up in relationships
when it comes to friendships inside the industry,
dealers, they get comfortable, more than the friendship.
It's a comfortable thing.
I don't have to worry about this.
I know what to expect.
This is what I'm getting,
even though it's not what they want to be getting.
And that's the craziest part.
And sometimes they think that because of the friendship
that it'll show the same on the business side,
but it doesn't always.
No, it does not.
But there is an element of you do business with me,
I do business with you.
I'm in your community.
Hopefully you're doing business with me
because I'm in your community.
Once you become part of our ecosystem,
hopefully we keep doing business together.
That should be the design,
but it should never be at the sacrifice of each other
that are doing business with each other
because the idea is that we're doing something
for each other.
It's not that I'm doing business with you
because I get something out of it.
I should be doing business with you
because I genuinely help and assist
and advance what it is that your cause is.
That's why we pick the people that we pick.
But I'm with you.
Cutting a relationship that has been built for years,
it has sometimes probably been
through many different situations.
It's hard to cut that off.
But at the same time,
it's also hard for people to just break their thinking
and recognize there's more out there.
There's more opportunity.
There's more things to learn.
I was having a couple conversations with a few dealers
and especially when it came to the training aspect
of things where they're very much fixated
on saying what it is that my people get
is my years of experience.
And my years of doing this,
I'm going to transfer that to them
and I handle all the training in-house.
How do you see that working for the long-term
of a dealership that's trying to adapt during these times?
So what's the specific question?
The kind of thinking that it takes to only be
the one that's in leadership
being the one doing the training
without actually ever educating yourself.
Everyone's got to educate themselves.
I don't think that there's no silver bullet
and not everybody's perfect
and there's always something else to learn.
I always tell dealers just be open to that conversation.
Just be open, just hear me out.
Let's have a conversation.
Let's just talk through things.
And if you hear something that makes sense,
great and if you don't then that's fine too.
I was literally on a call on Monday with a dealer.
And the guy said,
we looked at you guys like two years ago,
we ended up not doing anything.
We're not doing anything now, marketing was.
Wow.
And how do you do that?
And he told me, he says,
I told your BDR on the phone that I didn't want a sales pitch
and I'm like, I'm not giving you a sales pitch.
We're having a conversation.
I said, just be open.
Just be open to hearing what we're about.
I said, do you have some challenges in your story?
Yes, we have a challenge with old age units.
He said 40% or 50% of our inventory is over 70 days
and we have a hard time with that.
Ouch.
And I told him, I said,
you're telling me that you don't want to sign up
with somebody for marketing
but you have challenges right now.
I said, if I can show you a path to adjusting those challenges
and selling those cars and speeding up your turn
and we make all the numbers make sense,
then why wouldn't you do business with it?
So we agreed to table the conversation to next week.
And I just told him to just be open.
Let's just have a conversation.
And if we can find a solution for you
and it works, then great.
And if we don't, no hard feelings.
Absolutely.
We can just part of friends, it's all right.
Speaking of brewing solutions,
you all have been supporting our show.
C4 Analytics, shout out to you all.
We appreciate you all.
And you're talking about building that relationship
with dealers, making sure that they take a little bit of time
to get educated.
Tell everybody watching that may not be familiar
with what C4 does
and what it serves the automotive industry with.
We are a full service digital marketing agency
helping with all of the pieces,
the whole ecosystem of digital marketing,
SEO, SEMs, social media,
online reputation management,
connecting all the pieces.
Our belief is when you connect all the pieces
together, you can have that one message out there,
that full cohesive approach,
as opposed to some of the vendors
that do all the part solutions.
Some dealers will hire three or four
or five different vendors in their marketing.
The problem is you got five messages out.
Every company works as a silo.
They're in their own lane,
they're doing their own thing
and they're only focused on what they do.
So then you end up having a disjointed message out there.
Our belief is when you can put all those pieces together,
you can have one brand, one message.
And on average, we tend to save dealers about 31%
on their ad spend because we hired 19 people out of Google.
We follow Google best practice on everything that we do.
So having smart people and smart tech,
we can really save some money.
It's so true.
So they got a team that's ready to make sure
that you guys get real information,
not just some stuff that they feel.
One thing we talked to Tim Cox earlier
and he says it's about facts, not feelings, right?
And when you have facts like they do
and you have people who have been there
and they know what's going on,
they know how Google works,
then they can help you.
Saving you 31%, I hope that you guys heard that.
That's a huge number.
And if you could get anywhere near 31%,
even if you could get 20%,
even if you can get 10%,
why would you not even give it an opportunity
so he could save you some money
so that bottom line's a little bit better
so that top line's even bigger, right?
So that being said, I absolutely love that.
But man, one thing I love about this guy here,
we got some stuff going on.
As you can see, there's announcements going on.
Well, we're gonna talk through this for a second
just so we can make sure we get this.
But one thing I love about you
is you've done more than just,
you're more than just a guy
who works in the automotive industry.
You're somebody who's a husband,
a father, a brother.
You're all these things that you really,
and you hold that really dear to you, man.
I love that about you.
So that being said, you also are somebody of color
growing up in this country, right?
Having to go through things, seeing things,
sometimes having to take different paths
to be able to get where we know.
Go, we talked about earlier,
I said having a little chip on your shoulder.
It's not that you have a chip on your shoulder
in a sense, but we have to do things
and maybe do things more
because people are not seeing it at first.
You wrote a great book
and let's give him a shout on this book.
Folks, this book came out how many years ago now?
It's been like three, four years now?
Four years.
Four years ago, he dropped this book right here.
In this book, if you guys haven't got it,
it's on Amazon, it's been an Amazon bestseller.
It's phenomenal.
It's a great read.
It's everything that you want.
And if you're somebody like us,
this story will resonate with you.
I love it.
Tell people what inspired you to write this book.
Like I said, when I spoke up there,
when something happens to you one time,
well, it's a one-off.
When something happens to you more than once.
So after I got to let go of a few jobs,
when I was doing my best,
I was like, man, I need to put this into writing.
Maybe share that story with others,
maybe inspire someone else,
or help someone else.
That's been a super challenge.
Yeah, that's true though, man.
And we're loud here.
So I hope that we get that.
You think, hopefully they're picking that up.
But what I gotta say is that I'm proud of you, man.
I love watching what you do.
I love that you always putting yourself out there.
I'm so happy that you got to speak at this event.
And I'm gonna be an advocate for you, brother.
I want you to be applying for everywhere you go, man.
Maybe we'll all three get on the stage one day
and have a great conversation with some people.
I think that we can all share some great knowledge together.
There's somebody I can see us doing that with, man.
And I honor that.
I appreciate you.
I appreciate your support for us.
Man, they are loud over here.
I'm trying to say some serious stuff, just saying.
Come on now.
All right, but that being said,
DJ, seriously, brother, you are a brother to us.
We always got your back, just like you got our back.
Matter of fact, one of the reasons why C4
even reached out to us is because this guy
put our name in the hat.
So I appreciate that so much.
Honored, brother.
Thank you.
Ever since the pandemic, when we met, man,
ever since we met, on those Thursdays, Thursday calls.
That's right.
That's when it all started.
That's where it did all start, man.
And then we got to meet in person,
and then it just been growing ever since.
And one of my wife's favorite people to run into,
which she hasn't had a chance to run into yet,
she was like, I haven't heard the Cristilla yet.
I know she can't wait to see it, though.
I'm sure we'll run into you tonight.
Man, you're a gentleman.
You're a great core guy
that's out there doing some big things.
You're beyond the salesman of the month
beyond salesman of the year.
You are the guy.
And I appreciate you, man.
Appreciate you.
Thank you.
We definitely appreciate you, brother, coming out here
and leading us around a little bit,
letting us know the ins and outs of these events.
But your opinion definitely does matter,
especially being a frequenter to these events.
We appreciate everybody that's holding it down,
especially those that are brown.
I love all of the faces.
I love all the ethnicities.
I love all of the diversity that's out here.
And you should be out here the next time.
If you are a minority dealer
or you want to support minority dealers
and you want to see a different side
of how excellence is done here in automotive,
make sure that you come to NAMAD next time.
And you will definitely get to meet this guy.
OK, but you need to go ahead, get the book, get the book,
order it right now.
And if you actually send him a message,
you'll probably want to graph it for you.
Personalize it just for you.
Make sure that you do that.
Just have him go to the website, djsortano.com.
Too easy.
You guys order right there, go to the website, get set up.
We'll make sure that we have it right here.
Heck yeah, heck yeah.
Car Guys, Car Guys, thank you so much for tuning in with us
over here at NAMAD, the 45th meeting of all of these members.
We are excited to be out here.
Car Guy Coffee's having a great time.
But it got even better because we're hanging out
with the one, the only, DJ Sarvena.
Appreciate you, brother.
Let's go.
Drop something.
Oh, we're not done yet.
We're not done yet.
We're not done yet.
Yeah, we're not done yet.
So you all know how it is that we got to rock these out.
We got to drop those F-bombs, everybody.
So we got to drop these mics and get to flight.
On three, one, two, three, again.
Focus, fly, and keep rolling.
Keep rolling.
Let's hope you see it, everybody.

Request an Explanation

Heard something you'd like explained? We'll add it to this episode.

Sign in to request explanations for terms you heard.

Want to learn more?

Browse our glossary for plain-English explanations of automotive terms, jargon, and concepts.

Explore Terms

More from Car Guy Coffee

NCM Event Conversations feat. Chad Graves
Jun 1, 2026
NCM Event Conversations feat. Tim Hayden
Jun 1, 2026
NCM Event Conversations feat. Owen Moon
May 27, 2026
NCM Event Conversations feat. Eric Glass from CallReview
May 27, 2026