The Auto Dealer's Covenant with Eric Flow

Paul J Daly: 0:00Does anyone know what their grandfather did for a

‍Unknown: 0:08

living? This is Auto Collabs. How

Paul J Daly: 0:10

about your great grandfather? Actually, I'm gonna go there. Yes,

Kyle Mountsier: 0:13

my grandfather, yes. What did he do? My grandfather was primarily with P and G so if you don't, they make like, half the world's like, disposable goods for your family, goods, package goods and stuff. He spent years and years with them, doing what, everything. I mean, he was a an engineer, so he worked across the organization on a ton of different P and

Paul J Daly: 0:41

G projects, and your great grandfather.

Kyle Mountsier: 0:45

So my great grandfather was, there's, like, stories about, like, a lot of people in my family, on the on that side, and they all get mixed up, but more of my the stories are my uncle, my uncles, like, one of my uncles, worked on the candy coating of the Eminem, which is kind of crazy, yeah? My great uncles, my great or my great, yeah, my great uncles. So, yeah, that's like, that's all, all I know about my kind

Paul J Daly: 1:15

of legendary but it also reminds me of, have you ever seen National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation? Chevy Chase's character? He talked about the crunch in hand? Crunch enhancer. Oh yeah, it's a non nutritive cereal varnish that, you know what I mean. How about Cirillo

Michael Cirillo: 1:28

guys? My head kind of hurt. Well, first of all, my grandfather was he worked for a utility company when he immigrated to Canada. Before that, he was a farmer and a soldier in Italy. My father fought in World War Two, or my grandfather fought in World War Two for the whole duration of that war. What for Italy? Yeah, so we know how that started and how it ended, right? Yeah, in this my other grandfather. But this is why my brain started hurting, because I'm like, wait a minute. I got two grandfathers, but then I got four great grand fathers. Oh, yeah, that's right. And then I got eight great, great grandfathers. And I'm like, Well, now I don't know what I'm doing, right, but my the ones I do know about, so let's see my other grandfather. My mom's dad was military police and a police officer in Portugal. Of course, they were in control during the war. And then his dad, I don't know, but my other grandfather, great grandfather, was a tailor. He made suits.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:31

Well, here's, here's what, what I know. This is the only thing I know about grand great grandfathers. And grandfathers is Paul, and I know something about a great grandfather in this story, and we're talking to Eric flow today, and our challenge to you is to get the answer to the question about a great grandfather. So if you So, accept it. We hope that everybody enjoys this conversation with Eric flow,

Paul J Daly: 3:03

Eric, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to have you for the first time on Auto Collabs. Thank you, Paul,

Eric Flow: 3:09

excited to be here, really excited to get to know you guys better and appreciate you having me. So

Paul J Daly: 3:17

I have to say, there are organizations around the country that you look at, and you kind of know right out of the gate that they approach the people side of the business with a different level of intentionality, and your group is definitely one of them. Can you just tell us, like, what you focus on as your center point for your culture?

Eric Flow: 3:38

Yeah, so I think you know for us, both the focus on intentionality around the customer and the employee, because they're hand in hand. One doesn't happen without the other has been part of who we've been since the very, very beginning. So if you go back to organization, to the late 50s, you know we started, my grandfather started our business, and it was a used car lot, and he only sold fully reconditioned cars, and every car came with a warranty, which in the 50s was unheard

Paul J Daly: 4:14

fourth generation dealer already, but yeah,

Eric Flow: 4:16

so like, wow, this that level of intentionality around how we're going to treat people, both externally and internally, has been a part of who we've been for forever. And you know, we've really fostered that culture. My father has driven that, and I have as well. But, you know, it's really something that we talk about from the very beginning, is how we want to treat ourselves. We talk about having a covenant with relationship with our customers. We want to treat customers we can guess in our home, and we want to treat our individuals as,

Unknown: 4:43

as did you say, a covenant relationship with your Yeah, so

Eric Flow: 4:48

if you read our website, we sort of have our three C's, which talks about covenant community and commitment, and that's really how we think about that relationship with our customer and inside of our inside of our com. Team with our employees. It's a very similar way, right? And so, you know, we think about growing them as whole people. We want to provide opportunities. We think about Teach, coach, counsel, discipline, then terminate. We think about responsibility, accountability and authority, all being sort of inexorably linked together to help people understand how to grow and what their role is and when it's right to hold accountable and when it's not. And do you have authority? Are you responsible in that situation? And then we, you know, we really think about trying to provide, you know, we're very cognizant of the fact like so if you look at all the data from sociologists, right? You look at the amount of time people used to spend in social organizations that weren't work, whether it's church or VFA or the Italian American club or whatever, those social organizations that underpin American society have really eroded over since post World War Two, right? And so you've got family, and you've got work, and that a lot of people spend more time at work than they do at family. And so if, if, if you have employees that are only showing up for a paycheck, it's not going to be a healthy place. They're not going to want to grow and thrive and prosper there. And it's not the relationship we want to have, it's not the company we want to have, right? Even if it worked economically, which I don't think it does, you know, things can be both the right economic decision and the right moral decision. And so, you know, we're really conscious of the fact that we want to be a place that people can go home, that they can grow with us, and they can be a part of our community.

Unknown: 6:35

I just, I looked up while you were talking. I was like, I gotta know, because I, you know, I use, we use this vernacular in our in our world, the covenant vernacular and the the trigger word between covenant and contract, which can sometimes inappropriately be interchanged, right? A contract is a legal agreement. It is tick for tack, right? I do this. You do that if then statements right? And that's what typically like, if a customer buys something from you, they enter into a contract. If an employee works for you, they enter into an employment contract. The key word, and I found it in five different resources, the key word about a covenant is a promise. Yeah, it's a one way commitment.

Eric Flow: 7:22

Yes, actually, yeah, very much. So, you know, we we look at making a commitment to our customers, that we're going to keep our promises, and we can be full of trust now. We're a human run organization. We make mistakes every day, right? But, you know, I found out early in my career, it's not about if you ever make a mistake, it's about how you handle that mistake, and if you try to make up for it and you try to do the right thing. And I've had plenty. I mean, I had a situation. I was a young service manager in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was a Porsche Audi, Volkswagen Mazda location. You know, we had this customer with a 964 911 oil leak. We fixed it for them, and we didn't fix it for them. And, you know, two, it took me two and a half years and 50 grand to resolve, but we got it resolved, right? And they be we spend more money on this car than this car was worth, by far, but we turned the customer to a huge advocate for us, right? And, you know, we really want to focus our people on empowering our people to make, to make those good decisions.

Unknown: 8:28

And okay, so I want to know the dirty part of it, because you grew up in an automotive family, like there's no way it was all sunshine and roses when you were growing up, and grandpa and dad are in the car business. And when was the time where you turned over and we're like, Fine, I'll be in the car business. Or were you like, true from from birth? That

Eric Flow: 8:49

is a really good question. So I would say this, nobody in my family ever said you have to be in the car business. This is what you're doing. Ever it was always something I really, really wanted to do. It really was, and, you know, it was something I grew up in, you know, I was, we're in North Carolina, headquartered in Winston, Salem right. So it would snow two or three times a year, like two inches, you know. And I was going with my dad to knock snow off cars, you know, in middle school, I was going to help wash cars in the summer time, and I wanted to learn to change oil and rotate tires in high school and paint, paint fenders and things. And I liked going. I My dad would take me these manufacturer meetings, which, by the way, manufacturer meetings in the 90s were fantastic. Global Financial pre global financial crisis, were a ton of fun. And,

Paul J Daly: 9:41

you know, okay, tell us about those.

Eric Flow: 9:44

But I always, I always really enjoyed it, and I knew that's what I wanted to do. And I've done some other things that were, I would say, non career oriented jobs, you know, and some internships that were more career oriented, between grad school and college and stuff like that. But I really always enjoyed. It. You know, coming out of grad school, there was a time in grad school where I was sitting there thinking, do I want to go straight back in? Do I want to do something else? And have I really committed to this? Or was it just something that was, was it a conscious decision in it? Like I said, No one in my family ever pressured me. So it wasn't that at all. It was a I had, I took a step back to say to myself, have I made that conscious decision? Because I'm committing to you know, when you're working your family business, you don't leave after five years, very often, because you don't like it, right? Because that's so I wanted to say, Listen, I'm coming on to grad school. I've worked in our company post college four years, non stop. Really liked it, mainly all fixed operation stuff, going back in, going to come out, go run a store. That was sort of the plan. You know, is this what I really want to do? And I need to make that conscious decision for myself, to say actively Yes, not passively Yes. Because even if people aren't putting that pressure on you, and they weren't. I want to be clear about that in my family, it was something that I had just always assumed I wanted to do and enjoyed, and so I took that time to really say, Yes, this is what I want to do. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, I'm grateful to our company. It's provided me with incredible opportunities in life. You know, I think we have a lot of responsibility to our team members and our communities who were in but that alone, all of those things are really true, that alone isn't a reason to do something, right? There's a lot of you know, you I love our business. I love the customers, I love the employees. I also love the challenge every day of getting to use every part of my brain, right? You know? Yeah, undergrads and my undergrads in business and marketing and Spanish, my graduate degree I have, you know, MBA from Northwestern, and my majors were like, quantitative finance, Decision Sciences and quantitative marketing. Okay, you know what I do? I have a lot of friends that have great careers, but they're pigeon holed into, like, a really,

Paul J Daly: 12:05

really quantitative finance

Eric Flow: 12:08

right? Where it's like, this is what I do every day in our business. Hey, you're working on comp plans, you know, a recruiting structure. You're working on marketing the next second event, website, meeting yesterday on our relaunch a website. And this we're doing the community piece of it. We're working on our LM s or, you know, training module you're working on, you're with the accounting team, trying to work on X, Y or Z. And so you're using, really, I get to use every facet of my brain on a daily and weekly basis. And I think that's really that diversity is fun for me, and it keeps it very interesting. There's never a dull moment.

Paul J Daly: 12:46

Let me ask you, this is a pressing question. I'm going to let Michael talk every sometime before we're done, you mentioned, you know, turning wrenches, oil changes, painting fenders. What is your by far, like? Give me the front runner, what is the best smell in the automotive industry?

Eric Flow: 13:03

The best smell? Yeah, um, this is a

Unknown: 13:08

selfish question. I was like new car smell.

Eric Flow: 13:12

I like new car smell. I will say this when we, when I was younger, we were paying cars, you know, we use a lot of brake cleaner. Brake cleaner is great, and it's great. It's so bad for you.

Unknown: 13:22

Oh, yeah, well, I'm

Paul J Daly: 13:24

saying like, like, there's, there's, like, new tires, there's great cleaner, there's detailing chemicals, there's, you know, like, reducer there's all kinds of things that just are Bondo. Bondo, yes, you just, there's a lot of young by the way, but, yeah,

Eric Flow: 13:39

yeah, there's a lot of really unique smells. And you know, I'm glad to say our industry, from a safety perspective, has continued to improve and improve. But boy, you walk through some shops, and I'm not implicating any of ours, but you walk through some shops and you see people, you're like, oh, boy, those gloves back on. Do you need to eat

Paul J Daly: 13:58

the sandwich right now? Hands in the reducer to clean.

Eric Flow: 14:02

Oh, I used to clean my hands with brake cleaner. You know, that's what everybody told me to do.

Unknown: 14:08

Oh, no, sorry, I didn't pass the statute of limitations on that. But

Michael Cirillo: 14:13

how does, how does all of the so I mean this, I'm just the boys will tell you, I take notes. I'm sitting here. I'm just so enthralled with this. I'm kind of curious about the DNA of the organization where this all started. Right? So your third or fourth gen?

Eric Flow: 14:32

So our company was started by my grandfather, okay, third generation. My great grandfather was a Chevrolet dealer back before the depression, got out of the business. During the Depression, did some real estate development, did a number of other things. My grandfather was in the army at the end of World War Two, so he 96 now. So he pretty young for that generation. Still with us, doing great. And he was. Stationed in Japan at General Headquarters with Douglas MacArthur. He was actually Douglas MacArthur's courier and aide for three, four years in Japan at General Headquarters, comes back to America, goes to Wake Forest. Wants to get in the automobile business, gets a job as Henry Ford the second private secretary, assistant, what leads to the other one? Yes, it was a very close network in America that point in time, right? Yeah, moves to Detroit. Is there for a little while. From the south, it's cold, it's snowy. There's no EPA. The snow is like black, right there for a year and a half or something, says, I want to move back. Becomes a partner in a Ford store in elk in North Carolina. And my grandmother grew up. Her family was from Arkansas, but she grew up outside of Chicago and outside of New York, and then moved to Winston Salem because her grand her dad, worked for Bell South, which was had a regional headquarter in Winston Salem, so she's in elk in North Carolina, which is a small little town. She has my dad. She's pregnant with my uncle, and sort of like, hey, I need to move to a bigger town. Can we move to a bigger town? So they moved to Winston Salem, where he opened the used car lot before we had any new car franchises, because he sold out of his partnership in Elkin. And actually my grandfather, when he was opening his first store in Winston, got my great grandfather, his dad, who had retired and had been a dealer way back, to come be a service manager for him when he opened his store. Like, Hey, Dad, can you come help me out?

Michael Cirillo: 16:41

So what? What I mean, this is actually really interesting to me as I as I think about this, you know, experience in war, Henry Ford, Secretary, you know, Detroit, all these moves. And I think about at, at what point, see, I'm so intrigued by this, I want to ask the question, right? Because when you talk about covenant community, customer, you know the intentionality behind all of those things? Who? Who's responsible?

Eric Flow: 17:12

Yeah, so I would say, you know, my grandfather started with that culture, sort of in terms of what I mentioned about used cars and etc. And then my dad really, really grew that culture in a super intentional way. So my father went to University of Virginia as well. I went there. My wife went there. My mom went there, my sisters went there. So it's sort of a whole family thing. And post UVA, before he started with my grandfather's business, my dad's very faithful individual. Went to a college in Vancouver, British company called Regent college, and he was really struggling about how to live out his faith in business at the same time. And can you be a faith oriented business? Can you be a faithful person? Can you be a person who focuses on doing good in the world and in your community through your business? Or do I need to go into ministry to really live that creed, and really because he liked business, and it was no I can, I can have a company and grow a company, have a vision for a company in a way that serves a mission as well for individuals and for our community. And so I would say my my father, is really responsible for driving the orientation, or formalizing that orientation, growing that orientation, and really driving it in that direction. And he's very thoughtful about those things, and they're at the core and underpinning of everything we do. You know, we've turned down lots of opportunities because they didn't fit the way who we are and how we want to live. And we've made lots of business decisions that, you know, some people would argue what the right decision for the short run, but we would argue the right decision for the right decision for the long run. And as I said the beginning, you can do the right thing because of who you are and how you want to live and do the right thing because it's the right economic decision. I think most of our decisions that we make, and we would make them either way if it was the right thing to do, but I think they're all really served both purposes. I think people want to do business and want to work for an organization that is mission aligned with, you know, in that manner, yeah. And

Kyle Mountsier: 19:08

I think actually, this is a, it's a question that we come up a lot on, because we, like our focus is a lot around the people side of the business thriving people provide thriving profits. But the question is always like, how do you turn that in? Because, you know, we've been on this podcast for, I don't know, 15, 1617, minutes, something like that. And a lot of people could be like, Oh, nap, nap pods and ping pong tables never sell you a single car, right? But you don't, oh.

Eric Flow: 19:33

So we talk about, you have to be high care and high challenge and we're very high challenge organization, right? And we like to say, What's in a high challenge organization without care is a meat grinder. You get a certain sort of psychological profile that likes that they're not generally great with employees and customers and everybody else churns and leaves on time. High care only is a therapy session, right? So you have to have both. It has to be high. High, high challenge and high care. You know, I think a lot, my father played football in college, and I played football for a long time. I think a lot of us that sports mentality of, we got to get this first down, we got to hit this three, you know, this free throw, we got to do whatever. And we can go do it guys, and we're doing this together as a team, right? And it's, it's both of those things together.

Kyle Mountsier: 20:20

So, but how do you transition? Because you all have been like, leading edge, right, bespoke website, platform, like investor in multiple tech companies. In the auto industry, you've grown to 50 rooftops. What are you doing right now that is challenging, kind of the status quo of like moving consumers into covenant clients, right? Yeah. So we're,

Eric Flow: 20:50

you know, we're really focused on trying to make we're focused on two things simultaneously. One is employee training, learning and building out our LMS and dealing with the issues of scale, right? Because it used to be a lot easier. Well, let's get all the sales managers together and we're going to work on this, and we'll do this once a week for the next four weeks, and oh my gosh, that's a lot of people coming from several hours away, and they're not in the store and they're not with their families. That's tough, right? And so we're working on how to use technology to really help us continually train and reinforce our culture and sort of those business processes. And then we're also really focused on helping our customers do business with us more easily, at least the let's call it the 8020 where we want customers who want to do something that's pretty simple with us, whether it's service or sales, be able to do that in a way that's easier than everybody around us, and then in so doing, we want to free ourselves up to have more time with more humans to handle those more challenging cases. Right? So, you know, hey, listen, there's no reason that I need a human to tell you the value of a five year old Toyota Camry with 50,000 miles in a clean Carfax. If I can't do that, something is really wrong in 2025 right now, a, you know, two year old,$90,000 car with a CARFAX minor incident and a this and that. I think I want to look at that car and figure out what's actually going on. That's right. Same thing with Hey, you got to, you know, pretty easy, cash deal, buyer, etc. I should be able to make that a really easy with a customer, hey, credit challenge, multiple co signers, multiple trade in vehicles, negative equity, whatever it is, okay, that's where humans shine. We get to go solve that problem for that customer. And so we're really focused on, kind of trying to create multiple pathways for our customers to engage with us in the way that makes sense for their for their scenario.

Paul J Daly: 22:56

You know, I think one of the one of the primary ways that we get an at bat anyway. Is is on the website, and we know that. And you know the intentionality behind what we say to customers on our website, about ourselves, how the vehicle looks in photos, right? All, all of those things make a massive difference, and I think they say something about who we are, and the partnerships that we have with tech companies, dealers have with tech companies, and the willingness to like help you accomplish your goals in that, what do you look for in an industry partner when it comes to, you know, for instance, your website, or making things easy for the customer to see what you have?

Eric Flow: 23:38

Yeah, so, you know, vendor selection is a is really important for us. And you know, from a merchandising perspective, we're not selling anything if it's not merchandise. Well, I can tell you that from our experience with CDK last year, and it's no shady and CDK, I think they're a great organization who had a lot of more security than any of us will ever have. And you know, they had this unfortunate experience. But I can tell you, if things aren't on the website to sell, you're not going to sell them in today's world, right? Pull it behind the bar. Really important. And so, you know, we have to have vendors who can help us have our vehicles online. Now, a lot of what we do is look for vendors that can fit within our ecosystem, because we have sort of a different tech stack and ecosystem than a lot of other ecosystem than a lot of other dealers. You know, we have our own DBM digital vehicle inventory management system that we built back before those existed, and we continue to use and we've just gone through some changes with it and tried some other things and gone back to it, because it's how we price vehicles, syndicate pictures, syndicate descriptions. It's where we bring in external data to help us price those vehicles and create those descriptions the right way. And so when it comes to partners, we're looking for partners that can do a couple of things for us. One, we want those partners to be providing a product that we wouldn't build ourselves because it scales over plenty of clients, so they have enough money for R and D in that product, right? So. So we're also looking for partners that are willing to have the off the shelf product, and they're also willing to sell us a lot of the data information behind their product through APIs. So if we want to take that information and stick it in an internal product that we have, we can do that as well, because I think this industry needs and if you look at the structure of this industry, you know, called 18,000 car dealers, or 18,000 franchises in a new car franchise in America. 93 and a half percent of them are owned by holding company that owns between one and three stores. So the vast majority of them are owned by smaller dealer groups. They need off the shelf products, right? And there's times we need off the shelf products, but you also, we have different needs sometimes where we say, this is really cool. We don't want your whole product. We already have the solution, and it works better for us, but we want the data behind that product, and we want an API to it, and we're going to take that information and go stick it in this thing over here, right? And then we need sort of reliability in that. I mean, you guys are friends with one of our mutual friends with car cutter, and they've been a great solution for us, right? It's super flexible fit within our dB. I am great way for us to, you know, be able to have high quality pictures. It also, oh, I'll say this, any vendor that we have that involves store operational people doing something has to be easily execute, executable and easily trainable, right? And they've done a great job with that for us, you know, we've had photo booths at different stores before. And again, I'm not throwing any shade at those. If you have a huge complex with a bunch of brands, it could make sense for you to have that photo booth for us. You know, we have these clusters in different cities, decentralized,

Kyle Mountsier: 26:39

different people, taking different things. Yeah, are we going to drive cars

Eric Flow: 26:43

over here and then, if you Well, I have it in this location, but not this. So, you know, if you have a centralized website, some of your pictures look great, some of them don't. We were really looking for that solution that we could roll out enterprise wide and come up with a really homogenous way for customers to see our cars so they go, Okay, you have, you know, three Honda stores in 100 miles, and all of those pictures look really good, and they all look the same. I think that's and it's easily achievable.

Paul J Daly: 27:09

I think that's a growing challenge in the industry. As groups, small groups turned into mid sized groups, and mid sized groups turned into large groups. And single point stores, probably the biggest challenge is single point store is turning to multi point because until you have to make that first jump of being somewhere else, you know, especially the push to consolidate used car inventory, that that really is one of the things. And there's nothing worse, in my opinion, when you go on a site and you're shopping a used car inventory and you just, it's the same company, right? Like you expect it when you're in a third party. You expect it when you're cars.com or not a trader or, you know, but you don't expect it when you're on a captive deal or used car site. And it's, it's, actually can be very confusing. So we've,

Eric Flow: 27:53

you know, that's so we, we really want to come to market as a consolidated Company in the same way everywhere, not just in those brand values I talked about the beginning, but also in practical things to how our customers experience us, right? And so there's this struggle there, right? Because we have these individual stores with individual general managers and individual leadership teams, and we call them a general manager, but these, some of these stores, are big, right? If it was another industry, we'd call them a CEO, you know, hey, I got 165 employees, and I'm doing this sort of revenue. And I'm doing this sort

Unknown: 28:25

of revenue. Absolutely, that's bigger than

Eric Flow: 28:28

Yeah. So we want an entrepreneur spirit there, and we want agency, yet we want it done a certain way, because we're flow. We want to come to market as flow. So there's this tension there, and this thin rope and the thin line that we walk, because we don't ever want to turn into the big box conglomerate, where the people who are at the stores go, Well, I don't know. I don't have any control over that, so I don't care. You know, corporate told me what to do on it. That's terrible, right? And if we and if you end up in that place, I promise you, you're not going to be an excellent sales organization, right? Because sales organizations are inherently high agency people who care about what's in front of them and want to make a difference every day. So you're sort of, you know, what we try, we have a lot of processes that we create and centralized way to do things. And then we come up with sort of these guidelines and boundaries where we go. Here's where you're operating in within here, and you get to pick some differences around there. And also, you know, there's you can request exceptions for different things, and we, maybe we have a centralized pricing team or a centralized that team, and those individuals can allow those exceptions or those guidelines for those exceptions, right?

Michael Cirillo: 29:34

I, I don't want to close it down with a dad joke, but I can't help but notice how well the flow from intention and covenants and organization and DNA right through to intention and covenant, oh yeah, all the way around

Paul J Daly: 29:51

to to, like, how you it was like this cutter

Michael Cirillo: 29:54

and other vendor partners and all of these sorts of things, I think is, is tremendous. And I mean this, this is. Why we do this show. It's to sit down with individuals like you who are in it every day, who are thinking through this at a different level, to differentiate, to to you know, highlight what's available to all, but only the willingness of a few. And so Eric man, this has been so enlightening. We want to express our appreciation for you joining us on Auto Collabs today.

Eric Flow: 30:22

Well, thank you guys for having me. It's truly nice to get to know you guys. I look forward to doing something together, and I hope you'll make it to Baltimore at some point in time and to hang out with you guys at the southern con. So thank you.

Michael Cirillo: 30:40

Is my math, right? Do I have

Paul J Daly: 30:41

eight Grace still on this? After that whole conversation, I'm like, I mean, I know you. I know you were there. You did ask

Kyle Mountsier: 30:50

me an equal question. It was so I'm so proud of you, first of all, for getting that answer out. You nailed it, and you made it so sneaky, too, like it wasn't even on purpose. It was unbelievable. Okay,

Michael Cirillo: 31:02

but can we just, let's not gloss over the fact, and we didn't while we talked to him. But you ever heard a dealer use the word COVID covenant before

Kyle Mountsier: 31:09

blew my mind? No, I'm like, immediately like, what does covenant mean?

Paul J Daly: 31:14

Literally, the only, the only times outside of theological reference that that word is used in modern culture would be some kind of, like a land covenant, right, right, which is like, uh, but that's it. I mean, the covenant of marriage, right? Marriage is a covenant relationship.

Kyle Mountsier: 31:30

Relationship, that is, I didn't say that part, but every single source was sacred relationship. It involved a promise like that. Is a deep way of thinking about your people that tell

Paul J Daly: 31:40

me that's not a place you want to work or do business I'm in.

Michael Cirillo: 31:44

Like yesterday, I was thinking about the impact of that word and its meaning on the customer relationship, where for decades, it's been like, well, the customer is always right, or no, the customer, you know, there's always that debate, but it's like, well, what does it mean to make a covenant to your customers, yeah, and

Kyle Mountsier: 32:02

it's one sided, where a covenant is one sided,

Paul J Daly: 32:06

yeah, that's regardless of what you do. Regardless do this, I promise. Sometimes

Michael Cirillo: 32:14

that means repairing a car that's not even worth it. Just

Paul J Daly: 32:20

exactly what that means. Yeah, you guys want to know what my great grandfather did. Yeah, great grandfather, do I only know one of them. Did he work at Chipotle? No. His name was Joey amarosi, by the way, yeah, just like that. And it was amarosi. Prepare to be surprised. Oh, he was a Finnish carpenter who also played the mandolin

Unknown: 32:45

in South Philly.

Michael Cirillo: 32:48

I was like, one of two ways. He either lays tile, he's like, carpenter finished

Unknown: 32:54

carpenter that's amazing through

Paul J Daly: 32:56

and through. Well, look, regardless of what your great grandfather does, we hope you thought about it a little bit, or maybe figured it out. But more than that, we hope you realize that there is some real depth and substance within the retail auto industry that's right. So on behalf of Kyle Mountsier, Michael Cirillo and myself, thank you for joining us, as always on Auto Collabs, sign

Unknown: 33:15

up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and automotive retail media and pop culture, you can get it now@asotu.com That's asotu.com if you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time you welcome to Annika. Last recording you.

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