Wake up, Buy Here, Pay Here people. It's a beautiful day. Go grab yourself another cup of Joe and say hello to Jim and Michelle Rhodes on the Buy Here, Pay Here morning show. Take it away, you two. Hey, wake up. Buy here, pay here people. It's almost lunchtime in some parts. You know, it's almost lunchtime anywhere in the world at any time. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. It's still morning. It's still considered a.m. Yeah. Yeah. so welcome happy friday friends um a little bit uh of a lag with some of our hardware here so we apologize if there's any kind of a streaming issue today we think we're good we're gonna proceed we're gonna start telling our story for our yeah friday big big developments this week um a lot of things um that we've been working on for quite some time are taking shape. And so it was an opportunity for us to share some of those announcements and kind of give folks an idea of what's in store. You want to, you got stuff you want to kick off before we get into that? Sure. We, I, we spoke about this a few weeks ago that, you know, I stepped away for a while and, and stepping back in and just, I mentioned before that, that, that my, stepping in was going to be down the track of Buyer-Payer Nation Television slash the Institute, Buyer-Payer Institute. Well, we've got all the corporation documents filed and the important things done. And we will be starting the rebuild of the website. But I wanted to share with you all new logos, uh, Anna Marie Beck from Maria. I'm sorry. I, you know, it's like, I, my mother's name is Anna Marie. So, um, I, so she's been helping me with the new logo and she is turning it into a, um, a moving with, with, uh, audio for our, uh, broadcasts. Yeah. For like a stinger. Yeah. For the stinger. So, so, uh, just a big shout out to her. Thank you for, um, helping with that yeah and then you'll all be seeing within the next few weeks um a preliminary launch of the new platform with both nation television and um and i call it nation tv so um, nation television and the Institute, uh, and the one, because everything in the Institute is video. Right. And so it just kind of made sense that we would combine the two and create just a, a bigger platform. Um, obviously as you can see from the tagline, educate, equip, and empower. So we're really excited about that. That, uh, um, should have the stinger, probably be able to share it with y'all and maybe even have it on the morning show. intro, outro. So there's a lot of new things coming. Yeah, just a quick shout out for Anna Maria. You can find Anna Maria on Facebook at Anna Maria Beck and Digital Attention Online. So she's really great at this kind of thing. Yeah, we created Bahia Pia Nation Television how many years ago? Four or so. Yeah, four or so. And so it's kind of been our platform. Right. And it's time for a refresh and re- um relaunch the whole thing since we're going to be combining so that was just something that we're kind of excited all good yeah looking forward to that it's um so i think uh our tie-in to today's conversation as it relates to bhp nation tv is um we have um begun signing dealers into Oh, yeah, the White Hat Way AI over your shoulder. She's modeling the logo. Yeah, the logo for our AI launch and White Hat Way's AI. So folks who follow the podcast, especially our Wednesday broadcast, know that we've been working on AI. We've introduced AI personas and had them be part of our conversations on the podcast in the past. And so as we've been kind of working behind the scenes, I think the single biggest development we talked about um weeks ago was the the the development of the core dna for personas and i think it's really just it's about being foundational and it's about playing a long game and it's about solving some of the biggest problems that we see in the industry so we chose early on in development of ai to aim at the customer retention thing to aim at customer relations and sort of what we call advocacy. And so this is really about the way I've been saying it to our dealers is This is about creating a persona that dealers can trust to place with their customers. And it's going to do customer relations very well. And so we're excited about getting that out there. Yeah. Customer relations for it's, the biggest foundational piece. It's like building relationships and trust and teaching with all of the things that we've created under education, all of that. It's about the long game and it's about understanding that relationships with your customers are primary. And, you know, we... you see a lot in there like, you know, how do you improve collections? Well, this is how you slap the hand better. You know, this is how you create a system that it's harder for whatever. And this is not a collections thing. You haven't even really talked about what it is that is coming forward, the name of the thing. Maybe we talk about what it is and what it's not. So folks can get a look at... our initial offering by just visiting white hat way.ai. So we've got that domain and that website and there's a landing page there that kind of explains what the early warning product is. And it's a subscription. It's called an early warning system. Yeah. And so it's like after sales, And before collections has to get on anybody's behind about getting late. Yeah. So another way in between. Right. So it's another way, another way to think about, I've asked dealers to think about that. We talk a lot about this thing called ghosting. We've had podcasts on the subject of customers ghosting us. Right. And so if we think about that, The problem that dealers currently have in the buyer payer segment is they may have a customer who's been just fine. They paid just great for a long time. And then suddenly they just quit paying and there's no contact. There's no communication and the dealer ends up picking up the car and they have no idea what happened. And so if, if that for any dealer is one a year, if it's five a year, if it's ten a year, then when you can develop customer relations and make your customers better informed, more engaged, feel appreciated and respected as a customer. I think that's what most of us, if we just look at us from the consumer side, most any place we go, we like to be known and remembered and that the people we're doing business with appreciate our business. So this is what the advocacy does. Our early warning AI communicates with customers in a way that, you know, will it be perfect? I said with our dealers that it'll be what we want it to be because we won't release it until it is. Like we'll be working with some dealers to do this. And so I think this is the fun part of what is happening. So let me tell the part about the documentary, Michelle. Let me go into kind of what's happening with the documentary. So we had dealers enter into an LOI. They paid early dealers that are entering into agreements for this. And we extended that invitation. We haven't even publicized the website. So we just took it to our V-eight members and we said, look, we're going to create twenty founding members spots and we're going to make those available to you guys in V-eight first. You've been with us. We appreciate that you've been a customer with us. We want to give you guys an opportunity to take those slots. So when the first two dealers step forward and sign, it just happened that they were out of the same V eight group, just, just coincidence. And so they know each other and they're on different software, which is a pretty important element to, to what's going to happen here. And also our conversation. Yeah. Yeah. One in Florida, one in Oklahoma. So it's, that becomes interesting because I asked them in our very first preliminary meeting, meeting as we move toward onboarding and kind of them doing their part of the onboarding. I said, how would you gentlemen feel about going public in a documentary fashion with our rollout of this AI? Would you be okay with us sharing your names and faces in the conversation? Yeah, which is, you know, this is a new thing. This is, this is, jim and michelle's rendition of what transparency looks like right and um it's a really great opportunity for um for dealers to shine the product to shine and dms's to shine yeah i mean and and other partners in the picture but primarily i think it's going to be dms because mostly what we're going to be working with is the customer list right so we're going to be working with the customer list and and our version of ai our initial rollout of ai is is only going to be communicating with customers who are current so this is part of what you know especially new customers too starting with new customers that will be we make sure that we start to um to bring them into the fold more successfully as they become new customers and then we'll of course extend to all customers have been with us forever part of that is is that part of this process is that the customers will be introduced to them yeah that's right whoever it is that's closing they will become familiar with white hat ways they will become familiar with um the advocate, whatever name they've chosen for their, their advocate. And so it was, it's been really interesting working with the dealers. They, they both immediately said, yeah, I would, I would do that. So this lets us be transparent as we move through something collaborative. It won't be perfect. There will be delays. There will be setbacks. There will be successes. There will be every venture, but it's going to come out the other end, something that will be incredible. incredibly valuable to a dealer and the business and the customers too. Absolutely. Yeah. It should really be a good value to the, to the consumer as well. So I think this is why we felt like we wanted to be transparent because it is meant to be collaborative. It is, we've never created AI personas. Like we're not going to pretend that we know exactly how every part of this works, you know, We do have tech partners who are much further down the track on that and have successfully launched different people that have dipped their toes in this. And they're like, Oh, that's hard. Or, Ooh, that's going to, that's going to require a lot of time and capital. Right. And you know, just like all of the, I guess you'd say well, we just are very very very fortunate that we have a partner that's come in That's that's it's like what we are building is is he's built the foundation Yeah much so and so we're we're putting this this overlay of white hat way and yeah And how we intend to have it delivered am I right? correct in that? Yeah. And I think the part that we're contributing is the, you know, that core DNA thing is like to help people understand when, when, when anybody goes out and creates an AI agent, if you, Michelle decided tomorrow that you wanted to go create an AI agent and you wanted to name it Joseph, and you were just going to go do a job for you, there would be things that you would have to code into the development of Joseph. Who is Joseph? How does he operate? What does he do for you? What does he not do for you? And all those things. And it's not just a, like you get a, uh, an engineer, whatever. I mean, I've in my career, I've worked with lots of engineers and it's not just, it's, it's not an engineer task to code their DNA into the, into this persona. This is going deep into the DNA of white hat way. And it's like, and Jim has just spent so much time um through uh modalities of like just uh documenting all of the things and i mean hours and hours and hours of going through and and getting all of these pieces so that it it has an understanding about how they are going to be going forward to represent the dealership right And what we see or what I've seen when I see testings from different companies in the industry, out of the industry and an AI persona is that there's, you know, it's pretty straight line about how they interact with whoever it is that they're communicating with. And we had, you know, we've been working on this for awhile and last year at the national convention, just before we had, um, a group of people, we were doing a white highway certification with, uh, businesses and, um, and we introduced them to how far we had gotten. And I have to tell you that what we had built then prior to June, prior to June, far exceeds a lot of the other things that I've seen. Well, if you think about one thing that makes our situation different, and one of the things that gave us that advantage in June, walking into that room and introducing our persona to the room was that we had granted our ai platform access to our google drive storage which means all of the transcripts of podcasts and all of the content that is you know uh training materials and everything that has been the the formation of white hat way and what it represents in terms of an approach to business so this is a white hat philosophy this is a long game yeah you know it's just yeah so early on i think you and i were blown away that it just seemed to get it it understood what we were building and what and what problem we were solving One of the I remember one of the questions that was asked that I was like, okay This is this is like it was a test to me of how deeply it understood Oh, yeah was when one of our founding sponsors was there and asked Who are the founding sponsors? And it just blew it out of the water. And it's like, it talked about how, why, why these people are our founding sponsors, what it means to be a founding sponsor and who the founding sponsors are. Right. Yeah. And I was like, wow, that's pretty. Yeah. So, so let me tell you another significant element to this is. Shout out to Ken Yang. Yeah. Good morning, Ken. Thank you. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Thank you. I would say that one of the things too, we have data history now with these dealers who are joining us through our VA affiliation. We have data history back to January of Which means that when we deploy the AI, we will be able to chart any progress that those dealers enjoy in terms of charge offs and repos and that sort of thing. So we know that the customer retention factor will go up. We believe that the persistent and effective engagement of customers will also translate into fewer repos. Right. That we'll be able to track and we'll be we'll be watching those things. Imagine how this advocate. So the name that I use with these two dealers, just as an example, if let's say Maria goes to work for this dealer in Florida, then imagine how well it works when they have met Maria from the day of delivery. They have had dialogue with Maria that has been impressive. they now imagine how Maria becomes positioned to be an advocate in any kind of conflict resolution. Because one of the things that we saw, right, right. Yeah, as it grows, it's like you could position yourself so that way in there can be positioned to moderate conflict and find solutions and and really build trust that's the biggest piece of what happens here is we build trust by by maintaining dialogue and by making trust deposits with the customer yeah you know month after month we go in there and make deposits with them and this is not you know you hear an awful lot about uh the the concern people like either people are like all in or they're well there's three camps all in yeah AI scares the crap out of me or I don't know enough to, it's just, it's frightening because I don't understand. Yeah. And I asked that of our dealers when I said, Hey, when you, when you were debating about whether to sign this letter of intent and step into this understanding, what were you concerned about? And one of them said, it was just the unknown. Like, I don't know what it's going to look like. Right. And it's, it's the, and it's, I know that you go to a conference, you go to different things, and it's like that's the thing everyone's talking about. And we watched this podcast recently, and I can't remember whose podcast or whatever, but it described Jeff Bezos from Amazon was talking about, I can't remember what it was that he was calling it, but it was when a product comes out, it's either a vertical product or it's a horizontal product, right? Right. And a vertical product is something like the iPhone. So, you know, there are lots of other verticals that stand stacked next to it. And, you know, we want to watch the who's got the biggest market share, all of that kind of stuff. A horizontal product is the invention of the light bulb. It changed everything. And it didn't, it wasn't here for a minute and gone. It changed everything. It changed how long people could be working, what time in the morning they could start working. It created just in how many more daylight hours people had to be able to do the things. It changed people's bedtime schedules. It changed. It changed everything. Right. This one product AI is this product. Yeah. AI is, and there'll be lots of verticals. It's foundational product. It is foundational. So it's not going away. Right. And, and so that was one of the things that we were we were very well aware of that, that, you know, and we've talked about this many times. It's like, if I mean it's wild west. Yeah. And so who's the sheriff around here. And, and so this is not necessarily a sheriff or, but it's, it's an option that is encoded with ethics and kindness and compassion. I want to just, that thing when we were introducing Sage to the room of people before the last conference, one of them, one of the people, because we told them, come in and tell us, give us questions. Let's test her. Like it's a job interview. And so we had we had we had a couple of the founding sponsors there we had and other businesses and so one of the businesses it's like and you know it's so funny because when when someone's like i got something it's gonna it's gonna trip it up right and so it's like hey just very flippantly so customer comes in they only have like six months left on their contract. They've been diagnosed with stage, whatever, or the highest cancer. And they just want to turn the car and self-repair. What do you do? And Sage just like, I wanted to cry because she said, well, first off, that's a pretty big thing happening in their life. And so the first thing is, is to acknowledge that. That that's like, yeah, I get you sister. This she didn't use those words, but she stopped before giving the straight line answer and said something from a squiggly line perspective of. That's a difficult thing. Cancer's hard. I would first do this and then move into this. And how can we work with you and all of that? And that to me was the biggest representative to what this core DNA is about. yeah it is the core dna is significant and i i thought about brand i didn't didn't bring the actual documents but i'll bring the documents you know it's very proprietary so we're not going to share all the the uh i don't remember how many pages it's six modules and about four pages each so you know there's quite a lot of content there that forms the approach to customers, like the actual customer relations. And so the things like respect and dignity and all the things that belong in there and compassion, and it's how to communicate. So one of the things that you begin to create as you develop an AI agent. So let's continue to march down the path with Maria. Maria now has the code. She understands what it is to be a White Hat Way certified. She is White Hat certified in our program. So she understands what that is. So that means that unlike a person that you hire, an individual human that you hire, this Maria is going to show up with a being really good at customer relations. She's going to speak every language on the planet and she's going to be very good with customers. Now, what job do we need her to do? And here's. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And we're starting customer advocacy. We're starting very purposefully at customer advocacy because we're going to verify that the customer relations side of this is built and can can execute in the way that we have coded it. Yeah. And then, of course, it'll be able to move on to collections and the other elements. If we choose to. Yeah. Um, and it, you know, it may do the job and then, and then create a better environment that one of the biggest concerns that I see of, uh, AI fears is that it's going to take people's jobs. This is not one of those. Most dealerships do not have a customer advocate on their team. They have a very taxed collection department. They have a very taxed sales department. And they have a dealer and maybe a shop too. That's their team. They don't have someone designated. Your job is to build pathways of communication and relationship with this customer. And we have in many, when we've gone and done onsite visits and we've done coaching for dealerships, we've talked to them about having a customer advocate and there and i can think of one where they kind of hybrid and it was it was uh you know they handled like all of the scheduling with different um different repair shops and they were the ones that were reaching out and they were the ones coming up with like what promotions or what you know what things are we going to do that are community-based and you know it's just i love that they just kind of took it made it their own and ran with it but they have one And, and from all indications, it's been a positive addition to the team. And so this is something, cause we know most dealers, um, you know, are there. They are feeling crunches of economies and all of that like everybody else is. And just the headache of how do I hire? Who do I hire? All of that. All of this is taken away. You don't have to worry about it. Your collections team is still there. They're still intact. And they probably, our assumptions are, is that their job will become less confrontational. yeah yeah i think if we succeed in uh creating the relationship that that's the part that we will have a chance to solve more problems so i think you know when you look ahead to what does this look like when you uh reduce um delinquency by um i just touched the screen make sure i didn't mess up any other settings there but the uh i just swiped my my keypad by mistake anyway i think as you kind of put this thing if you can reduce the dealer's charge offs by one percent two percent, it's going to be a huge ROI for them. So this is the part that we and we get to have better engagement in the process. So even the customers are going to stay with us. We're going to be more engaged. We're probably going to win more referrals. All that kind of stuff is going to be a secondary benefit. But I would say the other thing to understand about the coding, because we've learned a lot, you know, we started in chat GPT in the last six months. I've worked in chat GPT. I worked in Gemini and I worked in Claude. And that's not important except that we have exposure to all of them. We can understand strengths and weaknesses of each. The tech people will be building this AI persona to operate from where it's going to operate. And we will, the thing I want to talk about quickly about is our DMS providers, because in our documentary, yeah, for our documentary, and I'm not going to say the names of the DMS systems today. I'm not even going to say the dealers names today. We just said, we've got one in Oklahoma, one in Florida, the first two to sign. And because they're in the same group and they know each other, it makes sense for them to be, it will invite others as they sign and join the thing they can be part of these conversations but we're certainly going to focus on the build out of these two dealers and we're going to be extending the invitation i've got in fact i've got the little short deck ready i'll show it on the screen here this will be going out the dms providers both of the dms providers like i said there are two different dms providers with these two dealers so that's good that lets us work with different ones and kind of work through this process together, but we're going to invite them to be part of these sessions. So here's the format. We're going to have a weekly sync as we move through this kind of, it's roughly an eight week build. Okay. So we're going to have a weekly sync. That'll be a recorded session. We record all such meetings of that type. And then we will take clips from those recorded meetings and then we will do a live reaction. Once a week, probably, probably won't be in our morning show slot. It'll be at a different time slot. It's a different, it's a different format. It's under the tech watch. Yeah. It's under the tech watch nation TV. So, so basically you're going to have a chance to walk, find the tech watch. We'll publicize it across a lot of the same channels, Facebook and YouTube, what have you, but, but where it broadcasts is we'll probably be on YouTube only. I don't think you and I have sorted that part out exactly, but the idea is that, the dms providers can come be part of those um recorded sessions as we work through the thing the dms is the dealers anyone else involved right yeah yeah and our team our development team and so we'll have that recorded and then we will take clips from those recorded sessions and play those live and react to them so we'll talk through the progress that's been made the setbacks that we encountered kind of where we're at in the journey So we're going to be able to take dealers, especially those dealers who are really not too sold on AI and they're not sure what it's going to look like. I would say this will be a perfect chance for you to get inside, not only the, I'd say the process itself for how you go about deploying something like this in a way that you're satisfied with the end result. I think this will give dealers, vendors, all these folks a chance to get inside. And of course, I think they'll learn as they go through it, what, white hat way is aiming at be a little bit different than what you know spend kind of the the history of ai in in our segment so far but we've been very um thoughtful uh let me just kind of uh take uh folks through i'm getting a little distracted here let me take folks through this uh this deck so you know we're asking them this is again going just to the and this will go out today i will email this today to the dms providers involved that the dealers use that are already signed up. That's right. There's every possibility that there will be Many more. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. We've got others in the wings that are waiting to sign, which quick, quick aside, I've, I haven't had a chance to connect with all of our V eight dealers. I had told our V eight dealers at one point that I wanted them to be signed up by April thirtieth that we would be opening those seats. I want to tell our V eight dealers that might be listening this morning. We're saving a seat for our V eight members until we get a chance to talk through all the materials and get them to a place where they can make a comfortable yes or no. But but in the meantime, I'm saving a seat for them. So just be aware because we've got that founding member program where they give them a special deal. Now the so it says a dedicated what is tech watch on AI? This is kind of what we're we have a special tech watch track that is going to be a tech watch. We'll be looking at all technologies, but this will just be the A.I. around white hat way. Right. And this will be one of the programs that will be under tech law. That's great. Yeah. And so this this happens. And so now we're starting into this two dealer journey as a as a documentary. And so we're extending that invitation and kind of lets them see that we're excited to work together with all the folks in the industry who are actively working to solve the same thing. We just know that when we work together on projects of this nature, we have a chance to really have a profound impact and a very positive impact on a segment that could really use some help. And AI is a great force multiplier. And we just know that it's got to be channeled in a way that we're going to send our AI out there wearing a silver star or, you know, this this white hat badge. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever that badge looks like that represents the white certification so that people can see how it's different. And and there are going to be other layers associated with that going forward for today i just wanted to kind of share how it's going to look with this documentary you know um when a few weeks back there was a post on a private facebook group that that i listened to and it was um around some of the the friction and uh yeah, friction that is, is very prevalent with certain DMS providers and with different softwares. And you know, I was like, Hey, how can I help? And so when Jim and I were talking about this, it's like this, that conversation kind of wove itself into, we're going to do this thing really transparently. We're going to invite the DMSs to be a part of this conversation. If they choose to, it will be a trans it'll be it'll be a transparent conversation. And we will, you know, it's I know. that there are really great DMS is out there that are willing to work. I mean, we've dealt with a lot of them. There's, there's so many out there that are great. And there's, there are some out there that are kind of struggling with, with, um, understanding that, that their relationship with their dealer is in jeopardy. Right. And so this is like, this is kind of like good training too. Like this is, this is how these things, um, This is this is the type of conversation we should be having. And this is, you know, being very, very open and and, you know, working together and how you collaborate on things and how you come together to make things work. And, you know, we are we always have been always have been from the day we started have believed in a big table. Right. Everyone is invited to the table. Everyone is invited to the table. So it doesn't matter if we've already got someone from this sector of whatever or this sector. It's like everyone's invited to the table. And so we're all going to work together to make this industry, to build this industry into something that it's like we really are supportive of. and, and work together and collaborate and really truly want the, the, the success of the dealer. And ultimately, ultimately every single software, whatever should lead to the success of the customer. Right. And so that's what, that's, this is a really big part of that. Yeah. Well said. Yeah. I think that's a good place for us to wrap up. I think there's a lot more. I just know that we'll be, uh, recording additional, um, meetings with uh these two dealers um and uh getting this invitation out and hopefully they will join our track and we just would have been able to kind of walk uh yeah yeah we look forward to walking dealers through it whether the dms folks are there or not all right all right thank you so much for joining everybody we really really appreciate you being part of the conversation and um And, you know, if you are a DMS and are interested in, you know, getting more information, participating, whatever, let us know. If you're a dealer, there are some seats available for our founding dealers, founding members. And this is, this is like, this is how we're building. And you get, you get a seat at the table on how, how certain pieces of this are built. So give us a holler or if there's anything else that we can help you with. All right, everybody. Have a great day. And yeah. We'll see you back here next week. All right. Thanks, guys.
