I’ll be covering why I won’t be at the NADA Show this year! NADA Show is extremely popular and special, but with certain guidelines on what I can talk about, it makes me feel a bit quiet. 

I got an interesting letter in the mail, a letter from NADA and for those of you who don’t know, NADA is the National Auto Dealers Association. They have this annual NADA Show that I’ve talked about on the show and about what a nightmare it is. They told me not to talk about Tesla and other things that I had on my mind. Last time I did workshops there and I attended three of the four days that I did it, they were the worst, the rooms weren’t set up, and I didn’t hear a single ‘thank you’ while I was there!  

When you participate in their convention, you have to go through the unions .I spent close to $100,000 on a booth, getting all the people there and talking to those who were interested in me. Basically the last couple of times I attended NADA Show, the best way to describe it was not that you got a lot of business out of it. Moreover, it was vendor on vendor crime because it’s just other vendors pitching to other vendors. The bulk of it is that there aren’t a lot of decision-makers inside the Automotive Industry present. There were some, don’t get me wrong, but we could get to those decision makers on a Facebook Ad and be more successful that way.  

This is the first time I’ve ever been asked to speak at NADA Show because the other times that I did, I had to submit an application that goes in front of a jury where they choose who they want to speak at their event. 

But I would like to discuss what this letter says. The letter relays this message of , “On behalf of NADA Show, it’s a great pleasure to reach out to you and I’m extending a formal invitation for you to speak at our show in Vegas. Please tell us what you want to talk about and give us three options. We’ll pick one and you can speak.” 

However, let’s go through what I would speak about if I was going to speak. 

First one I was thinking about was Home Field Advantage.

Dealerships have Home Field Advantage, however, they lose 80% of their customers to aftermarket independents. They have a monopoly on cars on the sale of new cars, but they have yet to find a way to retain their customers. It’s just crazy and I like to talk about Home Field Advantage a lot because even though it should be an advantage, it’s also a disadvantage at the same time.  

Second topic was possibly about Leadership.  

Leadership has been very successful. I could do a thing on leadership that would blow their minds and if you want to learn more about My Laws of Leadership, it’s ready on my On Demand.  

My third topic would have been about Recruiting Technicians. 

If you can’t hire techs, you might as well close up shop because we can’t increase our sales. Our quality’s gonna be hurt. We’re gonna, it’s gonna hurt our retention. Dealerships depend on  having good Technicians and without it your business is doomed. My question to this idea of having a Technician shortage is what is it that makes us hold on to this belief, that is our demise?

Your conscious mind is in conflict with your subconscious and when you’re telling yourself you can’t do something, your subconscious is going to make that reality. Doing this leads to you confusing yourself and your subconscious is way stronger than your conscious mind. When you’re saying you can’t do something, you are literally just putting the brick on the gas, heading off the cliff. The best way to fix this is saying things like, “I’m gonna figure it out. I haven’t yet, but I have faith that it’s coming.” 

That’s what I always do to myself when I’m in a situation where it’s not going the way I want, I step back, take a breath, and try to make it happen. You gotta work harder and be smarter by training your subconscious and writing it down 50 times to impact your subconscious beliefs and change your reality. 

A monopoly that nobody’s been able to break. I know they make a ton of money off their convention, however, for the most part, NADA Show isn’t doing that much for the Automotive Industry. In fact, I think they’re hurting the Automotive Industry in a lot of ways. For example, when they told me not to speak about the Tesla thing, I found it utterly hilarious because their job at NADA is to guard the dealer body against situations like this.  

It’s a changing industry and there’ll be failures and successes, but the humility and the ability to create a culture of collaboration is not there at NADA whatsoever.  

Moreover, someone reached out to me to speak at one of their events and I agreed to go because he’s one of our favorite clients. I told them that I’ll do it for that amount they offered, but I asked them to make him look like a hero and tell the audience that it’s because of our relationship with him. I get this text from somebody from NADA Show that said, “Jeff Cowan never gets paid to speak at 20 groups” and that Jeff Cowan is polished and I’m rough around the edges. 

They don’t need to compare me to Jeff Cowan. I don’t think we’re competition in a sense because we’re doing something completely different. 

Jeff Cowan does Service Advisor training and we have advisor training, but our training revolves around the broader mission of the Automotive Industry. Jeff has always been nice to us and I don’t have anything to say about Jeff Cowan, but this guy from NADA says that I’m rough..? So as I’m in the middle of a chapter typing away furiously, I put down, 

Remember the guy from the NADA Show and the ‘rough comment’ that interrupted me with their stupidity.

I know it’s always a battle to go into a 20 Group and everybody’s talking about a variety of topics that essentially don’t matter. When I come into one of these events and I talk about profit and actual results, people are a little confused because they sit in those meetings and most of the time in NADA Show isn’t teaching their audiences profitability. If anything NADA Show is confusing the listeners. How many times do you get a Service Manager at NADA academy that comes in just confused and oblivious to the industry?  

Honestly, the truth is if somebody thinks I’m rough, it’s my fault. 

I’m allowing them to think I’m rough and I don’t blame them for thinking that I am kind of rough because I could be more charismatic. I could approach how I give off my energy in a different way. However, for the most part, the clients that we want out of 20 Group meetings are the clients that respond to results and if I went to 20 Group meetings and it was all fluff, as a result, I can’t hand a client over to a coach that doesn’t want to achieve results. Another thing that happens is the more popular we are, the more people want us because we’re popular. 

Not because they want results and that’s the thing we have to navigate because we are only going to have longevity as a company if we’re getting the correct clients with a drive for results.  

We work hard at focusing on customer retention and profitability. 

This isn’t always a trending topic in dealerships. When Service Departments have a Dealer, Service Advisor, or General manager that came up through sales and doesn’t understand the service department, it’s just a natural thing that holds companies back because they aren’t always that committed to Fixed Absorption and Profitability.

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