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Small Lake City
Small Talk, Big City
Join host Erik Nilsson as he interviews the entrepreneurs, creators, and builders making Salt Lake City the best place it can be. Covering topics such as business, politics, art, food, and more you will get to know the amazing people behind the scenes investing their time and money to improve the place we call home.
Follow along for more!
Small Lake City
Bonus: Jeff Miller - Mark Miller Subaru
A coin flip chose Subaru. The rest is strategy. Jeff Miller, fourth-generation owner of Mark Miller Subaru, joins us to share how a family dealership in Salt Lake City rewired the car-buying experience around trust, speed, and community. We dig into the city’s uniquely family-led dealership ecosystem, the moment the Outback transformed Subaru’s trajectory, and why the Miller team embraced one-price transparency and no-commission product specialists long before it was trendy.
We get candid about what most buyers already know: haggling drains time and rewards the worst behavior. Jeff breaks down how their Promise Price model shows payments up front, cuts deal time to under an hour, and lifts close rates to 40–45 percent. We also explore what “meeting customers where they are” looks like in practice—from full online checkout and home delivery to a new mobile service pilot designed for Park City owners who want maintenance done in the driveway.
Community sits at the heart of the story. During Subaru’s Share the Love event, each sale donates $250 to charity—and Mark Miller Subaru doubles that when customers choose local partners like Girls on the Run Utah and USARA, plus $5 from every oil change. Instead of spreading thin, they go deep: partners get showroom presence, media support, and introductions to collaborate for greater impact. It’s transparent, measurable, and local-first.
We also zoom out: why Salt Lake has remained a stronghold for family dealerships, how Subaru stacks up in Utah’s segments, and what national sales and scrap cycles signal about demand. If you care about easier car buying, ethical retail, or how a business can power real local change, this conversation delivers clear ideas you can feel.
Enjoy the episode, then help us spread the word—subscribe, leave a quick review, and share with a friend who’s car shopping or passionate about Utah nonprofits.
50% Off Minky Couture Blankets: softminkyblankets.com/SMALLLAKECITY
Now through January 2nd, buy or lease a new Subaru at Mark Miller Subaru and they’ll donate up to $500 to local Utah charities like USARA and Girls on the Run. Drive a new Subaru and give back to the community at the same time.
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So that's when Subaru really turned and became the brand that it is now. I went didn't go to college just assuming I was gonna be in the car business by any means. If we were to do that, it would mean that we're lying to them. If you're gonna have a business in the community, your job is to support that community. We actually got in trouble with Subaru last year because too much of our money went to the local nonprofits.
SPEAKER_01:What is up, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Small Lake City Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Nilsen. Now, this week's guest is Jeff Miller. Now, Jeff is the fourth generation owner of Mark Miller Subaru. Now, we talk a lot about the interesting dynamics of Salt Lake City and car dealerships, how a lot of them have maintained these family ownerships for generations and a lot of the names that you tend to see on a lot of the different dealerships throughout the valley. But we also talk about how Mark Miller gives back to so much of the community that has supported it through the years, uh, especially right now with the Subaru Share the Love event, where with a new car purchase, can have up to$500 donated to a local community, either Girls on the Run, Utah or USARA. Uh, but great guy, great conversationalist, someone who loves the community and does so much for it, but definitely one you all are gonna enjoy. So let's hop into it. Um the Olympics came in 2002, there was this property outside of Snow Basin that was dedicated to That's the military. Yes. Yeah, that's what's that's how they got the land out there. Yeah, it's crazy. So sometimes like I have I have this fault in myself where and it's like the it gets it's like my own unique flavor of hating myself, where if I know something, I assume everybody knows something. Yeah. And so lately I've been trying to do better without having contact. Yeah, that's literally it until I like start talking. They're like, how I mean, especially like as I'm gonna do it.
SPEAKER_00:You talk to a lot of people too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and like like I'll talk to people who like I just meet and be like, oh well, did you know this? Did you know that? Like, how do you know so much random shit about Salt Lake? I'm like, well, like there's this thing called a podcast that people do in their mid-30s when you're a white male, and the next thing you know, you just collect a bunch of of information, and then sometimes it's worth something and sometimes it's not. Like there was uh, so there's another local podcast called This Is a Place, and it's essentially just like these two guys that talk about, I mean, random, as you can imagine, random places around Salt Lake. And so they had me on and just kind of talk to me about my journey. And I guess one of them works at a company and their executive team came out and he was giving me a tour of like Salt Lake, and the guy's like, How do you know all of this? Like, what is this Gilgal Gardens and why is Joseph Snipp on a Sphinx and like all of these random things? He's like, you know, you just start a podcast, and next thing you know, you just kind of have a bunch of random information that comes together. I like it. Cool. Well, Jeff, I'm excited because when I first because I mean I if you're from Salt Lake, I mean Subaros are Subarus, first and foremost. And then you kind of know them the major dealerships in general. And it wasn't until about last year, yes, because it was my sister's boyfriend's birthday, and we were at Proper. Okay. And so he um oh my gosh, what was the old name? Now it's I can't remember the new name. Um, uh David Garbett. Uh and so we were there. He's like, Oh, you got to get the Suba Blue. And I was like, tell me more. And he's like, Well, fundraising Mark Miller Subaru, partnered at Proper.
SPEAKER_00:The only car dealership out there in the world with its own beer.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Talk about diversification. Isn't that right? I mean, that's what a fourth generation car dealership owner how we figure it out. Yeah. Trial and error, you know, and now things we talked about, then now there's coffee beans in the mix. We got thirst soda coming into play. Yeah. I mean, I'm a big fan of people that partner because I mean, I do want to get into it, maybe not right off the bat, but um Salt Lake is a very unique place with car dealerships. And I don't know, and I'm curious to get your take on it, because I don't know if that's a thing everywhere, and I just haven't gotten to know like the all the different levers of the economy, or if it's such like a unique Salt Lake thing. Because I know, like, I mean, the Millers, like they've expanded into so many different things, but it like started here, you know.
SPEAKER_00:It's really interesting with the way it is unique to Salt Lake. Okay. So the Garf and the Miller thing is very unique to Salt Lake. So before the Miller sold, when it was just Garf and Miller, Garf and Miller were two of the top 10 dealership groups in the country based out of Salt Lake City. Why? Which is crazy. Because that was my hypothesis. Is this like a that is absolutely insane to think about somewhere as small as Salt Lake, Salt Lake City? Yeah, I see it. So I threw that in for you. Uh would have the two of the top 10 dealer groups in the country. Like that's insane to even fathom. And then there's just a lot of longtime family dealerships in Salt Lake. There's a lot of family groups that have just never sold, and there are not very many publics. Yeah. Like Asbury coming in and buying Larry Miller was the first time a public really came in. So a publicly traded company came in and bought into Utah.
SPEAKER_01:Because even in my head right now, I'm trying to think of any public computer.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there's no Lithias, there's no AutoNation, none of that has ever hit Utah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because I mean there's a couple of like the used people, like the uh Pro, what's the one in South, like right by IKEA?
SPEAKER_00:There's like Carvana and Carmax and those guys are the big ones, but no, none of the new car franchises. And the re and the biggest reason for that is because how strong the families were.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Is that if a dealership ever went up for sale in Utah, it's not getting past Ken Garf or one of the other big groups, Young Auto or one of the other ones, they're gonna buy it before it ever hits a public.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I mean, that's that's what was so surprising when Asbury came in and bought all Larry Miller.
SPEAKER_01:But that's like that's that's also like a thing with Utah in general, is like, I mean, for example, if someone's like, hey, I think I'm gonna sell my house, it's usually talked about in the ward in the neighborhood for a good month before it ever goes on the market. In the same way, I mean you catch a drift of, hey, I think so-and-so is trying to sell a dealership, it's like, well, send them an email.
SPEAKER_00:And that's without question the way it's been here for the last hundred years.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So that's what that's why it became such a closed environment to publics. And the Asbury thing was a big hit in Utah. If there was a big change in the car world for a public to finally be in the market, see, and this is where I like it. And they never change the name. So no one really realizes it's Asbury yet. Yeah, it's like there's still Larry Miller on the name, which I still I can't imagine that myself personally. But I get like you just like selling that's your family name.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:I don't disagree. I I assume it's I assume at some point it'll go away, but I don't know. It is what it is.
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's it'd be interesting to see. I mean, it's one of those ones where like, let me see that contract. I'm gonna see there's value in it.
SPEAKER_00:Without question, there's so much value in the Larry Miller name. I don't I don't blame Asbury for wanting to keep it.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I mean, it's one of the like I'm trying to think of more household names that are local than Larry H. Miller.
SPEAKER_00:Mark Miller.
SPEAKER_01:There we go. That's the one. And it's a and it's a not euphemism, uh Which has no relation to Larry Miller at all.
SPEAKER_00:Because that's what I'm gonna ask. I was curious, but I didn't think it did. Yeah, there's zero relation. So my so our family, we started in the car business twenties. So we're fourth generation. So my great uncle. How did he start? Like what was his great uncle's. I mean, if you really want to go back, you could probably go past fourth generation. And we were like horses and buggies in Idaho in the late like late. Just like you moving into beer. Ed Carlson. I have a photo of Ed Carlson carriages in Idaho from the 1800s. So like you really could go back that far. Oh my god, that's so really you could go farther if you really wanted to stretch it. We should go to four because that's the easiest to talk about.
SPEAKER_01:We gotta talk to your marketing guy and get that in there.
SPEAKER_00:You gotta get that to the fifth and start doing ho horses and buggies.
SPEAKER_01:Partner with uh like Family Search.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. So but it was my great uncle, so Fred Carlson was his name. And he he moved it from Idaho's a Ford, he had the Ford dealership in Idaho, and he moved to Salt Lake to take over the Ford distributorship for the state of Utah. So distributorship is the guys over the dealers. Yes. So that Pat hands out the franchises to each of the stores. At this point, there's only four distributorships left in the entire United States for any brand. So two of them are Subaru, and I think two of them are Toyota. And other than that, every other they've all bought up all the distributorships and they're all sold by their manufacturers.
SPEAKER_01:That makes sense, right?
SPEAKER_00:And so he was my great uncle, so my his brother, Harry, would be my great-grandpa, and they were partners in the business. And then my my like this quick quick on it, but then my grandpa was the son-in-law. So he was the son-in-law, son-in-law sneaking in. Son-in-law story, and he had married the boss's daughter and got one of the franchises. So he got the Pontiac franchise, which is what is currently what became Mark Miller Pontiac, which is what or became Larry, it was Laurie Miller, which is crazy. That's insane. My grandpa's name was Laurie.
SPEAKER_01:What was his middle name? Do you know?
SPEAKER_00:Um his Laurie was actually his middle name. Oh, okay. His name was Glenn. I was just curious, what's it like in the city? Yeah, Glenn Laurie Miller. So so the funny thing is that's why there's an H. That makes sense. So when Larry Miller came to town in in 1979, my dad would had taken over at that point, was the owner of the store. And they were, let's just Larry Miller is where it is currently. So 50th South and State, and we're on 35th and state. And one was called Laurie Miller Toyota, one was called Larry Miller Pontiac, or it was Larry Miller Pontiac and Larry Miller Toyota. And the some they sued him and said, You can't call yourself that, it's too close. You're getting phone calls, we're getting mail. So the settlement in the settlement for it before he went to court was he had an H. And this is in the state of Utah, so in the state of Utah is the only place that Larry Miller stores have an H. If you go to any store in any other state, there's no H.
SPEAKER_01:Insane. Isn't that crazy? That actually is.
SPEAKER_00:And six months later, my dad changed the name to Mark Miller.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And actually, another piece of contributor who's changed to Mark Miller on my the day I was born.
SPEAKER_01:That's important.
SPEAKER_00:The grand opening party for Lar Mark Miller Pontiac was my birthday.
SPEAKER_01:Where do you fall in brief order?
SPEAKER_00:So I'm the youngest.
SPEAKER_01:So you've been the most liked, obviously.
SPEAKER_00:No, generally.
SPEAKER_01:So how the oldest sibling gets born like we're changing in. Hit or miss. It depends on the season, age, general temperament.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that's how we got in. Then we end up picking up, we picked up Subaru in 1971.
SPEAKER_01:And then Which honestly, like, that's a lot of foresight, you know? Like, imagine being like, you know, I think there's gonna be some Subaru equity in Utah for sure.
SPEAKER_00:So that was random. So my dad would have been 21 at the time, and he was like, uh, sales manager, an office manager, something like that, where he was done. His grandpa calls my my grandpa, his dad calls him his office and says, We have a chance to pick up another franchise. They were just Pontiac at the time. And he's like, it can be Subaru or Honda. Those are the two options they had. And this is 1971. No one had any idea what those were. They were just names.
SPEAKER_01:They're like, why would we abandon Pontiac for these things?
SPEAKER_00:You weren't abandoning it. You were gonna add it. It was an add-on. So it was an add-on. So they literally pulled a coin out of the desk and flipped it. That's how we ended up being Subardealer. There's no joke on that. Like, that's a verified story.
SPEAKER_01:Amazing.
SPEAKER_00:And so we became a Subardealer off that. And we always joke. I actually joked at our grand opening last week with the president of Subaru there. That first 25 years of that coin flip was horrible. It was a bad coin flip because Honda took off and Subaru was tough. And then about 1996, what came out for Subaru was Subaroutback. Yeah. So that's when Subaru really turned and became the brand that it is now. And in the last 15 years, it's just gone through the roof. And the the beauty of Subaru is just it combined connects to who we are a lot better than any other brand would. It's just how we run our business, community-based, totally, nonprofits, more than just trying to make money. Subaru's that brand. And so it fits so great for us and just a great partnership.
SPEAKER_01:I just love that we're 10 minutes into this and my jaw's already down and my mind's been blown by three times. Flipped a quarter.
SPEAKER_00:We actually had our 50th anniversary, we gave away coins. You hit a quarter? Yeah, it was a coin. That's little commemorative coins for the flip.
SPEAKER_01:I just want to like, is someone who like has to source things and try to find, like, I mean, like, my I gotta have a merch guy, I gotta have this. Like, we gotta go find a coin guy, you know? It's amazing what you can find. Insane. Um but I guess like it's the history is fascinating because again, like to have I mean, down to a coin flip of hey, we're gonna do this dealership competitive. I mean, in hindsight, both would have done great. One would have done better generally, Subaru done even better locally. Yes. Um But I'm curious of like your story and all this, because obviously you get born, the name gets changed, it's like this uh prophecy being written that you're gonna take the the helm at some point. But what was it like grow? Like, did you were you pretty active at the dealership?
SPEAKER_00:I worked I worked in the storage as a kid, just I mean, little stuff, cart washing cars, worked in parts. Used to joke that you'd put you in parts to go dust parts shelves. So I did that as a kid. But it goes back, my dad would tell stories back to when we were really little, like five, six, seven years old, and he'd pay us, I think it was like a nickel a car to lock cars on the lot. Yeah. Because what they used to do on car lots is every morning you would go out, so this is before automatic keys, right? So you'd they'd bring a keyboard out, and everyone would go out to the entire lot and unlock every car on the lot so that the customers could walk and get in. Now we don't unlock the cars until a customer actually wants to get in. It's just a different world now. But what would happen is at the end of a shift, when it's closing time, six, seven o'clock, all of a sudden all the cars have to get locked again. So everyone has to go door by door and lock every car. So we get paid a nickel a car to go lock doors. That was my first job at the store. Interesting. But um, I I really I I didn't go to I went to college just assuming I was gonna be in the car business by any means. I mean, I went to USC for a business degree. I wanted to be in some sort of business. I didn't know what that part. I don't know, just wanted to see what I liked and see what I was interested in. And met a lot of cool people at USC, ended up working in uh some healthcare stuff when I first graduated. Um pendulum swing the complete direction. That doing healthcare staffing stuff. And then uh yeah, that was horrible. And then worked for a couple car dealerships down in LA, which there's a very big difference between a car dealership in Los Angeles, California and a car dealership in Salt Lake City, Utah.
SPEAKER_01:What's the TLDR of that?
SPEAKER_00:It is a lot shadier. Yeah, I mean, I think I was working for a Porsche Audi store at one point, and I think like two-thirds of the stores were under investigation for fraud at the time.
SPEAKER_01:Why'd that guy just hand him an envelope of cash? Don't ask questions.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I had no, I had a honestly right a couple days before I quit, it was uh I literally watched a guy walk into the general manager's office with briefcase, shut the door for half an hour, leave, and that was like a regular thing. It's like, yeah, they're definitely laundering money. So got out of that pretty quick. So was that like, did your dad know?
SPEAKER_01:He's like, Well, are you gonna work at another dealership? You can come work at our dealership.
SPEAKER_00:No, I wasn't ready to move back to Salt Lake, yep.
SPEAKER_01:Fair.
SPEAKER_00:So that was a big part of it. So and then my dad had an opportunity to pick up another store back in about 2003. Okay. And so at that point, he asked me if I'd come back and help him with it. And so I at that point I moved back and the store didn't end up working, like getting the new store. So we didn't end up getting it, but I was back at that point. So I started work started working for the family. And that that was October of 2003. So I'm 22 years now, yeah. So the nice thing, one thing my dad did was smart is that I mean I started at the bottom. I he wasn't, even though I had the degree from USC, business degree, graduate with honors, it's you're starting as a salesman. Yeah. So I was a salesman, worked myself up, special finance, became a finance manager, finance manager, used car manager, used car manager to new car manager. And then, and while I was doing that, I got my MBA at the U. So I got my master's at the U in business. And then in 2009, we got very lucky to be able to purchase the Southtown Subaru store.
SPEAKER_02:Got it.
SPEAKER_00:Larry Miller's first store Larry Miller ever sold, actually. And they sold it to us, and we bought their Sure store in 2009. And my dad said, if we're gonna do this, then you're gonna run it. I said, Okay. So at 29 years old, I took over general manager of the Subaru store in Southtown and haven't looked back. Dang. So I've run both stores since I've been I ran took over Midtown as well in 2011 and have been running both stores ever till last December when I finally hired a general manager to take over both stores and allow me to focus on more big picture stuff.
SPEAKER_01:Crazy.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I love the stories of like family business, for example, because I've seen it go both ways. I've seen ones where it's like, all right, well, you're gonna take it over some days. We're just gonna make you the VP of some title and you're just gonna come and very common in the car business. Oh, yeah. I mean, I could name a lot of names. Matt, I'm not gonna name a lot of names. Actually, fuck it, let's name some kidney.
SPEAKER_00:I don't like it, show. Let's do it. Well, this is as you could say, if you think small lake city, try small lake car dealership city. That's a small, it's a small world in the car building. Everybody knows everybody.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's like that's been a fun thing about the podcast and just like my own general like ADHD rabbit holes, is like I'll go down a rabbit hole, be like, oh, this is a lot small. Like the beer brewing um community and breweries, so small. Pretty much all of them. I mean, like Kevin Templin used to work at Red Rock, who worked with Isaac Winter, who then went over to High West, and you just kind of find all these little things, or even going into the art community and talking to uh Micah Christensen, who is like the middle of the wheel of the spoke of that, because he's like the biggest dealer of everything, but then also wrote the anthology of all the artists in Utah. And so everybody knows him, he knows everybody.
SPEAKER_00:Then you have the nonprofit world, non-profit world, pretty much everybody just moves around in different nonprofits between the 50s, maybe not profit.
SPEAKER_01:And then everybody just kind of passes money to each other. Everybody knows everybody. Yeah. Which is fun. Like I like it. It's fun to see how small the city is, but still like there's so much going on. And also to the point of like the I mean Southern California car dealerships, like everything here in so many of like the different, I mean, call them industries, verticals, how what have you, like everything's a lot more collaborative. Everyone is a lot more um understanding than a lot of other places. And so it's been fun to see how that's played out. I'd assume at least has some sort of it's a nice thing in the car.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, generally, I mean, we don't really southern Utah and Northern Utah are considered kind of different places in the Utah car world. So it's pretty much northern Utah car stores and the St. George stores, right? And so generally, and most manufacturers have five or six stores in northern Utah, kind of spread throughout the valley. So everybody knows everybody. We talk a lot. Like I'm working really hard trying to get us to work together better. Yeah. Rather than like like the Toyota guys and the Honda guys, they do a really good job of working together, right? Yeah, like your Utah Toyota dealers or Utah Honda dealers. We we've never really had that in the Subaru world.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So we're trying to get better at doing that and kind of competing against the Toyotas and the Hondas of the world, not each other.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. No, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Like we want someone, if someone comes to buy an Outback, we should be talking about why they should buy an Outback over a Jeep Jeep versus why they should buy it from us instead of the other Subaru guy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Let's talk about that for a minute because I think there's something that I really like. Cause let's go back to a college paper I wrote when I was doing a whole SWOT analysis on Tesla. Yeah. And so uh part of, I mean, I'll get into the specific point, not take walk bullet by bullet of the SWOT analysis, but like one of them was I mean, car distribution, where there's so many laws uh mostly at a state level of saying cars have to be sold at a dealership level, can't be sold directly from a manufacturer. And I mean, Tesla tried to turn that on the head, worked good in some places, worked better at other places. I mean, especially when, again, like you can go down to another deal dealership, he's like, you offer me a hundred less than you. I like, why would I? But one thing I really appreciate about Mark Miller is it's standard pricing. Like you we're gonna give you the best deal that we can, not based on who can negotiate the best or who can go talk to someone else the best. Hundred for fact. And I mean talk me through that decision of moving it to that way, because I imagine there's a lot of financial ramifications, both positive and negative.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. So we did that in 2014. So we're almost 11, 12 years into this thing now. And the logic behind it, and I'd I'd wanted to do it for years, and finally I had a good uh dealer friend of mine from Washington, a guy named Dave Jacter, kind of came back to look at some software or something like that, and met him there and ended up talking to my office about one price car selling, about this idea of why you do it. And the basic logic behind it is in most car dealerships you go to, the people that treat you the worst get the best car deal. Yes. That's horrible. Like that's a horrible business model. Like you're encouraging people to beat you up and fight and go back and forth and create a thing because that's how they're gonna get the best price. And that makes zero sense to me. And the guys, the new guys come in, you're talking about business model for Tesla, the Rivians, the Carvanas, they figure that out. That's what they figured out. That they know that people don't want to negotiate. Like there's pretty good studies out there that says about it's only about 15 to 20 percent of the US population actually wants to negotiate for a car.
SPEAKER_01:And I would love to study that population. Because whenever someone's like, I love negotiating, like I don't know, I know I usually have I have like my
SPEAKER_00:Employee orientation. It's one of the questions I ask every time I know employee orientation. We really knew employees and say, raise your hands if you like to negotiate. And without veil, it's always one out of five. It's like one out of five, two out of six. That's always in that range. And it's because we don't teach our kids to negotiate. And so what happens is they go into a car dealership and they have there we force them to. Yeah. They're not negotiating with car dealers because they want to. They're negotiating because they know if they don't, they're not going to get a good deal. Yeah. And there's a financial incentive attached to it. So what we're doing is we're saying we're going to give the best price right up front on every car. Are you going to get and the idea of it is are you going to get the absolute best price every time if you wanted to spend three hours fighting and doing like? No, probably not. That doesn't matter because you're going to have a great experience. And we can sell a car in a half hour. Good luck doing that anywhere else. Yeah. No one else is selling a car in a half hour to an hour.
SPEAKER_01:Three weeks, five weeks.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, three hours, four hours. Even if you know what you want, it's four hours. Because I mean, the the best part about it is when you the first time someone really gets to experience what one price and what we call promise price is what we call it at our stores. And it's they sit down, they go find their car. It's pretty standard. Like we show them the car, we tell them exactly how we're doing business, right? And they walk in the door, so there's no surprises. They come down, they kind of sit down to negotiate, right? Like it's the car deal, car dealership thing. And they sit down and the salesperson puts the information on the computer of the car they want, shows them their payment, shows them and says, which one you like. And the customer, the first time the customer sees that, they're just baffled by it.
SPEAKER_01:It's like when you pull into the parking lot to get the cars. That's part of the experience.
SPEAKER_00:They're sitting there like, wait a minute, you're not you're not gonna go to your manager and go back and forth to the desk and bring the thing. Why would I? The price is there. That's the price you're paying. So I can all I have to do is put the car and show you what the payments are, and you get to pick what the payments you want. And it just baffles people's minds. And it's good, a lot of them get confused. And then now generally a lot of people still try and ask. It shows they're testing us, they're testing to see if we're really not gonna negotiate, and we don't. And the idea of it is that if we were to do that, it would mean that we're lying to them, right? If we tell someone we're not gonna negotiate, then they come in and we negotiate, then where's our integrity in that? We're we're lying to the customer. And so the idea is we're gonna treat the old grandma that's what any other store would call her a lay down or all these horrible car terms that are out there. We're gonna treat the exact same as someone who wants to come in and beat us up. And do we lose customers for it? Sure. But the idea is, I mean, basic business basis marketing is if your target markets everybody, your target markets nobody.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Right? And that's what most car disciples are. If you ask most car dishipship who are your target market, they'll say, everybody. Everybody could buy a car from me.
SPEAKER_01:When's the best time to buy car? No.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, first of all, no, everyone can't. And one thing we found when we initially did it was it pushed a lot of our complaining customers away. So, like the customers that made our service managers and our service departments' lives very difficult, the difficult customers, we had a lot less of them after we did this. I imagine repeating back too. Yeah, and we all the repeat customers are the easiest thing in the world. Generally, especially a lease customer that comes back now, just walks back in and says, give me another one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Tell me the price.
SPEAKER_00:That just says, I'm gonna do another outpack, I'll I'll test drive when I get in, just have it all written up, I'll show up at four o'clock. You know, 45 minutes, they're back out the door and see you in three years. Right. And so then the idea of us is trying to figure out how we take what we've done with one price and now take it to the next level and how we can meet people where they are, how some of these carvanas and carmaxes are doing, how we can make it the most convenient process for what the customer wants, not how we want to do business. Yeah. Because most car dealerships look at and say, I'm gonna make the customer come to me and do it how I want to do it. We're trying to look at and say, how can I make it what the customer wants? If the customer wants to do it all online, like they're buying a Tesla, we should have that process. We should have that available to them. It's not gonna be a lot of our customers, but what if it's 10%? Okay, we'll do it all online, deliver it to their house, and everything's great. If your customer doesn't want to come to our service department, we're working right now on a new pilot that's gonna launch in January for mobile service. We're gonna go start doing Subaru service to people's driveways. Heck yeah. Pit crew shows out. We've we bought two Foresters, we shipped them down to California to get upfitted for it, and they're ready to go. I love that. And so we're gonna start doing that for especially for Park City.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Because Park City, it's tough for people in Park City to make it all the way down the canyon. Oh, hell yeah. So if we have a car up there that just runs loops in Park City all day long, it'll knock out a lot of people's work.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's like half of my friend Warner Trabert's business model with Fleetly, is like, I don't want to deal with this. And they're like, Yeah, we'll come do it for you. You leave your car on the tarmac for your private jet, it'll take care of everything.
SPEAKER_00:100% because like that's what people want. And they're willing to pay a premium for it. I'm I would absolutely pay a premium for that. If I didn't have to go do service in my car, I'd come to my driveway. Yeah, knock it out. Save me two hours of my life.
SPEAKER_01:Because that's what I love. Like, I always use this quote, like in compared to a lot of things of like buying, I mean, tech software or kind of whatever it could be, I mean, any sort of sales process can apply it to. But if I always say, if I get to the end of a sales process and I use a car, for example, and that salesman is like really happy and friendly, like I got taken advantage of. Like I want us to equally hate each other by the end of it, and then it worked out. But again, if we can skip that whole thing, it's like, yeah, come here, test drive this, you like this, here's the payment.
SPEAKER_00:Let's get away from that. What the idea is we we want our we want our salespeople, we're called, we don't call them salespeople, we call them product specialists. And we want our product specialists to be a true advocate for the customer. So, I mean, another great example of part of our one price thing, we don't pay our sales, our product specialists on commission.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So they don't make money based on how much money we made on the car. They make money whether they sell the car or not.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And they make money the same amount of money if they sell you a$50,000 car as they sell you a$20,000 car. So the idea of that is that I want them to pick the car that the customer actually wants, not what makes them the most money. Most car deals you go to, I guarantee you there are four or five cars on every lot in this city that have a thousand dollar spiff on them. The sales guy sells that yellow Camaro over there, they get a thousand dollars. So a customer comes in looking for a mini-ban and they go, you thought about that yellow Camaro over there? It's like, we know you're looking for a fan. It's awesome. And that's not genuine. It's not doing true needs assessments of our customers and getting the perfect car for what they need, not what we need to sell them.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And like relationships in general, whether it be with yourself, your family, and loved one, business, I mean, they all kind of have that same pillars, but I've never seen a relationship go well that starts off with lying. Totally. Like even when I was single, like there's a multiple dates I went on where someone shows up and like, oh, those are some old pictures. How do you expect me to be like, you know what, this is okay? Like I'm okay with you lying about me. Like, I know like, and it can go so many different ways, whether you start a job and it's different than what they promised you in the interview process. Or if someone's hiding something from like credit cards in America, like there's like nothing to start to.
SPEAKER_00:And in the car dealership world, it's encouraged.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
unknown:Right?
SPEAKER_00:You're encouraging you're encouraging, you're encouraging the customer to come and say, Oh, well, I got an offer for$1,500 less down the street. Are you gonna match it? Like what they don't a lot of times they don't never gone down the street. They don't, they're just saying to see what happens, right? And we encourage that to happen. That that that's been the issue with the car business, and it's why it's opened the door, especially on the used car side, for the Carvanas and the CarMax's and these other groups to come in and take that piece of the market.
SPEAKER_01:Totally.
SPEAKER_00:Because they've I'll give them credit, they've done a good job, making it a great experience.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Well, we're gonna beat them and we're gonna we're gonna do a better job of it. We're just gonna figure out, we just gotta do a little bit better.
SPEAKER_01:And it's a long-term play, too. It's not like it's gonna everything's gonna work out the first month. I mean, sure, when the first changed, there were salespeople like product specialists saying, uh, uh, they're they're not buying, I'm not doing this, they want to negotiate, they're getting better prices. Like, hold the course, it's gonna work out. And then after a while, people are like, oh, I like this better. I do want to come back. I do want to know.
SPEAKER_00:What it ends up working is we end up dealing with less people and selling the same amount of cars. That's that's generally what ends up happening in the one price world. And in a normal in a normal car dealership, it's about 25% of the customers that walk in the door walk out with a car. Yeah, but in our world, it's 40 to 45.
SPEAKER_01:That's insane. Well, it but if it makes sense if you think about it.
SPEAKER_00:It's like I'm a big ops guy. Yeah. And so I rent all about efficiently. But the the logic behind it is that you've taken their options to from three to two. In a regular car dealership, you I show you a payment. What can you say? Yes, no, or if you do this. Those are the three options. In our world, you can say yes or no.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right? So it just makes the process so much easier that it just goes fast.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, might as well. Yeah. And so like one thing I because like people always reach out to me to be on the podcast, and it's like a lot of from a lot of industries that there's a lot of them. I mean, like whether it's be attorneys, whether it be I mean, accountants, fitness people, whatever it might be. And my response back to them is always, why you? Because I mean, if it's just a general, let's use attorney for the sake of the argument, like, ah, you know, just I want some publicity I want to do. It's like, okay, like, no, thank you. But if you're like the number one attorney that knows what's going on in Salt Lake, like, yeah, I'd love to have that conversation. But then also, and which is like part of the whole podcast, is there's so many people doing great things to make this a better place. And one thing I love about Mark Miller's Subaru compared to a lot of the other dealerships is how much that you decide to give back to the community. And so, I mean, we talked, I mean, about I mean Suba Blue with the brew the beer with proper, and now we I mean of coffee beans, but I mean, talk to me about how that has evolved. Um, I mean, under your stewardship and I mean some of those key I mean, so along the way.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I think the community part of our that goes way, that goes back well beyond me, back to my grandpa and to my dad. I mean, my dad had being part of the community and supporting nonprofits. I mean, he's a big part of United Way since United Way has been around in Utah. I mean, my mom was on the board of United Way for 20 years. But like the idea is supporting nonprofits, supporting the community is taught to me at a very young age about that's part of your responsibility. If you're gonna have a business in the community, your job is to support that community. And you have to figure out how to do that. And so I've the nice thing is Subaru is the perfect brand for that. And so that's been really helpful for us and made it a lot easier. We were doing a lot of the stuff and the share the love and the giveaways and the we actually so the share the love event which we're doing now, we'll talk about in a bit. We actually did an event before that. Before they launched Share the Love about a year or two, we did an event very similar to Share the Love. And it was the Do a Good Feel Good event, is what we called it. And it was an event every April where we would the first year we did it was a disaster. But the first year we did it was the idea was the I think I want to say it was either$75 or$100. I think it was$75 for every car we sold. It was we only had our midtown, this would have been like 2006 or 2007. We only had our Midtown store, and we donated$75 for every new car we sold in the month of April. I think it was new and used that we sold in the month of April. And our rule with the first year we did it was you could pick any 501c3. Oh, geez. Horrible idea. We got some crazy nonprofits. Like, um, nonprofits we don't didn't necessarily want to put our name on. Like, we're gonna create a shell company and we're gonna donate somebody and donate. We learned that first year that that's not a bad idea. Like the I think the 80 or 90 cars we sold that month, I think we had like 35 different nonprofits or 40 different. It was crazy. So then we decided in future years we're gonna limit it to four or five nonprofits. And we kept doing that event, and that's when Subaru, a couple years later, I didn't think they copied from us, but the they started and where Share the Love started, which is what we're doing, what just kicked off last week is Share Love started in 2008 when the world was in the middle of the financial crisis. So I think what the Lehman brothers went down in October of 2008, I think. Yes, October 2008. So that point the world is falling, everything dying, like layoffs, everyone's quitting. The car business was giving away cars, it was zero percent financing, three thousand dollars off every car, incentives through the roof. It was all these deals. And Little Subaru comes along. This is a Subaru at that time was selling about 180,000 cars a year in the United States. Little Subaru comes along and says, We're gonna do a charity event and we're gonna donate$250 to nonprofits for every car we sell. At that point, I think they picked four national nonprofits that they could pick from. It's like, that's what we're gonna do. Have the best month in their history. Why history of the company in two in December of 2008? Subaru had the best month in their history. Think about that. That's crazy. Yeah, that's absolutely insane. And and ever since that moment, that was really the turning point moment when Subaru did that and really started leaning on the idea of love and that that idea and its marketing and went from 180,000 to they'll sell 680,000 cars in the US this year. Okay. And that's in the last, what, 16 years? Yeah, 17 years. And in the share love event has grown from the small beginnings it had there to, I want to say they'll break 300 million dollars donated through this program. Wow, this year. So pretty cool. And they've been able to expand. The cool thing is they just not resting on the laurels, they still have their national nonprofits, but what they did about three or four years ago is they decided we're gonna let locals local nonprofits. So we're gonna let each individual retailer pick two, one or two. I think it depends on your size of your store. We're big enough that we get to pick two. So we're gonna pick two local nonprofits that we get to support and we get to go deep with them. And the idea is that we can guide our customers to pick the local ones instead of the national ones and try and support local, which is so much more important to us. And a lot of we try and switch it up every year and bring different nonprofits in and create projects with them and have them on our showroom floors to teach our customers about what they do and have them in our TV advert times to try and get them not only help that get them money by us donating, we're trying to get them more PR, right? Yeah, get them more known, right, or more ability to be known in the community. So Girls on the Run and Usara, those are our two nonprofits this year. We're super excited about both of them. They're both partners we've worked with for a little bit, and we're really excited to see how much money we can raise for them in the next probably 30 more days.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, because it's going on right now, um, starting November 20th, goes till January 2nd of the new year. And I mean, that's one thing I love is like you think about again, you can go buy a car, Subaru donate$250, huge organizations nationwide, but the amount that's gonna come specifically to our community is limited. However, when it's like, hey, listen, we are gonna add more on top of this if you choose one of our local ones and that impact gets magnified.
SPEAKER_00:That's the big part. So we so we match it. So if it goes, the donation goes to the local nonprofits, we do another$250 from us personally from the dealership. And it's plus another$5 for every oil change that gets done in our dealership today at that time.
SPEAKER_01:I love that part too, because it's like, I mean, I'm always because like going back to the 2008 example, um, very different consumer behavior. Whereas now, 2025, people are so much more cause-driven in their purchase thing behavior. I mean, you see that everywhere from boycotts of Targitans, go shopping local to again, something as simple as you buy a car, we'll donate. And so it's like, I there's I'm sure there's people who are like, oh yeah, I would love to be able to go buy a car and donate to a cause, but I bought a car. Like I mean, in the middle of my lease that I got from last year, but I do need an oil change. So there's something that I can do.
SPEAKER_00:Put your oil change up by 30 days or something like that, and come in and get give the donation that way for sure.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I uh our hope, our goal for this year is we're trying to get to 200,000. We want to donate 200,000 to these two nonprofits. Love that.
SPEAKER_01:Because I love girls on the run. I am pretty active in the running community. And like I and like my mom, we're the family that runs on uh 5K's on holidays. Okay. And my sister's a big runner, and she has uh my niece, and like I was I heard her from Girls on the Run, and I was like, I kind of want her to do it. She's like, Ah, she's a little young, one time soon. Nice. But I mean, anything that can get people together, people outside, people moving.
SPEAKER_00:My daughter, my daughter was involved in Girls on the Run through her school when she was in middle school. Amazing. Yeah. So we were we've been involved on every level of that program. And it it's just fun to see when we get to the end of these events what they can actually use that money for and just to see the impact that that money truly has on the community. It's like our partner last year was Salt Lake County Animal Services, and they built a whole new part of their facility with the money that they got from us last year.
SPEAKER_01:So it's one thing to just be like, oh, like cool, you guys donated. It goes to this, it goes to our parent company who then distributes it this way. But then to be like, here is big check. I better be a big check. Because if I ever if I were to raise a lot of money, I'm gonna get a big check to give to someone.
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah, we always do the big check. Big check's so much for that. Big check has to happen. And we actually got in trouble with Subaru last year because too much of our money went to the local nonprofits, which which I told my guys, keep it up.
SPEAKER_02:I will pick that up. That's a great job.
SPEAKER_00:Keep doing it. Yeah, as long as you as long as we're letting the customer pick and they're making educated pistol locals and we're not picking for them, I'm perfectly fine with it. We want to get as much money to our local ones as possible, without question.
SPEAKER_01:I know, exactly. And then even if you need to come, I mean, I know next week good old Ethan Cisneros and Thirst Drinks are coming by uh to come, I mean, come grab a drink and I mean support it that way too. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we're excited about the partnership with Thirst this year. So the the years past, we we didn't do the Super Blue Beer this year. We didn't do the partnership with partners probably this year, but the idea is to try different partnerships, right? That's another cool part. Not only in the nonprofit world with our partnerships we do with nonprofits, the idea of trying to partner with different companies and with Proper Brewer. We've done a ton of stuff with Proper Brewery over the last few years. And with Thirst and just these local companies, Slud Magazine, like all these. We must have a great marketing team that knows exactly what to tell. Fabulous marketing team. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um because that's one thing I like on the topic of beer versoda. Like I was in Austin, I had a friend that used to live in Austin, now he's moved to Nashville, but I would go there every Masters weekend. So I'd go hang out with him for the week. We'd watch the Masters be a great time. And on the last day of the Masters on the Sunday, he's like, hey, we're gonna go to the social club, they have a um simulator. Okay. A couple of my friends were just gonna go hang out, drink beers, and watch the masters and sing some clubs. I'm like, don't tempt me with a good time. Sounds perfect. And so we go down there, and this guy's like, Oh, cool, like where are you from? Like, oh, Salt Lake. He's like, Oh, I was just down there for one of my distributors to meet up with them. We went to a jazz game. He's like, it was the wildest experience. Because we go in there, it's halftime. He's like, I could use a beer, goes up, walks over beer, orders it really quickly, and then he turns around and he's like, and then I see this turnstile just going back and forth and back and forth, and I look over what it was, and it was soda.
SPEAKER_00:I was like, Welcome to YouTube. Soda's big, soda's big. My kids are addicted to all the swig. And I think I've had swig and I've I've had swig maybe 10 times in my life, probably. Thirst. I'm not a soda guy. I it's a treat to me.
SPEAKER_01:It's not like because I'm not a bit of a soda guy. Like if I'm having a soda, full strength. Like I'm not gonna go get a diet something, but it's again very much a treat. Like my girlfriend's mom was in town last week, and she's like, Well, can we go eat one of those sodas? I'm like, Yeah, let's go, let's go stop by 33rd South, go by Thirst, and go grab a soda.
SPEAKER_00:I have my thought, I had a Thursday. My thirsty today was delicious. There you go. It was really good there. We we started the first drink we did was actually uh with Mountain West cider. And we had a cider that we put together. I do love Mountain West. And it was Suba Blue Cider. That was the first one we ever did. Suba low. It wasn't cider, then it went to beer. Now it's the soda. We'll see what we'll see what ends up next year.
SPEAKER_01:Next thing you know, you can have cooligan water and have suba blue water. And yeah, I I know what guy.
SPEAKER_00:Go to the whiskey, but we're on ship. Yeah, yeah. There's some whiskey guys. We can figure out the whiskey setup next. There's a there's a couple more of them now. That's one of the harder ones we do is trying to pick the two for sure love every year.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Walk me through that decision-making process. Because there's, I mean, again, as you've learned when it was open, there's a million.
SPEAKER_00:We started so Subaru started their Subaru loves stuff about because what's the natural partners? Ten years ago, probably ten years. So the idea of this they started this idea is like Subaru loves pets, Subaru loves to care, Subaru loves to help. There's like there's these different pillars, they call them. Subaru loves the earth. That's their pillars that they set across. And the idea is that they do events under each pillar certain months of the year. And then we decided to add a couple of our own pillars a few years ago. So we added Mark Miller, Subaru loves veterans and Mark Miller, Subaru loves diversity. And so the way we do it is now, so now we have our seven pillars that we focus on. And what happens is every year we take grant applications from nonprofits towards those seven pillars to try and pick one partner in each pillar. And the idea of it is rather than support 30 or 40 different nonprofits all year, we pick these seven. And those seven we go deep with. We're at every one of their events, they're at every one of our events. They set up tents on our showroom floor, they set up tents at our events, we introduce them to each other. We've had a lot of partnerships that we've created, nonprofits working together through it. And then the idea is that sometimes we're gonna keep them for the next year, sometimes we won't. We have probably two or three partners that we've are kind of long term partners that are kind of stay on the board for. Long time because Discovery Gateway is a big one. Yeah. Oh, I mean Kathleen Buttonless. Yep. Kathleen's amazing. Yeah, I'm on the board for Discovery Gateway. Yes, you are. So and uh we have our exhibit, we have our Subaru Mercurio Super exhibit downtown there. They just built they built all of our kids' rooms. So we have four Discovery Gateway kids' rooms, two at each store. I know that are actually actual museum quality exhibits that are our kids' playrooms, rather than just throw a bunch of toys in a room and call it a playroom. We actually have a mm, we actually have a museum. Yeah, we actually have a museum. So we have museum quality pieces. And then uh Volunteers of America's been another one of our partners we've had for a long, long time. And though we help supply them with vehicles, they've got they purchase cars from us. They probably have 60 Mark Miller Subers that they use to provide services around the valley and bring you homeless youth to jobs and try and get people to where they need to be to help get people back in the world. So amazing. They're just it's just fun. Uh it's just it's fun being able to see all these organizations that we help and not just be able to, okay, we're just gonna throw you a check for a thousand bucks. We're actually gonna get there and we're gonna include you in our social media, include you in our advertising, include you in our process of what we do. Volunteers from our store go volunteer at their locations and be a part of them versus just here's a give them money.
SPEAKER_01:Because that's like one of my biggest pet peeves as I like kind of like look at a lot of I mean, and it's not as even just like nonprofits, but like anything that needs money to succeed that can't succeed in a what's called a capitalistic environment. And so many times, like, yeah, here's a check. And it's like sometimes you need it's like not money doesn't solve everything. Sometimes you need the brains, the network, and like there's so much more to it. And like one thing that I've been reflecting a lot recently is like giving back as a topic. Because I mean, up until years ago, I was like, well, giving back means once I have millions of dollars, I go give those millions of dollars to someone and they put a building on a college campus, and then I get immortalized. But then what I've realized is like, oh no, no, no. There's so many different ways to do it. So, like just in my own life, I try to give back where I can. Like, if someone reaches out, like, hey, I need help with this, or I need someone to talk to through this, or I need some sort of advice, like, yeah, let's go grab coffee, let's go grab it.
SPEAKER_00:Thousands and thousands of ways you can give back.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And so I love that you've have this business and platform that you have where it's easy to be the guy in Southern California that twirls his monopoly mustache and takes the briefcase instead of being like, Well, how do we support the community? How do we give back? Totally. And not only like you, because you could easily just have say, oh yeah, Subaru gives back at a nationwide level, like that scratches that itch, we don't need anything else, would be like, no, no, no, no. Like I want to maximize the impact here. Totally. And so, I mean, thank you for for everything you do for all of us in our community when it's easier to not.
SPEAKER_00:And that's and that's really, I mean, one of my goals, especially now that I've kind of moved on from I know day-to-day management, I'm not doing day-to-day management of the store. I've got Chris Hudson there to kind of do that kind of stuff and manage the storage so I can focus on more big picture looks. And I mean, really, one of my big goals from a national standpoint is to try and show other car dealers that this is the way to do it. Yeah. And this is the future of the car business. And if we want to be successful and we want car dealerships to hang around for the next hundred years, we've got to get a lot better at beating customer needs and meeting the needs of the communities around us.
SPEAKER_02:Adapter die.
SPEAKER_00:Car dealerships, I mean, in general, car dealerships that generally do a pretty good job of being around the community. Like you got to give dealerships credit on that side of it. That I mean, that there's always the are like the the first guys to ever sponsor a little league team or the first guys to sponsor sports teams are generally the car dealers in town.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, I guess that you put it that way.
SPEAKER_00:Whenever if you ever go to any sporting, every any high school you ever go to, you will never not see the local car dealership on the fence. Local 5K, back of the shirt, dealership. Yep. Anything it's always there. And we've always been really good at that. Weird money reach out to the dealerships. We've just taken a lot deeper. And we try and focus our stuff so we can really make impact with it versus just going to everybody.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that. Focus, focus on what matters. Don't I mean you could be as broad as possible, but then that leads to like 30 to 4501 C's that want money. 100%. And then next thing you know, to actually make an impact that matters, where you can again like build a wing uh that that changes everything. Absolutely. Question actually, as it comes to mind, is I think you're one of the few people that would know this. What percent of Salt Lake drives a Subaru or owns a Subaru, or like percent of sales, like whatever metric you could use?
SPEAKER_00:So Subaru is an interesting brand when you look at market share because we can't. I mean, you can look at the basic, the full market share in Utah is probably seven or eight percent. Okay. Is Subaru, but we don't look at it that way because we don't compete in a ton of segments. Right. Like we don't have a minivan, we don't have a truck, we don't have we should have a truck, but we're work- I'm working on that. Sneak in. We should have a truck, we just don't have a truck. You mean the Baja? Right. We need like a Nissan Frontier sized truck, like a mid-sized Tacoma. Like Subaru, like a Subaru Tacoma sign would be an awesome car, but we're working on that. But because we don't compete in that in the stuff we compete in, especially in the Salt Lake market that we represent, so our Midtown market, we're actually the number two brand right now. It's Toyota than Subaru, which is the stuff we compete again. I mean, there's certain there's certain there's certain segments that we sell. I mean, I think the segment that CrossTrek competes in, I think we sell 65% of the cars. That's wild. Cross tracks in the small SUB category. I usually sell pretty much all of them, right? It's just we just don't have enough models to. I mean, if we had enough models, I think we could be bigger than Toyota in this. Right. I mean, Subaru knows it. It's just it's the it's the official car of Utah. Yeah. You go to Park City, it's all Subaru's.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It was wild when I moved to because I went on my mission in Washington and then moved to Seattle after graduating. And even driving around there, I was like, more Subaru's.
SPEAKER_00:Like they're usually As you get farther from Salt Lake, the less Subaru's you see. Yeah. So Salt Lake Park City is the bread and butter for Subaru. And then as it spreads out, it gets a little bit thinner.
SPEAKER_01:And as far as like, let's call it like Utah or even like northern Utah specifically, like how does that or you can call it sales here. I mean, however you want to define it compared to the rest of the country. Are we like the top dogs that are mostly?
SPEAKER_00:We're probably one of the top five markets, top six markets. Seattle's huge, Portland's huge. No, yes, per capita. New England area, New England areas, yeah. Monstrously big, like Vermont. They still have ton of sewers in those areas. But they've actually started really hitting the they call it the Sun Belt. So it's pretty much the entire bottom border, the bottom border of the country. Yeah, so you're talking like Arizona, Southern California, Louisiana, Miss Appe, Florida, like the bottom of the country. They really started hitting that the past 10 years and actually do pretty well. And that's where the a lot of the expansion Subaru's had going from the 180 to the 680 has been in those markets.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting.
SPEAKER_00:And we've done we've done well too, but the we were already doing well. Even before that, there a lot of people run Subarus back then. Used to be a little niche brand. Now the national goal for Subaru is a 5% market share.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting.
SPEAKER_00:They want a 5% market share, but they never have to be able to do that.
SPEAKER_01:Which is pretty ambitious considering, like, again, there's so many different uh model types that they just aren't ever going to come out.
SPEAKER_00:When you talk about when they were at 180,000 cars, they were at a 1% market share. So one 1% market is 170,000 cars. Yeah. There's they'll sell 16 million cars in the US this year. A lot of cars. And that's down. But here's the crazy part they'll sell 16 million that we scrap 18 million. So that's a really interesting thing when you talk about car world, right? Yeah. Is that when you go to down markets, the scrap rate never goes down. So the scrap rate is how many cars leave the market every year. Whether they get shipped to Mexico, shipped out of the country, totaled, crash, die, shredded, whatever. You've for the last two, three years, you've had more cars leaving the market than you have coming into the cars. So if you what happens in the carbons is if you have a couple bad years because of the economy, what happens, especially in our Subaru world, is uncertainty kills us. So tariffs and all this stuff just kill a Subaru market because when people are uncertain about the economy and certain things, they hold off on buying cars, which is completely natural. We completely understand that. But what happens is eventually they have to buy a car. Like eventually you have to those cars get taken out of the market. There aren't enough used cars in the market. People have to buy new ones. So if you get a couple of years where you're only selling 15, 16 million cars, those next two years after that are gonna blow up. Which is what happened in 2021 and 2022. And then you see the cycle. It just becomes this crazy up-down cycle.
SPEAKER_01:That's see the data nerd in me just like wants to scratch and double click all of that.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, we love the data. So we work a lot in AI and chat GPT. There's cars, car dealership-specific chat GPTs that analyze inventory data and all that. Like I geek out on that stuff too. Amazing.
SPEAKER_01:I could yeah, I could probably have a whole podcast with you based on that. Um, Jeff, this has been great. I like I always say this, but every conversation I have, like I go in thinking like, yeah, it's probably gonna go like this, or I'm probably gonna be this, but this has been fantastic. Like so many great uh, I mean, insights that I never knew about, also just like great human. No, thank you. Um but want to end with the two questions I always ask everybody at the end of each episode. Number one, uh, if you could have someone on the Small Link City podcast and hear more about them and their story, who would you want to hear from?
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:If I had someone I'm a sports guy, so have you got have you got many of the sports guys, local sports people in?
SPEAKER_01:Um here and there. Like a lot of like action sports and like skiers, yes. Jazz folk are harder to tap into.
SPEAKER_00:I really a really interesting one for you. He was my old neighbor, Will Hardy. Yeah, he's a really cool guy. He's got a really cool story, came out of the D3 basketball world, worked his way under Greg Popovich, like coming up through that coaching tree and learning his history stuff. That would be a really cool story.
SPEAKER_01:No, I'd love to hear that story.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Will Hardy would be a good one.
SPEAKER_01:I could do that. I mean, have him for actually just here. There was one time, because it's like always weird sometimes, like sitting at Edison House, because sometimes I'll be sitting there, like having a beer, food, whatever, watching sports, and I'll turn over and be like, was that it was, but I'm not the person who's like, oh my gosh, who's this person? But he walked in once and I was like, uh, Will Hardy.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, really a good guy. That would be the one I would say you should get on.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Deal. Will Hardy. And then secondly, if people want to find more information about Mark Mueller Subaru, get more information about the show the love event, uh, what's the best place to find more information?
SPEAKER_00:So our website is always the best place. Just www.markburgshubaru.com, or you know, any of our social media channels as well. Too for sure.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Jeff, thank you so much. If anybody needs a car, go make an impact. Right now's the right time.
SPEAKER_00:This is the best time. Till January 2nd and get a donate 500 bucks to every every car sold. So we're gonna try and sell a lot of them. I want to want to spend a lot of that money.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Help Jeff spend his money.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. Perfect. No, thanks, Jeff. Thank you. Appreciate it.
