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dealership spotlight / special finance of business) at the beginning of 2012, he opened a used car store, Aunt Bessie's Family Car Mart, at the former site of the Kia store. Where Brown Daub Kia focuses on the near-prime or upper-tier subprime buyer, Aunt Bessie's is focused on buyers in the lower subprime tiers and does most of its deals through companies like Credit Acceptance Corp. (CAC), Exeter Finance and Flagship Credit Acceptance, among others. Ring said he does not pur- chase any third-party leads and, instead, generates traffic for both dealerships through a mix of more traditional advertising, including televi- sion, radio and print, with the majority of the ad spending going toward radio. However, Ring noted, "It changes from month to month," and he is always tweaking the advertis- ing strategy to see what works best. "Looking back, opening a new Kia store [location] and launching a used car store the same month is definitely a challenge, so we're still in testing mode. We haven't perfected it yet … It's constant testing and tweaking." Tracking is a hugely important part of fine-tuning the ad strategy, and Ring acknowl- edged it can be difficult to track broadcast media. "It's not an exact science by any way, shape or form, but we drive everyone to specific phone numbers [and] specific websites, and we're able to track closely what works," he said. "We track our leads. We track our contacts, our ap- pointments, our show rates. We track the ratio of how many credit pulls we do versus how many cars delivered, so we just have a lot of things that we can watch." In addition to the website for Aunt Bessie's, a few different web addresses are maintained for Brown Daub Kia, from its main site (browndaubkia.com) to more targeted URLs such as 199drives.com, 8988kia.com and the slightly more irrever- ent kissyourmotherinlaw.com, Ring's official blog. The blog's name comes from Ring's advertised promise, "If you don't have the best buying experience ever at our Kia dealer in [Pennsylvania], I'll kiss your mother-in-law!" Ring estimates that all the websites combined generate an average of 2,800 to 2,900 leads per month. When it comes to the websites, he said, "It definitely is a little bit better … if you think you're in the lead collection business rather than the car business." He added, "We've got about 80,000 people in our CRM right now [gathered] over the last four years, so if we have a little dip in traffic … we've got people to call." They also do mailings to stay top-of-mind with people in their database. While he's not a big believer in direct mail in the traditional sense, "We do an interesting newsletter to stay connected with customers, but instead of just sending it to our sold [customers], we'll send it to our whole database." He said the newsletter talks about I have customers that I've been selling cars to for 10, 15 years who I've seen go through the whole gamut of a divorce, a bankruptcy, a foreclosure; and they're back. They're driving a new minivan, and they live in a new townhouse, and that's a beautiful thing. – Tom Ring current events and some of their charity events, offers goofy stories about Ring and encourages customers to send referrals. "That's a relatively cheap way to keep in contact with customers and generate a few deals," he said. Leads for both stores' websites are filtered through a business development center (BDC) housed in the Kia store and staffed by a manager plus 12 business development repre- sentatives working two shifts. Ring described the BDC as "a necessity," but also noted, "The BDC is the most chal- lenging thing that I've ever done in the car business." The challenge, he said, is hiring the right mix of people, figuring out their peak performance level and managing their productivity. "You have some people who are just happy making their hourly wage … and, obviously, that's not the person we want there." One way he has addressed productivity issues in the BDC is by moving it to a more central location in the new Kia store. "That's a huge mistake I made in the past … At our other store they were upstairs … and they weren't part of [the rest of the dealership]; they were left to just run amok. It was absolute mayhem. So now we've got them right there, and it definitely makes them feel like part of what we're trying to do … When they get an appointment, they ring a bell. The whole showroom knows, [and] we celebrate it with them." Much of the recent advertising seems to be driving traffic primarily to the Kia store, Ring observed, and he plans to change the advertising some- what to test that observation. "One radio buy was enough for our market; two radio buys, we believe, may have been too much," he said, referring to simultaneous radio campaigns for Brown Daub Kia and Aunt Bessie's. "A fair amount of business that goes to Aunt Bessie's is people that we refer down to them from the Kia store," said Ring, who esti- mates that results in about two of every five deals made at Aunt Bessie's. "If you think about the fact that we send [them] about 40 percent of their deals … they're not gen- erating a whole lot on their own from the radio buy." That is not to say that Aunt Bessie's is making a meager living from scraps, however. Far from it, in fact. Aunt Bessie's sells about 80 or 90 vehicles a month. Ring said Aunt Bessie's Family Car Mart "is set up for the 29