"We Solved a Huge Problem" — How This 17-Store Group Decides What to Fix First | Gary LaDue, Marketing Dir. Modern Auto
Every operator has felt it: too many fires, no clear order of attack, and the creeping sense that whatever you fix first is a guess.
This episode centers on a simple decision-making framework: plot every project against how easy it is to achieve and how big the return would be, then go after the highest-value, lowest-effort work first. It's borrowed straight from corporate America, and it works because it's simple.
The conversation walks through how that framework actually shapes daily decisions, why testing to optimize beats constantly chasing the next new tool or vendor, and how to know which problem in front of you actually deserves your attention first.
The takeaway: you don't need more tools to fix operational overwhelm. You need a filter for what's actually worth solving first.
Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(00:31) Show Support and Free Book
(01:58) From Paper Brands to Career
(07:19) Digital Tools vs Efficiency
(10:49) Practical AI Across 17 Stores
(12:47) Scaling Social Video with AI
(20:18) Optimize Vendors and People
(24:54) Respect And Listening
(30:41) Longevity Through Uncertainty
(33:29) Consent And FTC Compliance
(37:28) Responsible AI Guardrails
(42:08) Connect With Gary
(44:05) Final Thanks And Outro
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Episode Transcript
[0:00] Welcome to the Show & Support the Podcast
Michael Cirillo: We might have just single-handedly solved a huge problem for so many people in this industry.
Gary LaDue: Yeah. I mean, you know, I think we're all kind of... everybody's trying to eat the elephant all the time. Well, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that we can just pick off and get after, and it's going to have a pretty good return for us.
Michael Cirillo: So as you guys are looking at 17 rooftops, as you're looking at the next six months, what are the things you're paying attention to? What are you curious about operationally, and for the growth of the business?
Gary LaDue: Well, there's a bit of a long answer to that.
Michael Cirillo: One of the things I enjoy most about producing The Dealer Playbook is hearing from you, the messages I get from people who are getting so much value out of the podcast, applying it to their day-to-day workflows, and finding a thriving career right here in the retail auto industry. It means the world to me.
And one of the ways we make doing this possible is through my agency, FlexDealer. In the spirit of providing value, I think this is a perfect time to send you over to www.flexdealer.com. To show even further support for you, my beloved DPB gang, right now if you go to my website, flexdealer.com, you can get a full, free PDF of my #1 best-selling book, Don't Wait, Dominate.
I think it's so special because a lot of the topics in that book are even more relevant today than ever, with this surge in popularized AI and people wondering, "What can I do next? How can I have a competitive advantage?" That's all in this book, and I'd love to offer you a free copy if you go to flexdealer.com. It would mean the world to me, because that's how we continue producing this show for you.
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[1:58] Guest's Journey: Paper Industry to Automotive
Michael Cirillo: Okay, we were chatting behind the scenes, and I did not know, when I asked you to come on the show, that we were going to connect over paper. But here we are, two men with a past in paper.
Gary LaDue: Old school.
Michael Cirillo: Finding our way back to paper in so many ways. Tell me what you did at Mead.
Gary LaDue: I was a product manager and a brand manager. I was there for eight years and managed various product categories and brands in that time.
Michael Cirillo: People are like, "Wait, what's Mead?" No, look down at the paper on your desk right now. Look at the notebook you just bought your kids from Walmart for school.
Gary LaDue: Right. So, Mead used to have its own paper production business. They used to own paper mills, and they spun that business off at some point. I went to work for what started as a company called At-A-Glance. At-A-Glance used to make calendars and planning products at this enormous production facility in upstate New York. They were bought by Mead, and then that partnership went and bought another company called Day Runner.
When they hired me, it was to manage this new business they'd acquired called Day Runner. Over time, through a couple of other acquisitions and changing of hands, that whole business and portfolio is now part of ACCO Brands, a publicly traded office supplies company based in Chicago. They own brands like Swingline staplers, which got a whole resurgence after the Office Space movie with the red stapler, and they own filing supplies and all the Mead brands and stuff. So yeah, it was a fun job.
Michael Cirillo: I'm almost jumping ahead of where we should start in a timeline sense, but I want to jump to this because you were recently at ASOTU CON with us. We did a panel together, and it was very AI-focused. I should ask you how you went from paper to the car business and how you got to where you are now, we'll get to that in a second, but I want to go straight from paper to AI. Even in an AI-enhanced world, you've found a migration back to, "I still use paper." With everything you're seeing in technology, that you're overseeing and thinking about, you're kind of a proof point to my thesis that we, as human beings, make room to explore and adopt new things while also keeping room for what we know works for us.
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[4:57] Retaining Information: Paper vs. Digital Efficiency
Michael Cirillo: What does that actually look like for you? Why is paper, notes, and those kinds of things still so important to you in an AI world?
Gary LaDue: Yeah, I think it's interesting how you put it, that you're making room to explore and do new things, but holding on to the things you know work. I mentioned at Mead that we uncovered studies showing your brain retains things better after you write them down. I'm no longer in the days of using a planner to plan out every day. For me, if it's not in my digital calendar, if it's not in Outlook, it just doesn't happen.
Michael Cirillo: I'm glad you qualified that, because I was going to ask if you moved to a Palm Pilot.
Gary LaDue: Ha, no. First it was a BlackBerry. Remember those? I was bent when they stopped making that product, because I loved their keyboard. It was the best.
Michael Cirillo: That's what the founders hung their hat on. "No, people want to type on a keyboard."
Gary LaDue: Yeah, I loved it. But things change, you get over it, and I use an iPhone like the rest of the world. It's not like I ever gave up using paper, just my habits on how I manage my time and track what I have to get done metamorphosized a little. It became more about having a notebook to write things down, to remember things, to take notes. Within that, maybe this sounds a little nerdy, but I have a system. If something's really important, I'll highlight it to make sure it gets done first, because things come at you all day and aren't always in priority order. I'm not going to keep rewriting a list in order of priority, so my system is to highlight or circle, or highlight and circle, whatever's most important.
Michael Cirillo: It's actually funny you're saying this, because for anybody who still does this, I'd be curious, leave a comment or send us a message, what you're describing is actually more efficient than the idea of making sure something gets into a project manager and flagged properly. It's more convenient. And I'm curious your take, and this spills into operations, dealership or any business: do you think we're in an era where we killed the thing that was more efficient because there was a promise we could make it more efficient, and in doing so just created a new inefficiency we had to solve?
Gary LaDue: Maybe. It's funny with questions like that, you can probably find an example if you go hunt for it.
Michael Cirillo: Right, you create your own vacuum.
Gary LaDue: I think that's the case with a lot of things. Ask for it and you'll see it. Have you ever gone to the doctor, and, I don't remember who told me this, might have been my general practitioner, but it was like, if you feel fine, but you go to the doctor and start poking and prodding and asking questions and running tests, chances are you're going to find something.
Michael Cirillo: Something, yeah.
Gary LaDue: Right. In our world, I've only been in automotive for 9 and a half years. I say "only" because everybody I know has been in it for their whole career.
Michael Cirillo: Nine years in automotive is like 80 years in real people years.
Gary LaDue: Yeah, I'm in my 50s. I had a really long career before I got here, and it's a lot to learn about how a dealership actually operates with and without paper, systems, and technology. Is it easier if things are digital instead of written down? Maybe, it just depends. I like your example that it's more efficient to write it down instead of going to a project management tool. We have a lot of projects in our department, and we've kicked around the idea of using project management software many times. But our skepticism is that it would make us less agile. We want to operate quickly. We're not the biggest group, we have 17 stores, but that's a lot of personalities and requests every month, so there are always things to change and pivot on while also working on the big rocks we're trying to roll up the hill. You've got to find what works best for you. That's really the key.
Michael Cirillo: I want to use that to segue into this: you guys seem pretty balanced, aware of what's going to be most efficient for you. This is why, anybody who hears me speak on stage, I'm constantly reminding the audience to apply what they hear to the context of their own circumstances, because every operation has its own nuance of personalities and modes of operating. Finding what genuinely works for you is going to be more efficient than adopting something just because it had a big promise.
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[10:49] Real-World AI Applications in Dealership Operations
Michael Cirillo: So when it comes to AI, what's a real practical way you're thinking about it, looking across 17 rooftops? A lot of people are still kind of pie-in-the-sky about the possibilities. What's a practical day in the life of Gary using AI?
Gary LaDue: There's a bit of a long answer to that. When ChatGPT launched, and then Anthropic launched, we bought subscriptions. Not immediately, but eventually. It wasn't like I was sitting here giving my team direction on how to use it, and nobody above me was saying, "Give this direction to your team." It was just, "Hey, we've got this thing now, what do you want to do with it?" Slowly but surely, the team just explored, "Let me see if I can do this, let me see if I can do that."
Some very practical things we've done so far, and these aren't huge, we're not onboarding an enterprise-level AI solution for anything right now, although we're exploring what that might look like down the road. But practical things right now: we use it to summarize data in spreadsheets. A member of my team created an inventory tracking tool that monitors exactly what's going on at each site in real time, so she can just pick it up and look at it. If we want to give direction to the agency or to ourselves internally about what to focus on, we make sure we're not spending resources on models we don't have in stock. It's a simple thing, but it saved us a lot of time.
We've also brought on a service that helps us edit video for social content. It's not generative AI, they've built out a workflow that acts like an editor. You can film a ton of stuff really easily, but the bottleneck comes in editing and refining it before you can put it on the platform you're using. We decided in the middle to late part of last year that we were going to put a bigger emphasis on social media as a strategy, so we hired a new person. She came in, wrote a plan, and we were like, "How do we humanly make it possible to get content from 17 stores across multiple locations into one repository where it can be edited?"
We needed people to go shoot, we needed people at the store engaged, and we needed time to edit. We met an agency, through an agency, funny enough, that had been working on a tool to do the editing, and it's going great. Our social media lead and our two part-timers go out to the stores and shoot video. We've got a calendar of what we're going to do each month, and a schedule of when they'll hit the stores. Stores are prepared, we shoot a bunch of stuff, it gets loaded into a central repository, a folder. The agency taps into that raw footage, our social media person taps into that footage, and they both edit and post. The difference is the editing the agency does is AI-based. We loaded our brand guide, they load all the B-roll, tell it what they want, and it produces a video. The video does require a little human touch, it's not going to be perfect coming straight out of AI. We're not Skynet just yet.
Michael Cirillo: There's a couple of things I think are worth pointing out, and I think it's human nature at scale, we tend to favor the "get the thing shipped" mentality. But you just walked me through a very intentional build process. You started with, "We brought the person in." Most people do that and think, "Okay, now the thing should just happen." You were like, "No, now we've brought the person in, how are we going to do this at scale?" Realistically, how much time has it taken from bringing that person in to now?
Gary LaDue: Roughly six months. Because we started slow. It was, "Let's test this out. Give us a store that has a salesperson willing to be the lead," and our social media lead, Sarah, would go to the store and work with that person to film stuff, then edit and post. That was only going to work as well as the employees who were engaged and understood how to shoot video properly. So we expanded it to a couple more stores, and some were way more engaged than others, and that's just going to be the case, they've got day jobs, they're selling cars. Unless you're paying them to shoot video, it's going to be really inconsistent.
Our goal was to make it as consistent and easy as possible to scale. We had a couple of part-timers available who'd worked with us in the past, one in marketing, one at the store level, both young and very versed on social media. Sarah got them gimbals, mics, lighting, whatever we needed. In the last three weeks, she's been at the stores getting both of them up to speed. In another week or so, they'll just be hitting the stores on a cycle, filming, driven by what Sarah puts in the calendar, and the stores will be ready for it because they're trained. It just becomes this machine of creating content.
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[17:24] Overcoming "Pivot-itis" and Seeing Projects Through
Michael Cirillo: What feeds your group's ability to stick with the thing you start? We tend to suffer from "pivot-itis," where it's like, "Oh, heavier lift than I thought, switch." What drives you to see something through to completion, where completion just opens the door to the next set of things you've got to do?
Gary LaDue: It's just the job. Failure is not an option, we're here to make things happen. Let's just make it happen. People can get very discouraged if something doesn't work the first way they try it. Do you remember being a kid playing a video game, getting frustrated because you weren't as good as the friend next to you who'd been playing for three months?
Michael Cirillo: That's me, I never got better than that.
Gary LaDue: The guy's whooping your butt and you're frustrated, but he's been doing this for three months, so he knows what he's doing. Not everything you try the first time is going to work really well, so it's constantly trying to figure out ways to optimize things. It just takes time. We very much have a "test for success" mindset here. That was our strategy, when I first started, we tested everything, websites, chat tools, trading tools, agencies, the whole basket of things we touch. I think since then it's become more about testing to optimize as opposed to testing to change, "Oh, that didn't work well, so we're going to go get something else."
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[19:24] Choosing Vendors: Beyond Tech, Focus on Trust
Michael Cirillo: It sounds like you're working to solve shiny object syndrome at its core.
Gary LaDue: It's still hard.
Michael Cirillo: Right. We've conditioned ourselves to want to believe the promise of whoever's making the big promise. And then, to your point, we fail the first time we try something. It's like, you take vendor A, and dealer A doesn't get it to work out, so they move to vendor B, and vendor B doesn't work out either, but vendor A was working out great for dealer B the whole time. It was the same product. What's really different is the implementation, the iteration, the optimization of it. Outside of very specific circumstances, you can find a way through the iterative process to make almost anything do what you need it to do these days. The solutions aren't all that unique anymore.
Gary LaDue: Yeah, I think there are probably instances where one piece of tech from one provider works better than another, for sure, factual instances where it makes sense to use one over the other. But there's a lot of parity. So when you're picking a provider, make sure it's somebody you're happy to work with. You don't want to be the guy dreading picking up the phone to ask for help from people you don't like working with. Find somebody you like working with, and then just make it work.
It's very easy, sitting in a marketing director or marketing manager seat, to say, "This isn't working, blame the vendor, go find somebody else." That's a really easy thing to do, and yes, it happens. But if you've got pretty reliable stuff, figure out how to make it work.
Michael Cirillo: It introduces the human element, because the first thing you said in this sequence was, "Find somebody you can work with that you're not going to dread talking to on the phone." That's the piece that, even in an AI world, where the promise is that you don't have to do as much, human connection and finding trustworthy people is going to be the biggest differentiator.
Gary LaDue: For me, it is a differentiator right now. Sorry if the lighting just changed behind me, I've got a timer in my office, and if I'm not waving my hands around, the lights turn off.
Michael Cirillo: Efficiency.
Gary LaDue: Chair calisthenics. I got that piece of advice from a friend we have in common, Ben Hadley. He was one of the first people I met in the industry, and he's wise beyond his years, as you probably appreciate as much as me. I was talking to him about our test strategy one day, going through all these iterations, and he said, "Look, at the end of the day, there's a lot of stuff out there that's going to solve your problems. Pick the provider you're going to be happy working with." I was like, that makes a lot of sense.
Michael Cirillo: We might have just single-handedly solved a huge problem for so many people in this industry. Ben Hadley is wise beyond his years.
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[23:44] Being a Good Human: The Power of Listening
Gary LaDue: Just be a good human, that's how I raised my children. Just be a good human.
Michael Cirillo: You know what's funny about that? This is intriguing to me. I wrote my book, Don't Wait, Dominate, 14 years ago, and so much of it is still true. If I just added one chapter about AI, everything else in the book would still hold, and the premise is that despite all the technology and resources, be valuable to somebody, provide genuine value, which ties back to the thesis of being a good human. I remember a negative review of the book once, I wish I didn't, but it's coming to me now, this guy wrote, "Oh, be a good person, thanks," like that was all there was to it. And it's like, what does that even mean? He didn't give any context on how to actually be a better human. So I'm curious, when you're looking for a new provider, a new partnership, bringing a person onto your team, whatever it might be, what does "be a good person" mean to you?
Gary LaDue: There's a lot of characteristics there, but a few really important ones bubble to the top for me. Number one, just be respectful, there's no reason not to be unless somebody really gives you a reason. I really look for people who are good listeners, and being a good listener is hard, it's a hard skill set. It's hard when someone says something that sparks your desire to reply instantly, and maybe they don't get their whole point out. I think you learn this in personal relationships too, sometimes people just need an ear. Learning how to be a good ear for people is a really important quality, particularly when they're going through something.
So for me, if a vendor contacts me, warm because I know them or cold because I don't, and they don't know anything about our business, how we operate, what we run in-house or don't, and they don't ask any questions to give themselves the opportunity to listen and learn, and they just go right into pitch mode, that's an instant turn-off for me. I'm out, thanks, not shopping. And if I say that and they come back with, "But, but, but," that just makes me shut it down even harder.
So being a really good listener is so vital. I thought I was a good listener early in my career. Back in my Mead days, they put me in a leadership training program, a 12-month program. Once a quarter you'd get together with people from all the different divisions of the company, and a facilitator would run training for two or three days, then send you home to work for the rest of the quarter until the next meeting. The first lesson they taught us in the first meeting was listening skills. They asked, "Who here thinks they're a good listener?" Of course everybody raised their hand. So he put us through an exercise, asked a series of questions, and most everybody did pretty poorly. Then he asked again, "Now who thinks they're a good listener?" Not one hand went up. It's a skill you have to refine, if you don't pay attention to it, it's like a muscle, it won't grow.
Michael Cirillo: I love that, because that famous saying, I don't even know who started it, "You have two ears and one mouth, use them proportionately." It makes me think of listening, and hey, salespeople, guaranteed the deals you're losing and don't know why, it's because you weren't actively listening. What I'm picking up from you is that listening as a skill isn't hearing, it's paying attention, being curious, knowing when to speak and when not to, engaging in a dialogue that extracts more from the other person simply by being that listening ear. And relationships, how many times have I gone into problem-solve mode for my wife, and she's like, "I just wanted you to listen, I don't need you to solve this, I just need to vent for a minute."
Gary LaDue: You learn that over time.
Michael Cirillo: You think of the possibilities that open up from truly paying attention to what somebody's saying and seeking to understand where they're going. For me, that becomes the foundation my problem-solving activates from, "Gary, help me understand this, it seems like you said XYZ, is that tracking, tell me more about that." And the hardest thing in sales, whether you're selling a car, a house, or a relationship, is knowing whether you can actually be of help to that person, requiring the ability to walk away from your own pitch and say, "We might not be a fit here."
Gary LaDue: And if you spend enough time listening, you'll learn a lot about a person's personality and communication style. You've probably done a Myers-Briggs or a DiSC assessment, and when you understand those categories, how people think, act, and communicate, you pick up on it pretty quickly over time. I know where you fit on the DiSC, so I'll manage this differently because of that.
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[30:40] Human Thread for Longevity in the Automotive Industry
Michael Cirillo: What I love about this is, anytime I get to sit with somebody in a dealership or group operation, these conversations are so revealing, because not once did we talk about how to negotiate a car deal. We're talking about the genuine human elements, character traits, whatever you want to call them, that contribute to longevity. We're in a season with technology, I call it a gift, that once-every-30-years gift of a level playing field where none of us know what we don't know. Seasons like this tend to bring a lot of uncertainty and emotion, and one of the reasons I love doing The Dealer Playbook is you can go back 14 years, through the financial crisis, a pandemic, elections, turmoil—
Gary LaDue: The housing crisis.
Michael Cirillo: The housing crisis, it doesn't matter, you can go through all of that, and the common thread through 700-plus episodes is this: every single subject matter leader I've brought on this show brings it back to this human thread that ties to longevity. If you're worried about uncertainty, longevity is the answer. If you're worried about tomorrow, start paying attention to the things other people think aren't shiny enough. Every time I hear that, I think, please keep thinking it's not shiny, you're all but guaranteeing my success.
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[32:57] Operational Focus: Key Priorities for the Next Six Months
Michael Cirillo: So, looking at 17 rooftops over the next six months, this used to be a five-year question, by the way, but things are moving too fast for that now, what are the things you're paying attention to and curious about operationally, for the growth of the business?
Gary LaDue: In the context of AI, or just in general?
Michael Cirillo: In general. We could go the AI direction, and I'm sure there are things you're paying attention to there, but if AI happens to be one of those things, great, if not, also great, because it's important to think about the whole picture. What's in your notebook right now? What are the next three things you're really curious about?
Gary LaDue: For us, there are a couple of small pieces of our tech stack we haven't completed yet, so I'll start very tactical. We're onboarding a consent management tool. Why is that important? Because we don't need to get into any legal trouble. We've got about 15 different vendors sending out communication on our behalf, and none of them talk to one another. So if somebody opts out, or opts in, all those other vendors don't know that. We're centralizing all of it, so if a customer opts in, everybody else knows it, and we can go talk to that customer. Same with opting out. That's a really important piece of the stack, especially in the context of the current sensitivity around pricing with the FTC. The last thing you need is somebody really angry that you emailed or called them when you shouldn't have. We're doing everything we can to be FTC compliant, we're not worried there, but we're trying to be smart about it.
We're also in the middle of writing a social media policy for employees, guidelines around what they post on their own personal pages. They shouldn't be out there talking price in any kind of detail, because if they say something that's not FTC compliant, they're an agent of the organization, and suddenly the dealership is liable. We didn't have a social media policy on the books, so now we're going to have one. Everybody will sign off on it, it'll be part of onboarding, we'll have a guideline. We're promoting it, we hired a social person and we're expanding that strategy, but we've got to make sure people understand their guardrails.
So those are two very tactical things. Operationally, for us, it's about how we get the most out of the tech stack we've decided to build our ship with, and how we keep optimizing that. AI is most certainly a consideration in that. I think along the way, my team will just continue to get more efficient because we're finding shortcuts through using it, and I think that's going to snowball in a big way.
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[36:14] Navigating AI Compliance and Potential Fatigue
Michael Cirillo: Do you think there's potential for AI fatigue if every company implements their own AI into what they're doing?
Gary LaDue: Maybe. I think it'll become pretty common that the experience you have digitally on a company's website becomes far more embedded with AI, no different than when everybody added a chat tool to their website. It wasn't that long ago that chat didn't even exist, what was that, like 12 years ago? If you've been around long enough, you see a lot of technology come and go, and you see how things get adopted, starting slow and then suddenly everybody's doing it. We're creeping, we're creeping, and then it's just ubiquitous.
Michael Cirillo: How are you guys thinking about the compliance factor as you explore AI, making sure there are guardrails for responsible use? Is that something we should be thinking about right now, or is it too early, do we not know what we don't know?
Gary LaDue: Like responsible AI, making sure it's in line with the things we have to pay attention to?
Michael Cirillo: Yes, and making sure the team is trained on how to use it effectively, some sort of standard of use, so I know that when somebody summarizes a spreadsheet for me, it wasn't some weird hallucination. This kind of brings me full circle to the beginning, did we just create a new problem for ourselves that we need to solve?
Gary LaDue: You have to think about the complexity that now has to be applied to something like that. You don't want it hallucinating about your brand, your offers, your pricing, your inventory availability, the services you provide, where you're located, who you can service. It can get sticky very quickly.
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[39:03] Success Is Hard Work, Not Fancy Magic
Michael Cirillo: I've never had so much fun figuring out, in real time, the things I don't know that I don't know yet, Gary, is where I'm arriving right now. I love conversations like this, it's very enlightening. I'm so glad you were willing to share your time to get a real, inside look into somebody sitting in your seat, thinking about an operation. Not to make it sound overly simple, because it's not, the complexity of your day-to-day work, and to just say, "Here's two real, practical things we're working on, because they're needed," especially for the next phase of your growth. What I take from it as we wind down is, offline, it often just looks like work. Nothing fancy, nothing amazing, we're not wearing capes here, we're not superheroes. You've identified a path for your dealer group, you're pursuing it, you're six months in, and now you're going to complete everything that needs to happen structurally and organizationally to do it. I wish more people were grounded enough to admit that's what you've got to do. It's not the fancy stuff.
Gary LaDue: What's the saying, what's the best way to eat an elephant?
Michael Cirillo: One bite at a time.
Gary LaDue: Yeah, I mean, we're all trying to eat the elephant all the time. You've got to break it into pieces and priorities. For me, some of that process is putting it into a chart with an X and Y axis: how easy is it to achieve this thing we're trying to achieve, and what's the size of the opportunity? When you cross-section that, you can make some pretty easy decisions. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit we can just pick off, and it's going to have a pretty good return. Then there's the other thing that's super grandiose, probably going to have a huge return, but that's a multi-year project.
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[41:16] Gary's Decision-Making Matrix for Business Growth
Michael Cirillo: You've now got me thinking about the show notes for this episode, we need to vibe-code the Gary LaDue decision-making matrix for people.
Gary LaDue: It's not even me, I stole it from old jobs in corporate America, that's how all the big companies make decisions. "We've got 10 product lines, this one makes 80% margin but it's the smallest product line, and then you've got the big cash cow that keeps eroding profit every year. Which one are you going to put your resources against?" You're going to try and grow the one with the giant profit margin.
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[42:04] How to Connect with Guest Gary LaDue
Michael Cirillo: Man, I'm so glad we could connect, thank you for doing this. How can those listening and watching connect with you?
Gary LaDue: I'm on LinkedIn, that's the easiest way to get in touch with me. Just search my name, LaDue, L-A-D-U-E. I don't think there's another Gary LaDue on LinkedIn, maybe, I don't know. I jokingly say there are only about five Garys in the entire United States anyway.
Michael Cirillo: Not a common name.
Gary LaDue: No, it's not. When we were at ASOTU CON, I think I met two other Garys, and I was like, look at this, three out of the five Garys in the country, in one room.
Michael Cirillo: That is hilarious. Short for Gerald, though?
Gary LaDue: No.
Michael Cirillo: Your parents just beelined you right to Gary.
Gary LaDue: Gary, that's it.
Michael Cirillo: Wow, good for you. Hey, I'm serious, I was the only Michael Cirillo before LinkedIn.
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[43:01] Where Do Car Dealers Spend Their Time Online?
Michael Cirillo: One question as we end, this isn't selfish at all, I'm just genuinely curious. You went straight to LinkedIn, and it ties into a post I've done on both Facebook and LinkedIn over the last couple of days, asking, between Facebook and LinkedIn, where are most car dealers actually investing their time? You said LinkedIn for yourself, but what do you think, en masse?
Gary LaDue: For me it's LinkedIn, but en masse, I have no idea. What's funny is, in the last few months, I've gotten more and more requests to connect with people on Facebook because I met them in automotive. In the past, I've kept those worlds very separated, Facebook is personal, just friends, LinkedIn is work associates and connections. But that whole world is just starting to mesh together.
Michael Cirillo: Interesting. Well, there you go. Gary LaDue, thanks so much for joining me on The Dealer Playbook Podcast.
Gary LaDue: Thanks so much.
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[44:10] Thank You for Listening
Michael Cirillo: Hey, thanks for listening to The Dealer Playbook Podcast. If you enjoyed tuning in, please subscribe, share, and hit that like button. You can also join us and the DPB community on social media. Check back next week for a new Dealer Playbook episode. Thanks so much for joining.
