But what that really taught us, there's actually a massive demand for interaction at the home. I call it home engagement, home pickup, home drop off. Just like when you were talking to Scott at 50, people want services at their house. I'll take you a step further. People don't want services at their house. People don't want to waste time.
What's up, everyone? This is Card dealership guy. You're listening to the Card dealership guide podcast, which is my effort to give you access to the most unbiased and transparent insights into the car market. Let's get into today's episode.
I want to start right, get right into the nitty gritty, was looking through your background a bit, and found out a bit surprising that you went from the hospitality industry into this logistics tech. Can you walk us through that? Like your background, how did you get started? How did this all happen?
Yeah, there's actually, there's a lot of steps in there. I think that was probably the longest kind of tenure I had, but really always grew up in the tech space. Right? Started my career with Accenture. Left there pretty quick to start. An SAP consulting firm joined Starwood Hotels when there was less than 100 hotels. When I left, there was 100. So I had the fortunate experience of seeing massive scale and what was kind of even a little bit start-up beat, right? And growing from what was that 30, 40 hotels to, like I said, 1100. So learn quite a bit, help grow everything from the technology side, work with the executive team, and I think really cut my teeth on global scale finance, venture capital, all that, right? Reported dotted lineup to the CFO. Got it. You did that while at Starwood?
Yeah. So what do you mean? So what do you say like venture capital there? How did that play in there? So you think about it as probably more, I probably say, a closer to private equity, right? As we grew, right? From a company that eventually acquired, shared to launch the Western brand and had only a few hotels, there was a lot of acquisitions, there was a lot of discussions around capital raises. And I mostly sat it from a technology perspective, right? How are we going to scale things? How are we going to service our back office? And so I wasn't actually actively helping the financing. It was listening and learning kind of the early, forward of our years of my career.
What's it like working for Barry Starlink? What does that like? So it was interesting, right? So Barry's out of that. I like the smile. I'm ready for this one. It's been a long time with him. It's been time with his team, obviously, right? But out of Grand Canyon, Connecticut, actually yesterday, it was wearing a Starwood capital shirt. One of my good friends still works there. You know, incredibly dynamic, right? And I was probably too young to realize what I had, right? Started there in my late 20s. And I won't say how old I am now, but you know, probably double that. And it was really interesting, right? I really appreciated the attention, the detail, the design, but also just get it done mentality, right? Let's not do analysis paralysis. Let's grow. And the end product, which could be a new Western, could be a Phoenician and just amazing to see the growth, right? And I think obviously it's gone to be one of the most successful real estate investors in the world. So I think that tells you what kind of organization it was.
Yeah, definitely a good place to get started. So what came after that?
是的,肯定是一个很好的开始。那之后发生了什么事情?
Yeah. So, you know, after that, I decided like, hey, I want to try this fancy thing called a startup, right? I joined a few guys that were building a data center company in Phoenix, Arizona. And, you know, I was working in the data center. I was helping, you know, build things for Starwood and get things going. This is really before the advent of cloud, right? I mean, to date myself, I remember getting my first phone, which is a blackberry and looked at through my drawer. And that was the end of that, right?
And these guys had this notion that we're building the one of the largest data centers in the world. I joined them as CIO spent about four and a half years there, went on, they went on to raise about 600 million capital. Actually, I think they do or they did held the record for the most amount of venture capital and debt based in Arizona at the time. So another high scale, fast paced growth, really learned, grew from, I think it was employed 35 to 500, built the software, built the team out, and spent four and a half years there.
After that, went on to do some venture partner work, you know, worked actually with the chairman of MasterCard in the startup in London, working on IoT, and then bounced around quite a bit doing consulting work, support work, and came across this idea. These three guys, three founders are still involved today. They've got a product, it's MVP. They ship cars for a couple clients, and they do predominantly Southern California.
I took a look at it and I said, this is really interesting, right? Before all this, I bought a car and bring a trailer, right? And I'm like, I didn't know how to get it to me. And I dialed and I said, wait, you mean you're having a car guy? Oh, yeah. I'm afraid actually, I'm afraid that I might start talking about EVs. I got to tell you, yeah, you're more than you. You're talking about EVs. I feel like Steve Greenfield will pop up, Scott will pop up, and I'll get yelled at by one of them. I'll be curious to hear your take that, but we'll get that. Yeah, we'll get to that.
So, you know, they had this idea. And I said, this is this is fastening. This is about, you know, two, three of 2018, right? And they are three of 2018. And now, at this point, the company is live or is it still incubated? There's a couple customers, right? There's a handful of transporters, you know, a couple hundred cars a month being transported. Interesting. And I think at that time, you know, the first thing that came to my mind is like, Uber, how did Uber not capitalize on this opportunity? I know they have like Uber freight and all that, we can get into that too as well. But Q3 2018, I feel like if I'm not mistaken, that's right around the period where Uber had a bunch of shake up with management stuff. But just kind of walk me deeper through that.
This seems like such a simple idea, right? So practical. So, it just makes so much sense. It seems like food delivery. I mean, it's like, yeah, obviously, if we need to get a car shipped, we're not going to do this manually by phones or email, like, it's going to be done through an app. How did you guys wedge into the market, right? The founders and then you, yeah.
Hey, you know, it seems like a simple concept, right? And in the gray hair tells a little bit of a different story. Well, to be clear, the concept is simple. The business, I'm sure, isn't very sophisticated. So the concept is super simple, right? I think people say, Oh, you're a lot like Uber, you're like Lyft, or maybe Uber freight convoy. But let's put it this way. You know, where you generally have a marketplace and you have someone that is going to get a ride or moving an object, right, shipping or food delivery, it's usually within a city, right? Or if you are a convoy over freight, you're going from port to a major distribution hub or distribution hub to another another distribution hub or store of that nature.
As we started doing this, we realized that I might ship a car from my house to your house. I might ship it from a dealership to an auction, an auction to port or to auction to, you know, I'm going to fast forward here. But now in the last 18 months, we've covered 125,000 unique addresses, shifting cars, right? And it gets more and more compromised. What are them? You are one of them. Yeah, I've seen that, right? And so I think the thing that was really exciting.
So we built this this software, right? And we thought, Hey, we're a startup. Every book we read on startups and everything, we're going to start in Southern California. And we're going to do this in Southern California, and we're going to perfect it. And we're going to launch slowly go from city to city.
Then comes along. One of our first big customers, and I'll mention here was it was Toyota Financial Services and Fair, right? This is 2019. And they're like, well, we can't just ship cars in Southern California. Who cares? They got to go everywhere, right? And so how do you start a marketplace across the United States? That was the hard part. Yeah, the cold star problems. I'll tell me about that. It was a lot of a lot of phone calls, right? It was a lot. Can you move this car? Can you do it? Who are you? Are you broke or do you have technology? You can't just build a marketplace across the United States overnight. It was trying to price, trying not to lose money, trying to find someone to pick up the car. And while building what has become the most robust platform in the middle of it. So extremely difficult.
But when you say started, like, so what did you actually do, right? Did you pick up the phone call some major dealer groups like, Hey, I know you're shipping cars. Use us. Here's why. Like how did that actually work?
Yeah. And my assumption is that you went after businesses first before consumers, because it just it seems like an easier distribution channel to crack.
是的。我的假设是你先接触了企业,而不是消费者,因为这似乎是一个更容易打破的分销渠道。
Yeah, absolutely. We went to businesses first, right? There's repetitive routes there. There's higher volume. And it was a little bit like, Hey, we have this little MVP software. This is where I think we were really smart, but we're a mixture of automotive guys, right? If you look at my executive team, a lot of them spend a lot of time at Toyota at lenders, where we have a very, very skilled technology team and a skilled operations team. Give us some of your business. Let us try it with our with our software and see how it goes, right? Like any good startup. It was a little bit of salesmanship. It was a little bit, I'll say a little bit of begging.
What was the value proposition though? Why would I use you? Right? Your early stage, like why the heck would I use you?
这个价值主张是什么呢?为什么我要选择使用你们呢?对吧?你们刚刚起步,我为什么要选择你们呢?
Even at that point, even at that point, we still had software that gave you an interface that let you look at everything and let you enter things. And this is this is beginning in 2019. Right? You know, if you look today, it's mostly like, Hey, call us, we'll give you a quote, then we will send you an email when it's done. There's this clamoring for logistics, especially on mobile just going to be part of the supply chain. Right? Let us flow information directly into the software and spread it out to the marketplace. So we didn't want to go out and say, Hey, we'll do it faster. We'll do it cheaper. That's part of the sales pitch sometimes, right? But it was really let us hook into your system. Let us have communication back and forth and let us feed your systems upstream so you know where your asset is at all times.
How early did the founders bring you in? It just feels like you started the what you're telling you right now. You know, I hear the words MVP. And the thing that you came in so early, it's it seems like such a risky move by founders. And I commend them for that because clearly it's worked out tremendously. And you've done a great job. But like, how did that work to bring in someone so early? Like, walk me through that.
I think these guys did these guys did a phenomenal job in the sense that, you know, they they got they got their initial funding, right? And I was it was part of that that that discussion. And they realized that, Hey, if we want to make this very large company, we want to ship hundreds of thousands of cars. There has to be substantial investment in technology, right? We also have to be able to talk to corporate executives. We also have to be able to deal with individuals and dealers and bring the value up, right? It's really easy to say, Hey, we built an app. That's not that's not hard. Right? It is one thing to have a legal department. It's another thing to have insurance. It's another thing to raise money. It's another thing to develop the cybersecurity programs around all of this. And so I think they were, I think they were, you know, or thinking enough that like, Hey, let's stay involved. Let's do what we do, which is, you know, it's going to be a real company.
Yeah, it's going to be a real company. And we need someone to run it properly.
是的,这将会成为一个真正的公司。而我们需要有人来妥善经营它。
Yeah. And we're here 140 people today. So you mentioned raising money. Tell me more about that. Was it you that sort of steered the company towards venture capital? Why did you do that? Did you raise the money yourself? Can you kind of explain that to us?
Yeah.
So, you know, we have the initial seed funding from all my capital, large dealership group out of Southern California. And that was how we got our product going. That's in early 2019.
This was, is this the founders dealership? No, the founders, the founders do not have dealerships. This is this is what's the connection? Yeah. Did this happen to come across this group that they were selling to? So they were selling the product to a dealer. And this is the dealership group that I knew. And that's how we got involved. And that's the initial funding. Oh, okay. Got it. I like that. Okay.
So the customer invested, but that's a great way to do it. It's a huge testament. Okay. So that's, you know, that's a first round. What about like later capital? More institutional capital?
Yeah. So as so, so we started to get traction. And I think there's a little bit of a story to tell here. What really made it. So yeah, going into 2019, 2000, you know, Q one, 20, the pandemic hits. And we're like, as a startup, oh, like, what are we going to do? Everything's closed. The dealership's closed. I was going to buy a car. And we have been talking to a couple lenders, right, in particular, BMW financial services, financial services. And, and, you know, we got a call and they said, Hey, can you pick up cars from people's homes? Like, what are you talking about?
They said, well, the dealerships are closed. And we have least terminations coming up. We have termination is I have a family, right? And I'm going to drop it off a dealer because it's up and individual said, well, we don't want to keep it even if you extend it because we're not driving anywhere. I don't want the payment. So we're like, start, sure, we'll do it. Wow. Talk about timing. Right. So what that really taught us that there's actually a massive demand for interaction at the home. I call it home engagement home pickup home drop off. Just like, you know, when you were talking to Scott at Spitv, people want services at their house. And so we started to build. I'll take you. I'll take you a step further. People don't want services at their house. People don't want to waste time. Exactly. You're exactly right. And it could be at their house, it could be at their, it could be their office. It could be come to me, right? That's true.
And I think what was really interesting, that started to build our capabilities and quickly. So talk about the call start problem. How do you cover home addresses anywhere in the United States, anywhere, and move them to a dealer, right? So we started to build tech around that, right? In 2020, we launched what we call today's winded. Is that like IBM, IBM Watson's cousin or something? No, actually that's Watson, right? I know. Yeah. But the first guy, the guy, the guy credited with the horse and buggy trailer was winded. Oh, that's cool. Okay. I like that. Yeah. Man, I were in a rollover here, Spiffy with the penguin, wind tin, run buggy. I got a lot of these. We're setting the bar very high.
So then also led us to have been conversations with the bring a trailer team. Huge fan. I bought another car on the trailer, right? And I sent an email and I said, hey, it'd be nice if I could ship this. And we made our connection to Randy, the CEO there, who I can just an amazing individual, right? If you ever had a chance to meet him, you know, amazing individual. And he made the time for us. I can only imagine, you know, everyone wants to talk to him. And to this date, they still have the most sophisticated, robust integration there is with run buggy with run buggy, right? They put a lot of time and energy and effort into this. It is completely seamless to check out its automatic pricing. It's part of your experience. It is truly like what you'd expect from an Amazon experience.
所以我们也与bring a trailer团队进行了交谈。我是他们的超级粉丝。我又在拖车上买了一辆车,对吧?然后我发送了一封邮件,说,嘿,如果我能运输这辆车就太好了。我们联系到了那里的CEO兰迪,他是一个了不起的人,如果你有机会见到他,你就会知道,他是一个了不起的人。他抽出时间与我们会面。我只能想象,大家都想跟他交谈。到今天为止,他们与run buggy之间的集成仍然是最复杂、最强大的。他们花了很多时间和精力来做这件事。结账过程完全无缝,定价自动化。这是您期望中的亚马逊体验。
So how did this work prior to run buggy, right? Like 2017, I'm buying a car on eBay motors or whatever, right? I don't know if bring a trailer was, you know, launched in 2017. Maybe they were, but what did this, what was it like as a consumer and what is it like now?
那么在发现这个运行不稳定的软件之前,这是怎样运作的呢?就像在2017年,我在eBay Motors或其他地方买车一样对吧?我不知道Bring a Trailer是在2017年推出的,也许是,但以消费者的角度来看,这到底是怎么样的呢?现在又是怎样的呢?
So I feel I still think, you know, even though we've made progress and I'll call the competition, they're probably it's still the same because the market is so big. And what do I mean by that? It is still if you go out and you asking when you're in the industry, right? So you know, guys that maybe ship a car, you can maybe ask them to ship a car. But if you go to the average person or, you know, I'll call it 99% of the population say, how do you ship a car or how does a car get shipped? No one knows.
How do I ship a car? If I asked you right now, what would you do if you didn't know me? What would you do to ship a car from your house to Scottsdale? I would call up my GM and tell him, hey, who do we know? Who do we hear? We're curious to ship cars and he would go through and he would find some. Yeah, find someone, right? It's still like that. It's like that across the board, right? And even at the new car level, like they have carrier fixed carriers that do a phenomenal job, there's still deviations. They still have to go client someone, right?
I encourage you, like, you know, we think, like I said, we think 50 million cars a year are shipped and it's grown. There is no dominant player. There's no one major brand. But how do you so how do you aggregate that all on your platform? Yeah, like you have like a list of a database of like, you know, callers or because it seems like, you know, a lot of these people, you know, great people, but they're also they don't seem like the most sophisticated. Any of them I've interacted with some haulers and again, I don't want to speak for the entire market. Just, you know, certain haulers I've interacted with, you know, much obviously it's more blue collar. And you know, when you're talking about apps and all this stuff, like again, I spoke about this on the Scott Wingo podcast, like I'm a mechanic. I want to turn wrenches. Don't let me start doing all this app stuff. That's not what I want to do. If I want it to do that, I would go learn software engineering. Yeah.
So how do you go ahead? So it's a really good question, right? So one of the things is we approached the large shippers first and we said, Hey, we have a phenomenal platform. We can integrate through APIs. We can securely take it. You get all your reporting through through the platform free. You know, we have full service claims and everything got it. And then we created, we have an app for the drivers to drive. What are the drivers? We don't charge them, but we allow them to take pictures. We allow them to pick up whatever loads that they want. We allow them to be their own business. They also get paid within one or two days. We got build a shipper and that's 15 at 30. So they are literally running their book business. We also work on behalf of them. Hey, we see you have an open spot. Do you want another car along the way? So we keep the trucks. Wow. I like that a lot. Yeah. That's your your brain. That's that's a lot of value right there. Backhaul. Hey, I'm driving back from LA to New York. Do you have anything or they look on the platform better yet? And like, Oh, this is in Kansas City. I'll pick it up. Instead of driving all the way back empty. I've got something to take back. There is a challenge with a number of drivers out there, but there's also a major challenge that optimization keeping trucks full. Can't drive 24 hours. They've got a log book. They've got it here to the log book. What we can't afford is empty spots and empty trucks. What's a log book? So there's a regulation. Right. How many hours can you drive? Just just like a commercial driver, right? You can't drive too many hours. And I think that's key. So you can't say, Hey, you, you might have a team of drivers. I'm going to pay more. Get that car to meet faster. Like, Hey, I don't like to drive so many hours in a day. What's a I know some companies that you know, I see like under ads like, Hey, you get to come home every day. Like, what's what's the deal there? Like, how did they do that? Is it just like the major nationwide corporations that have so many like spokes that they're able to, you know, give you shorter halls or how does that work? Yeah, I think that's that's part of it. They're they're doing inner city. Like we do a lot of inner city work. You know, Hey, 30, 40, 50, even a couple hundred miles. Guy will go a couple of miles, come back. But what is what is really, I think unique about automotive transport, just like I think we were discussing earlier is it's it's all over the United States. Right. So if we if we talk about right, individuals, talk about movie, a car, you talk about ring a trailer, you talk about any of these things, you don't know where the order is going till you get it and you don't know what state to what state it's going from. It's extremely complex. So we have 17,000 drivers signed up on the platform right now. Wow. And out of every order that comes in between 80 to 85% of them go claimed, meaning a driver's seat on his phone and picks up that order without us getting involved.
So how do you make money? The magic question? I think again, it's it's pretty straightforward, right? It's a lot like Uber, right? We will charge the the shipper one number and we'll pay the transporter another number.
I will say this, this is an a game of marking things up two times, half a time. It's it's a it's a low margin game. And we're going for scale. What are the typical margins? Margins are probably between 10 to 10 to 15% on this. And is that is that gross? Yeah. Got it. So we'll move right. Like I said, we'll move in 2024. We'll move, you know, we think well over a couple hundred thousand cars. Got it.
So, you know, if I'm spending a thousand dollars on a on a transport, you're making roughly 150 gross. Yeah. I mean, I'll take that. I think that's fair. You know, you hooked me up with the transporter. You made my life easy. I don't have to pick up the phone waste time. I'll take it. Yeah. I mean, really, I used it. But you'll take it and you know, you would cover insurance, right? We make sure the driver has insurance. You have tracking links, you can you can engage with a transporter. It's on your phone. We run seven days a week, 12 hours a day. You don't have to pay the guy in cash. You can put in your credit card. If your dealer can bill you later. It's truly I call it the modern experience would expect for anything else.
Yeah. I mean, I think the first time I heard about you, I was skeptical. I think it was someone at the dealership was looking to to use, you know, run buggy for some, you know, out of state sales. And I was skeptical just because, you know, we're business people. The first thing that goes to our mind is like, how do I disintermediate this middleman for my business? Yeah. But then you realize that they're actually breaking value and you're like, okay, well, maybe it's actually makes a lot of sense because it's saving me time. And my team is spending less time. And so the psychology cycle I went through or whatever it's called. I want to first write about it. I think I think you know, everyone has that initial thought.
Like, I know a guy that will go down to, you know, from Pittsburgh, New York, not a problem. And all of a sudden you're selling a car and you see, I had a Wisconsin, you know, I don't know anyone. Right. And you just call and you get different prices and you don't have to trust. And then there's cash on delivery. And so also, you're like, I don't want to do this. Right. And you realize that you're not saving any money. Right. We have that, that epiphany moment with a lot of dealer groups.
And in terms of markets, you're serving your all over the country. Yeah. We covered even Alaskan Hawaiian now. Right. So we're, we're cover all the country. We, you know, like I said, I think we probably have the most diverse delivery network and what I mean by that. You know, a lot of people will move from dealer to port or or marshall yard. We're doing couple thousand unique addresses every couple of weeks.
How much funding have you raised in total? Yeah. So we've raised 47 million in funding today. And I think we, you know, we're going down this road and we started to talk. But you know, what led to the kind of rigor trailer on this seems was our series A, right? So series A was in, you know, public information was led by the Larry H Miller family. And then we had first ventures and Porsche all participate. So great group of people. And we purposely kept it really focused on automotive because it's, it's when you start talking about off-lazy starts about repo and finished vehicle logistics and dealers and auction. There's a lot of the main knowledge that comes to this.
你们总共筹集到多少资金了?嗯,我们今天筹集到了4700万美元的资金。我认为,我们沿着这条路走下去,开始进行了交谈。但是,你知道,导致这种严格的验证车辆的是我们的A轮融资,对吧?A轮融资是公开信息,由Larry H Miller家族领导,我们还有First Ventures和Porsche共同参与。非常棒的一群人。我们故意把焦点放在汽车领域,因为一旦涉及到追回车辆、成品车物流、经销商和拍卖会等方面时,就需要很多专业知识。
And there's a lot of, I think, bespoke information and how it served us really well is kind of on the tail end of COVID. You saw massive inventory shortages. Right. So one of the things is we sometimes I feel like we're a little bit like a leading indicator or maybe we're maybe my eyes or maybe we're trailing indicator. But we saw massive drop in repo off-lease because what happened is let me put it this way. If you were going to take a forerunner to a dealership, do you think it was going to go to auction two years ago? Unless it was on two wheels and not running, you probably would keep it and sell it. So none of those cars went to auction. So we saw a massive reduction in off-lease volume, but it's slowly starting to come back as inventory comes back.
I think we're seeing also more demand for transport in general as the EV maker's ramp up production.
我认为随着电动车制造商生产规模的扩大,我们也会看到对交通需求的增加。
So you mentioned leading indicators. I actually wrote this out on my notes. You're transporting, you're obviously ahead of the consumer here. What are you seeing right now? What is the data telling you in terms of transport? What are you seeing?
Yeah. So I think this is a pretty common knowledge. We're seeing a pretty big uptick in repo possessions. Really? And yes, that's sort of the partners that you're working with that lenders or whatever, you're just doing serving more business for them.
Yeah. So as a car goes from repo yard to an auction, we're moving those for a lot of lenders. We're coordinating when the car is available, we're coordinating to taking it to the auction. So we're seeing a dramatic uptick there.
What do you say dramatic uptick? Can you put some numbers behind that?
你在说戏剧性的增长吗?能给出一些具体数字吗?
Yeah. I think this is just for the business that we do. We're seeing it grow about 5% every month.
是的,我认为这只是我们所做的业务而已。我们每个月都能看到它以大约5%的速度增长。
Wow. Yeah. And is there specific regions or is this nationwide? It's nationwide, right?
哇,是的。那有具体的地区吗?还是全国范围内的?应该是全国范围的,对吗?
We can't tell, sometimes the car ends up at a yard that might not need to close to where it was originated from. So it's all over the United States, but we're seeing that continually grow and seeing more demand for it. We're also seeing more interest from customers that we don't have wanting to talk to us because it's a difficult business. You have to pick up the car from a yard and you have to make sure it's operable, you can make sure there's keys and then take it to the auction for sale. So we're seeing that's one of the most interesting things we're seeing.
We're also seeing dealers, individual dealers, sell more highline cars outside of their PMA. And what do I mean by that? It used to be for a couple of years, you put anything nice on the show a lot, you had 1, 2% interest, 3% interest, there was this craze, it was gone, it was sold. Now we're seeing a little bit more, and I don't have a hard information, but Anna Dohl, I'm saying, hey, that car just got shipped to states. It's a $100,000 car. This car is being shipped over there. This car is being shipped over there. It's not as easy to find the buyer just to walk in the showroom floor.
Yeah, and it makes sense, right? I'm paying more interest. Let me dispose of this car anywhere, even at a lower price, even if it's out of state, if I have to maybe subsidize shipping, just so I can get it off my books and move the metal. Well, if you have a $100,000 car, you're thinking about your flooring costs and you think about the risk there, what's maybe $1,500 to send it six, seven states away? That makes a little sense. Yeah, so we're seeing that. Wow.
Now, and then in terms of just broader demand, what are you seeing there? Are you seeing that your demand versus last year is it growing, declining? How are you seeing that?
Yeah, so in 2021, 2022, we grew 100% over a year for two years in a row. A little. We're seeing pretty good growth this year, not at that same scale. We'll probably see 100% growth next year and beyond that.
I think what's happening is you have this notion, you have this reduction in driver base. A lot of them have left the business during COVID. You don't have as many young people going in, so you need to have better optimization tools. You're also seeing more as EVs come on. So whether it's Rivian, or whether it's Fisker, obviously Tesla, Lucid, they are taking up more transportation because they have more deliveries to people's homes too. They also have more deliveries that they pick up cars and taking different locations. So you're seeing.
So they're working with you for transport? A few of them are. Yeah. Because we do a lot of the home deliveries. So you're saying that you're saying that pretty much the whole direct-to-consumer model is great for your business, especially when these players use you. Yeah. It's really good for our business. I think it's good for the OEM as well. There's a good experience. People like getting their new car delivered to their home. They like having that experience. So it works out really well. But that's also taking up capacity. You're now adding this to an industry that's already challenged with delivering cars. You're now you're adding all these home deliveries on top of it. And that's an expectation.
We also have to think about the demographics. The younger people get more involved in car buying. They might buy a car that gets over in the house. They might use a subscription model. You're talking to Scott at autonomy. We move for autonomy's cars. So there's subscription models that also take up transportation because those cars get shipped to the person's house or they get moved around the US as well. So we're seeing the market grow as well.
I think there's enough transporters. There's probably a couple of pockets of geography that maybe there might not be enough. What I do think is we've got to do a better job of optimizing. I say this. You and I fly around a lot. I'm getting on a plane later today. Those planes are always full. They come back full. They never stop unless they're waiting for a crew.
But if we go transport truck drivers and automobiles, some of the hardest working people keep their trucks full. Give them the loads that they need to. When they're driving back, don't let them drive back empty if they don't want to. Fill their trucks. If they can take nine cars, give them nine cars. So how do you do that? What's the secret sauce here?
So one of the things that we really focused on is this optimization. I think in actually we've been able to map the routes of drivers. We can see where they're going at any time. It's anonymized. We don't really know. It's not for tracking purposes. But we have the ability in the app to say, hey, they're buzzing in the app. There's a car 25 miles to the left of you that's going the same direction you are going. It's going to pay $300 if you pick it up right now. We see that you generally drive down 95 from Florida, New York. And we happen to have a car just off 95 right now. Would you like it? We do that at scale. We do that across the United States. That's been kind of one of our biggest value as we also are working right now on you will probably announce it internally in a couple of weeks with chat GBD4 and AI.
We collect all this data. So now we're able to say, this is the right transporter for this job programmatically. When what would make our transporter right? Is it just like the most profitable, the most efficient? Where it is, right? So here's the hard to say. I don't know. So you take Uber freight. You take Conway for the most part, right? But we're even Uber left. You have short runs or you know you're going between two major destinations. If you're going to ship a car tomorrow, I don't know where you're going to ship it to till I get the order. So it's extremely difficult. If you decide to ship it to Topeka, Kansas, we'll do it.
Try to find someone to take a 5,000 pound car. You want it gone in the next couple of days. Gonsafely registered drive through the heartland of the US. It's difficult. Right. There's guys that do it, but you need to know how to find them.
What's the biggest challenge facing Runbagi over the next couple of years? I think one of the thing is continuing the scale, right? It is, we're taking on more and more more miracles. So today, we do B2B, B2C, C2B, and C2C. We're also starting with several companies, something that she called just sticks. So as an organization, we think we're the only transportation company that covers the entire gamut. What I mean, we do home deliveries, right? We do home pickups. We do finished vehicle justice. It's building software that's extensible and scalable for all of them, whether you're the largest OEM in the world or whether you're an individual that just is going to go on a long vacation, what's the name of your car with you? Same platform.
But what percentage of your business is just consumers? The consumer business is growing and not in terms of events, but in terms of dollars, because the average consumer move we have is about $1,200. The average off-lease refund move we have is about $300. And so you have almost four to one ratio that you have. So my guess there is that why is that though? Is it because the auction, the repo just goes right to an auction that's very close to it local? Are you going to ship your car 150 miles? No, you probably drive it. You're going to get someone to drive it. You might drive and take an Uber back even, right? Are you going to ship your car from Pittsburgh to California? There's a good chance you might. Got it.
So that's that like inflection point where a consumer says, hey, I'll use transport. It happens to be a higher ticket item. It's almost inverse for everyone else saying, hey, we're going to sell it within our area. We're going to take it to the closest auction. Why would we move it? Although that is happening a little bit because, going back to the case of the forerunner, a salt-free California forerunner might be worth more in your area than it is in California. Right. So we're seeing some people do that because if you can have instant value or instant buying and we do instant guarantee pricing on transportation, you know exactly the price.
Would you say instant guarantee pricing? So you tell me right away how much I'm going to pay and you haven't confirmed it yet on your end? Yes. We've done enough math, right? Enough research. Yeah. We instantly price and we guarantee it. We won't change it on you. That's good. So it can be an oversized car. It can be a motorcycle. It can be an AEV. Yeah. My assumption is that the variance there is probably not that great. So the customer experience benefits definitely outweigh the potential costs. Yeah. It seems like it makes sense.
Sometimes we mess up, right? Because it's any address to any address and that goes to the database and we take a look at it and we refactor that price. Incredible. So I mean thinking like five, 10 years out, right? Where is Run buggy? What does this look like? Yeah. So look, I think one of my goals or investors' goal, the team's goal, right, is we really want to create a recognized brand about a lot of shipping. You know, I don't look, I don't think, you know, wherever we're going to be a brand that people are, hey, sitting on the coffee table talk about, what did you use to ship your car, right? But, you know, I think there is a need for a major brand that does most of the shipping, right?
I also think that transporters and the guys that move and gals that move the cars, they deserve to have a really good app. They deserve to get paid quickly, deserve to get paid a fair wage. They deserve all this, right? I think they're some of the hardest working people. We want to kind of extend that commonality, right? One of the things that we're doing, and I think this is part of our five-year plans, we also have software that we sell now. So in November of last year, we launched a product called Hitch, which is our transfer management system, right? That means, you know, what we said, we took a step back and we said, hey, all this software we built, just task management and workflow, why not we just give it to someone else too? Because it's built really for scale. You really are the spiffy of auto-transporter. It's exactly what's coming up. Oh, I listened to your podcast to look, hey, what should I do next? I love it. I mean, it makes sense. You build all this great technology. Well, great. Let me license it or leverage it in other ways. And the neat part is when we license it, they're still using the Rumbag. Yeah, but they're using it for their own assets. So they have their own drivers, maybe their own valet, their own porters, right? They're putting them on there. We've got 1,000 rooftops in the pipeline. We have the largest, not Mineheim, but the other largest-considered option footprint in North America that's rolling it out right now. We'll be also putting out a press release for a company in UK and Ireland, and we'll have opportunities in Mexico and Canada as well. We're playing an IPO? Not yet. Yeah. Fair enough.
I think even though there's still a lot to be done, the market is still massive. I think, I guess we're excited about 2024. I'm not sure if the pandemic was a wrinkle or a blessing in disguise yet. I think time will tell from a pure technology perspective. It's taught us a lot of lessons, and I think that's something we need to figure out.
I want to backtrack to one point you made. You mentioned just EVs, the impact of that. I had to go back. I had to go back. What you got? Yeah. It impacts our business in a positive way. It's not just about us. I think there's a positive message here. I think what's come out of it, people are accepting to have their car picked up or delivered to wherever they choose, whether it's their home, like you said, rightly. It's about convenience or time.
There is a realization though from some of these pure EV players that, hey, when a car does break down, you have to take it somewhere. In the case of some of them outside of Tesla, they don't have a lot of service centers yet. It has to be towed. They also have to have, they don't have the dealer lots. The dealers do a phenomenal job of storing cars and holding cars. Where do you put sometimes the inventory as you're building it? That means more shifting and quicker shifting in marshal yards. From our perspective, it has a positive impact.
I do think EV adoption is going to grow from what we see. We see people always very excited. I personally drive an R1T. I've had it for about 14 months now. It's an amazing car. I'm a huge car guy. I can go on and on and on and on forever. At the same time, I always want to be like, hey, if something happens, where do I take it to? There is one facility about 20 miles north of me. I think there's going to be more need for specialized transport, quicker transport in the future. You don't have Rivian, Lucid, Fisker, then Fast locations all over the United States. Dude, you guys are going to be a massive company. Maybe. Not that you're not huge already, but it seems like a no-brainer.
This is what I referred to at the beginning when I said a simple idea, not actually the execution of it, but it's like food delivery, simple idea, DoorDash, Uber. Of course, let me hail a ride, simple idea. It's a simple idea is that when done right, when properly executed, brings so much value to the everyday person.
Yeah. I appreciate that. I think we keep focusing on it or I keep focusing on it. I want to make it as much as possible and easy and relatively enjoyable task. No one enjoys shipping their car, but let's make it something that we don't have to think twice about. It doesn't matter who I am. If I'm an OEM, if I'm an individual, if I'm buying my dream car off of an auction site, just type in address to from just like we do with Uber. We take it for granted. Is a truck in a shelf in five minutes? Absolutely not. He might be there in a couple days or a day depending on the route. Let's make it easy. Let's make it what we're used to.
I think you guys, the more you think about it, the more you have a similar problem as dealers, which is a challenge. The average person buys one car every four to six years, something along those lines. You sort of have to be there when they're ready. It's not like a non-discretionary purchase that I make every week or every month. You have to be there when they're ready to buy that car, when they're ready to transport it, you need to be top of mind one way or another. You've lost that business potentially for years.
That's a really good point. On the consumer side, we think it's about two million searches a year on how do I ship my car. It's pretty big. About a million private car shit. If you go to the lenders, they put out multi-year RFPs. One of the challenges in our business is participating in an RFP, winning that RFP, which can be a year sales cycle and then executing on the RFP. So for anyone in the audience that's not familiar with the corporate proposal process, these lenders put out RFP, request for proposal, fancy explainer of what I'm looking for. And you come in and say, hey, I'll offer the service at X price.
Yep, that's exactly right. We'll offer the service here as the insurance, here's our proposal, here's our pricing, here's our security, here's the legal-like, legally surrounded. So that's also very daunting for a startup. We've had RFPs and contracts, MSF, that are over 30 pages long. Because if you remember, a lender is a bank. So we're essentially integrating with a bank.
Incredible. Kevin, any closing thoughts? Any other things I didn't ask you that you think the audience should know? No, I think we covered quite a bit. I think the only thing that's kind of unique to us is we slightly separated our consumer brand. It's called Rumbuggy1. Right? It's at the Rumbuggy1.com.
Who's the mastermind behind all this branding work? I want to know. I want to meet this person. Yeah, I think our head of marketing like to say he is, but he's definitely influential. But one of the things I focused on as a leader is the senior team is the exact same senior team since day one. No one's left. We have no attrition. These guys, I value their input. They work hard. So it's usually a collaborative group. We get together a lot in person.
I think if I had to coach, which I've done in the past, anyone else doing a startup, focus on your team. Startups are fun and cool, but if you don't have the right team, it doesn't go anywhere. That's what it's all about. Sounds trite, but it's just the truth. It is. It is. Surround yourself. Surround yourself with guys like Steve Greenfield, who's on our advisory board and talk to guys like Brad Parker, Private Auto.
Yeah. I saw you guys just launched an integration with Private Auto. Yeah. I mean, literally, if I go down your podcast list and us, so you tell me who's next? I should charge you for the client list. You tell me who's next? I'll go talk to him, right? You'd be surprised. There's a couple on there that I probably shouldn't have mentioned that we're getting closer and closer to. Well, we got Brad Morgan from Morgan Auto Group next. So I think that's a nice book of business right there. Brad, if you're listening, we got a good one for you. Brad's a good guy.
I love it. That's great. Yeah. Alright, Kevin. I mean, last but not least, where can people learn more about you, Ron Boggie, anyone that's interested? Yeah. Reach out, you know, sort of LinkedIn, you reach out to me directly, runboggie.com or website. We are going to be at a ton of conferences coming up, right? We're actually, in my hometown, used car week, we're going to be a major sponsor there as well. And then, listen to this podcast and send it to your friends. I think you'll be surprised.
Well, maybe you won't be surprised, but I'm going to be doing a fireside chat with Steve Greenfield at used car week. I won't be there physically. I will be remotely. But nonetheless, I'm looking forward to it. It should be a very fun conversation. So that's my little surprise for this podcast that I haven't spoken about or announced yet. That's great. Well, we'll miss you. I think we've got a panel with Steve also. So, you know, we'll have to meet up in person then. Yeah, for sure.
Kevin, thanks so much for coming on. This was very interesting. I found it fascinating, especially the part about the leading indicators of the economy. I'm what you mentioned. Yeah, I think that's just, you know, that's info that you have access to that, you know, others don't, which I very fascinating. But thanks for sharing everything about Runbuggie. And just love to see what you guys are doing. Like I said, I have used it myself, you know, terrific experience. I actually bought my wife's car from the group that invested in you early on. And so that's how that all worked out. I did ship a car across the country. And it worked out really great. Now, thanks for the time. I appreciate the the opportunity and look forward to chatting more. Love it. We'll be in touch. Thanks. Bye. Bye. All right. Hope you enjoyed that episode. Please give the podcast a rating. Consider subscribing to the show and check the show notes for links to what we talked about. Thanks for tuning in. I'll see you guys next time.