Risk & Resolve
The Risk & Resolve Podcast is your go-to resource for insightful conversations at the intersection of leadership, business ownership, and the insurance industry. Hosted by Ben Conner and Todd Hufford, this podcast dives deep into the challenges and opportunities that leaders face in an ever-changing world.
Each episode features candid discussions with business owners, industry experts, and thought leaders, exploring topics like innovation, risk management, and the strategies that drive success. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, executive, or insurance professional, you’ll gain actionable insights and inspiration to navigate today’s complex business landscape.
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Risk & Resolve
How Tariffs and EVs Are Reshaping American Dealerships with Andy Long, GM at Royal South Toyota
Andy Long shares the fascinating journey from high school teacher to dealer principal of Royal Auto Group, weaving together family legacy, automotive industry insights, and personal growth across three generations of leadership.
• Royal Auto Group began in 1969 when Andy's grandfather purchased a Chevrolet dealership in Bloomington, Indiana
• The company now operates three locations with six brands: Toyota, Mazda, Volvo, Subaru, Volkswagen, and Audi
• Andy initially pursued teaching before joining the dealership for a "one-year internship" that evolved into a lifelong career
• Car buying has transformed dramatically – from multiple dealership visits to primarily online research and communication
• New car sales operate on thin margins as a volume business, while used cars offer more profit potential due to their uniqueness
• Current tariffs are significantly impacting manufacturers, who are largely absorbing costs rather than raising consumer prices
• The electric vehicle market faces challenges despite government incentives – consumer adoption has slowed amid concerns about range, infrastructure, and cost
• Pending legislation in California could mandate elimination of new gasoline vehicles, creating major industry uncertainty
• Balancing work and family differently than his grandfather led to a pivotal confrontation that transformed their relationship
• Andy's grandfather's late-in-life spiritual transformation became one of his most meaningful memories
You're listening to Risk and Resolve, and now for your hosts, ben Conner and Todd Hufford. Welcome back to another episode of Risk and Resolve. I'm your co-host, ben Conner, with Todd Hufford, and today an extra special guest, a really good friend of mine from my high school days, the dealer principal with the Royal Auto Group, andy Long. Andy, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good to be with you guys today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really excited just to have a conversation with a good friend and to talk about the car business.
Speaker 2:I love talking about the car business, so that part is very easy.
Speaker 1:So we'll get to do that and we'll get to talk about family business and then even maybe go into our friendship group that we've warmly named man Bash, and we'll explain that here in a little bit. But, andy, thanks for joining us and if you wouldn't mind, give us a flyover, if you will, of the Royal Auto Group and what you're doing on a day-to-day basis professionally.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the Royal Auto Group is a collection of dealerships here in southern Indiana. Bloomington, indiana, is our headquarters. That's where we're located. We started back in 1969 when my grandfather on my mom's side came up from El Paso, texas, and bought into a dealership in Bloomington, indiana. As the story goes, he was actually maybe allocated or had an opportunity to buy into one off of Fall Creek in Indianapolis and he went up there, took a look at it didn't love that location, maybe as much and there was a gentleman down in Bloomington named Dave McIntyre who had a Chevrolet dealership here and he was trying to sell it and move back up to the Indianapolis area where he had been a Chevrolet dealership previously. And so then my grandfather pivoted and came down to Bloomington love the town, love the university vibe, and so then he bought Dave McIntyre Chevrolet. It became Royal Chevrolet in 1969. And Dave went up to Indianapolis and got back in the Chevrolet. It became Royal Chevrolet in 1969.
Speaker 2:And Dave went up to Indianapolis and got back in the Chevrolet game up there. So we've been here since 69. And we grew from a Chevrolet store through at the zenith of the empire, maybe it was 21 brands and 13 rooftops across two states 21 brands and 13 rooftops across two states. And then since maybe 2010, we focused on Bloomington. We used a partner model.
Speaker 2:So he, my grandfather, came up in an organization that usually had an equity partner as the general manager, boots on the ground, day-to-day operator, and so then he continued that. So he had various dealerships with a partner that was on site that would run the day-to-day operator. And so then he continued that. So he had various dealerships with a partner that was onsite that would run the day-to-day, and the last 15 years of his life he sold off his interests outside of Bloomington and even inside Bloomington to those very deserving partners. And so we've got three rooftops and six brands here in Bloomington currently. So we've got a Toyota store, which is kind of our flagship building, a Mazda, volvo dealership. That's here on our south campus and then over closer to the university on the east side of town we've got a Subaru, volkswagen, audi dealership so, um, so did you?
Speaker 1:obviously, there's a family tie, uh, with your grandfather, um, but what was? What was your journey? Uh, as you went to college and thought about your career path, like how did the dots connect to to finally end up going to Royal?
Speaker 2:That's a fun story, one that I enjoy telling. I'll give it an abbreviated version of that, which is through my own personal failure. So I, my grandfather, had five daughters and so it kind of skipped a generation where he didn't have.
Speaker 2:Uh, none of his five daughters had an interest in joining the family business full time. I think they probably all worked there at various times throughout their lives high school, and college, post-college but none of them wanted to work full time there and none of the son-in-laws wanted to work full time or wanted to do it, for after trying it for a while, none of them stuck, so it kind of skipped a generation. That's all going on in the background, but when I was going to school and then when I went to Taylor University, there was no plan for me to to follow in my grandfather's footsteps or to join the car biz. I didn't have any interest in that. I worked there every summer from when I was 12 all the way through college, so I would usually do a few weeks to a month in.
Speaker 2:Bloomington, where I would work as a lot porter taking out the trash, washing cars. The joke was that I learned how to smoke a cigarette down to its butt without ashing it a single time, while also washing a car, and that was like the true test of if you were a great lot porter, if you could do that. In the 90s and early 2000s, which I mastered, which maybe was part of my career path I exhibited some real talent for washing cars early on, taking out the trash. I went to Taylor and had an interest in teaching and so I played sports.
Speaker 2:Taylor is a real small school so they let people play sports if you have a desire and I really liked that and so I thought, hey, I'm going to be a teacher and a coach. And so I graduated with an English education degree, secondary for middle school and high school, got my certification, got my teaching license. But I did my student teaching in IPS Indianapolis Public School. And that was very different than my own education background, which was both public and private, but in a suburb, not the city, in a little bit different environment. And so I thought, hey, if I could teach there, I can teach anywhere and I'm not intimidated by whatever the tough educational environment might be. But they ran me out of Dodge so fast and that was a really eye-opening experience.
Speaker 2:I thought I had a lot of answers as a young teacher and I did not have the answers for some of the questions that were being asked in the IPS district and that gave me real pause. And so I was like, man, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I don't think I want to be a teacher. And so I took the LSAT maybe, was going to go back to law school, and at that time my grandfather kind of slid over and was like, hey, you know, what you could do is you could do a one year internship at one of our dealerships in Bloomington, earn some money. It'll look good on your resume for law school and you don't have to go right back to school. You just finished school. You don't want to get back in the classroom right away, so this would be kind of a good opportunity to just do something different for a little bit.
Speaker 1:And I said okay.
Speaker 2:I would be happy to do that. I've worked in various departments, like I said, all growing up, so I was kind of familiar with the dealership world.
Speaker 2:I moved to Bloomington, I started working full time and they kind of moved me around where I started in central office and I saw a couple of different departments, and then my primary duty at that time was that we were just starting to sell cars using the interwebs. This was brand new, and so we we didn't really have a process for that, and I was well qualified because I could type with both hands.
Speaker 2:I remember I uh, I replaced, uh, a gentleman named Alan who would would smoke with one hand and he would type with one finger, and that was to then and he was like the internet guru because he had he held that mantle before I got there. And so I remember when I got there, like my first couple weeks, like I would like type with both hands and like I didn't need to look at the computer or the keyboard because I was an english major and I, you know, I could type a bunch of words per minute.
Speaker 1:You were a whiz.
Speaker 2:They thought that was black magic and even Alan was like you got to take my job, I'm going to go do something else. This isn't going to work, so I did that for a year.
Speaker 1:You can't fire me, I resign, right, yeah, he saw the writing on the wall.
Speaker 2:Good guy.
Speaker 3:Technology comes at you really quick, just like right now.
Speaker 2:I think if I went back to the sales floor I'd be way out of touch, right. So we wished Alan all the best. He was a good dude, but yeah. So I did that for a year and at the end of that year I really enjoyed it more than I thought I did, and it had elements of a lot of things that I was interested in. It was different. Every day You're dealing with people.
Speaker 3:There's some theatrics involved.
Speaker 2:I was like theater. I was on the debate team or mock trial team in high school and had an interest in like point, counterpoint and not argumentation but persuasion, and so I liked the day to day. And so then he asked me. My grandfather was like well, hey, if you want to stick around, you can. Your internship is done. If you want to join full time, we've got a spot for you. And I said, yeah, I would like to do that. So I spent five years working at our East side location, which at the time was a Nissan, volkswagen, audi, subaru, lincoln, mercury all in the same building, which I think we had the most franchises all in one building in the state of Indiana, probably in the Midwest, and so that was my upbringing. For five years I worked at that location doing sales on the digital side the.
Speaker 2:Internet world, which was evolving every year, and then a position became open at the Toyota store. So I was promoted and placed as a sales manager at the Toyota store. And that's like the guy if you're negotiating on a car dealer, if you're trying to buy a vehicle, when the sales guy is like, well, I don't know, I have to go, let me check with my manager. I was that guy. I was the manager that they would go check with and I was the guy that would come out and try to give you reason to buy the car from Royal today versus someone else at some other time. So that was my role for about seven years, from 2010 to about 2017.
Speaker 2:And then I kind of moved into a pseudo executive role where I was the general manager. I wasn't locking up every night, that was someone else. That was my protege. I wasn't locking up every night, that was someone else that was my protege, a guy named Mike who kind of took my spot. And then I learned full time from our business partner who's still here, a guy named Brad who worked closely with my grandfather, and then so I learned from him over the last several years and then in 22, when my grandfather passed away.
Speaker 2:At that point I was the de facto dealer principal, making the decisions on an executive level day to day, and so then that title went to me and I was the dealer principal and was able to buy the majority of shares and become the dealer principal, majority owner at the Toyota store. So, and that brings- us to today.
Speaker 1:All the way to today. So back when your grandfather asked you hey, or told you, asked you, I don't know what it was, but why don't you come work? Asked you, I don't know what it was, but why don't you come work? And this internship thing Was your grandfather the kind of guy that he knew that was the hook, or is he the guy that was just like? No, that was just the offer. He had no intention of it going further than a year. Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 2:I think he was a very good salesperson. I mean, clearly he didn't finish high school, he didn't go to college, he was very self-made. He started selling cars when he was in high school and then did that full time and kind of left his educational opportunities and started selling cars at a very young age and turned out to be really good at it, and so he was a natural salesperson. I think maybe he saw some of that in me and the joke goes is that none of the son-in-laws wanted to work for him full time because he was a really tough dude to work for. So he came from nothing and he built a very successful business, but he was a tough dude to work for, very exacting, he had high standards, was demanding. His secret to success was just to work longer and harder than most of his competitors. And you mix that with a good sense for business and opportunity and risk and he did really well. But he was tough to work for. So the joke was that he had to mellow out and skip the generation. He realized, hey, I can either sell it to a larger dealership entity or sell it to a rival, or to sell it to somebody, or I can have my family join me in this, but I'm going to need to maybe downshift just a bit and become a little bit more approachable as an owner and as a boss. And so, looking back, I think that he was trying to give me an on-ramp into the the family biz, but he didn't. He certainly didn't present it that way at the time.
Speaker 2:It was very much just like hey, if you want to, you want to do this one thing for a year, no problem, no strings attached. But then, behind the scenes, talking to some of the, we've got two partners who have been here since the 90s and both of those gentlemen I work for they were my direct bosses when I started and they were both like, oh no, he was definitely telling us, like, let him, you know, let him come in later if he needs to leave for a weekend or if he wants to take a car home under the like I have got to move some furniture. Let him take that SUV with fancy wheels, which I did almost every weekend. I found a reason to like borrow a car from the dealership. So he was definitely trying to get, uh, pique my interest in the business. So and then. But it was a very soft offer and it was like, hey, if you want to do this, no problem. And then at the end of that year it was like, hey, what do you think? Um, and I really I did. I loved it. I loved aspects of it for sure. So my wife bethel will we? We joke about this now, but it was kind of tough at the time, not kind of it was exceedingly rough, but so I worked kind of like a nine to five, no weekends, during that internship year and during that year I was dating beth, who's now my wife.
Speaker 2:We had met in high school eagles, fly higher and heritage Christian. We went to different colleges, started dating about halfway through and had been dating a long distance. She lived in Indy and I lived in Bloomington, so I went home every weekend or she would come down and she would actually stay at my grandparents' house, and so then I was. We got engaged during that year and so she had only we'd only been kind of in the same state, dating each other when I had a pretty flexible schedule and I had my weekends free. So when we got back from our honeymoon I had committed to joining the car business full-time and my grandfather was like hey when you're.
Speaker 2:You know, because you're coming on full-time now you're going to work a traditional car schedule and I was like sure that sounds great. And that's like bell to bell, which is kind of a euphemism in the business for like you open at eight and you stay until we close the dealership at eight and you lock the doors up and you leave when we close, and every Saturday until we die, because Saturday is a big volume day, all of our customers are off work so they can come in and do some shopping. So usually that's a bigger retail day for us, important in the car business. So we went from seeing each other every weekend to when we got married and we're back from our honeymoon. I was like, hey, by the way, I'm going to work a different schedule than you've just seen for a year and that's going to be every day, eight to eight and every Saturday until we die. And so that was a very abrupt adjustment for a young married couple.
Speaker 2:But that was what was expected in our field, in the Royal biz. It was just hey, if you're going to be a manager or on the sales team, you're going to just work a ton of hours and that's the difference. That's what we expected and that's what I did. So that was really difficult but looking back, I'm appreciative of that time that I kind of put in my dues and I missed a lot of social stuff. I missed a lot of kid stuff. We've got four kids now so that was difficult, difficult but probably needed, and it's given me a real appreciation for the sacrifices that a lot of our employees make every day. Uh, being part of our team, we've tried to to curb the expectations a little bit, align them more with the family-friendly schedule, so we don't work those hours anymore, but it's still a lot of work and so I appreciate people that put in that time for the Royal organization and I'm probably more appreciative because I did that for a while. I did that for, you know, a long time 11 years.
Speaker 3:Well, maybe if we added an attorney to this call, we'd have an attorney and an insurance agent and a car salesman, which would be the most unlistened to podcast ever. I was reflecting on the similarities of really your business and our business. We represent carriers, you represent manufacturers. We're out for the interests of our customers. You're out for the interests of your customers. We're out for the interest of our customers, you're out for the interest of your customers. But it's that delicate balance between meeting the needs of the customers and servicing, in our case, their policies and, in your case, servicing their vehicle. Give us a breakdown of the components of a traditional dealership, from parts to service, to new to used, and maybe give us percentages on, maybe, where some of that revenue is coming from.
Speaker 2:Those are good questions. So a lot of people aren't aware that each dealership is its own franchise. So maybe similar to a Chick-fil-A or what you guys do is you represent those carriers but you're your own business. Similarly, I represent the brands here in Bloomington like Toyota, mazda, volvo, but I don't work for them. I'm not an employee of Volvo. I run a dealership, a brick and mortar business. We have our own customer base and I am the authorized seller and servicer of those brands. So I'm the only Toyota guy in town, I'm the only Volvo, only Subaru, volkswagen, audi, mazda and so my goal is to represent those brands, the six that I've got here in Bloomington. In my market area, which is a little bit larger than Bloomington it stretches up to, you know, south of Indianapolis for some of my brands and west, over almost a terahertz down south past Bedford. So if somebody wants to buy one of the brands that I've got, I'm going to represent those brands. I try to keep the vehicles in stock for them to come and do research, test drive. They can buy one here when they've got a problem mechanically or if they just need to maintenance their vehicle, they could do that here. We've got a full line service department, parts department, and we also have a body shop or a collision center. So if you get into an accident and your insurance carrier says you could fix it with OEM parts or that's OEM is kind of like the slang in our industry for the official brand you could do that here as well.
Speaker 2:So but we may sell um at our two larger dealerships. We may sell a hundred a month right now is kind of our, our benchmark. That was higher pre COVID, for sure. Uh, a good month. We may may sell 120 or 150, both new and used combined, and the brands will have peaks and valleys. So you may have a really good Subaru month and Toyota may be down a little bit. Or Mazda may have a great month and Volvo may be a little slow. So that varies. We try to shoot for 100 to 120 new and used every month and we may be servicing 50 to 60 cars every day. So we may have 50 to 60 customers coming in saying I need an oil change or I popped a tire or something even larger, like hey, I think I've got a weird electrical problem with my older Toyota and then, we fix those and then we may see another.
Speaker 2:It varies in the body shop, but it could be as many as 50 to 60 in a month, sometimes less. So all those things are working day to day and we're trying to interface and one of my jobs, along with my partner who's our executive VP, is just to try to make sure that we're communicating within all those departments to try to service those customers.
Speaker 3:I've always heard that used cars are a bit more profitable to a dealership than new cars. Is that truth, or do you need to debunk that?
Speaker 2:It can be true. So for a long time our dealership sold more used cars than new. Traditionally we were a used car. That was one of our focuses, and so we would sell one and a half used, sometimes even two used cars for every new that we sold, and pre-COVID for sure.
Speaker 2:New cars is a volume game. You want to sell as many as you can. I've got the exact same car, usually within maybe a few different options, as a competing dealership in Columbus or in Greenwood, indiana, they've got a red Camry, I've got a red Camry, and so it's who can provide the best service, give the customer the best experience and often who can offer the most competitive price. And those factors all kind of come together. But that means that there's a cutthroat amount of competition between all the dealerships trying to sell a customer that new car and then after that we're hoping to get that customer back for service. We want them to do their tires and their brakes and their wiper blades here. We want to care for that customer for as long as they own that vehicle really low, because it's just the market drives it down.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of competition and used cars are a little bit different in that if you trade for a really nice, you know, two year old Toyota Sequoia with low miles. There's probably not an identical one anywhere close, and so they're kind of like fingerprints or snowflakes in that every used car is a little different, and so it's very hard to say, hey, I'm interested in this car that you've got on your lot. I can buy the exact same car at a different dealership. We would counter and say, well, it's not going to be the exact same car, it doesn't have the same pedigree, ownership history, maintenance records, the condition is a little bit different, the price is different.
Speaker 2:So it's usually a little bit easier to hold gross profit on a used car. You're still going to price within market and I think across the board we make way less than customers assume that we make. We think, oh, we're making thousands on every transaction, but often on a new car the front profit may be a negative number and that you're just getting that customer here and then hoping that you can establish a relationship and keep that relationship for years and try to make it back in that way.
Speaker 1:Andy, is there, like on the new cars, because you also have to manage a relationship with the brand, right? So is there incentive then that, hey, we, we may not make money on this, Obviously we want to care for the customer over time, but we also want to show the, the, the brand, that we're able to move vehicles and like how does that is that true and does that help you? And like what does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say pay to play, but we've invested, you know, millions of dollars in a brick and mortar facility.
Speaker 2:Using our Toyota store as an example, we had a big renovation where we spent almost a million dollars just on the front portal that is that kind of iconic white tiled rectangle that goes over our front door.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of expense to represent these brands in our area, and they also dictate what our sales efficiency should be, based on all sorts of metrics that they get from registration data, from the state and their own sales data. So they come up usually with an objective saying hey, we think that you should be selling this many new Mazdas every month, and then it's our responsibility to stay within that acceptable range. So we want to sell as many as we can, but we certainly we have an obligation as part of our franchise agreement that we're going to represent the brand in a sales efficiency or compliant manner, and so that means there is a ton of pressure to hit our objectives, to sell the appropriate number of cars, to be sales efficient in our area, and that usually comes at the expense of well, hey, if we waited longer, if we waited for the exact customer who wanted this car we may be able to sell it for a higher profit or a higher transaction price.
Speaker 2:be able to sell it for a higher profit or a higher transaction price, but we would rather give up the profit, get the customer report the sale and then kind of move on from that. So the new car game is for sure very volume oriented.
Speaker 3:What percentage do you sell within the footprint of your market versus, obviously, online? You're attracting people from out of your market. You're even probably shipping them.
Speaker 2:You may not even talk to the customer in real life, yeah, so that's changed remarkably since I started in the business, which was it would have been maybe unusual to correspond with someone via the email. We didn't even have texting really when I started, but it used to be that you would call and maybe you would call two or three different dealerships. I'll call the guy in Greenwood, I'll call a guy in Fort Wayne, I'll call a guy in Bloomington, find a salesperson, try to get some information about what the best price would be on a particular car, and then you make a trip and you may make two or three different stops at various dealerships, look at them, collect the information, then make a final decision. So the shopping process was a lot longer over the last 20 years. It's really changed and the customers can do so much more research online. They can go to these very robust OEM websites where they can get all sorts of information configure a car, get pricing, get availability. They can see in terms of Toyota, they can see exactly what I have in my parking lot just in real time, the same as I can, and so there's a lot more information out there. That means less trips.
Speaker 2:So it's very uncommon that a customer would go to two or three dealerships. Usually that's all done via email or texting and you know what you're trying to get and you usually have a pretty good idea of what you're going to pay for it before you would drive over, whether it's drive down the street to your local guy or drive across town because they've got something different, or drive from here to St Louis because they've got an exceptionally rare car. So I, as a small town, half of my business is repeat and so I've got maybe a larger percentage of customers from my PMA or primary market area that I focus on because I'm a small town Indiana guy and I don't have as many people coming from out of state, but we'll ship several cars every month to customers that we never meet in person.
Speaker 3:So roughly, what percentage do you think is out of your PMA, sold out of your PMA?
Speaker 2:We'd like to sell maybe 70% of customers that are here in my backyard or in my area, but there could be 25 to 30% on a given month that we happen to have the car that they're looking for. And it's much easier now than it was 20 years ago to just say hey, I can call this guy, I'm in Memphis, tennessee, but I know that this guy will sell me a product. I can trust that process and he can even ship it to my driveway. I don't have to spend, you know, a month searching for the car. I don't even have to spend my weekend driving up there to get it and then drive it back. So that happens more frequently now than it did, for sure, but we still try to focus above 60% for sure of my own customers.
Speaker 1:There's been seemingly some shakeup in the car business over the last few months and even recently, one being tariffs and and obviously when the tariff conversation comes up, the auto industry is what gets zoomed into. So I was just curious to get your take on kind of what your visibility has been to tariffs and how that's impacted you all, or perceived impact for you all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that has been a wild ride, and so I want to be careful to say hey, we're neutral on that subject. We're not advocating for or against the idea of tariff. That's a bigger picture thing, but I can speak to how specific auto tariffs are changing or affecting the retail world and how consumers would interact with my dealership in the face of these tariffs. I would say that I probably didn't know much about or hadn't paid attention to import export stuff. I know that we represent a lot of international brands. We've got German brands, we've got Japanese brands, I have a Swedish brand and so I know that these cars are coming from somewhere. But each of these brands that we would have have a manufacturing presence in the US, but they also import cars globally from all over the world and I probably didn't have a great understanding of how all these components came and fit together and got assembled and then were shipped to a final assembly place until the conversation about tariffs came up. But it is on the top of all.
Speaker 2:Of our only partners are really grappling with this issue right now and how it's affecting their prices on a short term. None of the brands that we represent have changed their pricing structure to consumers. So none of them have said, hey, we got to pass this tariff on to our consumers. We're going to raise the retail price of the car that we're selling. Some of the brands that we represent have said, hey, we are racking up huge tariff bills, like multi-million dollars, every single day that we're open for business, every single day that we're open for business. We cannot sustain that and we need to change our wholesale arrangement or our wholesale pricing with the dealers.
Speaker 2:So and it kind of it comes in and out of focus as some of these tariff deadlines come and go, or there's an extension or there's, you know, an exemption that comes up. That's been really difficult to navigate as we're often ordering two to three to four months ahead. So we're trying to plan on well, what's our volume going to be like in August or October and how many cards do we need to have on order for those times? But I have a brand that we represent that has changed their wholesale arrangement and they've said hey, we're the price point with the tariffs. If the tariffs go into effect on May 3rd or continue to go into effect, that price, if we were to add it to the price of the car, it would make the car unsellable. No one's going to buy a car that suddenly is 25 or 50 percent more expensive.
Speaker 2:They'll just wait and so none of the brands want to kill their sales and so none of them have changed the consumer facing price. But they are all absorbing huge tariff bills and some of them are beginning to pass those on to dealers saying, hey, we can't do this alone. We're going to change your margin structure, so you're going to need to participate, you need to take less, have less profit, if any profit, on the front end of these sales, because we can't change the retail price that's set but we can't continue to pay these tariffs. So that was in development just last week and we're kind of waiting. There was some language that came out earlier this week about Trump alleviating some of the tariffs that are automobile facing. So we'll see how that plays out. But it's literally been like, you know, day to day. There may be something that changes. I went to a big conference for one of the brands I represent down in Texas.
Speaker 2:They hosted the national dealer body, so almost 300 dealers and I know that this is a grade A, primo executive level presentation with a slide deck and audio visual that they had created probably months prior and they were scrambling last minute because there had been a big tariff announcement 48 hours before our meeting and so the whole tone of the meeting was kind of changed in that. Okay, well, we've got this new information about how tariffs are going to apply to our specific brand because we're bringing in cars. This car is not made here in the US, so it has been a wild ride. If I was going to guess, I would say I just cannot imagine tariffs continuing in this way.
Speaker 2:At some point the dam will break and some of these manufacturers will say, hey, we have got to raise prices because we cannot absorb these tariffs on our own. And at that point, if that changes, then I think that the administration will react really quickly because that's a direct increase to cost to consumers, a tariff that goes across, and then all these brands are like, yep, we have to, we're gonna have to raise the price of this truck by 25. That would slump the auto industry and I don't know that's not. That's not good for me, for sure. But we're often thought of as a vanguard of the larger economic trends, and so nobody wants to see a big slump or a recession in car buying because that's going to have trickle down effect. So if I had to guess, I would say something gets resolved, maybe before that happens.
Speaker 3:You've got a lot of different brands. I'm thinking Subaru having gone to Purdue. Obviously they've got a big factory up in Lafayette. Toyota's got a presence in Indiana. Do you kind of start wargaming which brands might fare better on that because they're assembling more in the US? Does that become part of the conversation you guys have?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've thought about that. Or another wrinkle to that was last month when they announced these tariffs and said, hey, like these are going to go into effect, these tariffs and said, hey, like these are going to go into effect, there's going to be 25 percent import export on these cars coming in, even for brands that assemble vehicles, or a good chunk of their vehicles. Like Toyota builds a million cars in the US but they also import, you know, not quite that many, but a good chunk. So they're doing both. But there was some question of like, hey, if the tariff date is X date, like early April, if the tariffs go into effect that date, everything that gets into the US before then would be pre-tariff and would not be tariff.
Speaker 2:So the gamble was, hey, would we want to try to get a hold of a large shipment of cars, way more than we would need, gambling that if there was a tariff increase, all the other cars that were coming in after that tariff effective date would be seven, eight, $10,000 more expensive than the one that's in my parking lot. As it turned out, that hasn't really happened and the manufacturers have absorbed those. But there was definitely some strategizing about hey, should we make some big play and in hindsight that would have been a big risk, and I think we didn't have the appetite for that, and so we just kind of stood pat and said, hey, we're going to buy and sell within market within our normal time frame and we'll participate, I guess not as a gambler that's out ahead of that curve, but just with everybody in the normal group of wait and see.
Speaker 2:And as it turned out, it was kind of much to do about nothing so far.
Speaker 3:So far. So basically, you're not buying the quote unquote futures on the Toyota Highlanders and the Sequoias by loading up the bathroom shelves with rolls and rolls of toilet paper or, in this case, tens of thousands of dollars of cars. You're just taking it as it comes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, millions, and millions of dollars of inventory Millions.
Speaker 2:So it's a big gamble and no, we said no thanks. We had the opportunity, like from Volvo as an example, they've got a lot of vehicles that are in port, which means they've been unloaded from the boat but are waiting in a giant logistics parking lot, and so it would have been possible to say, hey, let's take 50 EX-90s or 50 XC-60s and bring them in. Even that's way more than we would need for a two month, three month period. But so we did not do that, and it turned out that that didn't save us or lose us any money, so holding fast was probably the right strategy in that case. It's hard to time government tariffs, as it turns out, nobody has the algorithm for that yet. Yeah, absolutely, andy, you mentioned something to me. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Andy, you mentioned something to me Gosh, I think it might have been even yesterday about a California law that passed. That is just interesting for the car business.
Speaker 2:Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, this is man. This has been the most interesting topic outside of tariffs this used to be the topic that everybody was talking about but the role of BEVs, or battery electric vehicles, in the US marketplace. And to give just a little bit of backstory before I talk about the CARB states or the ones that are following California and their emissions policies since Tesla started so the 2010s, that decade or maybe even earlier, as they got going very small company but saw tremendous growth and they were able to bypass the traditional dealer network, which I'm not a huge fan of. They are selling direct to consumer.
Speaker 2:So just like you buy your iPhone, you can go online and buy it. You can go online and buy a Tesla. They also have brick and mortar dealerships, but they're all corporately owned. They don't go through a franchise dealer network like most of our legacy manufacturers do, and so that was very novel and is a threat maybe to someone like me who has a traditional distribution type role for the products that I represent. But they saw a huge growth as EVs were coming up and they really dominated that original EV space. So even up until the last five years they had huge market share. Five years they had huge market share and they were seeing, you know, like and we're talking about small, small numbers like they had point zero, 1% of the market share point, you know, point 5%.
Speaker 2:They've made it up to 1%, which is a huge number of, you know, 16 to 18 million cars sold. They could sell a quarter million cars every year, but they saw huge growth on very small numbers. And all of these other legacy manufacturers noticed this and said, hey, the growth is going to be in EVs. We have got to get into the EV game. And so if you look at the number of nameplates of electric vehicles from 10 years ago, they were like a handful Tesla dominated, you know, nissan had an EV, mitsubishi had a weird EV at the time but real small numbers.
Speaker 2:Now every brand that sells a car in America just about offers some sort of completely battery electric vehicle for the US market and the US market with China. Those are the two biggest markets globally. So if you have a presence here in the US, that's what's required to be a major player on the global stage. You've got to be able to sell cars in the US. We've got a ton of car buyers, same with China. You've got to be able to sell in that market.
Speaker 2:And so EV saw this huge increase where everybody's scrambling to get an EV and they're doubling some years on a very low percentage, doubling their space in the market. And so everyone was just betting the farm that EVs were going to continue to have this just meteoric growth, growth. Now there are, last count, over 30 different nameplates of electric vehicles that you could buy, and so the market is saturated with different options and at some point over the last few years the market kind of turned and there was this weird sentiment there's huge competition. Everybody's got an electric vehicle. None of them go more than 300 miles, most of them go 200 and change. They're all fairly expensive, so they're way more expensive than a traditional Prius or another hybrid vehicle, a Ford Escape hybrid. They're more expensive than their hybrid counterparts. They're usually very expensive because the R&D and the raw materials needed to make the batteries, and so there was this weird slowdown where people started paying more attention to like. Okay, hey, like, what are the advantages of an EV, does it?
Speaker 2:have the range I need Are these good cars? And it's kind of become a focal point or a debate within the auto market. Those who follow it would be like, hey, what is the role of an EV in our market? Do we have the infrastructure to? If everybody joined the EV club and we were all driving an electric vehicle, does our power grid support that? Do we have enough power in our grid to support, you know, 10 more million EVs on the road?
Speaker 2:And so there was some debate and they kind of started slowing down. There was market saturation and then EV has just tumbled the last couple of years and concurrently with this, elon has aligned himself with Trump, and so what was like a very cool and hip, maybe liberal and young tech brand has become kind of lumped with a very political vibe. Probably unintended for people that bought a Tesla in the last couple of years. They probably weren't thinking like, hey, this is going to be the equivalent of a MAGA hat or some sort of political statement, but that's kind of what it is right now, and so Tesla has seen dramatic drops in sale.
Speaker 2:All other EVs have also slowed way, way down, and that market right now is really being propped up by these very big government rebates. You can get a $7,500 government rebate if you lease an EV across the board. Just about everybody qualifies for that, and so that makes a $60,000 car darn near 50, makes a $50,000 car very affordable for the average consumer, and so there's a lot of turmoil in what would happen if that government and the current administration has already talked about maybe pulling back from that and taking that or reducing that, that EV credit.
Speaker 3:But to your point. So like, all right. So what that's?
Speaker 2:the. I've spent too much time talking about the backstory of the EV market. But California and some other maybe more liberal leaning states that were faster to adopt the EV market have said hey, we want to do our own emissions, tailpipe emissions standards, so we want to set our own limits. And California is such a big state, just like the US is a big market globally. California is a big state in the US and so manufacturers kowtow to what California wants to do because they got a ton of people there that buy cars Huge market, you got to be able to sell cars there. So over the last couple of decades they've been like hey, we'll set our own tailpipe emissions and we're going to try to make it stricter than the general US. So to drive a car in California it's got to hit a certain requirement. That's often way different than Indiana, and so this month California is going to be voting on a state bill that would essentially phase out or eliminate gas cars.
Speaker 2:So they're trying to say hey all the way up to 2030, 2035, the percentage of EV cars that the OEMs, that the manufacturers, are going to be able to sell in our state go up every year until they're 100% no hybrids, no gas cars, no internal combustion engines, no gasoline by a date that's not too far off in the future. Those mirror and to me that's crazy talk, because as a market we're nowhere near that. We don't have a car that can go 400 miles, yet there's no way that an EV fits every individual driver. They don't fit long haul truckers, yet they don't have that technology. The infrastructure to drive across country is barely there. If you don't have access to a charging system at your house or in your neighborhood or at your workplace, where are you going to charge your car?
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of wild logistic questions that we have to answer before we would mandate hey, you're not allowed to buy a gas car anymore or you can't sell them here brand new in California. But they're voting on that this month in California and there are 11 other states that basically mimic whatever California does. They've kind of formed a coalition and they're all going to do the same thing. So New York, a lot of the Northeast states in the Pacific Northwest have all kind of banded together and say, hey, we're going to do our own laws, our state laws, in relation to how vehicle manufacturers can sell new cars in terms of the emissions that they produce, and so it's maybe from a good place. Hey, we want to reduce greenhouse gases. But we're kind of we're jumping to start a little bit and we're saying, hey, we're going to mandate that you have to buy an EV by 10 years in the future, when maybe the market isn't there quite yet. People aren't ready for that.
Speaker 3:So that's what's happening right now.
Speaker 2:And it's. There's so much other news headlines going on in the market that I don't I'm not aware of that, probably outside of my industry. And so I know about it because I'm getting internal memos and briefs from the brands I represent saying hey, you should be aware of this, this should be on your radar. But I don't know if people in my that I go to church with know about this, because it's not something that people are yelling and screaming about.
Speaker 3:But that's what is absolutely crazy, and that's happening this month and would have huge implications, right?
Speaker 2:So it's going to either penalize all these, these car companies, maybe with a $20,000 per vehicle sold penalty, so you'd rack up huge bills. You wouldn't sell cars in California, you'd miss out on that market. Very, very unstable in terms of how you plan for that.
Speaker 1:What a wild energy conversation around that. Because it might be an emission. I'm not an energy expert by any any stretch of the imagination, but I know it takes energy to charge a car. So, um, you know, maybe you're you're solving one problem by perception and just creating a whole nother issue, because I don't think california would ever be able to get the energy to support that. And so what would you do in that environment? And does that kind of a bet just force people just to leave the state?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there would be some big questions for, like, could a brand in the US survive if you're not selling cars in California and New York and the Pacific Northwest? I mean maybe, but that's a huge chunk of market share. So that's why, even if they're what, I would think those are half cocked ideas, those are not fully baked yet. They maybe come from a good place, but you've not. The market isn't ready for that type of legislation where you're dictating what a customer can buy. But yeah, we can't ignore them because that's a lot of market share that those states represent.
Speaker 2:So one of the brands that I represent, toyota, was caught a bunch of flack over the last five years for not being aggressive enough in the BEV space. So they weren't bringing BEVs to market. They didn't have plans to bring more. They have one and that's it so far. And that's it so far. But they believe and I can kind of parrot that because I think that's the best way for the market would be hey, give consumers a choice. Do you want a gasoline engine? Do you want a hybrid? Do you want a plug in hybrid? Do you want to be EV? Do you want even a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, which they offer out in California? So there are different avenues that a customer can take, based on their own driving habits and what they need. So I think that's maybe a better way. Hey, give customers choice. They'll choose the one that's the best, and if you make a great product, they'll buy it.
Speaker 1:That's right, free market.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but mandating and saying, hey, you have to buy it or you can't make those cars gasoline cars after a certain date, whether the market's going to buy your product or not, is wild. It is and I can say that some of our slowest selling and post-COVID was just an absolute rush. Everybody had PPP money and inventory was small because the factory shut down and there's a psychological trigger for American buyers when you say you can't buy something, that that's all they want to buy, so you're like don't tell me I can't buy.
Speaker 1:Don't tell Americans what to do.
Speaker 2:I'm going to buy that car, no matter what. And you're like you could just wait a year. And they're like, nah, I'm going to buy it right now.
Speaker 1:End of the free baby.
Speaker 2:Don't tell me what to do, and so inventories are still struggling to get back to where we were pre-COVID. We're not quite there yet. Some of the brands like Honda, toyota, lexus aren't close. We're still less than 20 days supply on the ground. We finished with an 11-day supply. That's really tight inventory, really nuts compared to pre-covid, but uh yeah, there's just. It's been a wild ride inventory wise and trying to figure out hey, how do we plan for the future? So customers that are looking for bevs and are getting these big rebates right now you can get a heck of a deal on a bev because they's some of the slowest selling models out there, right? So the shine is kind of off. There's a reticence, maybe kind of a wait and see, on BEVs right now, and so while everybody offers them, they are often the slowest selling, most heavily discounted models in a brand's lineup.
Speaker 2:And so there's this weird juxtaposition where the previous administration and they were subsidizing this. They were saying, hey, we have to create these rules. We've got greenhouse emission gas rules that are going to eliminate gasoline-powered cars by some date in the future and in the meantime, we're going to pay everybody a big chunk of money to buy this car. Maybe you hadn't previously thought about doing an EV, but we're going to give you $7,500 if you buy it and you try it. These are huge market factors, bigger than any disrupting factor in our market that I can remember. This is bigger than maybe the internet. Is that, hey, you can get almost 10 grand of free money if you buy this car that maybe you're not ready to buy or we want you to try it? So without that, we'll see. But a lot of these brands Sales are still slowed.
Speaker 1:Even with that, sales to try it. So without that we'll see. But a lot of these brands Sales are still slowed. Even with that, sales are still slowed. So, it probably should be telling us something.
Speaker 2:And the final thought on that, and I can keep going because this is so fascinating to me. But so right now, all these brands are still actively, right now, bringing new EVs to market, because it takes three or four years to R&D a car and then to launch it, and so they've invested billions of dollars to bring these EVs to market, and I'm currently demoing an EV. They're cool. I like EVs, I think they're really neat, but I've got access to a charging station here at work, so maybe it's easier for me to drive one.
Speaker 2:But there are brands that are bringing these EVs to market right now brand new stuff, even in the midst of this very I would call it an EV slump. They've had this in the works for three years and there's no stopping it. They're bringing it to market even though they know it's going to struggle to sell in the US market and in Europe. So we're in the middle of that right now, where it's too late to go back, and there'll be more EVs that are scheduled to launch over the next couple of years that are going to be money losers for some of these brands, who have spent billions of dollars to develop and bring them to market, only to find out that the market has radically changed and that the buyers that they thought were waiting are not waiting for those cars.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe they're the ones that are going to be lobbying the California legislature to get that thing passed then so they can sell those cars.
Speaker 2:But I think there's a split allegiance there. There's what the market would dictate and what you can dictate to the market, and if you're on the other side of that coin, you want there to be some sort of incentive, either your company or your consumer, to buy those EVs. There's got to be something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, they spent four years building so they could recognize that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. So whether it's there or you can force it to be there, it doesn't really matter. Maybe from their perspective.
Speaker 2:They got to move that hill somehow.
Speaker 1:I know we have maybe 10 minutes left. There's a couple of things I did want to make sure that we discussed and I wanted to spend some time talking about your grandfather, mr Royal, and I know you kind of gave us a little bit of just some characteristics of him and his business acumen and just how he just understood business and was a tough, tough man. Um, but you had, you had the blessing honor of working with him for, uh, a decade, uh, actually probably more or less like 15 years. What were some of your takeaways in working with your grandfather of lessons learned or just other things that, uh, you really want to share about your experience and working with Mr Royal?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's a big topic. I was very fortunate to work with my mentor every day, so by the time I got into the business he had some trusted partners two of those we still have who did a lot of the day-to-day management for him. And so when I was coming up, one of the things that he would like to do is that he would show up to the dealership and he would come to the sales tower. A lot of our dealerships had a physical office. In one of them we actually had a tower that was elevated over the showroom and one of them we actually had like a tower that was elevated over the showroom and it was kind of like where the sales managers would hang out and have their pcs and and do some of their paperwork and communicate with the sales guys, and he would go up there and he would just kind of set up camp and the joke was that whoever the junior sales manager was at the time would would literally give him the chair. You'd have to go like work in a different office while he was hanging out in your chair at your desk at your pc. But he just wanted to like relate to. Hey, this reminds me of. I saw the same thing in 79, when, when gas prices went really high, or I saw this in the 80s when the the income tax went up, or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 2:So he loved to tell stories about experiences that he had had in the business throughout his career.
Speaker 2:And so one of my favorite things and I was very fortunate to be able to do this, because he let me do it, but kind of collect as an oral historian, stories from his past, and he was very keen on doing that over the last few years of his life, when he was essentially retired and during COVID, he took that very seriously because he had some health issues and so he didn't leave his home to come to work hardly at all.
Speaker 2:So I would go there every day and try to talk with him for an hour, give him an update on what the dealerships were doing, and during that time he would relay stories about, you know, when he was a semi-professional race car driver or when he bought out his first partner or when he bought his first import store. So that was far and away the most important aspect of our relationship, was not nearly in the day to day of like, hey, how do you do this, or how do I work with this customer, how do I work with this manufacturer? But big picture stuff, nostalgic memories that he wanted to share, that he thought were important enough to pass on. So I was very fortunate to be able to do that for several years and then during COVID I did that almost every day and I really that was super valuable for me.
Speaker 1:So that was like it sounded, like he got to a point where he was trying to impart the business on you, which was more than just how many new cars are we selling? What are the metrics in the service department? Yeah, it was bigger than that. It was the thing of 50 years or however long you did it for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like that book.
Speaker 2:I think we, if we all grew up in Indiana I think it was required reading fourth or fifth grade but the giver where you know the premises, like this old guy, has collected all these memories for a society and then he passes them down to one designated, you know, receiver of all these memories. And I kind of felt that same way where you know he wanted to tell me a story about an interaction that he had with a factory higher up and how it spoke to what he thought factory relations should be. But you know, it's a story from 30 years ago and he still remembers it really clearly and thinks that it has significance. So I was very fortunate to be able to take on all of these memories. And then I'm trying my best with some of our younger guys on staff, guys and gals. How do I distill all of these memories and stories that he shared and then give them to our younger employees in a way that's meaningful to them? How do they learn from these royal stories from way back in the day?
Speaker 2:Because there's a lot of significance and information and helpful precedents that come from those, and so that's one of the things that I try to spend some time on and try to flow that information down to the younger generation. And I'm older now, older now, I'm in my forties and so I'm not that younger generation anymore. I'm definitely, uh, on the older side, and so now there's a group of people that are younger than me that I think it's important to try to connect with the founder of our dealership, who many of them never met in their lives.
Speaker 1:What are some uh, what are some other moments that really stand out to you as like just you know, mr Royal, moments that you're like I will never forget when. What are some of those moments?
Speaker 2:Well, I've got two, one's more personal, maybe not a business, not as much business, but one of them is he fired me, so we got into a disagreement about what the work life family balance should be at the dealership and he had lived his entire life under the premise of if you don't work so hard, someone else is going to come and steal your business. Or if you let your foot off the gas for a minute, your business is going to come and steal your business. Or if you let your foot off the gas for a minute, your business is going to go downhill, maybe forever. So he, that was like ingrained in him. And you know he had, he had five daughters, he had a huge family and he, he did all of this with a really rigorous work schedule and probably and I think that all of this with a really rigorous work schedule, and probably and I think that all of my aunts and my mom would all say, yeah, he plays, he loved us. He loved us by providing for us. We did not see him at school functions or sporting events. He didn't go to church with them. He was focused on business. So he would come home. He would sometimes cook in the evenings for them. He loved to on business, so he would come home, he would sometimes cook in the evenings for them. He loved to cook, loved to grocery shop, but that was how he showed his love for them is by provision, by providing for them through tons of hours of the dealership.
Speaker 2:And so then I think my family ethos is different and that family was more important. Being there with our family, with my kids, is more important, or it looks different. And so we got to it in a pretty big disagreement the biggest one that we ever had about what does that look like and can you succeed in business by balancing family and work in a different way than his generation had, family and work in a different way than his generation had. And at the time he said, nope, that's, there's no way to do that. You got to go. Your, your radical ideas don't have a place in the Royal group. And so he fired me. And then, uh, I actually I tried to give my two weeks because I said, hey, if we can't come to some sort of agreement where I'm not locking up the dealership every night, I cannot work here I've got four kids.
Speaker 2:I've got. You know, two of them came home within 60 days of each other. So I went from two to four in a period of about 60 days and it was bonkers at our house and I needed a different balance and he was like there's just not a place for that. So I tried to quit and he said I don't need your two weeks, you're fired, we? We thought about it for uh, maybe three or four days. He kind of came back and said hey, don't try to sell your house, we'll, we'll, we'll work it out and we'll try to figure something out. So then he that was kind of the gateway to him saying look, I trust you enough that I'm going to allow you to run the dealership very differently than I did, in terms of you're there every day, you're the one closing up, you're the one locking the store, and that's just how it is. I know that he did not agree with me even until his dying day. He was probably very nervous that I was taking this very different approach to trying to balance. What does family and work life look like within the auto retail business? But he trusted me enough to say look, you're going to sink or swim. Those are the decisions that you're going to make and it's going to affect our dealership, but you're making them, so I'll allow you to do it. So that was a big deal. I remember that.
Speaker 2:And then, on a more personal note, he was not interested in spiritual things or organized church or religion. He had a bad experience growing up in Texas and so he kind of had a cynical and jaded view of church, although his wife went to church, was a huge supporter of their local church for 60 years the same one and so he was the de facto provider for this local church, even though he didn't like church. It would say that he wasn't a big fan. But when he was 88, he called me one night and said Andy, I want you to know that I became a Christian.
Speaker 2:I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life. I admit that I need a savior. I can't do it all by myself. And I just wanted you to know, and that was something that I had been praying for for literally my entire life, and it was a huge surprise to have an answer to prayer like that, but one that I will always remember, and that was a huge deal. That was at the end of his working career, and so he had maybe more time to reflect. But that brought us closer in a way that I didn't think I was going to experience in my life. So those two memories are probably bookends of the the royal legacy and maybe changed his opinion on self-sufficiency towards the end of his life and realized he needed Jesus, he needed a Savior. He couldn't do that by himself. He had been self-sufficient so long. So that was a big change, and so I think about the balance between those two and I think about both of those almost every day.
Speaker 1:That's incredible, you know. I think about the courageousness of that conversation between the two of you. You know, I can only think about what, the what the wives were saying behind the scenes for level heads maybe to prevail. Um, also, what kind of occurs to me too is like just to think of, like at the end of his life, and just that mr royals, like one of his best friends, ended up being his grandson, you know, and doing like life together. Like that's pretty incredible, you know, and just what, just what a interesting thing to think about a 40, a 40, actually a 30 something at that time and an 80 something being like buds. That's really cool, andy. Thanks for joining us. A couple of things before we go Real quick to go real quick.
Speaker 3:Ben Sure, annie. When I think about that story, I can't help but get a visual of my favorite movie, which is Secondhand Lions. Do you know that movie?
Speaker 2:I do. I'm familiar with that movie.
Speaker 3:You are him, and there's actually physical resemblance to the actor in the movie as well, where you know, of course, the, the, the nephew, if you will, or the great nephew goes and lives with the two old guys, which is essentially what you did. You live with your grandfather in his business and I just can't help but think that the two memories you have is of him firing you, but then, ultimately, I think he fired himself.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Yeah, fired himself as the leader of his own life. So what a great story. Thanks for sharing it.
Speaker 1:You just set the record straight. You mentioned being at college and you know playing sports and since it was such a small college that anyone can play, but and I think we probably need to put the link in the show notes but do you not hold the world record for the most amount of goals scored in the least amount of time in the soccer program at Taylor University?
Speaker 2:Well, they don't keep great records but I'm probably a candidate for the quickest pair of goals scored in a soccer home match, for sure. And it just so happened that the the finest, flukiest moment of my athletic career, because I was a career-long bench warmer, uh, but happened to have this funny, you know fortune smile of me on that day. Then I had it on film, which my wife laughs about, because I do have a tendency to pass on that link, uh, and talk about glory days. And I've got it on film which is more than a lot of people can say they can only talk about I could show them.
Speaker 1:So that's right. That's right. How many goals did you score? Appreciate it. So you scored two goals in how many seconds?
Speaker 2:It was 30 seconds real time Game time. It was only maybe a few seconds.
Speaker 1:So two goals in 30 seconds real time. That is epic. We'll put the link to YouTube, the YouTube link on the show notes. So we'll have to have you back, cause we didn't even get to cover man bash and what intentional friendship looks like. So we'll have to. We'll have to talk about that. But, uh, we usually close the episode, uh, with two questions, um, and the first one being, um, what is a risk that you have taken that has changed your life?
Speaker 2:I think the risk was going into the auto business. So that wasn't a stated goal when I went to college or even when I graduated, and that was very different than what I thought I was going to be doing and that was a big risk at the time for me. What I thought maybe was kind of settling for something that you know I wasn't planning for. It wasn't as prestigious I thought as getting a degree or getting a graduate degree or going back for more schooling, and so that was a very different path than I thought I was going to take and it was a risk. I didn't know if I was going to be good at it or would like it or would find fulfillment in it. So a huge life altering risk, as it turned out, that has served me really well and I'm very blessed to have found a career field that I really enjoy.
Speaker 3:Andy, your second question and last question is what is left yet unfinished, that you have the resolve to complete?
Speaker 2:Ooh, that's a tough one. But one word or theme that has come up a lot in my professional career has been legacy. So I'm carrying on my family's legacy, mr Royal's legacy. There's a lot of pressure that comes with that to maintain it, and so at this stage in my life I'm interested in how do I not only carry on my family's legacy, but how do I establish my own legacy? How do I lead the Royal Automotive Group in the next 20 years, in the next 30 years or however long the Lord will allow me to do that?
Speaker 3:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Well, andy, thanks again for joining us, and to all our listeners, thanks for joining us again for another episode of the Risk and Resolve pod. We'll catch you next time.
Speaker 3:Thanks for tuning in to Risk and Resolve. See you next time.
