Could you give an exclamation mark on that just to give a quick orientation to the bigness of that moment?

so and i just again this is this is a big story for me but i do very casually mention it um so wayne huizenga of course was one of the founding fathers of auto nation uh the way he impacted me just by his memory and total recall of conversations i think he had a photographic memory i don't know but he was very influential even though we didn't spend a lot of time together and then Mike Jackson was obviously an impactful automotive giant that started as a technician and turned into like just the most wildly successful automotive professional.

But Mike Maroney is the one that sticks out the most to me.

I remember very clearly how he helped me to see a part of me that I didn't think would ever be there.

And I don't know why he chose me or why he believed in me, but I was one of the 20 general managers that he sort of put under his wing and put in a development program and wanted to figure out what are you doing to have most improved dealers year over year how are you getting 40 net to gross how do you have clean schedules and clean inventory and creep and and the thing that made me the most proud was we had the number one esi dealership in all of auto nation which stands for employee satisfaction and these are private surveys that are done by the employees Mike and Mike and Wayne sent a group of people in to interview the employees after the culture survey came back.

And I was nervous.

I was like, why are these guys in suits coming to interview my team members? And as it turns out, they wanted to make sure that the results of the culture survey were real and not coerced.

If you were to give our audience kind of the three to five KPIs that they really should look at, what kind of comes to mind for you?

Any suggestions for people that are stuck in a mindset of overwhelmed or procrastination today?

Yeah, really.

So getting started isn't the hard part.

It's convincing my mind of the things that need to happen before I get started.

because the sustainability to staying started, right? I could get started all the time.

Like I quit drinking when I was drinking a hundred, maybe a thousand times.

Every morning I woke up and didn't know where I was.

How important is it to frame each day in this idea of being present?

I think this year will eclipse the $10 million mark.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

And, you know, this program started in 2008 and it originally started as just an idea of one of the staff members here who wanted to provide resources out into the communities across the state.

And I think we started off with five awardees.

And now, as I just mentioned, we did 85 in 2025.

How are we continuing to do that to help people feel like home ownership is still within reach?

[laughs]

So probably the approach is the one that is most commonly misunderstood, right? Because an really great attitude, really great energy, but an idiotic approach is not gonna produce great results.

So the attitude and the energy, I think it's a precursor.

The approach, I don't think it, m- many people have a written, detailed, executable strategy.

They show up and they work hard.

And I think the four letter words that we need to remove is more and hard.

"I need to do more." More of what? "I need to work hard." What kind of hard? Where? What is the outcome? What are we doing every single day that's producing the result that we're trying to accomplish? So if I had to get...

Hell yeah.

I got no training.

Well, my training is doing lots and lots of music for the last 40 years.

But when I started writing, it was working with Douglas Wright that I started delving into writing for different instruments.

Yeah.

And I remember doing a piece for him and I I got a few like harp, French horn, trumpet, did a few people like that.

And then it was like, oh, this is good.

And I slowly just got bigger.

way.

What are the economic levers that you pull? How does the business model work in your organizations?

Well, as far as donations from farmers, we focus, as you know, a lot on working with farmers.

There's a farmer tax credit that the provincial government brought out.

I think it's in four provinces across the country.

It should be in every province.

But in BC, it's a 25% tax credit for farmers, so they donate their surplus and they get this tax credit.

The problem was when the government brought it out, they didn't really advertise it.

Tell me the story of this.

impact.

And I've been working on this book on and off for about a decade.

It came to me more than a decade ago.

I'll never forget.

You mind if I go into that story a little bit? Are you kidding? People are saying, come on, man, bring it.

Okay.

You know, I'm I had an epiphany.

Oh,

Do you want to talk about that?

No, absolutely.

We are working with UBC this summer, and hopefully we're going to get it completed by the fall.

But we want to do a study, and UBC is very excited about doing this.

And it's sort of looking at the last eight years where we've gone from 20% fresh fruit to actually now it's approximately 80% fresh every week.

So what we want to study is what is the health benefit for somebody actually eating this fruit? quality food compared to what it was eight years ago.

So when you have 80% fresh food being given out and we're giving out milk and eggs and cheese and dairy and fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, what is that impact not only on yourself, but your family and your children? And so if we can get a study like that done and we can show, and one of the cost savings for the government within the health industry, there's got to be significant cost savings.

So what are you thinking? What numbers are we talking about here?

So what is the true advantage in taking away that illusion and bringing them back to, or delusion really, illusion, delusion, whatever you want to call it, but back to reality?

I think that the core thing is that we give every incident, DOT reportable or not, the same structured treatment.

So the same workflow, the same fields, same document requirements, same link to the driver's compliant record and vehicle's compliant record, whether it's a highway crash or somebody backing into a bollard at a warehouse.

And it goes into the same system with the same rigor.

And that sounds simple.

but it's a fundamental change from how it has worked historically.

Right now, a fleet might use one system for DOT incidents and a spreadsheet for everything else in a separate email chain for their insurance carrier and paper forms for drivers.

How important is it to get that information right away?

I like it.

Yeah.

We would get as many people from the department as we could to get into a room with us, and the whole concept was to share with them, "Let's talk about your systems, and within your systems, what pain points do you have? Let's identify those pain points, and let's, let's just not start with one and say, 'This is the one we have to make it work.' We want ten pain points.

We want twenty pain points." 'Cause who knows? Like, the way AI works, we can solve for one and then potentially have a list of a ton more we can tackle next.

Let's find that first one.

And so we'd go through, and we'd let people talk cathartically about their job and what bothered them and what could be done better.

They could spend more time doing something else.

I don't have the time to do this work." David, did you do anything in particular to give people permission?