Stalwart Lot Rat: Used-Car Finance Mastery

One big passion that motivates me has roots in my heart that are as old as I am. I was raised in poverty. I hated living that way. I grew determined to do something about it in my life. I have a heart for people who struggle in poverty. Beyond my childhood experience in poverty, it is tied to the buy-here pay-here space. I have a heart for people who are good folks who have good intentions, but maybe poor means. My big passion is to help used-car financing dealerships to sell more cars and reduce repo losses because I know the struggles they go through to grow their businesses. In our family’s dealership we mastered how to overcome challenges and embrace opportunity through the years. Helping other stalwarts to succeed gives me a sense of purpose. Some of the most interesting things that occur in life are conversations. I have had many conversations with a good number of high-profile people who wanted to know my story. From start to finish I’d tell them how I came from poverty to ending up in some pretty phenomenal, high net-worth situations. So many of those people told me, “You hafta tell your story. You have got to write a book.” When I asked, “Why?” they said that my story is inspiring and could help many people in many ways to understand what we all have to go through to succeed in life and in business, and to motivate a lot of people. So I decided to write a book. After I began the process and have been thinking through things, I started to see how others will view my life from a written, documented point of view. When we look back on our lives and verbally tell our stories to people, it’s different. In print, we start to see it. We get a picture of how somebody could benefit from what happened to us. I realized that I do have a lot to say and I believe what I know and have experienced in the used-car finance business through the last 45 years can help anyone in business, and specifically the guys in the buy-here pay-here industry. In this book, you will find tips about the industry and what it takes to win. There is information about how to be an entrepreneur and what it takes to succeed and how you’ve got to push against all odds to get out of life what you want. There is a lot of that in this book. When I was going through the school of hard knocks and my family’s buy-here pay-here business and later my indirect lending business was growing at a very fast pace, there was not really anybody to turn to for consulting. However, in the industry today there are industry trade show conferences, there are Twenty Groups, and there’s a lot of information out there to lean on. My book is another way that somebody in the buy-here pay-here business can get information from an expert to help them over some hurdles rather than charge through all of the challenges like a bull. You can go through the pain alone if you want to. You can do that and still succeed because there’s enough profit margin in the industry to allow for the mistakes you’re going to make. But why go through those? Learn from professionals. Learn from the guys who have already been there. Learn from someone like me who has developed tools to make your life easier. High on the scale of things that bring you success as an entrepreneur is that you must be open. You must have an open mind toward anything that could possibly accelerate you in business or help you get off the ground. Don’t be close-minded. You increase your chances of failing if you are close-minded. One last piece of advice before you discover the treasures buried throughout this book: to the degree that you’re able, in whatever industry you are, do your best to move away from being a personality-driven business and into more of a systems-driven business. It’s a lot easier to exponentially grow a systems-driven business than a personality-driven business. Get this book to find out why.