When I think about the value of the dealer network, I think mostly about service. You sell a car once, right? And then for years, you have to maintain that relationship through a service department. And so I think if there's OEMs that wanna try to go around dealers on the sale, they need to really and disintermediate dealers. They have to really think about how are we gonna satisfy that customer service needs long term.
What's up everyone? This is Car dealership guy. You're listening to the Car dealership guy 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. Darryl Cunningham is the CEO of Groupon Automotive, a publicly traded dealer group with 205 locations and more than $16 billion in annual revenue. In this conversation we discussed, that was obsessive focus on dealership parts and service, dealership incentives and what drives decisions, making record profits while balancing economic concerns, his favorite auto franchises right now and much more.
I have no words to describe this episode other than say it was a hell of a conversation and I absolutely love it.
我对这一集没有言语可以形容,除了说这是一场“超级棒”的对话,我绝对喜欢它。
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I've been with Group One, as you mentioned, CVG 13 years. I was on the OEM side my entire time before that and Group One was founded by three dealers that decided they wanted to roll up and go public and then grew from there. It was Texas and Oklahoma based at the time and then grew around the country buying different platforms in those early years. And then I joined in 2011. And my first job here was managing the stores and on the East Coast for Group One. We had about 50 dealerships from Boston to Georgia and North Florida that I was responsible for.
So I went from the OEM side and that was my first real retail job. And I had spent over 20 years in the OEM side and all of it was dealer facing, contacting dealers, calling on dealers, supporting dealers and managing a network. And then I went over to the retail side and what you realize going from the OEM side to the retail side is they're as vastly different as you can imagine. And I thought I knew how dealerships worked. I thought I knew, you know, it would be an easy lift, but honestly it was the toughest job I've ever had. And those first, especially the first three years, working through that, learning everything you need to know because when you're in an OEM, you don't have as much exposure to things like use cars, to things like F and I, certainly not as much depth in parts of services I needed at the time.
So, you know, given our business, it's a 5% margin business. And I talk about that a lot. You have to have every single department in the dealership working. And you can't afford just to care about new cars. And honestly, if you do, it's gonna be a short trip.
So that's how I got started and got into group one. And then I took over the western side of the US about six, seven years ago. And then I started to get some corporate responsibilities added to that. And I took over our Brazilian business when we owned that and managed that for a couple of years, right in the COVID actually. And then we sold that business a couple of years ago. And I became the COO a couple of years ago. And then when Errol Hesterberg retired last year, I was fortunate enough to be selected to be the CEO. So that's my career at Group 1 for the 13 years I've been.
For anyone on the OEM side, that's essentially listening to this, you know, the vehicle manufacturers, for anyone not familiar with industry lingo, you mentioned it was very different. Like what was the starkest differences for you going from OEM to the dealership side?
I think I probably didn't have an appreciation for how hard the teams in retail work. And, you know, managing customer expectations, managing, you know, the day-to-day environment of a retail store is very difficult and extremely dynamic. And the variables that you have to react to are endless. And some of them are controllable, some of them are uncontrollable. And it is the competitiveness of it was significantly higher than I really expected. And in a different dimension, to be honest with you, I just, it's just a very difficult job. And almost any position. And so I think that's why it's so important that you have to realize that you're only going to be as successful as your teams in the store feel like they can be successful. And our job to a great degree is to try to help them be successful.
Yeah, I always like to say it's, we're in an execution business. To say no 80% gross margin, this isn't software. No. So it's what you save is what you earn. No, that's right. And it's great when you're on the OEM side, sometimes you live in a world of power points and presentations and things like that. But when you're in a retail environment, you've got to take that stuff and be able to execute it with real customers and real co-workers and real partners and vendors and providers. And you've got to be able to execute that stuff. And it's a totally different challenge. And it's much more difficult to execute, I think, than at least I understood on the OEM side. And I considered myself to be a fairly successful, you know, on the manufacturer side. But it's a different, different, totally different environment.
On the topic of difficult and difficult execution, you have stores in the UK, you just mentioned you had stores in Brazil. Why venture so far and wide, you know, what was the driving force behind that? And then I guess on another token, why did you decide to divest from the Brazil operations?
Well, the growth, you know, our company wants to grow. And a lot of the things that we are good at in the US, we could apply in other countries. What are those things? Well, and just the management of dealerships and the management of capital and the application of capital allocation. The models are similar enough where you can do that. It gives you another avenue to grow it. And so we went to the UK first in 2014, just about to hit 10 years there. And very small, three BMW dealerships. And then grew from there. We now have 55 dealerships in the UK. And then in Brazil, we entered that market again as another growth lever for Group One. And we had a fabulous partner. The dealer group that we bought, actually, the principal is still on our board and he's a terrific contributor. And we still have a wonderful relationship, obviously. But we went into Brazil and actually our, we achieved all of our assumptions in terms of our pro forma revenues and gross profits.
But the exchange rate worked against us for the entire time we were there. When we went in, the exchange rate was two and a half A.I. to the dollar or two A.I. to the dollar and we left. It was five A.I. to the dollar. So effectively you have to work two and a half times as hard to generate the same dollar. And so while Brazil was never as big a drain on our businesses, I think the investment community thought it was, we didn't see a path to where we could make it a meaningful part of Group One. It was still only three or four percent of the company. So we thought our, you know, applying our capital and our people to other efforts is probably a smarter use. So we exited a couple of years ago.
然而,整个时间我们在那里的时候,汇率一直对我们不利。当我们进入该国时,汇率是两个半 A.I. 兑一美元,或者两个 A.I. 兑一美元,而当我们离开时,汇率变成了五个 A.I. 兑一美元。因此,要达到相同的美元金额,你需要付出两倍半的努力。尽管巴西从未给我们的业务造成过太大的负担,但我认为投资界对此持有这种观点,我们没有看到能够使其成为 Group One 公司中的一个重要组成部分的机会。它仍然只占了公司的三到四个百分点。因此,我们认为将我们的资本和人力资源投入到其他项目可能是更明智的选择。因此,我们在几年前退出了这个市场。
With respect to Brazil, UK specifically, do open points still exist? Could you just start up a dealership still at your scale? Or I mean, these are clearly all acquisitions, everything you're referring to here. The markets, the opportunities into those markets, is that something that you would have ever considered or strictly acquisitions?
Let's go for something that's proven, something that's already operating. Well, in Brazil and the UK, you generally have a market area that you're assigned and then you will agree with the OEM, where the dealerships should go in that market area. And so there are times when you might move a showroom or move a service outlet or open a dealership in your market area. And you do that in concert with the OEM.
In the US, you're awarded a point at a specific address. And so while we love open points, most of the OEMs are not awarding open points these days. As a matter of fact, I think some of them are looking at how they can reduce their dealer count. You're seeing that with some of them buying out dealers and you're seeing some of that. I met with an OEM yesterday. Their store count has dropped about 40% in the last 10 years. And that's what they wanted to know. Can you tell us what you met with us? No. No. Are they at the best? No. But they're much healthier brand today. What they realized I think has got us the value and the power of this network. And for them to be successful, we've got to get the throughput to a point that they can be successful. Again, we're at a 5% margin business. If you're over dealer, that's not a recipe for success.
You know, you want your network, you want your dealers to invest in facilities. You want them to invest and be an aggressive in the marketplace. You don't invest in the best people. They can possibly hire. You want them to invest in the community. And if they're constantly fighting with other dealers of the same brand and it's just eroding both of your profits, that those are dollars that you can't invest in places that can help grow that brand. And so this OEM was, I think, smart enough to realize that. And they judiciously worked on that over a period of years. And I think today their network is much healthier and their brand is much healthier. They combine that with some great products. It's not all the network, obviously. Their products are significantly better today. And I think the great OEMs, they realize there's power in their networks and they realize there's power in great partnerships and investment that your dealers are willing to make. And that was just one example.
Do you think this is consensus among OEMs? Again, just your hunch. You're clearly not in the minds of every OEM. But or do you think that there's some OEMs there that are sort of taking the opposite approach trying to grow their dealer network? No, I think there's, I think there's, I don't think all the OEMs have the same appreciation for their dealer network. I think there's some that have a place high value on their dealer networks. And I think you can go look at the NADAD dealer attitudes survey and the ones in the top third are the ones that are probably the ones of the best relationships through good times and bad. I mean, dealers get it. Things are gonna get tough and you gotta do some things sometimes that are hard decisions. But with your OEM partners right there with you to help you do that.
And I don't think principally as dealers, we cannot expect, you know, state laws to save us or politicians to save us and think that makes us competitive against the Teslas of the world or against OEMs or something like that. At the end of the day, dealers have to do be great partners to their OEMs and they've gotta be great with their customers. They've gotta be, they've gotta provide their customers high value service and they've gotta be a place of choice that customers would want to do business. We can't expect and sit around and wait for, you know, legislation that's gonna protect us from the evils in the world. We've gotta remember, we gotta be competitive. We've gotta fill a customer need. We've gotta be able to do it better than anybody else. So I'm, and I think there's OEMs that realize that, wanna help support the network in doing that and they put their efforts that way. And I think those are the ones that generally are the most successful.
What does that mean to you though? When you say great partner, great customer service, what does that actually mean to you? And do you feel like all this kind of anti-dealer sentiment, pro-direct to consumer, do you feel like that's allowed minority or do you feel like that's, you know, a growing majority, like within, with the consumer base? How do you think about that? If I understand your question correctly, I think more OEMs are, that number of OEMs is growing. I think they see the value in their network. I think they're trying to be more selective about who they have in their network. And I believe their standards are higher, but I think if you're able to meet those standards, it can be a great partnership. And they won't have programs as an example that are corrosive, that promote competition between dealerships, that have these sort of programs that, you know, drive you to the lowest possible denominator on whether it's pricing or anything else that you're trying to do, because often that makes it an impossible environment for our teams to be successful.
If a salesperson comes to a desk, the desk, and today, you know, we can sell this car at $20,000, and then tomorrow we have to sell it at $24,000, because of some, you know, crazy incentive program that just because the calendar flipped over one day, you know, how does that salesperson make that a long-term career? I mean, how does a sales, a desk manager be credible with this sales team in that kind of environment? How do we stay credible with our customers in that kind of an environment when you do these artificial things that generally are corrosive? And so I don't, I understand being competitive and the need to have aggressive incentives and things like that in the marketplace, but sometimes I think what you end up with is your dealers just fighting each other, and you drive a real negative environment in the dealerships which reflects poorly on the brand.
Explain to us though, when you say cars being sold for $20,000, the next day you have to sell for $24,000, because of an incentive was launched, what does that, how does it mechanically, how does that actually work? Well, if there's a program that's ending at the end of the month that has some giant stair step in it based on hitting some volume, you know, but. So some volume target for the dealer? Yeah, I'm not opposed to aggressive volume targets, but when you make the price dynamics, so artificially crazy, you know, that today this bottle of water is $20,000 and tomorrow, it's $24,000 because the incentive numbers changed or because the program changed and you're starting over the next morning just because the calendar flipped. It's not because there was any change in the marketplace or anything else. Now, thankfully today we don't have a lot of that because supply is still on a historical basis. You know, relatively low. And you know, but you saw some crazy stuff like that leading up to COVID. And I just think it's a great chance for a lot of the OEMs to reset and try not to go back down that road. And some of them will be able to, some of them all depends on their discipline on production.
Any favorite brands or opportunities nowadays that you're looking at? Well, I think if you were to go look at, you know, we have 50 BMW dealerships around the world and you know, terrific brand, great partners, Mercedes-Benz, a great partner for us. Audi's a fabulous partner here and in the UK. Toyota's a terrific partner, Subaru's a terrific partner, Honda's a terrific partner, Mazda's a great partner. We don't have much Mazda, but they're terrific partners as well. So, you know, there's a bunch of them that are really good and I'm leaving somehow. That's not an exclusive list. But those are brands that, you know, if you were to look at the Group 1 portfolio, you'd see a lot of those brands in our portfolio. And, you know, we love growing with those kind of brands. And, you know, so I'm not trying to be exclusive, but those are some really good ones.
Do you have any worries about manufacturers side stepping, the franchise laws, you know, anything like that? And if so, are you doing anything about it? How do you think about that?
When I think about the value of the dealer network, I think mostly about service. You sell a car once, right? And then for years, you have to maintain that relationship through a service department. And so I think if there's OEMs that want to try to go around dealers on the sale, they need to really and just intermediate dealers. They have to really think about how are we going to satisfy that customer service needs long term? And how are we going to manage through that? And I think that's the real value in the future that dealers provide is, you know, we're all fighting to make as much profit as you can. Obviously, that's, you know, it's free enterprise. But at the end of the day, you know, people still buy their, we still buy our cars for the same price as the dealer down the street does from the OEM. And what we're selling is the same thing. And our ability to differentiate in service is a significant opportunity, I think.
I think the OEM, how are you differentiating there? Our service model is we want to be available for customers when and whenever and however they want. And so we as an example, we keep our schedules wide open in our service departments. We don't limit our schedules. We treat Monday through Saturday as full days, regular days in the industry. Typically Saturday is like oil change day or half day. We don't treat it that way at all. We also invest immediately every time we do an acquisition we see under investment in parts of service. And at Group 1, we call parts of service after sales. And so whether it's equipment that's broken or there's, a shop is not fully equipped, the staffing, the training, we, almost every single time we do an acquisition, we see under investment.
And, you know, when you think about our industry and you think about most dealers came up through the variable side of the business and that's where they're most comfortable and that's what made them successful. And I think as a result, it's left kind of an opportunity in fixed operations and parts of service. And so we invest heavily. We put lots of focus on technician recruitment, retention, trying to grow that. We try to invest in the technology that it takes to be successful. And we want to be, you know, in the world today, there's not enough technicians and there won't be for years and years in the future. And so you must invest in your team and the shops and you must give them the best opportunity to be successful. And in our minds, that's great work schedules, a great pay, their shops are properly equipped and they have the best opportunity to drive volume that they can. So we invest heavily to do that. And so for us, and it's perpetual, it never ends. I mean, we are continually trying to challenge ourselves. How do we reach more customers through after sales? How do we drive more productivity through our shops? How do we invest more in our shops?
Generally, we will over-build shops and when we're doing new dealerships, you know, we spend a lot of money building new dealerships. We have over 50 projects in process right now. And I can tell you the vast majority of those involve more after sales capacity. And you not just have to add the capacity in the building, you've got to staff it. That's the hardest part is staffing.
So, well, when you say you're over-building, right? Are you anticipating just growing surveys, maybe people keeping their cars even longer into the future? Right? Like where is that demand going to come from? Ultimately.
Well, I think there's so much demand that's untapped today. It's just unbelievable. You know, we think we're pretty good at retention and we still only retain about two thirds of our customers over the life of the vehicle. So there's a third of our customer base that's out there getting their car service somewhere else. And then when you look at the amount of work that's declined, you know, we do an inspection like a lot of dealers do. We do an inspection on every car that comes into our dealerships. And when you look at the amount of work that's declined every month, it's millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars that, you know, we're not able to capture that is coming through our lanes already. And then when you look at what's, I'm just sorry, quick question. What's the reasoning for that? Is that driven by price or do you have any more specific data?
Well, I think some of it is, you know, certainly could be price. You know, they're already in the store spending money on something and, you know, maybe they want to put something off and, you know, we've got to give a credible presentation. They've got to see us as somebody who's, you know, not just trying to jam something on them that, you know, we want to see them in the next two or three and four service intervals that they have as well. So, you know, I think some of it is that people have to make financial decisions all the time and trade offs. So I think what's critical for us is that we keep communicating with them about whatever those opportunities are on the next service and the service after that and the service after that. And we do that intelligently and we do that, you know, on their terms. And so we try to do that.
We still have a lot of opportunity. But, and then, you know, you talk about after sales opportunity in the future, you know, the age of the connected car is here and our ability to anticipate service needs is here. And our ability to reach out to customers before they know they need services here. And how do you leverage that? How do you maximize those opportunities in the future? And so when I look at our after sales business, I just even with EVs, no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are, I see nothing but opportunity. And some of it's because there's under investment in that sector. Some of it is because I just see so much more that's out there.
And so our company, it's the, our after sales group. We have more people in our parts of service team than we do any other team. And it corporately and in the field and needless to say in the shop, in the stores, but we invest heavily in after sales. We're just big believers in it. We feel like that's where a lot of our value comes as a deal. Digging in a bit more specifically, is there anything special in the software or hardware side that you're investing in that you say maybe is not so common right now in the industry? Any specific areas you're looking into?
Well, we're using some AI to try to reach customers at service intervals that make sense to them. And so we've used that in the third quarter. We generated about 10,000, a little less than 10,000 service appointments out of that activity. We're continuing to try that. We have a customer data platform that we've invested in that gives us access to first party data that we can use to try to understand what customer needs are. Not only at their, the vehicle level, but also at their household level. And in many of our markets, we have a number of dealerships in Houston. We have 18 dealerships in Boston. We have 29 dealerships in Oklahoma City. We have 10 dealerships. So, we're able to satisfy the needs of households and families across a number of brands. We wanna be able to do that for them. So those are things that we're thinking about. And as we get into, how can we fill more of those customer needs and meet the needs of customers on their terms, that's what we try to do. And that's what we're investing.
So shifting from AI to Flintstones. We have some stores in urban environments. What's your philosophy on pickup and delivery for service?
所以,我们要从人工智能转向弗林特斯通计划。我们在城市环境中有一些商店。你对接送服务有什么理念呢?
Look, I'm dealing with this right now. My wife has had to take this car to get frickin' serviced at the dealer for like three weeks and it's still not done. And so we're working on it. But what's your philosophy on pickup and delivery? Pick up and delivery I think is a healthy thing. I think it's always, it's hard to execute. And it's hard to execute because, which customers do you do it for? Which ones don't you do it for? How do you say no to certain customers, yes to other customers? You know, and if you say yes to every customer, then how do you manage that and control that? Because, you know, am I gonna go pick up cars that are 50 miles away just for an oil change? And, you know, how do you possibly staff that, manage that? So those are all things that we are playing with, toying with that. Generally, I think pickup and delivery is a good thing. It's a customer convenience. I mean, I would pay extra for it to be, you know, to be frank like, and I'm sure many consumers that, you know, value their time or at a certain level would gladly pay extra to have their car picked up and delivered. I think you're right. And I think, you know, today's customer time, to many of them, time is more valuable to them than money. And so I think that's an opportunity for us.
So I don't, you didn't ask this, but one place I don't see at least today is opportunity and mobile service.
所以,你没有问这个,但是我今天至少没有看到的一个地方是机会和移动服务。
Interesting. AutoNation had that big acquisition. No, they did. And here's why. I don't debate that it can extend your brand and extend your reach. And maybe reach customers you wouldn't have otherwise gotten. But when I think about the industry, and I think about the shortage of technicians that we have, if you wanna try to impact as many customers as possible, the best place to do that, and the best way to do that is to put a tech in your shop with the right equipment, the right tools, the productivity they need, the parts that they need, you know, they can touch far more customers in a shop, in a stall in a shop than they can in a van on the road.
And then there's just by its nature, there are going to be certain repairs they cannot do out when they're on the road. And those cars are gonna end up in your shop anyway. So we're not investing in mobile service on our own. There's some brands that want us to be in the mobile service business, and we're supporting that based on their brand promise. But honestly, that's not something that we see. We see more opportunity, more ability to impact more customers by investing in our own dealerships, and doing things like, you mentioned pickup and delivery. I mean, to me, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think putting my consumer hat on, I think I would opt for that. That would be definitely my first choice, to just have the vehicle pickup dropped off of the dealership for service at a shop.
I think there's also an element of just peace of mind. You know, I don't know if I want someone in my driveway getting too deep into that car. Look, a detail is one thing, that's simple, and I'm much less worried about that. But yeah, I think getting mechanical, I would definitely opt in for having that car to deal with shipping, but picked up and delivered, that would be huge value out for me.
Tell me more about just expansion, and what do you look for in new acquisitions, sort of like, what is your formula for finding value? It's clear to me that, you mentioned several times, fixed stops being under invested in, that's, I'm gonna go with a big one, but if you can expand on that, or just give us some other things that you're looking for.
You know, we're in a 5% margin business, and in the future, I think more than ever, I think scale matters, and I think your ability to leverage your operations matters a lot in the future. So we look for larger revenue rooftop stores, great brands, if we can buy a cluster of stores, we always have better results. When we have a cluster of stores, we can service customers better, we can grow our talent better, you can give people more opportunities across brands. To grow their careers when we have clusters, and we can leverage some of our costs better when we have clusters. So we like clusters. Now, you'll look at the Group 1 map, and you'll see, hey, you have a store in Pensacola, Florida, that's kind of on its own. You know, that doesn't really fit your cluster strategy. Well, no, it doesn't necessarily, but we have some great stores, there's some great locations, there's no reason not to have them. If we could build around that store in Pensacola, gosh, we'd love to do that. You know, and we'd love to be able to do that. So those are what we look for, higher revenue rooftop, underinvestment, after sales, and ability to grow in clusters. And then, you know, the right brands are important. We want to be great partners to the OEMs, and then we want them to see us as great partners to them too. We've got to deliver, you know, at the end of the day, we've got to perform, and we've got to deliver on the metrics that are important to the OEMs, which usually comes down to market share and customer service, honestly. At the end of the day, we kind of got to get on those two things.
I'm not going to ask you to name names, but are there specific franchises that you're staying away from? Right now, you know, you're deliberately like, I am, we're not going to buy X, Y, and Z brand for whatever reason. Do you have that right now going on? Yeah, not many, but there's a few. Yeah, now sometimes, if you're looking at a group of stores, you know, one or two of those brands might be in there, but there's others that if there's too many of those brands in that group of stores will stay away from the acquisition. And we have.
How do you think about, you know, I'm putting my marketing hat on now. You make an acquisition, it's not a luxury store where, you know, BMW, have Pensacola or whatever. It's going to be a local name versus you rebranding it. Like some of the larger groups do where they put their name on it of their brand. So how do you think about that distinction of rebranding a store to fit your unified brand versus, you know, the model you've taken, which is, you know, retain, retain a local name, what's your thoughts?
We've thought a lot about that. We don't have a national brand. Well, that's a good start. No, it's a great question. And it's a great question. We don't have a national name in the United States. In our dealerships in the UK, we have 55 stores in the UK. They are all called Group One, all of them. And that change just happened last year. Now, most of those stores are clustered around London. And so it's, you know, we're a dealer group, basically in one Metro in England. And so there's some leverage in us having those stores all called the same. Before we rebranded them, we had about 15 different names. So just from an awareness perspective, we didn't get any advantage. And so now that they're called Group One, at least we have some advertising scale in that local market. I believe generally the new card business is local. It's not national. I don't think the OEMs will allow it to be national or dealers to be national. You know, we're evaluated based on how we do locally. How do you service customers locally? How much market share do you drive locally? If I were to rebrand, if we were to rebrand all of our stores with a vision that we want to be a national network and we will ship cars everywhere, what that starts to look like is a different business model to me. What, you know, again, we're in a 5% margin business. It takes new cars, F&I, use cars, parts, service, collision to work. And when you ship cars, new cars all over the place to try to satisfy the, meet the vision that we're a national brand, you lose five of six or at least four of six of those revenue streams. And you can't service those customers, retain those customers. So to me, our business is about being driving scale on a local basis. And so that's how we try to drive it. And that goes for branding. And that goes for just the way we operate. But we've looked at the branding a number of times and we'll continue to look at it. You know, ultimately at the end of the day, customers, you will do business with the dealership closest to them. And if you can fulfill their needs, well, you'll own that customer no matter what the name of your dealership is.
So your branding is decentralized. How do your processes work, your systems? By the way, this was asked by several people. You know, we posted on LinkedIn on X, several people asked about how you actually operate. Are your processes, your systems, is that decentralized as well?
We try to centralize the things that don't impact customers, if that makes sense. So when you look at our DMS, we have the same DMS across the US. When you- What DMS is that? CDK. And- Oh, they're a partner of the podcast. Shout out, CDK. Yeah, yeah, they've been a longtime partner, a group one. And so a lot of our technology, we want to, you know, scale that because it's so expensive and can get, it's easier to manage that way. And then, so, you know, our accounting system is the same across the country. You know, we have the same legal team, we have the same IT infrastructure, everything else. You know, there's a thousand decisions that have to get made inside a dealership every day. And whether it's about hiring somebody or appraising a used car, or, you know, some goodwill decision and service that a service manager has to make. And we can't control those decisions from Houston, Texas, honestly. We have to hire and pay people in those markets to be able to do those. And we have to be able to make judgment calls on all of those kind of strategic decisions that impact customers every single day. And so we try to let our stores do that. You know, we want support in place to help them make good decisions and to try to develop them and grow their skills in those areas. But honestly, we don't try to make every decision for a store, because we know we possibly can't do that.
You're hired competence, smart operators, and let them make those decisions on a local basis. Yeah, our turnover in our GMs is 8.8%. And we're proud of it. How does that compare? It's low. And we're proud of that. We don't, we want, we want general managers that are leaders and run their businesses. And, you know, we pay them like, you know, like the rest of the marketplace gets paid. We can't expect just because we're group one or we're a big consolidator that somehow we can afford to pay people less and have them do the same job. I mean, we compete for talent with everybody else in our industry. The public's only own 8% of the volume in the industry.
So it's not like we've cornered the market on anything. And so we can't dictate compensation anymore than we can anything else in the marketplace. So we have to be competitive with our pay. We have to be competitive with wages and with schedules and everything else. So if you were to go look at our pay plans for our teams, you would see they're remarkably similar to what the private capital pays or some of the anybody we compete with out there.
You mentioned that you believe that there's power in being bigger. So I think my biggest, my biggest question is, how do you reconcile that with the idea of remaining decentralized brand and being a local community branded dealership? Are you referring mostly just to the embedded operating leverage economies of scale with being a big dealer group? But when it comes to marketing, strictly staying local, is that how you think about it?
Yeah, I mean, there's still, the corporate office, we've got about 140 people here. If we were to go add 15 dealerships tomorrow, we wouldn't grow a corporate office headcount by 10%. I mean, it might grow a little bit here or there, but you can scale some of your fixed costs over a larger revenue base. And we don't want revenue just for the sake of revenue. We don't believe that, if we did, we would be a lot bigger than we are today, revenue ones. We want the right revenue in the right places. It's intentional growth and something that, we try to play the long game in every single thing we do. We want to integrate these stores well. We're partners in the community as soon as we buy a dealership there and we try to keep that in mind every time.
Look, you're clearly at a massive scale on a relative basis with the industry, but if you're a single point dealer, right, you're one dealership, you're listening to this podcast right now, maybe you have two. Do you believe that there's operating leverage and economies of scale if you go from one to three or one to four or do you think that it's more, this is more of a game where you go big, like one to 20 or you stay at one? Do you have a philosophy on that?
I think going from one to two to three to four, you'll get some. Cause on one hand, I think you go one to three, you're starting to add that corporate overhead, the drag, you're not really getting the leverage. And so to me, it feels like it's a, you're either going big or you're going to stay small and you got to pick and choose, but if you stay small, you're also in certain, you know, to a certain extent, disadvantaged, you know, adopting new technologies, improving processes, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, I know, I think so. I mean, I don't know if there's a magic rooftop number or revenue number or sales number or something, but yeah, I think there's not much difference between one and three or four or five. Then I think probably you get to 10, you're probably starting to get some scale on your corporate staffs, on your technology, on your investments, maybe facility, things like that. So those are, those are, and I think in the future that, you know, you look at, look at the investments that dealers are asked to make these days. Whether it's just in the physical facility, yeah, facilities are just, you know, unbelievably expensive to build. Cyber security risk is huge.
Every dealer in the country is at risk for a cyber attack or ransomware attack. Some dealers in the country have had them. Some in other countries have had them. And, you know, your investment there is big. The investment in your people, you know, people are less loyal these days. So, you know, they wanna, they don't necessarily look at going one place and that's my career. They tend to hop around more. Well, that can add cost to you as a business owner. And so, you know, how do you address those? So, there's a lot of things that dealers have to look at as costs that are coming at them, investments that are coming at them, that they're gonna have to make. And then I think they have to really consider in our 5% margin business, how am I gonna be able to digest that and leverage that moving forward? And there's a lot of really great dealers. I mean, honestly, some awesome. And I learned something from them every day. So, but those are the things. If I were sitting here back to your question and I had one or two stores and I'm thinking about what does the future look like, those are the things I'm thinking about.
You mentioned job turnover right now, right? A talent retention. So, I think another thought that goes to my mind is, as we're still kind of in this hangover period from 0% interest rates and just, you know, the money sloshing everywhere over the last couple of years. Are you seeing your, your just overall turnover with your staff rising now? If so, how are you combating that? Where are you on that scale? I expected it to rise. It's actually dropping a little bit, to be honest with you. Why is that? Well, you know, I wish I could say it was, you know, because we're smart and good looking, but it's, I'd like to think it's because we're investing in our team. We do engagement surveys with our team. We take them, you know, critically serious and what our work, we have a lot of opportunities for our employees to give us feedback. We think we're responsive. We try to be responsive. We make enhancements with benefits and insurance and savings plans and stock purchase plans. And we're continually evaluating and changing that. Just, just launch some changes here this week as a matter of fact. And so, you know, I'd like to think it's all of those things, but it's something we watch really, really closely. We wanna make sure that we never lose touch with that and what's important. Because honestly, again, this is a local business. We're only as good as how we can execute locally.
And so, if it doesn't matter if we have all the, all the brilliant people in our Houston corporate office thinking up all these great things, honestly, our teams in the stores aren't willing to or can't execute it or we've designed it in such a way that it's impossible. It doesn't matter. So, the value has to be driven from the outside in, not from the inside out.
I wanna shift gears to just macro and Stal look for the industry. You know, let's just start first. What's your take on, you know, the pricing pressure on cars, sort of us getting back to, you know, normalized depreciation schedule, you know, the impact of interest rates. How do you think about the overall outlook for car sales, the overall, you know, the overall car market?
Yeah, I don't think it's a secret, you know, affordability is a concern. And, you know, you're seeing it with the evaluations and use cars with some of the public data that's available these days. And it's definitely an issue out there. Interest rates, you know, inject cost into your business and in a lot of ways. And when you combine that with rising inventories, that puts pressure on businesses. And so, I think as that continues, that puts more pressure on dealers and on consumers ultimately. And so, you know, affordability is certainly something to pay attention to. And that's not just in the new and used car business. That's in parts of service.
One of the things we try to focus on is not just, you know, how much is our gross profit growing in service, but, you know, is our repair order count growing relative to our average repair order, either gross profit or effective labor rate. And we don't ever wanna grow, you know, just grow because our pricing is going up or because we're able to retain more gross because the environment happens to be favorable. We wanna grow the number of customers coming through our service drives. So it's equally as important to fixed operations as it is in sales. So that's what I see. And I see there's pressure there. And I think it'll get to me.
Yeah, what do you think is putting more pressure right now on affordability? Do you think it's inventories, supply shortage or interest rates?
是的,你认为现在对于购房能力造成更大压力的主要因素是什么?你认为是库存、供应短缺还是利率?
I think interest rates are certainly having impact and affordability on the issues that's creating for customers.
我认为利率对客户造成的影响和可负担性的问题是肯定存在的。
Yeah, I think the supply side, I believe most of the brands will be more disciplined in the long run with their supply. Where do you're saying the new vehicle supply?
是的,我认为供应方面,我相信大多数品牌在供应方面将更加谨慎。你在说新车的供应情况吗?
I believe so, yeah. There's a couple of them out there that have gone a little crazy. And I don't have to tell you who they are. You can look at the industry reports. But they star with an S and end with an S and then they don't have a telantis? Yeah. And it's, you know, some of those inventory levels are just, you know, sort of bewildering. And, but I do believe you saw even, you know, General Motors this summer, they closed a pickup plant for two months and for two weeks to try to just moderate their supply and the dealerships. And honestly, if we'd gone back four years ago, said, gosh, we got a 35 day supply of Silverados. We feel like we were starving when we were out. Well, today you get a 35 day supply of Silverados and, you know, General Motors is closing their plant for two weeks to try to, try to moderate. So, so they've seen the value of not stuffing the channel. And I think, you know, you're seeing discipline, more discipline for more OEMs on that. And I think ultimately that's a good thing.
And I think that one of the learnings through all of the supply chain issues the last couple of years was, you know, we can work with customers to deliver their cars, you know, how they want to and equip how they want to and in a timeframe that works for them without having, you know, all this pressure in the system because of a 90 day supply of cars sitting on dealer lots. And that is extra cost. And that's just a ton of extra complexity in the dealer network and in the channel that's unnecessary and absolutely, you know, just extremely wasteful.
What vehicles are you seeing right now? Like specifically, anything that is surprising to you that's still very low supply, right? In light of overall rising supply across the industry, what are you seeing there?
Well, on the new car side, you know, certainly, you know, the $20,000 car is rare. I mean, it's hard to find Toyota Corollas and Nissan Centres still low day supply those kind of lower price vehicles. Just right before I got on the air with you, I had a call from somebody looking for a Chevy Tahoe and we have a big Chevy store here in Houston. We have one Chevy Tahoe in stock today. And so even though there's inventory drive- I've been seeing that full size SUV is just unbelievable demands, tail to the set.
Yeah, no, just terrific. And you look at things like the Lexus TX, which is being launched now. It's super hot. The Toyota Sequoia is still super hot. And so even with these affordability issues that we just talked about, you know, there's still segments where it's not, it's we're not able to get enough inventory and enough balance. But so there's still, you know, some brands, some models that are still, you know, super tight, for sure.
What about, what about on the flip side? I mean, is there anything you're seeing that's cooling very quickly, faster than you would may have expected? You know, hard for me to say, I mean, you know, EVs is certainly something everyone's wrestling with. No secret there, you know, it's, it's, you see, you see a lot of the OEMs dialing back, their production plans, and you see the inventory levels of EVs are higher than, than ice vehicles. So yeah, that, that, that's probably the segment that you've seen cool the fastest, or at least not meet expectations, like, like people thought it would.
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't have access to your data, but what I think is that anecdotally, at least, from what I'm hearing that the full-size SUVs, right, these vehicles are, you know, they're desired by people that have money, and they may not necessarily need financing, right? It's just, you know, for them, they need the car. And so affordability, you know, maybe is less of a factor when you're making that type of purchase. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
All right, well, you posted a record, record profits last quarter, $4.6 billion. I believe that's up 10% year over year. Dealership stocks have done pretty well in the last four years, I think, to say the least. You think you can keep this train going? I mean, how are you thinking about the next three to five years? We're thinking about growth. We wanna grow the company. We wanna continue acquisitions that fit our ideal model. We wanna be great partners to our OEMs. You know, that's how we think about it. And we think there's still so much potential out there. I mean, we've taken our used car game up quite a bit in the last couple of years, three years, but there's still more opportunity there. Parts of service, we feel like that's really our strength as a company as parts of service.
But, you know, even today with all the growth we've had, we've had 10 straight quarters of double-digit customer pay growth, 10 straight quarters. And. Customer pay, you're referring to service. Service customer pay work, right? Yes, versus warranty work. Yeah. So that's when customers choose to come in and do business with this in service. So, you know, we've seen terrific growth there. And even with all that growth, we still see as much or more potential in the future on that as we have in the last two and a half years. And so, I don't. We see good things ahead. We see chances to invest for the long term.
And I think as OEMs look at the future, I think they're really looking hard at which dealers they grow with. And that's true in the UK and in the US, in our two markets. What we're seeing is those kinds of conversations are happening more frequently with OEMs. And so, I believe they'll. Like I said a little earlier, I think they'll be more selective about who they do business with and who they want representing them. We always want to be one of the ones that's on that list.
Very well said. Darryl Cunningham. Thanks so much for coming on. For anyone that's listening, that one's to learn more about Group 1, yourself, where can they go to find out more? Well, you know, Group1onomotive.com is a great place.
I want to thank you, CDG. It was terrific. I read your. I read X every day and follow you. And some of our analysts, you know, that we meet with, I met with one this morning, they quote you often. And you're a great source of insight to the industry. And I just want to encourage you, keep going and keep doing it because a lot of people. I love that. Really, really put a lot of stock in what you say because I think you have a lot of high credibility. So, congratulations to you. I appreciate it.