The story of Hoovie's FAILED dealership

you're going to get shot people are going to hate you you are going to be the scum of the earth with these people turning off their cars well before youtube and all of this i'm a 10-year survivor of the car business my first job in the car business was opening a carmax in wichita kansas opening day trying to explain to people how carmax works which wasn't a familiar concept back then no haggle pricing all the weird things they do people just thought i was a jerk and not discounting the car at all was a bunch of ed bullions trying to streetly negotiate i'm like the price is the price we're meeting you smack dab in the middle at the price and that that's it that's it and uh it didn't work out i wasn't very good i really was one of the last people to sell a car of all those people at the dealership i think i sold three cars in the first month it took me a long time to get my groove and figure it out but i really didn't like the structure of carmax at the time you had to say the same thing over and over again they did not want you to deviate from the script at all there's a wrecked car in the showroom they wanted to show people the wrecked car tell them you would not sell them this wrecked car because carmax is special but people would say what would you sell me the rex car for a discount is can i buy this car if it's cheap they didn't understand they wanted to go out and look at the cars you had to go through this whole song and dance it was irritating i quit maybe after four months so the next job in the car business was at a chevrolet cadillac bmw store which resulted in an amazing crazy experience with drunks and dysfunctional adults there's another story from way back when one of my first tellings here at benwicky that culminated into a crazy situation but that was very different the first person i ever walked up and talked to at that dealership they bought a truck full sticker this was 2007 when the new chevys had come out paid full sticker for it i made 1500 my first day carmax had made 200 a car thought that happened every day so i went to ultimate electronics bought a plasma screen tv figuring it would happen the next day spent all that money it didn't happen the next day or the next day or the next day but i did learn a lot i learned it's a great way if you're interested in cars and wanting to see what that world is like you learn a lot in the car business you may not want to stick in it your entire life but it's definitely a good starting point but i wanted to go further but i also wanted to finish college so working full-time at a dealership and finishing college it was hard to to do that so i quit and you know just worked odd jobs until i finished college the last couple of years graduated with a degree in political science which is absolutely useless it was the easiest way out so why did i go to college but but anyway i was determined at that point to open a car dealership i thought this would be so easy i see how much money these dealers are making if it's mine i can have all of it so 2010 i open up ad astra automotive which means to the stars that's the kansas state motto and i'm a big mercedes fan so i thought i'd be specializing in late model used mercedes well i bought anything that i could make money on the first day i went to the auction actually bought two jeeps the first one exploded on the way back from the auction i sold it to the junkyard the second one i made about fifteen hundred dollars and that made up for the loss so i broke even but that's kind of a theme for the entire existence of my car dealership which was like five short years and uh it was very very hard to make money because these dealer auctions if that's where you're going to source inventory like a lot of dealers are struggling with right now you're not gonna find cars it takes years to develop these wholesale sources these honey holes as they would say in american pickers to get these cars but if you're just going to auction and lane bidding you're going to get cars that people don't want and the auction prices are going to be as they are right now just ridiculously high to where you don't make money so you have the issue with sourcing inventory which was always a problem it's also a problem with me because i'm a hoarder i want to keep anything that was cool for myself i'm like a drug dealer wanting to do too much of his own stuff but then there's the other side of it why you don't want to be in the car business because it's the only business where people think you are a jerk for making money you can flip houses and you're not a jerk because you put money into the house making it nicer you can flip for more you can sell groceries you can sell burgers and make money and you you're not a jerk for making money off of selling food anything else but cars everybody wants to be like ed bullion and make it an adversarial situation where you making money on them is you getting something over on them you are screwing them over so it's very frustrating in that aspect so even though i'm not working for a dealership i'm still sourcing used cars from dealerships they're wanting to make money and then you're dealing with a customer so on the back end you're having trouble making money because they're able to look everything up on a computer and see how much everything's supposed to be worth and so they want to pay trade in i think they should be buying it trade in and selling at retail just like everybody so it's an endless frustrating deal and i wasn't making any money i realized i was going to struggle forever to maybe crack into six figures maybe there was never a year in the car business where i made six figures maybe someday maybe in this crazy environment we are now i probably could have if i had stuck it out but in those five years i never made it so i was failing i knew i wasn't doing that well and i actually moved locations to a more expensive location thinking that would help shared it with another dealer and they went under so then it was all me in this one space it got worse so i decided well if i'm going to survive i need to change my business model entirely and i see what these buy here pay here dealers are doing it doesn't matter how much they pay for the car it really doesn't matter what they sell them for as long as they're decent cars that are going to last the life of the loan they will make a fortune and it's just money coming in month after month after month and you get enough of those cars sold and it's a numbers game to where enough people make their payments you're making money the problem is every time i had done a little short-term financing thing with somebody i was the worst debt collector ever i would say okay you don't have enough money for the sales tax you have 30 days before you come get the title to pay the sales tax they would never have the money any loan that i did with anybody they never paid me and they would walk all over me it's like it was written on my face i am a sucker even though i'm a car dealer i am a sucker and there's one woman that stands out she was a teacher at a high school and she just needed a car and i took this van on trade for a thousand dollars and i sold a tour for 2500 or something like that a reasonable profit for a good running and driving van and she put a thousand dollars down this was kind of an experiment for me and she drove off with the car has a special needs son the whole sob story she's a teacher she has a good job her credit's bad because this isn't this well the check she gave me bounced right off the bat so i call her up she says she messed something up to where she didn't realize she'd come with the money it took about a month for me to get that thousand dollars and then once i got that thousand dollars then she was talking about how the van was broken down and didn't work anymore but then i would see her which kansas is a small town i'd see her driving around in the van so then i know i'm just absolutely being played and that's what happened so many times it was going to be a very difficult business but i figured i could get somebody to handle that and we'd do the payment boxes where the cars would shut off and the tracking so you know where the cars are and i was actually wanting to do a rent to own concept which is a little different because you know you don't have to do credit checks and all this stuff but the repossession is a little different when it's a rental you're not taking away somebody's property it's a rental until they own it the laws are a little different from what i understood and my father has been in business for a very very long time he was in the oil business hated that because he couldn't determine the price of oil got out of it around when i was born so he's actually a geologist by trade but then he got into fast food restaurants and uh bought a bunch of taco bells and that was basically his livelihood i go to him with my idea in this business model and i wanted to show it to him before i took it to the bank to see if they would finance me on this venture and he looked at it flipped through everything and just thought you're going through all the trouble for this you're going to get shot people are going to hate you you are going to be the scum of the earth with these people turning off their cars you don't want to do this and not for this kind of money so he turned around he printed off a spreadsheet showing me what he was making with restaurants specifically this new venture freddy's frozen custard and steak burgers and said i'm starting to get involved with this you can get in with me and work in the stores it's going to be different you're going to be flipping burgers and traveling a lot but this could be a good thing for you and i actually took his advice i walked away from the car business entirely and thought i was done maybe someday i would be able to finance my dreams with burgers instead of cars i could actually own cars without having to flip them to make a living that sounded pretty good but what i didn't realize was it was literally flipping burgers for years and i went to training and realized that i'm learning how to flip burgers and churn custard and also how to run a business and it was definitely an adjustment went to the first opening had a great guy in place who was kind of a mentor that came over from my dad's taco bells who is still involved the two of us and some other people we just built a great crew of opening stores it's up to 11 stores now but right around the time that things started to get on autopilot and we had people in place i thought well i still want to do something with cars so i thought well maybe i can write i've always wanted to write so on the side when i'm down in say a hotel or apartment that we lease for a long time while stores being open i can write articles on cars and it took a little while to get my foot in the door the jeremy clarkson meeting him which is another vin wiki story is uh is basically my big launching moment also getting on doug demiro's coattails writing that up resulted in me having a youtube channel that took off and now of course youtube is my full-time job so i'm still involved with the freddy's just a small little bit that i have a piece of you take one step in the store that's that's probably my step so i still check in sometimes like the queen of england or something you know just just wave at the people that know what they're doing i'm so out of it at this point but they're they're all great they're doing a fantastic job and me getting out of the car business basically hitting the reset button and exploring this new avenue this this whole history enabled me to be in this place right now where i have all the cars really that i've ever wanted and more and i'm just super lucky so walking away from something when you know it's bad can be a good thing and it can come full circle like it is now and well i'm i'm sitting in here telling stories isn't that cool patrick adair designs makes some of the coolest rings out of the most interesting and exotic materials on earth whether it's a wedding band a fashion ring or just whatever reason you want to wear a ring he and his team have an amazing selection of awesome products that i'm sure you will love last year he made me this ring in a series of rings out of one of the broken wheels from an old lamborghini that i had and so we're going to do some collaborations on other exotic car part inspired rings but check them out today at the link in the description below use the code vinwicki for a discount and thank them for their support of vinwicki [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 562,063

Rating: 4.9412298 out of 5

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Id: VnK9lAMRkdc

Length: 11min 36sec (696 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021