ASOTU: Thanks for making time to chat, Joel! We like to start with how you got into the industry. We can only assume you didn't start as the President of Easterns Automotive Group.
Joel Bassam: I'm a classic Nepo baby. My dad sold his first car in 1986, became a dealer, and pretty quickly started our brand in 1988. I started working here when I was 12 and I have worked pretty much every position in the dealership.
We are a singularly owned, completely independent family business with eight retail locations we call delivery centers, backed up by a central hub in Sterling, Virginia, right outside DC.
I imagine most of the readers are following you right now, but help me understand what you mean by "Delivery Centers" and why it is the setup you and your team use.
Sure, the easiest way to explain it to anybody outside or new to the industry is we are like a regional CarMax. We have 8 retail locations with sales teams, but we handle all the other operations at 160,000 square foot hub on 20 acres. It's basically a fixed-ops car factory. We do reconditioning, bodywork, photography, all our BDC, our call center, vehicle acquisition, inventory management, and even the title work from all the locations is handled by a team at the central hub.
We've been operating this way for a long time because it has just always made sense. We don't have OEM requirements, so there is no need to have a separate set of books or several small acquisition teams.
Think about if each Starbucks had to source its coffee; the one on First St. might be better than the one on Second St. In the same way, we protect the quality of each store by ensuring the person in them can focus totally on their unique part of the business.
That makes a lot of sense to me! It sounds like you had a headstart on the digital push during the pandemic. Would you say so?
We consider ourselves an E-Commerce platform, but the customer decides. We had our first online sale in 2012, but it never had a huge part of the company. We did see a big adoption spike during COVID. It climbed and has stabilized to about 30% of our monthly sales mostly or entirely digital. With that said, a huge majority of those customers still want to come in and test drive before delivery. These experiences are less than 30 minutes with 80 plus average NPS [net promoter score].
Sounds like a unique balance! Tell me some about how the group culture feeds into and flows out of the business.
We constantly work on culture. No matter the specific role an associate fills, we remind everybody we are all in the business of sales. So, while other places may look to get more hours on a car in service, we are connecting that effort to a sale.
We also give each new hire, regardless of department, a tour of the whole business, so they see where the cars come from and how our process all serves to best support sales.
And lastly, we are committed to serving the greater good. We have a slogan "Any car, any way, for everyone." We want to be sure we have a solution that works for everybody. It seems, especially in the digital retailing market, that anybody who may be considered "sub-prime" gets brushed off. Which, with a specific definition, could be half the country.
So, we want to be part of that solution that serves everybody. From acquisition, reconditioning, sales, or tag and title, we are going to do our best to work with every single customer who walks in the door.