AutoVitals is joined by Parham Parastaran, CEO of Left Lane Auto and Founder of Market Genie, and Derek Dimke, Operating Partner at Left Lane Auto, to discuss how advanced and comparative analytics can help take your shop to the next level.
Listen to our discussion on:
- How to use data to know when your shop is ready to grow
- How to use market trends and benchmark data to better understand your shop’s performance
- The importance of embracing new technology
- And more!
Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated with Artificial Intelligence. Error may occur. If you identify an error please contact [email protected].
Lauren Thunen (00:02):
All right, there we go. We are live. Good morning and good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for joining yet another iteration of the Digital Shop Talk Radio. My name is Lauren, I’ll be the host for today, and I am really excited for the content that we have prepared because we’re going to talk about data, which is one of my passions and something that I think AutoVitals does a really good job of. And we’re partnered now with Market Genie, who we have Parham and Derek on the call. They’ll introduce themselves in a little bit to tell you about how they’re supercharging the data that you have available to you in AutoVitals and your shop management system. But before we get into it, I just wanted to make a few, couple housekeeping notes. If you hover over your Zoom screen, you should see a q and a box. If you have any questions as we go through, we should have time to answer them live. So please put your questions in the q and a box. If we don’t get to them live, we will make sure to follow up with you after the webinar via email. So if you have any questions, put them in the q and a box. We’d love to hear from you. And now without further ado, Parham, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Left Lane Auto and Market Genie? Sure,
Parham Parastaran (01:14):
I can do both. Yeah. Hi everybody. My name is Parham. I’ve been a shop owner since 1992. My shop journey started with a small muffler shop that my dad had that I got involved with in 92. And it was part of a franchise called CarX. It’s a Midwest franchise. I got involved, knew nothing about vehicles, knew nothing about cars, knew nothing about oil, knew nothing about brakes. I couldn’t even tell you where oil was. But I got involved. I used to be a tennis pro before that, and so I had some money saved up and that’s how I kind of bought into the business. But I realized the Tennis Pro and the teaching was not that dissimilar to the automotive business. It was about a people business, yet we’re fixing cars and we’re doing old changes, but at the end of the day, it’s a real people’s business.
(02:01):
And I was like, oh, I could be pretty good at this because it’s really about managing people and the most important part is managing customers just got to be great with customers. And so I liked it and I ended up staying in the business and then I grew it, and I’ll go quick, but I grew the business. I had a lot of setbacks, I had some successes, expanded really quick, went backwards, but ultimately it grew little by little, little slowly over time. And then in about 2016, we had 17 locations at the time and I sold it to Monroe. And the reason I sold it at that time was because Monroe bought CarX franchise. I didn’t like what was going on. There was a couple of other reasons. And ultimately I got out of that business and I had a five year period where I stayed out of that business and that five year periods of support when I come back to Market Genie. So I had about a five year period where I started out of that business and then basically exactly four years ago this April, well now it’s May.
(02:59):
I started Left Lane and Left Lane Auto was not that dissimilar to what I was doing before I was in the automotive business. And even the tail end of my 17 locations, I was acquiring stores and building growth through acquisitions. So essentially I kind left off, I started where I left off with my previous company and built Left Lane on the premise of buying good tire and automotive stores, tweaking them, adding some value, bringing some technology and doing things similarly to what I was doing before and then adding on to the things that I wasn’t able to do at the time or I had learned from. And so that company grew quickly. Right now, we’re four years into it and we have 55 stores, we have 55 locations in 12 different states. And that’s the plan. We acquire stores that are good stores and try to improve them a little bit.
(04:00):
Mark Genie started side by side on this after I left and sold the automotive business. But this was something that was in my head even when I was in the business. And it was at first to strictly intended to answer how’s business everywhere I went around any shop owner, whether it was SEMA or in my life, I was part of some boards at CarX and the US Auto Force and Continental and these type of things. But everywhere you went and the second you saw a shop owner, they’d be like, Hey, how’s business? Everybody was like, how’s business? How’s business? I did the same thing. I used to run the counter at a store and every time a parts guy would drop off some brake pads and whether I was slow or busy, I’d want to know how everybody else was doing around my town. I’d be like, Hey, how’s everybody doing?
(04:49):
And be like, oh, this dealership’s slow. They only had sick cars in there. They had three cars in that bay. I would ask these kind of questions and ultimately I thought, wow, would there be a way that the community could join together and while we compete but share this vital information about how you’re doing today? But obviously it’s got to be anonymous. So Market Genie was birthed from that thought was what if we created something that every single day shop owners could put into a system? Your basic data, you’re not taking your life state away, but your basic data where then in return, what you would get is knowing exactly how everybody’s doing around you. You would know last week, I’m down 5%. Okay, you don’t know if 5% is good or bad that you were down. It’s possible that you were down 5% and it was actually a good thing because everybody around you was down 8% or 9%.
(05:44):
Traffic was up 4% last week. Everyone’s clapping. Wow, great. 5% up would last last week, but what if the traffic around you was up 8% or 9%? And this used to drive me bananas because I never actually knew where I stood. It’s like a benchmarking thing. I never knew where I stood. It’s not actually beyond benchmarking because it’s really, benchmarking is kind of like an overall thing, what your average ticket is, but this was more literally last week. How was everybody doing? Nothing in the market had this, there’s no way to get this data yet this data exists everywhere. AutoVitals has tons of data. You have Gig Gillian customers and they’re all doing business and the point of sale systems have customer, but we’ve never been united in a platform where anonymously this can go in. So that somebody in South Carolina, Lexington or somebody that’s in St.
(06:33):
Charles, Louisiana and is wondering, wow, I had a really bad week last week. Did everybody have a bad week? And you know what? I don’t know what you want to do with that information. That’s your business, but at least I can give you that information. And that’s what Market Genie was. And so now it’s grown. We have about 1600 locations in the US reporting data. So it’s starting to get really good. So if I’m in Louisiana or I’m in Texas or I’m in North Carolina, I can go on Market Genie and look last week what the car counts were of the stores that we’re all reporting. It’s all anonymized. So it’s you versus kind of what the market is doing, but at least you have this one very vital piece of information that tells you where you stand. Because where you stand without knowing what you’re relative to is pointless.
(07:22):
And then sometimes people do marketing and they do a Facebook campaign or they do social media and also their car counts go up or they do billboards or radio and they immediately want to attribute it to the billboards. But you can go on Market Genie and they’re like, actually everybody was up. Everybody has been up the trend for the last four weeks. Everybody is going this way on the trend. Everybody’s going this way on the trend. So that’s essentially what Market Genie is, and it’s obviously that was the basis of it. Now it’s a lot more. There’s data out there in Market Genie, but that was truly the premise is how’s business?
Lauren Thunen (07:54):
Yeah, I love that the platform is so community based and growing out of, like you said, whenever you go to a trade show or have the opportunity to interact with the community of shops, that is the first question that you ask. So I love that. Yes, it is a data and analytics platform, but it’s really birthed out of this idea that the industry is better together and how do we keep comparing and keep asking each other for advice and seeing where everyone’s at when you’re not physically in person and keeping that collaboration going through everyday life. And before I have, obviously I have a bajillion questions for you on Market Genie and also your journey with Left Lane Auto, but I wanted to give Derek an opportunity to introduce himself. Can you tell us a little bit, Derek, about what you do with Left Lane Auto and your role at Market Genie as well?
Derek Dimke (08:39):
Yeah, good to meet everyone. My name is Derek. I work very closely with Parm at both Left Lane Auto and Market Genie Left Lane Auto. As Par mentioned, we’ve got 55 locations across the country continuing to grow and operate our auto repair facilities. And then Market Genie is obviously the technology platform that we’re here discussing today. So working very closely with Parm and all of our team members, both at Left Lane and Market Genie.
Lauren Thunen (09:05):
Awesome. Cool. Thanks Derek. And also I wanted to mention just like Parm was a tennis pro, Derrick, you had a brief stint in the NFL, is that correct? As an NFL kicker? So I’m surrounded by greatness, so it’s great to have you onboard some of the highest level athletes in the world. So it’s good to have you, Derek, and I was interested in that when I was looking at your LinkedIn, so very cool.
Derek Dimke (09:27):
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and it is funny, being a professional athlete, everyone is getting more and more driven by data even in the sports world. And so it ties very much into what we’re talking about here today of the importance of data and the importance of information and how different organizations and people within that organization leverage that information.
Lauren Thunen (09:48):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that’s a great point and that was actually something I was going to ask later, but across industries, sports, really everything is becoming more data-driven. So I think it’s a great conversation to be having now to talk to our shops about how you can stay ahead of the curve with how you’re using your data and analytics because that really is the future of, so before we go any further, Parham, you had mentioned there was so many lessons learned when you were working with CarX and now having 55 locations with Left Lane. I know a lot of folks that are using AutoVitals and are on the call might be considering expanding to multiple locations or they already have three and they’re wondering what it takes to get to 5, 6, 7, 8. What were some of your biggest lessons through expansion of both CarX and Left Lane Auto?
Parham Parastaran (10:39):
Yeah, I mean, one of the first things that’s come to mind when I really think of my first real big failure, I grew really fast and I was very young and I went to 10 stores really quickly and it was during the nineties, banks were just loaning money and I just thought adding a location sounded great. So it sounded to have three stores, and if I had four stores that’s better than three, and if I had six, it’s better than five. And I was just infatuated by this idea of having more stores. But there’s this really big important thing was that you want to have a good foundation, you want to have a really, really, really good foundation if store number one isn’t absolutely on very good grounds. And what does that mean for everybody? It’s a little bit different. Obviously it needs to be on good financial grounds, it needs to be on good operational grounds.
(11:25):
It needs to be on good morale grounds with your employees and your thing. It needs to be in control at the end of the day. It really needs to be in control. And if you are there, then it makes sense to go to number two. And then you don’t go to number three until those two are under control and you really have figured out how to be really good at managing two. And then you get three or four and then you stop. And then you say, okay, am I really good at managing these three or four? Am I actually really taking advantage of all the levers and I’m not just trying to do a plug for AutoVitals, for example. AutoVitals become a very important part of our business, but we can’t immediately incorporate that into some of our stores. There’s some complications to it.
(12:03):
For some people, there’s some learning curve. And so we have to be very methodical about saying, all right, is the manager, is this operation? Is this clientele ready for this evolution of technology and bringing out a vitals? And well take that same analogy and move it to your business. Are you ready? Are you ready to incorporate some of these best practice that you have? And are you able to do it and repeat it at three? Or what’s going to happen is you can get really good at two, but then the third you’re a little out of control. Then what you’re doing is you’re sucking the energy out of those first two and now your three are honestly running at one and a half. And so the biggest lesson I learned was to grow methodically, but be very ambitious. You should always dream whatever it is that you dream and be very ambitious about it, but also be very real with yourself and real with your company and look at your data, look at your real information.
(12:57):
Am I strong to grow? You certainly wouldn’t build a 10 story building on a foundation that was designed to build through and certainly a story building foundation with 10 stories with the foundation that’s capable for 10. So I think that was one of the biggest ones. And the other one was you have to be very willing to change and adapt to the environment because your environment just by simply going from size changes the way you think should change. And if you’re going to try to think the same way with one store when you’re doing two stores or three stores, it’s not going to work because it’s not the same thing. You don’t think the same way raising one child or two child, everything’s going to be different. And so I think what happens sometimes is somebody gets really grounded, I’m really good at this one store and they got pretty good at two stores and they want to just run everything the way they ran two stores. The reality is it’s not going to be able to be run the same way year four serves. You’re going to have to change some things. So I would say foundation and I would say willingness to change.
Lauren Thunen (14:08):
Awesome. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And when you say one of the things you kept repeating is you need to make sure you have your existing locations under control. When you think about what data indicates to you that you have your stores under control is that your a o is continuing to increase weekly revenue is steady, car count is steady. What are the metrics that you’re looking at to say, alright, these locations are under control. I’m ready for more.
Parham Parastaran (14:35):
Yeah, I talked to a lot of owners and different people managers and people have different lenses that they look through this thing, but for me is you need to absolutely have steady car counts. They’re not always going to be growing and that’s why Market G exists because you could be doing everything. Your car counts aren’t necessarily growing, it’s just the market is not there. And for people that have been in this business a long time, they know that market goes up, market goes down, there’s just periods where there’s just cars walking into your door. But cars are very important to me, but very important part, and again, it’s going to be an AutoVitals thing is our average ticket. And most people will think, oh, if you focus on average ticket and think so much about average ticket, you’re trying to oversell, you’re trying to, it’s just the absolute contrary average ticket is correlated and it is a visual into how you’re doing your processes with the customers in that vehicle that walks in the door.
(15:32):
Our job as I make it very simple with our staff and Derek and everybody knows this, it’s quite simple. Customer walks in, you greet them incredibly well, you tell them what you’re going to do with the vehicle, you put your best foot forward, but at the end of the day, we’re the doctor of that car, we need to go and give them an examination. And a lot of people are afraid to do that. A lot of people are afraid to do that because, oh, the customer’s going to get upset. Well, they’re only going to get upset that you present it poorly, right? That’s the only way they’re going to get upset if you do a horrible job of presenting it. But if a car walks in, I don’t care if a person comes in and is just absolutely reluctant and they’re terrified of auto shops and they’re like, I’m going to get my oil chains and I know they’re going to tell me 10 things wrong with my car, I actually like those customers because I’m going to tell them, you know what?
(16:16):
I know you’re going to be upset when I’m going to tell you this, but it’s my job, but actually I don’t even want you to do this work, but it’s my job to tell you this work. And that’s why digital inspections are very important for us because if we can get convinced all of our managers and our teams to really embrace this, it will work because that’s all where our job needs to be is inspect the car, give the customer, inspect the examination, just like you would expect from a doctor that you would in for a fever, but you don’t want them to just only focus on one thing. You want to give them an examination how you present it is the next thing.
Lauren Thunen (16:49):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Parham Parastaran (16:51):
I look at that big time. To me it’s process. So I learned a lot from our average ticket and the type of jobs we’re doing is if the process. So that’s a huge, so really car counts and the average ticket, and again, it’s not trying to oversell, it’s not trying to say we don’t incentivize average ticket, by the way, we never incentivize. It’s just an internal tool that gives us a little of indicative of whether people are actually inspecting the vehicles properly.
Lauren Thunen (17:19):
And I like how you’re phrasing that of average ticket is what you’re looking at, but really it’s a reflection of every process in the shop and how culminated in this last metric. Awesome. That makes a ton of sense. Okay, I want to pivot a little bit more to Market Genie as a platform. So you mentioned high level overview. When we’re talking about comparative benchmarking, you’re able to see from inputs from all of the shops using the platform. Let’s just take a look at car count. Is there a car count up or down? Can you give us a little more information? Are you splitting that? Is that a national, can you look at regional and what other analytics are available and what are the value of some of those other metrics that you can see in Market Genie?
Parham Parastaran (17:58):
Sure. So yes, everything that I mentioned, car counts, average tickets, sales can look at the trends last week I could see what the four week trend is, two week trend. I can go anything I want. I could look at just exactly last week what the benchmarks is, and I could get it as obviously the us we have by regions, the US has broken up into 10 regions typically. That’s the way it’s organized by industry standards as all. And then we can get it down to the state level so we can know in Alabama, this is what happened last week. Now as we grow and as folks keep joining, we have data at a granular level. The dream is that you have a shop in Little Rock, Arkansas and you’ll be able to say, I want to know within a 20 mile radius what traffic counts were for my shops that are like me.
(18:50):
We already have most of that. We haven’t published it yet because we’re waiting for it to have some more validity. And that will come as more people are joining every day, more people are joining. We did a partnership with AutoVitals. I don’t know if you’re the people on this call know this, but we have a seamless integration with AutoVitals. I vials have been kind enough to help us with that. And basically if you’re a shop one or you say I’m an auto customer and I want to join Market Genie, it’s very, very easy. As that keeps happening, and we’re at 1600 locations in the us I think by the time we get to maybe 2,500, I’m doing a little bit of guessing, but I’m pretty close. But we’ll be able to get to within a 25 mile radius, and that’s where it wants to go.
(19:36):
Now it has tire trends in there as well. I could look at the tire trends in the markets, I can look at the car count, I could look at the sales trends. There’s a lot of benchmarking. It has effective labor rate, it has gross profit. So for example, if you want to know how am I doing gross profit wise, you can go to Market Genie and be like, well, what are the shops around me doing? What are people making? What is their gross profit? I know my gross profit and from what I know from both being on the acquisition side is we purchase a lot of one store operations. They don’t really, unless they’re part of a franchise or a big group, they don’t really know what’s good. They don’t know what is good. It’s like going to the gym or being an athlete where you have no competitors and you don’t know whether I lifted a hundred pounds is good because everybody can’t because I’ve got to know what is good. And a lot of those metrics are in a Market Genie. And Derek, if you want to add to that, if I missed something, please.
Derek Dimke (20:31):
No, I think you said it very well, Parm. I mean, the biggest thing that Market Genie allows users to do in a variety of benchmarks, in a variety of metrics is understand how you are doing relative to the market around you. And that’s something that is very hard or nearly impossible to know without a platform like Market Gen. And so it gives you that line of sight to help you and help your teams make better decisions day in and day out. And that’s really what the goal is. How can you make good decisions if you don’t have that benchmarking data to know what is good and what is not? So that’s where the power of Market Genie comes into play.
Lauren Thunen (21:05):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And is Market Genie, when you’re in the platform, will it tell you you’re in this, okay, good, better best range in terms of around you? Or is that for the user to interpret based on what they’re seeing?
Parham Parastaran (21:20):
Little bit of both. Obviously when you’re on a trend, and I’m looking at my four week trend and I see my four week trend in cars is 4% growing. And I see the market in Alabama is 6%, so fairly easy to interpret. And then there’s one other one that’s a little bit up for interpretation is benchmarks. It’ll tell you what the top 25% are doing. And so my average ticket is $310 and I’m in South Carolina last week and I’ll say, Hey, the top 25%, the best of the best average ticket was three 40. Interpreted how you will. But there’s people that are doing three 40. In fact, one of the things that we have in Market Genie, I’m not going to say it’s great right now, but it’s pretty darn good, is it tells you is what pricing is around places. So what your alignment prices and what your labor rates are. And there’s some community sharing of that information. And what I find is a lot of people when they look at their average ticket, think it’s three 20 and the best are three 50. It’s not necessarily because they’re actually doing more work on that car. It’s honestly because the three twenties are underpriced and they just don’t know it. They just don’t know it. Their labor rate is 95 where the market is 1 0 7
(22:40):
And not saying they should go to one 10, but go to 1 0 5 or whatever you want to do with it. But for the most part, we try to leave interpretation to the folks and try to give ’em as much information as possible, try to point them in a certain direction, I would say. And we do provide notifications, for example, will say, Hey, three weeks in a row in your market, car counts were up and your car counts were flat. You do what you want with that information because I don’t know, maybe your manager was off, maybe your best tech was on vacation that week. So you would say, oh, I know why R Red Chicken has dropped because my number one guy is out or my, so that’s going to be left for interpretation. But again, you have to have this thing on your dashboard. This is not a thing that replaces anything. That’s what I love about Market Genie just is that it doesn’t replace anything. It doesn’t replace AutoVitals, it doesn’t replace point of sale systems. There’s nothing and replace, it doesn’t replace your CRM. All it does is add one more tool in your toolbox for information that you just impossible for you to get without it.
(23:44):
I hope that made sense. I answered your question.
Lauren Thunen (23:47):
Yeah, no, no, that makes a ton of sense. And then my next question was obviously you guys are operating Left Lane Auto. Do you have any examples of how you guys have used the data from Market Genie to improve your operations to get folks you just mentioned effectively labor? Are there any other changes you’ve made internally based on what you’re seeing nationally and region?
Parham Parastaran (24:06):
Yeah, I’m going to let Derek answer this, but we could spend the day doing that, but I’ll let you go, Derek.
Derek Dimke (24:12):
Yeah. One of the big things that Market Genie provides is a weekly summary. So it gives you a breakdown of your business from last week, every Monday morning. It’s automatic, it ties into your data. There’s nothing that you have to do, it’s just there for you when you get to your desk on Monday morning. And so we have implemented at Left Lane is we take those weekly summaries and then we send those to all of our managers, all of our managers receive those, all of our regional managers receive those for the stores underneath them. And then that is our starting point for discussion for operational changes, efficiencies, good, bad, whatever it may be for that particular week. And so again, as Parm has mentioned, it adds another layer. It adds another tool in our tool belt to help coach and improve our stores. So not only is it giving me the benchmarks that we’ve talked about of me versus the market, but it’s also helping to get some of the me versus me.
(25:02):
So some of your data really right in your face at the start of a week to help you make some of those better business decisions. Maybe your trend is dropping on your average ticket for two or three weeks. Well, the summary is going to call that out for you so you can quickly identify or try to identify where that problem is before that pattern turns into an eight and a 10 week problem. So it’s allowing you to get ahead of the curve as opposed to being a reactionary maybe a month or two months down the road when the p and ls come out. So it’s allowing you to get ahead of the ball there.
Lauren Thunen (25:34):
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I’m sure that makes team meetings so much easier too from a management team to run because you’re like, great, I already have all of the information I need Now I can go in and like you said, I can dig in to why Arrow’s down, but at least I have the top level of where I need to focus my time before the team meeting.
Parham Parastaran (25:52):
Yeah, I mean Derek mentioned, I’ll just holler it again, but have a store or a market that is down a couple of weeks in a row. So I’m on Market Genie every day looking at all the trends of all our locations. So I can quickly look at where are we trending this different than other people. And so there’s so much noise in our business and you have limited time, and we speak about this internally in our company is where do you want to put your attention today? We have limited amount of attention, limited amount of resource that we do. Where is the most specific area that you can put your attention to that’s going to have the biggest bang for the buck? And we all need that. It’s directly related to your profits. And so Market Genie helps narrow where should we look? For example, there might be a store that’s trending down, but then we look around and everybody around that is trending down. Do we want to put our attention? Maybe not. Maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s just fine. And they’re just kind of following the market. Yes, we’d like it to be better than the market, but it’s actually okay. But if you’re just looking at your sales and you see three weeks in a row, you’re down, you might go excessively overreaction to that and then make some bad decisions as a
Lauren Thunen (27:00):
Result. Result. That makes a ton of sense. And something I’ve been thinking about throughout the conversation, and I’m sure you guys deal with this objection quite a bit, is how do you get folks comfortable with sharing their data? So obviously it’s anonymized, but what would you say in terms of folks that might be on the fence of like, oh yes, I want to see everybody else’s data, but I’m hesitant to share my own?
Parham Parastaran (27:27):
Well, I’m assuming the reason they would be hesitant is because they want their data to stay private.
(27:34):
And so I would say simply put, I would go broke, but a lot of my money, my own money developing Market Genie, it would all be a complete bust if somehow I was able to protect that data. It is imperative, and we have guarantees of it. We talk, this is a very important aspect is because without people’s data Market Genie doesn’t exist. So it’s so imperative for us to be good sort. I put it this way, I have no ability as the owner of this to be able to go look at somebody else’s store. Once they sign in and they change their password, they only see them and nobody else can see them. It just goes into an anonymized pool with everybody else. And honestly, the business plan and the entire premise of this is based on this because it will fall. All of the work we’ve done for five years will crumble if we ever breached that or if we ever didn’t secure that. Right?
(28:36):
But it’s a completely valid objection, and I’m glad you asked that question honestly, because I’m sure people feel that way. But I will tell you this, if you’re on any point of sale system, your information isn’t secure unless you’re writing things by hand. Everything is, everything is going through a computer, everything is going AutoVitals, I mean everything is AutoVitals, probably spends a lot of money. Making sure that your data is very secure. I guarantee that’s a huge part of your focus and a huge part of your concentration, huge part of your money that AutoVitals spend because it has to be because everything we do in this thing on this phone call and phones and everything is up for grabs these days. And I find that question sometimes interesting because I do have some people that say, oh, I don’t want to give my data. I’m like, do you have a point of sale system? Yeah. Well, is it a web-based? Yeah. Okay, well, that’s it. It’s the same thing. It the business of the business would fail.
Lauren Thunen (29:33):
Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense.
Parham Parastaran (29:36):
It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.
Lauren Thunen (29:38):
Yeah, and I think it’s important too, like you had said, you can see all of your data as the owner and obviously you have your, but once it goes out into the ether, it’s anonymous. So
Parham Parastaran (29:50):
Yeah, it is. You see both
Lauren Thunen (29:51):
Trend line.
Parham Parastaran (29:53):
Yeah.
Lauren Thunen (29:53):
Great. Cool. And then also one of the questions I had is, and I think Derek, you kind of alluded to this when you were talking about the weekly summary that you get, how do you balance operating Left Lane and looking at Market Genie of obviously you want to compete with yourself first. You want to be operating the best business possible, and then also we want to use comparative analytics to benchmark where we are. So how do you balance the focus of let’s get us to be the market leader and also we don’t need to stress if we’re down because everybody’s down. So how do you balance those philosophies?
Parham Parastaran (30:31):
Good question.
Derek Dimke (30:31):
Yeah, it’s a good question. And I would say that multiple things can be true at once, right? You’re always competing against yourself. I think Parm had mentioned this, we’re always changing, we’re always evolving both as an organization and as a company and as individuals. And so we are constantly growing and evolving, and so we’re always competing and growing against ourselves. I think anyone who’s on this call who’s a successful business owner or participates in business is always trying to get better every day. So I think that part is a little bit, I don’t want to say a given, but that’s a standard. I think high achieving people always have that drive to compete against yourself and then tying that into competing against the market to the point of market. Judy, how can you compete against the market if you don’t know what the market is doing?
(31:14):
That’s the idea. And so it gives you that nugget to know I’m always competing against myself, but what is good out there? What is great out there so that I have that benchmark to compete against without having access to that information, it becomes a very tough challenge to say, I want to be the top quartile of auto repair shops in my state. If you don’t know what the top core tile of auto repair shops in your state are doing this week, last week, whatever it may be, you don’t have that information to make that decision to know where to put your focus and know where to put your energy. So I think two things are true at the same time with that, it’s a great point, but that’s how we approach it, at least at Left Lane. And for marketing,
Parham Parastaran (31:51):
I promised myself that I would not use this analogy, and because of you asked this question, I’m going to blame this on you. Everybody knows the story about the four minute mile, and if you don’t know that, I’ll do a quick job at it. The four Mile was believed to be impossible to break. It was supposed to be an impossible thing to break when, and I forget the person’s name that broke the four minute mile within about one week, seven people or six people broke the four minute mile. Why? They didn’t know what could be done. And so what ends up happening with a lot of shops that I meet with, and I did a lot of consulting actually with shops and a lot of one shop owners, they don’t know what’s good. And it’s not because they’re wrong or they don’t know what they’re doing, they just aren’t comparing, right? And so you have to know what’s a fast speed in the 40? What’s the most touchdown somebody throws? So I can beat that next record. Is four good in the game or maybe at 1.3 was good in the game and then it’s four in a game or rushing yards or whatever sports or whatever things that you like. There’s always things that get broken, but if you don’t know what is believable or achievable, you can’t go for it. And Mark Genie does it a hundred percent.
Lauren Thunen (33:05):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting that you bring that up because well, now I’m going to blame this on you that I’m bringing this out, but I just watched a video that was tied to a scientific study that if you put a rat in water, or maybe it was a mouse, I dunno, some rodent in water, it’ll try to not drown for 30 minutes, but typically on average, again, rule of large numbers, I’m sure some rats survive longer, but if you rescue them at 20 minutes, let them dry off, get warm, and then you put them back in the water, they’ll tread water for up to six hours.
(33:42):
And so the theory behind it is exactly, just like you’re saying, if the rat knows that someone’s coming to save them, it increases their likelihood to push harder because they believe that they’re going to make it through this versus if they’ve never had that experience of being saved, they’re going to give up. So just kind of in line with what you’re saying is once you believe it’s possible and you have the information to prove that to you that you’re going to do better, you’re going to run faster, you’re going to tread water for longer. So just a interesting business life. That’s really good just to build off of that. Cool. Well, we’ve talked a lot about Market Genie and the platform, and thank you guys for giving our listeners a great understanding of that. Do you have any advice, just outside of marketing specifically, but for shop owners that are using AutoVitals now have a lot of data in their shop management system in AutoVitals, what would be your biggest advice for them to be making better use of the data that they have at their fingertips now,
Parham Parastaran (34:49):
Derek?
Derek Dimke (34:50):
Yeah, I can jump in. I would advise a lot of shop owners and most shop owners lean into it, embrace it. Again, it is obviously a theme on this call, but embrace the change. The world is not going to go backwards. The world is going to continue to evolve, and those that embrace the change of technology embrace different ways and new ways of doing things, you will be on the forefront. You will have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. And so while it’s very easy to say, you know what, I’ve done this for, I can’t tell you the number of times Parm and I and our team has heard this throughout the course of Left Lane’s growth, we’re buying an owner and they’ve been in business for 20 years. Well, why did you do it this way? Well, that’s because I’ve done it this way for 20 years and it’s worked. So embrace change, embrace technology, lean into that. That’s what a lot of the market leaders are doing. Don’t be scared of it. It can only help benefit you. I know there are many shop owners who feel like it may be intimidating, it may be a large step in a different direction, but lean into that, embrace that, and over the course of time you will continue to evolve. Your business will continue to evolve. Evolve. And I think both shop owners and their employees will benefit and their customers more importantly, both short and long-term.
Lauren Thunen (36:06):
Anything to add? Parm?
Parham Parastaran (36:08):
Honestly, he couldn’t have said any better. No, I really wouldn’t. The same thing that I hear is that I’ve done something the same way, and I think AutoVitals. So we’ve learned this very firsthand when we do an acquisition, of course day one, we would love to install AutoVitals, but you can’t because some people are just not ready for it. And so what we developed, and Derek could probably speak more to this, I don’t want to speak out of turn, this is more on his end of it, but we developed what we call AutoVitals light. And what that means is there’s a lot of ways to use AutoVitals. Like you can just completely lean into it as Derek is talking about and just everything about it. And then we have store managers and operations that just roll with that thing, just absolutely just do a phenomenal job with that thing.
(37:07):
But then there’s areas that we’ve gone into and managers, they’re a little bit more archaic in the way that they’re doing things. And so we’re not going to come out and roll out the full AutoVitals, we’ll say, let’s do AutoVitals light. It’s just checking a few things using AutoVitals to just do some basic things. And I think that’s the thing that I would say is you don’t have to go from, I’m so resistant to change to then just changing with everything and know it goes a little against leaning into it, but leaning into it to me just means just go, just lean into it. It doesn’t mean jump over the valley. And so if you are a one the way you guys are doing things, go to a two, it’s a phrase that I use all the time, but it’s really works. Don’t come from one to a five in AutoVitals because then you’re going to fail at it and then you’re going to say, see, it doesn’t work,
(37:56):
Do it. Very simple. And I encourage AutoVitals. I think you guys do that to teach people that, because I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it firsthand. If you go too fast and too hard, the resistant adds to it because the challenges will hurt them and then they’ll look for reasons why it’s not working. But if you just go little by little over time, you’ll get to the full use of AutoVitals. By the way, one thing I forgot to tell you is you asked about the mix between us and doing AutoVitals. When we install vitals into places and we look on Market Genie, average ticket goes up. We have that data and I’m sure you guys do too, but I mean we have that data and Market Genie, we can see it. We can see the stores using AutoVitals, what’s their average ticket? And we can see stores not using auto or they’re using AutoVitals light. We have stores that are using AutoVitals light, and we’re going to get the stores that are using AutoVitals light to go into AutoVitals medium and then eventually to the full blown 8% proof or 12% proof, whatever.
Lauren Thunen (38:57):
Yeah, no, that’s awesome. I think it’s important, like you said, just start and get some few quick wins and make it as easy as possible on yourself to start whatever improvement that is what you want to make with your business, take down those barriers, and then once you have some momentum, then you can really start to ramp it up. But I mean, it’s the same thing if you eat out for every meal and you’re like, all right, I’m going to start cooking at home for every single seven days a week. You’re going to do it for a couple days. I just literally went through this so I can speak to you. You’re going to do it for a couple days and then you’re going in and out. All right, cool. Well, we have five more minutes. So I have one closing question. Ken, I do see your question in the chat about utilizing and accessing Market Genie and that you’re with Transformers and AutoTechIQ. I will email intro you to Derek and Parm after this so they can answer your questions about cost and things like that. Unless you guys wanted to give a general overview of what you’re currently charging for
Parham Parastaran (39:56):
Promot, I’ll do that. I’ll let Derek do that because that maybe speak to the integration, but for Ken, transformers actually is using us. Perfect.
(40:07):
Transformers is actually onboarding 100 locations and they’re doing it by steps and they’re bringing a hundred locations in right now into Market Genie, and they’re using it to coach because they lack some of the data to be able to share between all their operations. So they nailed what Ken is doing and things like that, but they don’t have this platform that immediately can compare Ken to the 99 other people in his area that are similar to Ken’s operation. And so Transformers and some of these coaching groups are using us and I’m sorry I had to jump on that, but Derek, maybe you could speak to the integration and the process.
Derek Dimke (40:41):
The integration is very streamlined. We connect to points of sale usually via API. Long story short, that’s just how one piece of technology talks to another piece of technology. We pull a few pieces of data that we need on a daily basis to populate the information from Market Genie, and then everything else is done automatically on the back end of Market Genie. So once that integration happens, there is no, Hey, I’ve got to do something daily to make sure these reports run or anything like that. We have a fantastic development team behind us and they have done a really, really good job of automating and creating all of these alerts to make it a seamless integration. Once it’s done, it’s there and running for you. There’s no manual work that needs to be done after that integration happens.
Lauren Thunen (41:28):
Awesome. Great. Yeah, that makes it easy. And then I presume it’s like a monthly or yearly subscription for folks that are listening.
Parham Parastaran (41:37):
It is. It’s honestly by design. When we set out to do this, we want to make it simple and formative and fun. We also wanted to make it be very palatable and it’s for a single store, it’s $69. I always think of it’s like one bottle of water a day or two bottles of water a day to have this information at you. It’s not going to break the bank. It’s just enough where it could pay our bills, but it’s not something that is going to inhibit you, I hope. And the idea for that is that we want the masses because the way Market Gene is going to get better and better and better is for us to go from 1600 stores to 3000 stores to 5,000 stores because that data is going to get incredible. There’s going to be a day where your shop is a million dollars store and 70% of your business is mechanical. And say, I only want to compare myself to stores that are exactly like me. And so we have that. We already have it, we just haven’t released it because it’s important that it’s really materially valid, but we have that, but it’s going to get there. And so the way to do it is to try to keep the costs as down as we possibly can while we can still move forward. Glad you asked that question. Appreciate it.
Lauren Thunen (42:53):
Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And that kind of answers the last closing question I was going to ask you is what’s next for Left Lane Auto and Market Gen as you look to close out this year and start next year?
Parham Parastaran (43:07):
Well, Left Lane is what I told you beginning from the lessons I learned, it’s fundamentally going to grow as fast or slow as we possibly can. We like the growth, we like the expansion, but we’ll do it methodically when it’s right. Market Genie, big plans. I mean, we want to get to the point where there’s so much really good data out there and it can get granular and more granular that it actually, I mean it does it now, but literally you can just count on it. Helping your business and finding the momentum and finding the things that you need to do that really will transfer into your pocketbook, into your bottom line. And that’s our mission is that it will help every shop owner. And I always say Market Genie was made for shop owners by shop owner, and it’s really matters because we built it to do. If it doesn’t work for us, then it’s not going to work for somebody else. And so it’s a really good beta just having us using it and then having the market use it.
Lauren Thunen (44:12):
Yeah. Awesome. Perfect. Well, thank you everyone for joining. Thank you Parm and Derek so much for coming on and chatting not only about Market Genie, but about Left Lane Auto. Obviously we’re very lucky to have you guys as clients and we’re really excited about our integration with Market Genie. And just hearing from you got me fired up to see how many of our shops get signed up with you guys. If you’re watching this webinar, you will get a recording sent to your email that will also have the link to Market Genie’s website that has their contact information. So if you want more information, it’s very easy on their website to get in touch with them for more info. Is there any other ways that folks should be keeping in touch with you both?
Derek Dimke (44:54):
Yeah, I would say visit the website. I think that’s the best way.
Lauren Thunen (44:57):
Visit the website. Perfect. Okay. Well again,
Parham Parastaran (45:00):
And I want everyone to know that Auto Vitals is our only DVI partner is our only one, and we do this by design. So we really have enjoyed our relationship and we really want to service at a very high level. Every customer that’s AutoVitals, we’re a customer of AutoVitals and it means a lot to us. Thank you.
Lauren Thunen (45:22):
Yeah, of course. Yeah, thank you both for coming on and we really appreciate your partnership and we’re looking forward to what this closeout of the year brings. So again, thank you and I’ll follow up with both of you via email to say thank you as well. So thanks for everyone for joining and have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Bye guys. Thank you.