Changing The Industry Podcast

Lucas Underwood [00:00:06]:
You don't know what you got yourself into, do you? It's the last day of a conference.

David Roman [00:00:12]:
It's the first recording of the last day. Caffeine hasn't hit yet.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:17]:
He's in a bad mood. I'm in a good mood. So the combination of this, like, we've gotten to the point, at certain times in the day, we warn guests. Right. We don't warn them until they're set down and the recording button's pushed. Right. Just saying.

David Roman [00:00:35]:
We had a guy last night, he was a little shell shocked. He didn't know what to say.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:39]:
I'm just gonna be reactive.

David Roman [00:00:41]:
Yeah. He intended on speaking on leadership. Did he get anything out?

Lucas Underwood [00:00:44]:
I don't know. You keep kicking the camera.

David Roman [00:00:48]:
That's a terrible placement. That's entirely my fault.

Lucas Underwood [00:00:51]:
Just don't kick your drink over. Biggest thing that would make for a bet while you're already in a bad mood.

David Roman [00:00:56]:
So it won't spill. It'll be fine. I should have gotten you a drink. I thought about it, but also, I don't like you, so.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:04]:
Yeah, that's a good point. I'm good with that.

David Roman [00:01:07]:
I wasn't that worried about it.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:09]:
How are you, sir?

Lucas Underwood [00:01:10]:
I'm great.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:11]:
Introduce yourself.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:11]:
Yeah. So Kevin Robinson, GM of shop management for velo. Second time at Ratchet and wrench. Last one I was at was actually the. The last one they had in Minneapolis. Were you guys at that one?

Lucas Underwood [00:01:25]:
Yeah. The furries. Yeah, the furries.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:28]:
So what's funny about this is my wife Ashley actually came with me on this trip. A little time away from the kids, a little pool time. Right. And I told her, I said, this was the conference. I don't know if you remember, but I went to it a few years ago, and it was in Minneapolis. And literally the first thing out of her mouth was, was that the one with the people in the costumes? This was a throwaway line that I sent that I gave her when I got home from that conference, and it's all that she remembers. Mainly about my job.

David Roman [00:01:51]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:01:52]:
Hey. I mean, like, my wife doesn't really know anything about what we do here or what I do at work or. I mean, that's just. Your wife knows more about you, I think, as far as your task.

David Roman [00:02:06]:
I tell her I work really hard. That's all she knows. I come home tired. I'm like, oh, I'm so tired. She's like, oh, you must have worked really hard. Yeah, I sure did.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:19]:
There's videos of David sitting at his computer, just laughing away, watching YouTube videos in the middle of the day, I.

David Roman [00:02:27]:
Was trying to show somebody something. I don't watch YouTube videos all day long.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:30]:
And he turns around, he's like, get back to work.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:35]:
Where do I see the David reacts YouTube channel? Oh, this is like, you need to have, like, shop specific content and just a square, like, picture in picture of David in the bottom right corner, just reacting.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:49]:
That would be awesome.

David Roman [00:02:51]:
We have those. You were there.

Lucas Underwood [00:02:53]:
No, I'm saying just you. Just a channel with just you responding.

David Roman [00:02:58]:
What am I gonna say?

Lucas Underwood [00:02:59]:
Terrible, terrible things like you usually do.

Lucas Underwood [00:03:03]:
It would even give me more of an excuse. Cause I have a six year old who's obsessed with YouTube and reaction videos, right? Mrbeast reacts and stuff like that. So now I could, like, we could work David into the algorithm.

David Roman [00:03:13]:
Now, have you seen this stuff with MrBeast?

Lucas Underwood [00:03:16]:
Oh, I have a six year old. Absolutely. Every time we go to Walmart, it's, can I have feastables?

David Roman [00:03:22]:
Have you seen the controversy?

Lucas Underwood [00:03:23]:
Oh, that's a thing?

Lucas Underwood [00:03:25]:
No, I've not even seen it. What is it?

David Roman [00:03:27]:
What's that? Well, he had somebody in there that wanted to live an alternative lifestyle, let's say it that way. And everybody was very supportive on the show, and everything was fine. But turns out they were in the background sharing inappropriate content featuring children, and it was getting passed around within the MrBeast inner circle. He, like, went into hiding. He first came out and he's like, I want to sue everybody that says anything because this is all false. But then, like, the discord chat rooms, logs all came out, and the actual conversation started coming out, and then employees started coming out saying, yeah, we kind of knew this was going down. That's why I quit, because we kept telling them, like, hey, these two guys over here that are in your inner circle or whatever, they're doing stuff they shouldn't be doing.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:30]:
Yeah, it's officially complicated legacy, Mister Beast.

Lucas Underwood [00:04:35]:
Yeah, well, I mean, you get to that level, it's gonna happen, right? Like, sooner or later, you're gonna get to that level and somebody in your organization is gonna accidentally take you down.

David Roman [00:04:44]:
This was, like, one of his core. Like, this was one of the very first people he had in his group. When he first started, like, zero subs, he was one of his friends, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:04:54]:
One of the ones that they, like, did the whole YouTube learning process with.

David Roman [00:04:59]:
The very first people he started with. But people then started going back and watching videos and, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of content. But then they started seeing, like, pictures hanging on walls, hand drawn but inappropriate. Not to be in a children's video, but just in the background. But, you know, these are grown men that are doing stuff that they shouldn't be doing with minors, and then they put, like, artwork on the artwork. I say that very loosely on the walls with stuff going on, and people started noticing, and so all of a sudden, those videos start coming down. All of this. You didn't see any of this?

Lucas Underwood [00:05:49]:
No, I did. I didn't. Yeah.

David Roman [00:05:50]:
Oh, did you?

Lucas Underwood [00:05:51]:
Yeah, I'm on Reddit. You know, there's, like, a whole lot. There's tons of threads right now about, like, the fall of the empire, basically. I mean, it's still super popular, but there's a lot of, like, inner circle. It's trust.

David Roman [00:06:03]:
It's not just. It's not just Mister Beast. There was another very popular streamer. His name was Doctor disrespect. Have you seen that one gamer?

Lucas Underwood [00:06:12]:
Yeah.

David Roman [00:06:12]:
Yeah, that. The whole mess came out. And so, you know, I'm super freaked out about what my kids watch on YouTube.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:22]:
We're not doing YouTube. My daughter posts on YouTube, but that's the extent of it.

David Roman [00:06:27]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:28]:
Sounds like there's a lane to be carved for, like, good, wholesome shop content. Then maybe something featuring David.

David Roman [00:06:35]:
Wholesome?

Lucas Underwood [00:06:36]:
Yeah, like, very wholesome. David for kids.

David Roman [00:06:39]:
David wholesome?

Lucas Underwood [00:06:40]:
No, David's. David's a lot of things.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:41]:
Are you interested in getting in the trades? I'm just glad for you.

Lucas Underwood [00:06:45]:
I'm just glad that the most controversy we have in this industry is, like, arguments between coaches, right. And them fighting things out. And then we obviously have a couple shop softwares melting down all at the same time and, like, getting their tick toggle. And that's.

David Roman [00:07:02]:
What are you talking about? Bunch of seedy stuff going around in the industry all the time. What are you talking about?

Lucas Underwood [00:07:08]:
Like what? Like what?

David Roman [00:07:10]:
Just sketchy stuff. Just, you know, inappropriate stuff. Sketchy stuff. Like sad stuff. And you just see, like, because there are families involved, children involved, marriages, there's always something.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:22]:
Yeah, but I mean, those are, like, those are base level, everyday human beings having those types of.

David Roman [00:07:27]:
That's what I'm saying. There's just always some drama going on.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:30]:
I'm just saying, for the most part, drama free. Like, no, I'm saying, like, the organizations, for the most part, the bigger organizations within our circles are not too dramatic.

David Roman [00:07:42]:
No, I guess not. They're for super conservative, though. Like, they don't put themselves out there. For example, you guys were arguing about getting on TikTok. Like, hey, we're fighting over TikTok.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:54]:
Or not.

David Roman [00:07:54]:
Terrible idea, by the way, but it's.

Lucas Underwood [00:07:58]:
Just because you support the Chinese.

David Roman [00:08:00]:
Don't support that Chinese. It's about demographics. It's about demographics.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:07]:
Who is on controversy here? We are. It's.

David Roman [00:08:10]:
We are just saying, like, we gotta look into demographics. Who is your typical shop owner? Software buyer. Not the owner, necessarily, but who's making the purchasing decisions in the shop and then who's on TikTok? And do they mesh?

Lucas Underwood [00:08:24]:
Oh, I think we're getting there. I think that.

David Roman [00:08:26]:
I think, like, Instagram makes more sense. I think Instagram makes more sense.

Lucas Underwood [00:08:31]:
There's some interesting things happening there. The thing that the. I don't even know if you can call it drama, but the thing that I like the most about, especially coming to these shows, is there are a lot of professionals in the industry that are with, whether it's software provider, shop coach, consultant, whatever you want to say it. And every show I go to, somebody's at a different booth wearing a different polo at that time. So there's just, like, there's a lot of shared DNA and, you know, there's not a ton of, like, people going to competition, but there are definitely, you know, somebody's like, literally six months. After six months. After six months, like, oh, he's over here. And now he's over here for sure.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:11]:
It is over. Crazy.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:12]:
It is pretty crazy. I hadn't thought of that.

Lucas Underwood [00:09:15]:
So it's just. It's interesting, right? Cause you see a lot of people, and some just start new companies, some start new products, but it's just interesting because of the. Some are competitors and, you know, the six months, this is the best product that you will ever use. And then at the next show, they're like, listen, those people that do that product.

David Roman [00:09:32]:
Yeah, the people that do that, though, like, they lose all their credibility because you come to me and you're pitching me on a product and you're saying that's the best thing ever, and you've got a good pitch or whatever. Okay, great. And then you show up six months later and you're with a different company. Now you're telling me that thing was the best thing ever? I call them out. Typically, I will call them out and be like, what happened? Yeah, well, I had a better opportunity. Okay, so you're full of crap, is what it telling me. You're full of crap. It's.

David Roman [00:10:01]:
You're not that. Hey, I don't knock them. It's just that I just don't buy their shtick. Their spiel is you. What I'm saying, oh, yeah, because it's like you're telling me this. I don't believe it. It's because they're paying you the most. So when the next company comes in that pays you the most, you're going to jump on all over that? I don't.

David Roman [00:10:20]:
I don't know.

Lucas Underwood [00:10:21]:
Everybody's got to go after. Everybody's got to work the opportunities that are presented to them. Right. Some might be part of a layoff, some might be part of, you know, whatever, and it's all they know. But, David, you're like the credibility piece. They got to spend a lot of time working back any goodwill that they have.

Lucas Underwood [00:10:38]:
Yeah, for sure.

Lucas Underwood [00:10:38]:
Customers. And we saw a couple really do that.

David Roman [00:10:42]:
Like, I see them do it now to this day. You see them jumping around or they move across the country, and then, like, they're like, hey, I'll take that job. You're going to pay me this much? No. Okay, I guess I'll stay with this company. Hey, this company's still the greatest thing ever. Like, get out of here, dude. Like, you're full of crap. I don't.

David Roman [00:10:59]:
I have no problem with, you know, trying to maximize your opportunities. It's whatever. But at the same time, like, don't. If you're. If your job is to sell me on this product, like, and all you're doing is hyping it up, but then I know that you're just gonna go to wherever. Like, you don't believe in the product. That's why, like, I appreciate, uh, what's. Us, nuts from auto ops.

David Roman [00:11:24]:
Yeah, because the dude, like, he started the company. His whole family works in the company. And he almost looks awkward trying to pitch you his product.

Lucas Underwood [00:11:35]:
Talking about Stephen? Yeah, Steven's awesome.

David Roman [00:11:38]:
He looks awkward trying to pitch his product. Cause he's like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna stick you. And I'm like, okay, go for it. And. And then he tries and, like, well, was a good attempt. I appreciate that, but I know he believes in this product.

Lucas Underwood [00:11:51]:
Yeah, yeah. That's why we're so loyal to Monique. Right? Is because of. She's been consistent. Right. I'm sorry. We're loyal to Monique more than we are to shop owners.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:02]:
Oh, that. You know what?

David Roman [00:12:03]:
No. What are you talking about? There's lots of great people at shop. There is.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:08]:
I'm not saying there's not. I'm just saying. Would you quit kicking the damn camera?

David Roman [00:12:12]:
I'm sorry.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:15]:
I just keep watching him out of the background, like, twitch and shake, and I'm like, dude, he's got.

David Roman [00:12:19]:
I'll put the steady cam on it.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:21]:
The first time that I worked the Monique side of things is funny because the first time I ever worked a show with her as part of Shopware, this was at. Gosh, where was this at? It was earlier this year. I can't remember. There's been too many shows. But to your point about loyalty to Monique at Shopware, absolutely true. Somebody came up. Long time customer. Oh, my gosh, it's been so long.

Lucas Underwood [00:12:45]:
I love using shopware. You're my favorite person at Shopware. Thank you so much, Angelique. And she was like, you're welcome. Just like a true Monique fashion. Like, I'm not going to correct this person. I'm too nice. And she's like, actually, Angelique might be kind of a cool rebrand.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:03]:
You know what I mean?

Lucas Underwood [00:13:06]:
At least it wasn't like Monica or, you know something?

Lucas Underwood [00:13:09]:
I think I've heard somebody call her Monica before, which could.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:12]:
I mean, yeah, as long as you hit the m. Like, maybe that's. Maybe she's. It's like, me. My name's Kevin Cavan. And I'm like, as long as you get the k or the c sound out of tons of Kevin. It's actually funny because when I jump on zooms, like, and my video isn't up yet and it just is my name, people are kind of left to guess, right. So I get a lot of coupons because I think they probably think I'm, like, eastern.

David Roman [00:13:34]:
I would totally do that and be like, hey, Kevin, it's Kavan. Thank you.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:39]:
Oh, you would correct him.

David Roman [00:13:42]:
I would totally correct him.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:44]:
That would be awesome.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:45]:
I think, you know, for my relatives, I still get, like, Christmas cards and it'll say Kelvin or Kevin or, oh.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:50]:
Man, that gives me, like, heebie Jeebie flashbacks. My barber, his name's Kevin, and I called him Kelvin for years because it.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:58]:
Was like, you're so.

Lucas Underwood [00:13:59]:
He misspelled it on his Facebook. And I never did catch on that. He like, he's like, I. Man, my name's actually Kevin. I misspelled it on Facebook. I couldn't figure out how to change it.

David Roman [00:14:10]:
You call everybody guy. Hey, my guy.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:12]:
You know what? Know your name. That kind of sounds like it's on him, though.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:15]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:15]:
I mean, maybe a little bit evidence there. Like, it wasn't just a shot in the dark where, like, you misheard him at one point and for the rest of his life, he was good.

David Roman [00:14:21]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:21]:
He figured out how to change it now.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:22]:
Sorry.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:23]:
It's all good.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:24]:
I'm messing stuff up here.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:25]:
Nah, it's okay.

David Roman [00:14:26]:
Camera.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:27]:
Nevermind. Power strip.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:28]:
Yeah, it's funny.

David Roman [00:14:29]:
Everything's shut off now. Great.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:32]:
Even worse. Root problem. We know who it is.

Lucas Underwood [00:14:35]:
So you recently kind of, like, stepped up into this new role at Velo to do all kinds of new cool stuff. What was that change? Because we've known you for a long while now, and it's really cool to see you get the opportunity to advance. And I know there were a lot of shifts in brands and stuff like that. How did all this come to be?

Lucas Underwood [00:14:58]:
Yeah, good question. So, man, it doesn't seem like that long ago, but I started in 2020, so it's only been just over four years. And when I started, we only had two shop management systems under kind of this velo ecosystem. Right. It was shop boss and it was omnique.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:16]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:16]:
Okay. And within.

David Roman [00:15:18]:
Monique used to work for Omni.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:19]:
With Monique from Omnique, you think about branding. Like, there's been some conversations, right? Like, Monique, would you, like, maybe want to do a little bit of omnique stuff again? And she's like, I'm really good at Shopware, but two products, and now we've grown to six. So Shopware was our most recent product to join the family back in March. So now we have this, like, wide range of different solutions and we're really trying, like, the biggest thing from a responsibility standpoint is like, how do we not step on each other, right. It's so different from everything else you're seeing in a pit platform.

David Roman [00:15:55]:
Make them all fight each other, see who comes out of line.

Lucas Underwood [00:15:57]:
Fight club.

David Roman [00:15:58]:
And, yeah, you do a whole fight club thing and if it doesn't work out, you can just smush them all together and just call it like shop boss wear omnique.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:09]:
You nailed it. You know, we'd have total complete domain authority.

David Roman [00:16:14]:
Yeah, just put tabs, like, what do you want it to look like today? I'm Nick. There you go. I'm going to run this today.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:23]:
It's actually funny you say that because back in, I think it was Q four last year, actually. You guys know Lisa Coyle?

Lucas Underwood [00:16:29]:
Oh, yeah, of course.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:29]:
From 360. Now she's started promoted with Joel, but she actually, she and I partnered on, I think it was kind of a webinar or something, where we actually did shop management shark tank last year. And we brought all six products in and basically said, hey, give us your best pitch. And then we had, you know, a few people. We had Jesse from 360, we had Sam from auto serve one. We had a couple other people. We had Jill Trotta come in, and they were our sharks. And the shop management.

Lucas Underwood [00:16:55]:
Each person came in, got, I think, two minutes to pitch their product, and then we literally, at the end, like, crowned a winner, essentially, of, like, the best pitch.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:02]:
I can't remember who won.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:03]:
I think it was shop boss. I think Frank Jones. Oh, wait, actually, hold on, let me think. No, it might have been Darren Williams from protractor. Actually, I wasn't thinking about it. Yeah. Cause we did a couple of those, but. Cause we did one recently for websites as well, digital websites, which is kind of cool.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:23]:
Sorry, Mandy's flagging me from. That was the winner. Okay, so I'm wrong both ways. It was Tiger guru. It was probably Josh nail. Was it Josh nail? Okay, so it was Josh McNail from Tiger guru. That was Mandy.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:33]:
You can sit down and record, too.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:36]:
Mandy, she likes to. She likes to direct from afar. She's great.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:41]:
Come on, sit down.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:45]:
Mandy's like, Kevin has to do awards dinner rehearsal that they're calling him for. And what time did you talk to him? Okay, yeah, we're good.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:56]:
It'll work out.

Lucas Underwood [00:17:57]:
We're just. We did the. I don't know if I did. I see you guys drive for the Thunderdome last night for the. Did you see that whole thing going on there? So in the exhibitor showcase last night on the backside, we actually had a RC car race, the velo victory lap. And we had six races or six championships.

Lucas Underwood [00:18:20]:
Oh, that was the video of Chris and the.

Lucas Underwood [00:18:22]:
They came dressed as Talladega nights characters. Yeah. We had Ricky Bobby, we had Cal Naughton Junior. And for life of me, I'm not gonna remember the Sacha Baron Cohen character, but the dude that raced for Perrier. Anyway, six winners. And then. So tonight, as part of the awards dinner, we have specially branded Velo product RC cars. Like legit RC cars that we're giving away as awards tonight.

Lucas Underwood [00:18:46]:
As part of that, you know, a.

Lucas Underwood [00:18:47]:
Shopware user won the all star award, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:18:52]:
Oh, I feel like I've been so unplugged the last few days. But I did see that those awards came out recently.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:00]:
Which shop? Tom Shear.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:01]:
Tom Shear. Okay.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:02]:
Yeah. So Tom won the. And he's a shopper user. He was on the show yesterday. Oh, a good friend of mine. So, yeah, you need to go. Like, yeah, he's got to go speech. And just be like, hey, man, how many times did you mention shopware in there?

Lucas Underwood [00:19:15]:
Like, hey, for every time I have.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:18]:
A $10 bill, Tom's kind of money.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:26]:
Start going up a little bit. So do you, how would you feel about Abraham Lincoln? And how do you feel about.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:34]:
How.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:34]:
Do you feel about Susan B. Anthony? Wait a second.

David Roman [00:19:38]:
She on it. She's on something and she. Yeah, probably like a coin. Maybe it's a coin. I'm gonna say it's a coin.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:46]:
It's definitely a coin. Although I don't know what currency.

David Roman [00:19:51]:
I think it's a dollar. Like a dollar coin.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:54]:
No, Lucas is gonna find out.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:56]:
I am.

Lucas Underwood [00:19:57]:
We had this conversation earlier about like, what would we do now without search engines? We would literally go have to find somebody.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:02]:
I should have used chat GPT that would have been better.

David Roman [00:20:04]:
Really.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:05]:
Chat GPT is the bomb. Diggity says the Susan B. Anthony dollars United States dollar coin minute from 79 to 81 when production was suspended due to poor public acceptance and then again in 1999.

David Roman [00:20:19]:
Poor public expect what? Who wants to carry a dollar coin?

Lucas Underwood [00:20:23]:
Not many people want to carry coins in general. Although I am, like impressed that you, like, pulled that from the jeopardy. Side of your brain.

David Roman [00:20:30]:
I remember.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:30]:
Do you? Susan B. Anthony Wiki page too. He's got lots of recent update by David Rogan.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:37]:
He knows a little bit about a lot of things and he just like randomly drops the breadth and the depth.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:42]:
That's the. Okay, that's fair. Now that we've talked about currency.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:47]:
Yeah, what else?

David Roman [00:20:48]:
Dig deeper in a currency.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:50]:
We can get into it if payments. I get $10 every time I mention a Velo brand.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:55]:
Really? No, but that would be fun.

David Roman [00:20:59]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:20:59]:
Cause you talk about it a lot.

David Roman [00:21:00]:
You know, how do we get signed up for that? Cause I'll slip those suckers in every five minutes. You kidding me?

Lucas Underwood [00:21:08]:
Well, you already see, you've already put yourself in a bad position because you're just thinking about combining the brands. So you're like, if I just mentioned this one time, I get paid one royalty. But that's why you gotta keep 16 brands separate, because have you ever thought.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:19]:
About working a Mac and cheese truck into the velo market?

David Roman [00:21:23]:
That's.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:23]:
Do tell.

David Roman [00:21:24]:
Hey, they're gonna keep expanding out. Eventually it's gonna be Walmart, Amazon, and Velo. They own everything. That's how it's gonna go.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:33]:
VMac, Mac and cheese, I'm telling you.

David Roman [00:21:37]:
See, Walmart just bought Vizio.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:38]:
No, I did not see that.

David Roman [00:21:40]:
They bought Vizio. So now your Vizio tv is going to be a Walmart billboard.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:46]:
There you go. That's rough. Put it in demo mode.

David Roman [00:21:51]:
Yeah, just watch Walmart, Walmart ads all the time.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:55]:
I could not imagine there is a.

Lucas Underwood [00:21:58]:
Just on the product side of things, nothing that we've done, but things that we've been pitched a lot is think about. So I gave a presentation yesterday on DVI, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:22:07]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:22:08]:
So a lot of products, companies, whatever you want to say, have come to us and come to other DVI providers and been like, hey, what if we did display ads on your consumer facing Dvi world? And we're like, I feel like that's maybe a little bit not intrusive, but especially think about it from a UI perspective. Who hates the. You go to an article online and you're reading it all of a sudden, pop up from the bottom, pop up from the top, pop up overlay. But there's almost an interest in, hey, if I pull up as a consumer, the inspection report that I have and I'm reviewing it, what if there was a little banner in there for X product? I won't call it any names here, but that's been an interesting, it basically is a mobile billboard as part of the DVI process. So there's been a lot of conversation about that internally about like, could we put a revenue play there? Not specifically Avila, because we honestly, like, I believe that from a UI perspective, like, it's to get the customer to do business with you and like, prove the estimate right, not to sell them potentially more, or sell yourself revenue space from a billboard perspective. That's what jogging memory on some of that discourse that was happening.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:22]:
So the ways that I see it is if, you know, in an extremely transactional shop, could put something like, in other words, you could control it. And if they could do their own ads, you know, say tire rotation, this.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:35]:
Much when selected with promotion banner, right.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:38]:
Things like that. Or hear me out now. Hear me out, because this is giving.

David Roman [00:23:42]:
Me, like, here's anxiety here.

Lucas Underwood [00:23:44]:
This is how, let me just tell you how Mike Allen's gonna use it. Mike Allen is going to say he wants space on all of his competitors, dvis, right. He's going to say, we do free diet, we're going to discount until we're lower than them.

David Roman [00:24:00]:
I guarantee you either have to pay for the premium package of this particular DVI, or we're going to run competitor ads like Yelp does. We're going to run competitor ads right underneath your DVI.

Lucas Underwood [00:24:12]:
Have you ever, just referencing my previous role, before Velo, I was on the franchise automotive side of things with software. Have you looked at a franchise dealership website recently? Like, I don't know if you've been shopping for a car, but one of the things that was like a true, this would literally drive, probably break up some examples at some point, but this would drive David crazy. We would always have, like, we would, when I was at that company, we'd build websites with inventory and everything else. And then basically the whole thing was, how do you get the consumer to select that, you know, learn more or buy now, whatever else. So one specific call to action from a marketing standpoint, you guys do this all the time, right? You don't confuse the customer. Well, what ended up happening, especially when OEM started to come into the fray and certify certain products, you'd have all of these third party widget, bolt on type, call to action things. You'd have your simple, like, contact us, but then you'd have, here's your payment. Then you'd have get your Carfax report, then you'd have chat with us.

Lucas Underwood [00:25:17]:
Next thing you know, every one of those squares that shows a piece of inventory had 25 buttons on it that you could click and dealership customers would start saying, why is my conversion rate so bad right now? Like why I'm getting so many customers? But nobody's clicking on any of these links and you're giving them 25 different options.

Lucas Underwood [00:25:37]:
Overload.

Lucas Underwood [00:25:38]:
And especially if you look at it on a mobile device, because on a desktop the buttons are all like in a four by four grid, right. Mobile device, they all stack one to one, right? Right. So all sudden, like to scroll through one listing of a vehicle, infinite scroll, like going through the entire thing. So that was one thing that's like, really. And I'm in David's camp, which is like, I'm obsessive about UI components and like usability for sure, product and that thing, like that whole experience, like, and there wasn't anything that we could do about it because all of these like bolt ons were actually certified by the OEM and they were, and there was a lot of regulation on that side of the business. So what I see over here where it's like we actually have the power to say we built the UI for a very specific reason and we're not just going to bolt things on with a little bit of script or a little bit HTML, like whatever else. So we try to keep it as clean as we possibly can. Could the UIS always be better? Absolutely.

Cavan Robinson [00:26:29]:
But just going back to the point about the consumer experience on sites like Google's even started deprioritizing content that are, that ads that hide content in a recent slog update, so they call them interstitials. Which is a fun word that I like to use and confuse people because that's just what they call them is you go to an article and if there is an ad that pops up that blocks the content behind it, Google will actually deprioritize that listing within the search engine results page. So it's this interesting thing about they're trying Google say what you will about them and some of the data stuff that they do, but their ability to say at least like, hey, if you're clicking on a link, we expect you to get what you're looking for, not an ad served up, penalize the other. So I appreciate that component of it, but that just again, is sort of triggering. And I have scar tissue from my previous role, which was just all about everybody grabbing for everything. I can prove my tools the best if I get the most clicks on it. So not only did you have that four x four button grid, but also you had buttons that were flashing buttons that were like different shapes because everybody was competing for the exact same amount of attention from the same customer that was visiting the website. So that type of stuff just.

Lucas Underwood [00:27:39]:
And it still goes on to today. Like if you go to a car dealer website, especially for a certified provider, like a Toyota, Kia, Volkswagen, you'll see it all the time. There's no rhyme or reason to what the call to action is. It's very much just like competitive competition for eyeballs is essentially what it is.

Lucas Underwood [00:27:56]:
When this was before, before you came into shopware, would have seen it. When they started developing DVX, that's when a lot of those conversations were happening. Is what does this look like from the client perspective? And does this make sense, is it confusing? Does it work? And it was like Andrew and I had a number of conversations about just the perspective of the client on this. And you know, we spent probably an hour, 2 hours sending messages back and forth the other day going through like, hey, what does this look like? Does this make sense? Does this work like it's supposed to? You know? And so I think that was one of the cool things about shopware, because they spent a lot of time and attention into the client experience more, not necessarily more so than the shop experience, because the shop experience, like, we're the ones working in it every day, we're the ones trying to make it work the way it's supposed to and go through it and have speed and efficiency with it. Whereas a lot of shop management softwares, they end up forgetting about the end experience. They only focus on the shop experience. And so it was really cool to see Shopware focus wholly at one point in that process on the consumer.

Lucas Underwood [00:29:06]:
Love, Andrew. I just started so similarly to Monique where I just like worked my, I've known Monique for a while, but I worked my first trade show with her. I worked my first kind of product feedback loop with Andrew recently from Shopware. And the two things that I really appreciate about Andrew, one is his discovery process, which is very much like whenever we get on a phone with a customer for the most part. Now there are certain customers out there that we appreciate are more constructive, like yourself. There are other customers that we get on and they're an owner operator. So in a lot of cases their mindset is typically solution, solution, solution. So they know the problem internally potentially.

Lucas Underwood [00:29:47]:
And they say, put this button here, create this configuration, this report, so they get automatically into, here are three solutions that we can address that Andrew does a really good job of. Like let's just reset a little bit and just consider that we're not going to even think about the product right now. Talk to me about what the actual problem is inside the shop. Is it a personnel problem, is it a process problem? And then he'll go into, okay, now that we know sort of this base layer, right, we're not just playing whack a mole with symptoms. We're actually thinking what's the main cause of the stress or the friction? And then we'll start talking about solutions within the product that can potentially address that. So love that about Andrew. And then the other thing about him too. And this is actually something that I picked up from just going back to mentioning Lisa Coyle.

Lucas Underwood [00:30:31]:
Cause she always used to say this is, she wants people that wake up every day in terms of their job obsessing about x. So one of our biggest things was, you know, maybe about a year and a half ago, we appointed somebody over shop management to oversee all of onboarding because we know that 1st, 30 to 90 days is just like critical, right. That's a huge change for a system. So we said we want this person, Paul is his name. Paul Forsey. We want him waking up every day thinking about how to make the customer experience better, how to make onboarding for sure, how to be obsessive about it and not be in the weeds all day, right? Because we have plenty of people that are working with customers on a daily basis, doing data migrations, installs, training, et cetera. But we need somebody to think about the actual, like, experience from a high level. Andrew does that for shopware.

Lucas Underwood [00:31:15]:
He's the guy that wakes up every single day thinking about, especially DVX, because I did a. I was saying, I did a presentation yesterday on the DVX experience as part of Ratchet and wrench. Andrew helped me prep a lot of it. Cause I'm like, I need to pick this guy's brain because he was here from inception and just has a very passionate approach to DVX. So being able to kind of consult him on, like, how much of it, if you had to select the pie chart of how much of it is dependent on the shop versus the consumer, and then where that also, I guess, that Venn diagram meets with the intersection. He was really prescriptive on how we developed DVX and then also how it is deployed and worked back and forth from the shop side. So end user number one. And then also, all right, let's look at it on an incognito browser.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:08]:
Let's look at it on an emulator. Let's look at, like, actually see what it's like from the consumer user side.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:13]:
And so his thing was, is that he's still a consumer, right? Like, he still uses auto repair. So he says, how would I want this to look if I'm. If I'm the auto repair consumer, what should this look like? What would I want? How would I want it to be? And that's kind of cool, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:32:28]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:29]:
And then, like, one of the interesting things. So there were when. When Velo came in, there were a lot of concerns about, oh, my gosh, what are they going to change? And is it going to work? And is it going to be this, and is it going to be that? Now, some of those people like, not to speak poorly, but some of those people had reason to feel that way. Right? Because if you'd been there from the very beginning, there were times that promises were made, or we're going to do this, and. And things don't always happen right now. That's nobody's fault. And that happens with every single one of these products. Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:32:59]:
But in the same respect, it's been really cool to see, like, even some of the little, tiny, small. Hey, there's an inconsistency there, or this doesn't work like this. It seemed like all that started getting fixed and rounded out when Velo came in. What do you think made the difference there?

Lucas Underwood [00:33:18]:
Really good question. I try to think about it internally and externally. So you made a really good point about not only the potential stress or pessimism of what things are like when Velo takes over, because change is hard for anybody, especially when you have a company that has so much brand equity and products functionality like Shopware. A big acquisition like that can be really stressful and cause a lot of heartburn. So thinking internally first with the team itself, that was number one, because we're in this super exciting yet disruptive time of shop management software.

Lucas Underwood [00:33:57]:
Right?

Lucas Underwood [00:33:57]:
For sure. Gosh, even if you think about when I started in 2020, Techmetric had just come on the scene. Shopware was getting stronger, but really it was. Mitchell and Ro were still the Titans out there, and we were all David playing versus Goliath. And now it's kind of like we're at parity with a lot of those different products out there. So it's like, what is the slight competitive edge that you can have over somebody that's selling a different solution or a different product for the market? So internally, the hesitance around, oh, big acquisition, what does this mean for us now for the personnel? Granted, I thought the leadership of shopware did a great job setting the scene, Carolyn, especially in terms of what does this mean for the team? And then also internally, I think we have super strong at Velo Cross functional leadership. So we have people that represent different components of the business. Customer success and onboarding, customer support, development, product management, sales, marketing, sales ops.

Lucas Underwood [00:34:58]:
So the ability, and I'll use a very, I hope this isn't too trite, but a very important Ted Lasso quote for me, which is, be curious, not judgmental, right. I was a part of a big acquisition back in 2015 when a company called Dealer Socket acquired a company I was at called Dealer Fire, and they ran the private equity playbook, which is, we know how to make you profitable, do these things. Velo does it completely opposite, which is we bring in the founders and literally have this weigh in to buy in type conversation about what do you do, things that you think are great, where do you think you need improvement? And really, the investments that Velo make are around how do we make those weaknesses stronger or how do we amplify the strength? So that's a view internally, which is something that a lot of acquisitions, typically the owners, like on a one year transition plan or something like that. And Carolyn works with us one to one. She recently left the business, but she and I talk pretty regularly. And it's actually funny now because she's still a Shopware user.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:03]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:05]:
That built the product that's now submitting customer feedback and using it as a end user for, like, the first, like as a day to day operator without.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:16]:
Having that, that integral day to day operation within Shopware.

Lucas Underwood [00:36:20]:
Yeah, exactly. So the founder transition piece is very, very important because you have to have the trust, you have to have the validation of, like Carolyn saying, this is the right move for us right now in this market because you guys have seen it. There are sides assembling, whether it's mergers that have recently taken place, acquisitions, consolidations, contractions. There's also a ton of PE coming into the space and investing in shops like enterprise and MSO type growth. So to really solidify and strengthen that brand, we knew that an acquisition was the right way to go. And Carolyn agreed with us on that. And now it's all about how do we take that torch? How do we take that baton? I mentioned this in a conversation with Braxton not too long ago, which was funny, but, and keep doing the things that made them successful in the first place. And a lot of that's product, honestly, like the investment in product, trying to strengthen the product, trying to continue that parity and then also build a competitive edge and then also making sure that the brand is out there.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:24]:
Right. Like, typically when you see the acquisition, acquisitions, one of the first thing to go from a cost standpoint is marketing. Like, we're not going to that show. We're not going to go to that show. We're not going to go to that show. So we want to make sure that the brand is out there. But at the same time, and you guys probably seen at this conference for the first time ever, we're actually exhibiting as like an ecosystem of shop manager.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:42]:
I thought that was like, really cool. Thought that.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:44]:
Appreciate that Mandy's back there. She'll love that comment. Yeah, I keep telling her, sit down.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:49]:
And talk with us.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:50]:
No, she just wants to mime. She just wants to drive here, stand.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:55]:
Right in front of the camera so we can get them.

Lucas Underwood [00:37:57]:
She's like, zoom in on Mandy. So, and, gosh, if you think about, you know, even two years ago, one of the things that was like part of our playbook was to go back to the fight club reference. We don't talk about velo like, people come to shows and be like, what's this all velo like? We didn't have a website. We didn't have anything on the Internet outside of maybe like a LinkedIn page for recruiting. So now we pull back the curtain, we're like, hey, here's all 16 brands that we represent.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:20]:
Here's what we.

Lucas Underwood [00:38:21]:
Some dealership, some payments, some aftermarket software, here's what we do. And we find it to be, you know, stronger in market, although we still got to work through the gaps of, like, somebody walks up to the booth and they say they see the four shot management products that we're representing here, and they're like, oh, are these all integrated? How do these work together? And you're like, well, actually, it's more about, like, what customer is the right for what product. Yeah, so we're still dialing that in. I mean, we got plenty of lessons to learn, and this is a great show to kind of work out some of those kinks. And we'll be at seaman apex representing kind of like shop management as well. Much bigger footprint that we're going to have there. And we'll have individual demo stations for each project or each product, too. But it's a much different approach than the other competitors that we face off of in the market, where it's trying to be one for everything, one for all.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:10]:
We're trying to find the right solution for the right type of shop. So we have protractor, who's a true enterprise. If we have 100, 100 5170 type location shops on that, then we have shopboss, which is like, hey, we're just getting into digital transformation. We want to dip our toe into creating invoices and maybe doing some DVI, getting payments. Okay, fine. Shopper is really, like the best coverage of the entire gap, which is, hey, you have one or two locations, but you want to be at five locations in the next year or two. This is what they need to do. We have MSO capability.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:43]:
We have a great digital vehicle experience. We have really good. And this is probably one of the nicest things, especially about being a part of Velo, is that all of our shop management systems are directly integrated with 360 payments.

Lucas Underwood [00:39:55]:
Yeah, well, that's one of the things I was going to ask about. And so, like, I've always wanted to get to the point, and Carolyn did not like the idea at all. And in fact, she told me that that would never happen because she didn't like it. But I always wanted to get to the point. Like, the financing was integrated into shopware, so I'm not having that discussion. Like, when they're approving their estimate, if they need financing, they can apply while they're approving their estimate. Right. And so I've started seeing little things that I've noticed that were from the other brands within velo that, like, there's better integration, there's better communication across the platforms.

David Roman [00:40:35]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:40:35]:
Because I talked to a lot of the people within all of these platforms because I'm friends with them. And so you start hearing that where before there was no communication or there was trouble with APIs and there was stuff like that, now that communication smoothed out and things just flow much faster and much better than they had before.

Lucas Underwood [00:40:52]:
Yeah, one of the callouts from our vp of engineering, Shashir, who's just wonderkin, literally at aftermarket, all of our integrations as part of the family should be better than any aggression that we have externally. So nobody should ever come to us and say, hey, this 360 or this payments integration with Company X is way better than anything that they have with shopware or shop boss or protractor, et cetera. If we hear that it's like nails on a chalkboard, it's like, that can't happen. We have to be the best internally first because nobody should ever ask the question, especially now that we're exposing more of the velo brand, nobody should ever ask the question of, well, if you and 360 are in the same family, why is this integration sucks so much? Or why is it so clunky? Why is it slow? We really try to work on that to the best of our ability. Now, what we're getting to also, which is exciting, is going to more of a common API platform. You can imagine we have dyne products across aftermarket because we also have auto shop solutions. We also have auto serve one. We're building the whole customer ecosystem.

Lucas Underwood [00:42:01]:
But the biggest thing is instead of now doing nine integrations to a data provider or to payments provider, we have one common API layer that sits over the top of all of those that's kind of cool and plugs into one spot so that we make one update from both sides. So we're just trying to scale that out a little bit more so that it's not sucking up development time as well. Because you can imagine those ad hoc integrations are just a pain in the butt. They're important and customers want them, which we totally understand. But sometimes you're pulling developers off of big boulder type projects to like, hey, we got to fix this one API call.

Lucas Underwood [00:42:38]:
They want this type of product or they want this type of integration, but they also want this big problem fixed. And it's like, which is it? What do you want?

Lucas Underwood [00:42:46]:
There's a compromising effort that typically takes place. And we've also built a bit of a, we call it the CoE or the center of excellence, even though it's remote. But we built out kind of like a separate group of engineers and developers that can work on multiple platforms, because although, and I'm sure people can assume this, but although we have the six products in shop management and they all do shop management things, they are very different, not only from a customer perspective and from a UI perspective, but also from an architecture perspective. Some are on Azure, some are on AWS, some are on other platforms. So the ability to try to standardize to the best of our ability and then also get a collective of developers that are just masters of all, or at least to the most part, that they can be an integration person, can do multiple things with multiple platforms. To have that team that can scrum different projects around Velo, as opposed to just like, here's the requirements, here's the work, go put your fingers on the keyboard and get to building. We try to be a little bit more thoughtful on how we do some of the development now. And that's really driven, again by that.

Lucas Underwood [00:43:52]:
Velo cross functional leadership, the standardization, for sure, the, the tire guru thing. So I was talking to a shop the other day, and they said, hey, we do a lot of tires, and we also do mechanical repairs. Right now we're using Shopware, but we also have another tire software on top of what we're doing. Is there ever a chance that shopware will either get better tire integration, or is there a chance that there's a way that these, these dual function? Because, I mean, I don't know that I like the idea. I mean, what do you think using, using two softwares like that, my fear would be. So they, they would use, like, the tire software for the quick lube side of the business, and they would do tires. All they did was tires. And they did oil changes on the tire software.

David Roman [00:44:36]:
I don't know anything about tire software. I don't know why you would need it's inventory. Is inventory.

Lucas Underwood [00:44:41]:
Yeah, well, the. So the reason that they wanted a different tire software is because it did the automatic federal reporting, like when the.

David Roman [00:44:49]:
Automatic tire registration on the background and.

Lucas Underwood [00:44:51]:
Shopware to a degree. But, I mean, this is, this is, hey, give me your name, your address.

David Roman [00:44:56]:
No, I'm asking him. He knows how to do that stuff. You don't know.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:01]:
I mean, I don't work in a shop, so that's the experience, speaking, right, of, like, what you can and can't do. But I'll talk about the shop, the.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:08]:
Software side to register attire. Right. Like, you have a federal requirement to either give them a registration cardinal. So that means you have to have a stack of registration cards and you have to remember it. And then the dot number is on their invoice and shopware. So they could just write that down if they wanted to do that. Or I guess the other option would be is you register it for them manually by collecting their address and everything else, which is an awesome way to improve your marketing. Just gotta get the right address with the apartment number.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:38]:
I do those follow up cards. Yeah, I do follow up cards with.

David Roman [00:45:42]:
Auto, house or apartment. That's just like, standard.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:45]:
Yeah, well, I'm not on the front counter, but. But I guess my thing is, is it is a legal requirement that you register the tire?

David Roman [00:45:54]:
Sure.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:54]:
So. And does tire guru do automatic registration? Yep.

Lucas Underwood [00:45:59]:
Automatic registration warranty. Like, they're. I mean, they're so embedded into the tire. I mean, and the other part of it, too. And this is kind of in the background, but the software with tire crew is actually private, labeled for a number of large tire distributors. And it's used to do ATD and it's used to do.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:18]:
Oh, that's cool. Turn the air temperature down. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:46:26]:
So it's an interesting point about like, hey, is there ever in a scenario where, you know, there's this combination? The best example, this all goes, I think, to this whole notion of digital and software convergence that just goes to say, from a market standpoint, there's more of these services that are being absorbed into general services and repair. Best example I can give. And that's simply because we went through this. We actually purchased, Velo acquired a product back in 2019 called Profitboost. Do you remember Profitboost? No. So profit Boost was a product that played primarily in the transmission repair market.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:04]:
Okay.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:04]:
So they had very specific transmission repair, you know, guidelines. They had dye eggs. They had a lot of relationships. There was a former. I don't know, I think they combined with somebody. But there was a association called AStrA.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:20]:
Yeah, yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:21]:
That used to do a show as part of Apex and Sema. It was a transmission specific show.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:25]:
I think they're doing the same thing this year and they're doing their training and everything.

Lucas Underwood [00:47:29]:
Bingo. So, but what you started seeing, especially in, like, even 2019, 2020, is that a lot of general repair shops started to take in, like, hey, we can just do transmission repair over here because there's more options baked in. So we ended up just. And profit boost didn't have that many customers attached to it. So we actually ended up doing a migration effort and sent most of those customers over to shop boss at the time. Cause we didn't have shopware at the time. And we built a lot of those transmission specific features. We built profit per hour and a few other things directly into shop boss for those customers to migrate over.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:00]:
And we still have many of those customers today. So if you think about that scenario, tires, we typically say like, the rule of thumb for us, and especially if we're thinking about, like, what's the ideal customer for Tire guru, the rule of thumb for us is if you're doing 10% or more of your revenue in tires, tire groove is probably a good fit for you because it has all of those features baked into it. What you'll likely see, you know, certainly there's not going to be a migration effort of Tiger guru and Shopware. But what we think is really interesting is that we're starting to carve out pieces of tire guru because we feel like it's a really strong beachhead in the market, especially for EV services.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:37]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:37]:
We're starting to carve out pieces of tire groove and put them into shopware.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:42]:
Oh, that's cool.

Lucas Underwood [00:48:43]:
Shopware right now actually has a pretty strong tires component. Protractor has pretty strong tires component as well. They're integrated with community tire and a few others. So they have like a lot of inventory and distributor supplier type functions they have access to. But actually at Siemen Apex, and we can chat about this later, but Tire guru is actually releasing their tire price optimizer. Another little wizard of Oz behind the curtain thing about Velo is we also acquired a company called Fitment Group, based out of Duluth, Minnesota. They are the primary provider of tire and wheel upfit data, or fitment data, I should say, for North America. Fitment group powers the data for a lot of these tire distributors.

Lucas Underwood [00:49:27]:
Tire connect, tire web, like a lot of these. So we can leverage that tire data for North America and we can actually do the tire price optimizer is, okay, what inventory of tires do you currently have in stock or have access to, to? And then how does that compare to other tire pricing within the market? And it'll actually give you a margin up or down in terms of what you're selling your tires for, against your competitor, against your market, against your region, against your state. So something nobody else out there has, it's going to launch primarily in tire guru first, because that's our bread and butter is the tire market. But we've tested it with a few other shop management systems, and we really think that that's the next piece that's going to be important, especially as you see more convergence of, hey, if I can, maybe I went from, I don't know, five ev's a month to 25 or to 50. Right. And the tires on those burnout so fast.

Lucas Underwood [00:50:20]:
Yeah, they do. They go crazy.

Lucas Underwood [00:50:21]:
20% faster than a combustion engine tire. So the ability to have access to tires through the inventory, which that's like what we own, and then also the ability to say, am I pricing these tires correctly? Like, I think that's one of the biggest pain points that a lot of shops do right now, is, like, pricing too high? Am I pricing too low? It's kind of a game of darts, just throwing them at a dartboard. So the ability to have that knowledge powered by data, in this case, especially since that's part of our family, again, a very important and big integration for us is really going to, I think, help drive that forward within the shop management sector. Who knows, in the next two to three years, does that go from, hey, you're doing 10% of your revenue in tires, 20% of your revenue in tires. I had a conversation with a gentleman, his name's Tim Ferguson, who does is a part of the tire pros ATD program. And he quadrupled his tire business really just in the last two years. One, from implementing tire guru and more of those options, and then two, and this is kind of a still growing piece, is he actually bought a mobile tire installation van.

Lucas Underwood [00:51:31]:
Oh, that's cool.

Lucas Underwood [00:51:31]:
And they literally stock the tires the night before, take reservations from the website, and it's literally a mobile service van van that drives around to customers. I've got a friend of business or whatever similar to that, and he attributes that not only to the service that they're booking through the tire service, they're booking through that, but also the advertising. Right? So if you're driving around town all day and it's got tire pros, whatever else on it, the ability to have that as basically a moving billboard. So that's been kind of an interesting thing on the tire side that's popped up recently is like. And it's huge over in the UK.

Lucas Underwood [00:52:03]:
Huge.

Lucas Underwood [00:52:04]:
Like the ability for them to drive to your place of work, to your home or wherever else to change your tires out, you know, whatever else. And that is really like, peaking in the market right now.

Lucas Underwood [00:52:17]:
That's pretty cool. I've got one last question for you. The CDK thing you saw that does stuff like that keep you up at night?

Lucas Underwood [00:52:28]:
Always. Here's another nice thing about Velo is, man, since we're private equity backed and the people that have been there done that, we have a very progressive and serious security team. We're always doing not only security penetration type testing, we have a third party company that does security and data testing for us every year. But we also actually, and you guys probably can understand this because I think this is one of the CDK gaps that they had, was we do personnel and employee specific security training because the Social, what do they call it? Social engineering is really the biggest gap. I was at a company a long time ago, and one day I got this email that said, hey, you've been enrolled in two years of credit monitoring. I'm like, what is going on? This has to be spam, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:53:25]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:53:26]:
And maybe an hour later, the CEO sent out a note that said, we had an issue where somebody reached out to a leader in the company posing as CEO and asked for all the employees w two s, zip file out the door. So they, to their credit, and this is a while ago, right. So we were still working on our security, and this is a startup company, but they, to their credit, they bought us all credit monitoring for a couple of years to make sure that we weren't compromised.

Lucas Underwood [00:53:58]:
Right.

Lucas Underwood [00:53:58]:
But the social engineering part is true because I get ten texts a day right now saying, hey, Kevin, this is David from Velo holdings. Will you approve a $2.1 million.

Lucas Underwood [00:54:07]:
Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [00:54:08]:
Cash infusion, blah, blah. And I'm like, these are ticks.

Lucas Underwood [00:54:12]:
Yeah, well, the scams are getting crazy. Like, on Facebook, LinkedIn, I mean, everywhere. I mean, you just get all these crazy. I mean, it's always been bad, but, like, the telephone calls have ramped up, the messages on Facebook have ramped up the messages in groups, and, like, it just, it makes you think about the web based life that we live. Now.

David Roman [00:54:32]:
Last night, I got a text saying that your chase cars are chase card has been hit for $519 at the Apple store. And, like, click here to approve or decline.

Lucas Underwood [00:54:42]:
And I'm like, it's, you got to treat every. No matter who the email's from now, you got to treat it with the utmost cynicism and say, are there misspellings in here, or do I just have a friend that can't spell?

David Roman [00:54:56]:
Just don't click anything off an email. 100% off.

Lucas Underwood [00:55:00]:
And it's generational. I feel like our generation is probably more apt to, like, be very, like, head on a swivel with that type of stuff. My mom actually got taken. My mom's in her sixties. She actually got taken for about $500 a couple months ago because she was buying. I don't know if you guys have kids, but I don't know how old they are. But our kids are super into bluey, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:55:22]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm an adult and I'm into Bluey. What are you talking about?

Lucas Underwood [00:55:26]:
It's like, my kid left the couch 20 minutes ago. I'm like, but wait, what happens to bingo? But she got taken for a pretty big sum of money, $500, because she wanted to buy our boys tickets, too. There was like this Bluey, like, show that was going on in Madison or something like that. And she got a. I don't know what happened in the process, but she got sent a link that was like, hey, bluey tickets for discount, blah, blah. It was probably because they knew it was in Madison, so they just, like, targeted anybody's info they had. She clicked on it. Cause she's like, of course I wanna buy bluey tickets at a discount for my grandkids, right? And she ended up giving her debit card so she couldn't do chargeback or anything like that.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:00]:
She got money taken from her and she even called the place that did the show and she's like, hey, I haven't received the tickets yet. They're like, oh, yeah, that's a scam that's been going around. And I'm like, oh, no, my poor mom, who just is trusting of everyone. Just the nicest woman of all time. And it's like, you get taken for it. You get taken advantage of because people are there to do it.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:18]:
At some point, though, as bad as it's gotten, in some ways, Facebook has become pretty terrible for it, right? Like, you have to pay a lot of attention. And if you weren't paying attention, or you.

David Roman [00:56:32]:
Who's clicking anything off of Facebook?

Lucas Underwood [00:56:33]:
Well, no, I understand. I'm just saying that the number of messages and the number of things you get in Facebook is nonstop. Like, if you go to your spam folder, you just see hundreds of hundreds.

David Roman [00:56:43]:
Check it, right?

Lucas Underwood [00:56:45]:
Text messages. Spam text messages.

Lucas Underwood [00:56:47]:
If you run. So Mandy will. Mandy will appreciate this one. But if you run any business accounts on Facebook, right, if you're doing ads or anything else, constant messages from bots and spammers that say your business account is going to be shut down in twelve days because of non payment, please click this like it is crazy.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:06]:
Hundreds of them.

Lucas Underwood [00:57:07]:
And sorry to any shop boss, Shopware protractor and or customers that are reaching out via Facebook messenger and, like, you know, trying to ask questions because we're like, well, we're getting 20 a day. But luckily, I think a lot of people understand now that there's been enough emphasis put on it. But there's still. What's the next phase of this? I actually heard the other day, I don't know what company it was, but this was an interesting use case was that there was a scammer that took a YouTube video of a CEO, ran it through an AI software that extracted the voice, and then use that voice to call an employee and say, hey, I need this information for blah, blah, blah. And it was a voicemail. So like, you have the CEO whose voice was essentially taken out and used against him just because it was out there. Like, what's the next phase of like social engineering? That includes AI. It's a whole nother thing.

Lucas Underwood [00:58:07]:
So we do it. I mean, nobody's bulletproof out there. Nobody CDK that they had that. I think there was another big provider, I won't mention names, but last year that had the huge outage for, you know, two, three days. CDK was two weeks and they had a huge rant. Granted, I did, like, the one thing that I will appreciate about the CDK situation is they were pretty upfront and transparent about like, guys, we've been hacked. It was our fault. They want us to pay this ransom.

Lucas Underwood [00:58:33]:
Like, they didn't need to say all that. And typically CDK has been a little bit more like withholding in terms of information, like even previously. But I will give them some credit on their communication. But either way, it's like, that's a, I mean, you think about all the, not only automotive systems that were down with that, but any accounting services ADP, there was a lot of disruption from that.

Lucas Underwood [00:58:53]:
So the assistant manager or the manager that I just hired for the shop is an assistant manager at a dealership. And he was saying that when CDK sent out messages that gave an update saying, hey, we hope to be back online. It's probably going to be this much time, it's going to be about a week, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are some of you that we're going to contact and we're going to have you on earlier. Right. And then right after that, they started getting telephone calls. And so they would answer the telephone and the one manager wasn't there. And so a staff member who's trying to be proactive and like, get this fixed says, okay, well, let me, let me walk through this with you.

Lucas Underwood [00:59:32]:
I'll get you what you need. Well, they didn't ask for the manager, right? So. Well, a, wouldn't they be asking for a manager or someone who manages the software? And that particular person, from my understanding, was listening to them and starting to go in and click here and click there and do this and do that. And then it's like, wait a minute, why do you need a client Social Security number? Right? Like that doesn't make sense. And so they went back and they called and they found out that the email that they had received saying it would be this long and we'll be calling you was one of those scam emails that somebody was either taking advantage of that or it was the original person who got into CDK that was looking for specific dealerships to obtain information from. Right. And it could have been one of those. Calcutta, would you please quit kicking that camera? You're gonna drive me nuts.

Lucas Underwood [01:00:20]:
That's just me vibrating from the caffeine. It's not actually David, but.

Lucas Underwood [01:00:27]:
So like they had targeted specific dealerships to go in and start trying to get client information from. I bet you money it's one of those like whole Calcutta buildings that. Where they just employ scammers on every floor of the building.

Lucas Underwood [01:00:42]:
Hey, it's. And you know, the.

David Roman [01:00:44]:
Everybody got hacked. Everybody's Social Security number is out. Yeah, like whatever. 700 million. Whatever Social Security numbers or whatever got.

Lucas Underwood [01:00:52]:
Got released. Yeah, our money got hacked. Our CIO chief information officer has done this for many, many years. Very like Fortune 500 companies. Like, he's been around the block. And one of the things he says, which is actually very interesting for me, was certainly there's click farms, there's scammers out there that make money off this, et cetera. There's bad agencies, but actually all the really, really bad circumstances that I've seen with hacks is somebody that's actually being either held hostage and. Or someone that's like, if it's blackmail or whatever else, it's typically like they'll find a really good developer from a company.

Lucas Underwood [01:01:37]:
And in some cases it's sometimes brutal stuff and in some cases it's money stuff, sometimes it's status stuff. But he says a lot of the bad, bad hacking scenarios that he's seen in the past is typically somebody that's actually doing it against their will. Which is even like, if you think about it from urgency standpoint.

Lucas Underwood [01:01:58]:
Right?

Lucas Underwood [01:01:58]:
Like click farms, they're just like in there all day, like, you know, trying to disrupt as much as they can. But the really bad actors are the ones that have to cause the most amount of damage. And it's like up to them to like, yeah, they gotta work through their situation. So it's really.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:13]:
And yeah, in some cases it's internal is what I've seen that it was somebody within the organization, so that sucks. David, are you being blackmailed?

Lucas Underwood [01:02:25]:
Is that why you act the way you do?

David Roman [01:02:27]:
Blackmail me with.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:30]:
Your money, David?

Lucas Underwood [01:02:31]:
I have none.

David Roman [01:02:32]:
I don't have any money. I don't know what they're going to take.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:35]:
It's all in crypto. It's all under the mattress.

David Roman [01:02:38]:
I've got some crypto.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:40]:
Do you?

David Roman [01:02:40]:
I haven't sold any of it because then the government wants to come in and tax me. So I'm going to wait. I'm going to wait for a crypto friendly administration coming and go. Yeah, don't worry about the crypto taxes. Then I'll sell it off.

Lucas Underwood [01:02:54]:
Locked up passcode.

David Roman [01:02:56]:
Yeah, it's in there forever. But they even tell you, like, if you're. If you're legit gonna carry crypto, you got. You got to have the little USB with the wallet key on there.

Lucas Underwood [01:03:05]:
You got. Yeah.

David Roman [01:03:06]:
If you put it on a broker site, it's amen.

Lucas Underwood [01:03:10]:
I subject to whatever kind of a personal story. But I had a cousin who's 40, 40 years old and passed away very unexpectedly, did not have any, didn't have a wife, kids, or anything like that. He was single, but certainly had family members. And he had been working since he was 20, basically as an IT admin in Wisconsin. And he was making really good money, but he invested all of it in crypto. And when he passed unexpectedly, his family couldn't get access to any of the accounts. He had anything written down. He didn't have a will.

Lucas Underwood [01:03:47]:
He didn't have anything. So it took them. I think we finally resolved it, but it took them two, three years to work through the legal process of, like, where is this? What is this? Like, if you could just imagine that. So David's exactly right. Like, you better have some sort of at least bulletproof backup plan.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:05]:
Yeah. If you're gonna put money in.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:07]:
If you're gonna put money in it, because. Yeah. If something just all of a sudden happens, it's not like traditional financial institutions, right where I'm talking.

David Roman [01:04:14]:
Like, you keep it on a USB drive and you put it in a safe and a safety deposit box, and that's where it goes. Because you put it on. On with a coin base or look, look what happened. FTX platform, like, money's gone.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:28]:
Yep. And what do you do?

David Roman [01:04:29]:
Yeah, it's not backed by anything. Like. Yeah, it's just. It's just code. Like, it's gone. Sorry.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:35]:
Yeah. Not that it's important, but what was your, what's your mother's maiden name? What was the name of the. What was your favorite. What was your dog's name?

Lucas Underwood [01:04:45]:
Yeah.

David Roman [01:04:45]:
What was your dog's name? Your first dog's name? Yeah, very good. Fluffy, by the way.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:51]:
Okay. Very weird.

David Roman [01:04:52]:
Snoopy spelling, though, so you guys guess it.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:55]:
Ph, yeah. Okay.

Lucas Underwood [01:04:57]:
Ph, thank you for being here.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:01]:
Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. It's always good to catch up. I know. You'll be at a apex, and sema.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:06]:
That will be there will be Asta.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:08]:
Okay, that's it.

David Roman [01:05:10]:
That's it. Asta. And then apex. And then we've got institute in January, February.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:16]:
Yeah, we'll be there, too. Cool.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:17]:
Nice. And then you guys are going everywhere.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:19]:
Well, monique is, but, you know, as.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:21]:
Long as mo's going, like, everything's okay. We only care about shopper. We only care about the rest of it. And 360 payments, we care about them, too.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:27]:
Okay, let's rest it.

David Roman [01:05:28]:
Oh, I don't care about 360 payments. Yeah.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:32]:
Say three more. Say three more. Below products, you get $50.

David Roman [01:05:35]:
The problem, the problem. They didn't have split funding. That was the. I tried them. I went to them. I'm like, hey, you guys have split funding. We don't know what that is. Okay.

David Roman [01:05:44]:
All right, so I have to go with somebody else.

Lucas Underwood [01:05:46]:
Lisa rolled her eyes at me the other day.

David Roman [01:05:48]:
Why?

Lucas Underwood [01:05:49]:
I think the last time I saw her, I was like, hey, remember that thing that I signed up for, the, like, financing portal through 360 payments? She said, yeah. I said, I don't know what it is, and I keep getting billed for it, but I've never done anything. She just rolled her eyes and walked away.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:07]:
She's like, it sounds like 300. Sixty's problem.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:09]:
I know, right? No, this was before she wanted to.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:13]:
Talk about transition recruiting, because, boy, do I know someone.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:17]:
Yes, absolutely. They're doing really well. They really are.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:21]:
They got a rock. They got, you know, if you think about bringing in the, what is it? The monstars, space jam, all the heavy hitters from the industry into one company. That's what they've done over there. They're doing awesome. Love working with their team. We just launched a partnership with them and protractor and then Shopware as well, where we're going to be doing some passing of info back and forth. Gives them access to some of our data to measure technician efficiency. We haven't really figured out exactly where we're going with it yet, but we do understand it's something that can help them fuel, like, more conversations with getting good, solid people into places.

Lucas Underwood [01:06:56]:
I just need to point out garbage in, garbage out. David doesn't clock his employees in and out, so don't look at his data.

David Roman [01:07:02]:
Yeah, I don't do that. They don't clock in and out of the jobs either, so you suck.