TRAXERO On-The-Go Podcast E8: Auction In A Box
September 5, 2023
In this episode of TRAXERO On-The-Go, Auction In A Box, we sat down with Kevin Leigh, Founder and Director of Auction Simplified, and spoke about all things auction related. One major highlight was what our auction software offers our customers in an effort to help them get their inventory in front of as many bidders as possible and how we make that happen. Click play to listen.
Transcription
Laura Dolan:
Welcome to TRAXERO On-The-Go, a podcast for the heroes of the road. This podcast will feature amazing towing professionals as they share their experiences on what life is like out on the roadways, the challenges, successes, and everything it takes to ensure a tow business stays alive. Thank you for being here. Now let’s get this thing rolling.
Shelli Hawkins:
Laura Dolan?
Laura Dolan:
Yes, Shelli Hawkins?
Shelli Hawkins:
Can you believe that we are here with episode eight for TRAXERO On-The-Go?
Laura Dolan:
Lucky number eight?
Shelli Hawkins:
Insert a soundbite of applause here. You’re doing a good job from the last one, so I feel like we need to get a round of applause for episode eight. This is fantastic.
Laura Dolan:
Episode eight applause.
Shelli Hawkins:
We’re having a blast.
Laura Dolan:
Yes, absolutely.
Shelli Hawkins:
Having a blast. This is an incredible journey. We are talking to amazing people. Last episode seven, we talked to Chase Leonard from Floyd’s Towing in Racine, Wisconsin and Jai Grunewald from Ken Weber Truck Service in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. These guys have grown up together. They’re just neighbors in neighboring towns and what a great conversation. So good.
Laura Dolan:
It was really cool to hear about their connection and their passion for this industry and how much fun they have doing it and the different jobs they’ve gotten to do together. So it was really, really cool to hear the camaraderie and the accents were very strong.
Shelli Hawkins:
It was great.
Laura Dolan:
I love that Wisconsin accent.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yes. And I loved that they were debating which is better, the 9055 or the V100. Chase is a Vulcan man and Jai is Century all the way, so I love to just throw things out there and stir the pot on occasion to see what’s going to happen. It’s amazing.
Laura Dolan:
Yes. It’s the towers equivalent of nerd talk because I’m sitting here, I have no idea what’s happening, but I believe you.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yes.
Laura Dolan:
This is how I learn.
Shelli Hawkins:
I will say, well, I’m sure that means something. Whatever you just said, it sounds like probably like Charlie Brown’s teacher to you, right?
Laura Dolan:
Wah, wah, wah.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yes, exactly. I love it. Gosh, we are here. We just got back from the Indiana Tow Show with our good friend Sydnee Carroll. Made a ton of new connections, talked to some amazing towers in Indiana, Illinois. They came from all over the place. Cheever’s Towing was there, you guys, Cheever’s Towing, the oldest towing company in America, seven generations. Crystal and Rick Rose owned and managed the business with their son, Richard. Today, they brought some really, really super cool old trucks and of course they brought one of their NRCs. Just so beautiful just to reconnect and meet new people. I call it a success. It was great and it’s growing every year. Shout out to Sue Moreland and Chris Rose forward a fantastic job organizing the Indiana Tow Show. You guys put it on your calendar for next year. Please come.
Laura Dolan:
It looked like you had beautiful weather there, so I’m glad that held up. And the tow trucks, the pictures that you sent were just phenomenal. Oh my gosh, there were some that were just, I don’t know if they were from the 1920s or ’30s, but some of those models were just classic. So, amazing. I love seeing all the different types of equipment out there, so I’m glad you guys had a great time. I saw Chris Landis, our COO made a special appearance because he lives in the area.
Shelli Hawkins:
He did.
Laura Dolan:
So that was great.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yeah, he did, and he was in our booth for quite some time the second day. Got to have some meaningful conversations with folks that were both curious and on pen and paper or having other issues, and we got to talk through all those things. So another great time with Chris Landis. Thanks Chris for joining us. Even though he’s not here, I’ll just say thanks you to Chris and Sydnee Carroll.
Laura Dolan:
Amazing. Well, speaking of great people who work at TRAXERO, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our eighth episode than welcoming on our fearless leader of Auction Simplified Kevin Leigh, our founder and director of Auction Simplified by TRAXERO. Kevin, how’s it going?
Kevin Leigh:
Going fantastic. I agree, by the way that it is nerd talk. When I talk to Shelli, I call her Shelli-pedia. She knows more about tow trucks than anybody I’ve ever met. She’s talking about chains that I’ve never heard of and it’s really-
Laura Dolan:
Winches, hooks, and tri steers, things I never even heard of before 2023.
Kevin Leigh:
I know. I’m so glad we have her though because it’s really brought me up to speed superfast, just being able to chat with her for sure.
Shelli Hawkins:
Absolutely.
Laura Dolan:
Shelli-pedia, I love it.
Shelli Hawkins:
I was showing Sydnee Carroll the toolboxes of Kirk Connect’s brand new 1075 twin steer rotator, and I said, this is a grab hook and this is why it’s called a grab hook, and I slid it onto the link of a chain and it doesn’t move. This, I pointed to another one, is a cradled grab hook, and she looked at me and said, well, I’m sure that means something.
Laura Dolan:
Which is your coined phrase. I love when we’re having conversations in the marketing chat with our boss, Pat Niersbach and our demand gen manager, Andrew Cody, and we’re talking about movies, sometimes we’ll just get off on a fun tangent and Shelli’s like, I’m sure this all means something.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yeah, I need an interpreter. I will often ask for an interpreter, could someone please interpret what we’re talking about, these-
Kevin Leigh:
You’re like a translator for us. You can do the middle ground and tell us what they’re saying. So it’s great. That’s one of the things I love about this company is every division has somebody like a Shelli. There’s all these pedia’s. Tessa-pedia or Jeff-a-pedia. Different [inaudible]-
Shelli Hawkins:
Yes.
Laura Dolan:
All these subject matter experts.
Shelli Hawkins:
Todd Althouse a-pedia. All of those who’ve been around me [inaudible]
Kevin Leigh:
[inaudible] for sure, yeah.
Shelli Hawkins:
Our Omadi friends. I don’t want to leave out anybody that have been around for a super-duper long time. We work with really, really amazing folks. I’m grateful for that every day, for sure. Kevin Leigh, we are beyond excited for you to be here, and thank you so much for joining us. You are the founder of our software, Auction Simplified. What is that website, by the way?
Kevin Leigh:
Shelli Hawkins:
Outstanding.
Laura Dolan:
Plain and simple.
Shelli Hawkins:
Before we get into your story and how this came about and your past history of your journey through life and all the things, if I had to describe you, I would say that you, Kevin Leigh, are a serial idea generator.
Kevin Leigh:
I wouldn’t take credit for that. I think there’s a-
Shelli Hawkins:
Well, I do and I’ve been around [inaudible]-
Kevin Leigh:
I’m serial idea collector, my partner Phil Gates, who is the developer of all of this stuff-
Shelli Hawkins:
Same thing. It’s the same thing.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, same thing. I guess I’m the translator of ideas into action.
Shelli Hawkins:
I like that even more. Even more because it starts with the idea.
Kevin Leigh:
And most of the ideas come from the customers. Quite frankly, it’s not even ours. It’s just being able to hear what the customer is saying and translating into something that’s real that I think is one of the core principles behind us and TRAXERO for that matter. We have a channel in Slack, which is a tool we all use to communicate with each other, and ideas are being popped in there every day from our customers.
Laura Dolan:
That’s amazing. And I love that we have that power to meet them halfway and actually bring what would be of value to them to fruition. So I think that’s what really sets us apart.
Kevin Leigh:
And it’s not just from the CEO, it’s from the people that are out in the field working with customers and support channels can communicate ideas, which is great. It’s what made Auction Simplified successful for sure.
Laura Dolan:
Absolutely.
Shelli Hawkins:
All ideas are good ideas. It does not matter how old you are, how young you are, what position you’re in the company, if you’re an operator of a tow truck, we accept all ideas, voice your opinion every day, to your employer, to the folks that you work with. What do you think about this? Yeah, that’s how things get started. We appreciate it.
Kevin Leigh:
[inaudible] sure.
Shelli Hawkins:
So you’re a serial idea… What did we decide?
Kevin Leigh:
Collector.
Shelli Hawkins:
Collector.
Kevin Leigh:
I collect and implement ideas.
Shelli Hawkins:
So when people ask when Rene and I are together and they say, Shelli, what do you guys do for fun? And Renee will always say, well, Shelli collects people.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, that’s true.
Laura Dolan:
That’s so true.
Shelli Hawkins:
You’re an idea collector, and I am a people collector. Laura, what do you collect?
Laura Dolan:
I collect keychains.
Shelli Hawkins:
Really?
Laura Dolan:
No joke.
Shelli Hawkins:
So now that I know that I literally have at least a dozen tow truck company keychains that I would love to ship to you.
Laura Dolan:
I want them all. I want them all. I have been collecting keychains… I’m not kidding. Since I was eight years old. I have a gigantic… You should see it. I should weigh it. It probably weighs like 20 pounds. This entire ball of keychains that are all attached together, it’s phenomenal. I should put a picture in our water cooler channel on Slack.
Shelli Hawkins:
I want you-
Laura Dolan:
It’s probably going to break records.
Shelli Hawkins:
[inaudible].
Kevin Leigh:
So to all our listeners right now, send your keychains to Laura. She needs them.
Shelli Hawkins:
Laura Dolan.
Laura Dolan:
Laura Dolan, Newark, Ohio.
Shelli Hawkins:
Put your address in the meeting notes and ship them all to her.
Kevin Leigh:
No, no.
Laura Dolan:
I don’t know if I want to get that specific.
Shelli Hawkins:
Well, there’s one specific-
Laura Dolan:
We’ll send them to the Ohio Tow show.
Shelli Hawkins:
I’m really excited to send you one from our customer out in Newcastle, Delaware. Those guys have been on Tracker forever, and I have a keychain from them, from BNF Towing, Yellow NRCs. Everyone knows them. The world knows them. Kevin has actually visited with them, but yeah, I’m going to send you one of those, so get excited.
Laura Dolan:
I’m excited. So excited. This has-
Shelli Hawkins:
Gone completely off the rails, but we’re okay with it, right? Kevin Leigh, we want to hear your story and gosh, where do we start? First of all, where do you live currently and did you grow up there? Where are you from originally? Can we talk about that? Where are you from originally? All the things. Go for it.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so I immigrated from Ireland when I was 13 to Buffalo, New York. We always joke that we must’ve had a bad travel agent or something because we ended up in the northeast where it’s cold in the winters and beautiful in the summer, but love it here, love this community and a big part of it. We were heavily involved as a company in the charities in this area and the community, especially children’s charities from foster parenting to kids escaping drugs, organizations like that. And so that’s where I’m from. Love it here and love traveling the country to see the other parts of the country and where our customers are coming from.
Shelli Hawkins:
When you immigrated, your entire family came, and how many siblings do you have?
Kevin Leigh:
I have six brothers and sisters and yeah, we all came together… We landed in a loaner cottage of a friend of ours that didn’t even have running water or bathroom. I’m not making this up. They had an outhouse. We were only there for three weeks, luckily, but it’s a great backstory I guess. But give my parents credit very quickly. They got us settled and into schools, and one brother went to West Point and another runs a giant chiropractic firm. My sisters are all monster successful. It was a good move. I’m so proud of my parents for making it.
Shelli Hawkins:
And your brother Damien Leigh. I have to give a shoutout to him and his entire team because he is the executive vice president of group sales, I believe, something similar to that of the New Balance Corporation in Boston, Massachusetts. And with his help and his team helps, they helped us facilitate our very large order of the New Balance shoes for the trade show season. So thank you so much Mr. Leigh for that.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, they’re cool, aren’t they? And you guys got the orange shoe laces to match our look. I love it.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yes.
Laura Dolan:
Can I just say they’re not only cool, they are the most comfy shoes I’ve ever worn. No joke. These sneakers, I was on my feet for two days in Florida during the Florida Tow Show. I had no discomfort. Usually I wake up the next morning with shin splints or cramps in my calves or arch pain. I had no pain. I felt amazing. And the whole day I’m on my feet, I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t in pain. So yeah, just shout out to New Balance. And yes, those orange laces are legendary. I cannot wait to wear them to my next tow show.
Shelli Hawkins:
If anyone is curious about this model, you can Google the New Balance 574 Core. So it’s coming from their line of core shoes, it’s got an old school feel to it, but this is not a shout-out to New Balance, but I am saying thank you to your brother Damien Leigh.
Laura Dolan:
This is not a commercial. We’re not sponsored by New Balance. We literally just love the product.
Shelli Hawkins:
We do.
Laura Dolan:
Just wanted to put that out there.
Kevin Leigh:
He’s going to love it though, so thank you for that.
Shelli Hawkins:
Perfect. So immigrating at the age of 13, that to me is wild. So I am going to absolutely put you on the spot right now and ask you for an amazing Irish accent because you’ve got to have it.
Kevin Leigh:
Ah, sure, I don’t don’t know if I can do one on the spot like this.
Shelli Hawkins:
I’m sure you can. That’s great.
Laura Dolan:
This is why [inaudible]-
Kevin Leigh:
It only comes back after a couple of cocktails or then I start yelling at the dog with an accent and everybody starts laughing. It’s pretty funny.
Shelli Hawkins:
And your amazing mother is still with us. How old is she?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, she is. She’s 89 years old, about to turn 90.
Shelli Hawkins:
And I feel like she probably runs a marathon every day knowing how much energy that you have.
Kevin Leigh:
She’s amazing. And the brain is all there, man. She tells me what to do every time I call her. [inaudible]
Shelli Hawkins:
Does she?
Laura Dolan:
I love it.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah.
Laura Dolan:
So she’s here in the US I’m assuming?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. She’s right here about an hour from where I live now, so yeah.
Laura Dolan:
Nice. Do you ever go back and visit?
Kevin Leigh:
Oh yeah, we go back all the time. It’s kind of like going to Florida for people that live here. We go back to Ireland instead.
Laura Dolan:
Oh, I love that.
Kevin Leigh:
Lots of relatives. There’s one thing the Irish do well is have lots of kids, so plenty of cousins to go visit.
Shelli Hawkins:
Yeah, there’s something.
Kevin Leigh:
In fact, my sister Gráinne, which by the way, Gráinne means grace in Gaelic, she’s in Ireland right now. So yeah.
Shelli Hawkins:
Perfect.
Laura Dolan:
Love that.
Shelli Hawkins:
I want to hear the story. I know we talked about that. This has been a fantastic conversation so far. I’m loving it. I hope you guys are too. So Kevin immigrates at the age of 13 from Ireland to America. Fantastic story. I love it. And then you go to high school, you go to college, and then did you have years where you were floundering around or did you boom, know exactly what your mission was in life? How did that look for you starting from high school and into college?
Kevin Leigh:
Well, I can’t claim I had a mission because I did not. But I went to work for my father first in a little used car lot, you’ll love this. It was called Cheerful Motors. So back in the day, everybody had those globes with the smiley face that’s now an emoji. But that was the thing you had at the side of your bed was these little smiley face globe lights. So he had a sign built in front of our little used car lot that had that big smiley face on it. So I think that contributes to my positive attitude to this day.
Shelli Hawkins:
Love that.
Laura Dolan:
No doubt.
Kevin Leigh:
[inaudible] car lot and then I had the pleasure of being recruited by Al Maroone, who Mike Maroone, his son became AutoNation. They started the AutoNation, which is the largest dealer group in the world. So I got to work for those guys, great alma mater, when they wanted to move me out of the area, I didn’t want to, I had young kids at the time, so I made another move to a giant dealer group called the West Herr Automotive group here in Buffalo. Just to give you a comparison, they do about 40,000 cars a year and about 18,000 wholesale cars in their auction, which is part of why the auction business came about. So yeah, nice career road in the auto industry.
Shelli Hawkins:
And thank you for that. Your idea for Auction Simplified, when did that happen?
Kevin Leigh:
So quite frankly, Phil and I were at a Denny’s having breakfast one morning and we had come up with three pretty big ideas for the company.
Shelli Hawkins:
So, wait a minute, I thought that all good ideas came from Waffle House and now you’re telling me that it’s-
Kevin Leigh:
No, at Dennys.
Shelli Hawkins:
… Denny’s.
Kevin Leigh:
In this case it was a Denny’s. I don’t know why we ended up at Denny’s of all places.
Shelli Hawkins:
Blowing my theory out of the water here, go to Denny’s.
Laura Dolan:
Come on, you go to Denny’s, you get the Moons over my Hammy, and all the great ideas just come flooding in.
Kevin Leigh:
Wasn’t it Microsoft that sold something at a Denny’s? I forget. So anyhow, so we’re at this Denny’s and what happened was we had invented this idea of price to market, which was a tool that allows people to price vehicles based on what other cars are being sold in a market. So we were one of the first to have that. We didn’t call it price to market at the time, and we’d watched another company vAuto, which is part of Cox and Manheim Auctions. We watched them take that idea and then make it a business. And then we came up with this menu selling thing for finance, a partner of ours at the dealership. And we watched that become a thing we’d go to NADA and we’d see, not necessarily our ideas, but people were coming to the same conclusions at the same time.
And we just kept seeing these things get built and we were like, this auction thing we’re doing, we should not let somebody go and build that. Let’s be first to market. So we were, we were first to market with a dealer auction platform, and literally six months later, ACV came around, which is another large online auction company. A few others started, and Manheim and Odessa and all those other companies did the same thing. They all went online. So we were just right at the right time. I’m glad we made the decision. It was a big decision for us to quit our jobs and start this company, but it was a good one.
Laura Dolan:
It has to be scary as well.
Kevin Leigh:
Oh my God. I threw up in my mouth.
Laura Dolan:
[inaudible] just quit your jobs and-
Kevin Leigh:
When I had to go tell my CEO what I was doing, it was like, oh my God. And my wife’s at home going, are you sure? Are you really sure? We’re going to have to clean out our 401K and start a business? Are you really sure you want to do that at your age? All that stuff, for sure.
Laura Dolan:
Sometimes that’s what it takes. And look at you now. Absolutely no regrets. So sometimes-
Kevin Leigh:
No regrets. No regrets at all.
Laura Dolan:
… it’s just worth taking the risk.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, no regrets at all.
Shelli Hawkins:
So here’s the idea. It comes about in a Denny’s. What year was that about approximately?
Kevin Leigh:
Oh, so we started, and I got to look back at the dollar that somebody gave me here. We started in June of ’14, so it would’ve been ’13, some point in 13. Yep.
Laura Dolan:
So 10 years ago.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah.
Laura Dolan:
We’re talking 10 years ago. That’s wonderful.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, we had this idea, then we actually built it on the side just to see if it would make sense. We sold one on the side before we even told anybody we were going to. We wanted to make sure it was a working model and it worked immediately. So we launched and we were very fortunate to be immediately profitable. Very first client made us profitable. Of course, we didn’t take much in salaries when we started, so it wasn’t hard to be profitable when nobody’s making any money.
Shelli Hawkins:
Kevin, who was your very first client?
Kevin Leigh:
So our very first client was a good friend of ours that ran a large dealer group in Binghamton. I’m not going to name their name because they’ve since been sold. Our second client is the Competition Automotive Group who’s still a client to ours today. We’re super excited about those guys. I can’t share the results because we are very private about customer data, but they sent me some stats that the top of my head blew off. The amount of money they’re making per car is just exemplary. They’re doing a great job.
Shelli Hawkins:
So when I think about auctions, I think about a lot of clients that we service today. But the one that comes to mind right now for me is our friends at Weil Wrecker in Birmingham, Alabama. I had the opportunity with a few other folks here to go down there and witness the auction that they have and it was outstanding. They do a simulcast auction. Kevin, explain to everybody what that is.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so there’s multiple ways to run an auction simulcast. And just for clarity, there are some towns, counties, police agencies that require live auctions, and there’s others that are okay with online only auctions. In this particular case, they require an online and in-person combination, which is really kind of cool to watch. These guys built a school bus with an awning on it, with TVs bolted to the outside of the bus and generators clamped onto the front and back of the bus. In fact, I’d almost want to make that the podcast thumbnail if we could. It’s hilarious, this bus.
Shelli Hawkins:
Get a picture of it.
Laura Dolan:
That could be one of our cover photos this episode for sure.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. It’s kind of fun. So they run an auction out of this bus. They drive from car to car down a lane and-
Shelli Hawkins:
Saw it.
Kevin Leigh:
… we simulcast, which means we allow people to listen in and watch the cars as they’re being run and bid online, bid in person. So there’s people that come in the heat and wearing sombreros and walking with the auctioneer. And then there’s also pre-bidding, which allows people to proxy bid and bid ahead of time and have their bids take effect as the auction’s running.
Shelli Hawkins:
Explain what you mean when you say proxy bid.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so proxy bid is basically probably one of the first ideas of artificial intelligence doing something for you. So the idea is you put a number on a car, let’s say you think the car is worth 5,000 bucks, if the current bid is two grand, it’ll bid automatically for you if other people bid against you. So there’s automation. So there’s a little algorithm that says, okay, we got a bid of 2100, we have somebody willing to pay 5,000, so let’s make it 2200. So the customer can comfortably feel that they can put a high bid in and not have it take all of their money, but actually bid on their behalf as if they were there.
Shelli Hawkins:
So I want to make sure I understand and use an example of what I experienced at Weil Wrecker. On the auction block, during that live auction simulcast auction that I saw, there was a Hellcat for sale. It was actually parts only. And the person that was walking around, they would put the safety cone on top of the vehicle or the piece of equipment that was being auctioned, it was up next for auction. And so the auction started, and let’s say I had gone online to Auction Simplified, saw this Hellcat, knew that I wanted it, I would put in a proxy bid of $10,000. I’m willing to spend up to $10,000 on this Hellcat for parts only. And I would choose the increment. Is that how it works? When someone gets ahead of me, if someone gets up to, it’ll just bid $200 more for me. And then incrementally-
Kevin Leigh:
You don’t get to choose the increment. The auctioneer actually chooses the increment. So the auctioneer could be at 500 levels and they’ll bid [inaudible] 500, but typically, when the auction is getting close to people are running out of money, they typically will lower that bid increment to 25 or 50 or a hundred dollars depending on their mood. Now the online auctions that we run, proxy bidding can also be applied there. And typically on salvage impound auctions, it’s $25 increments. That’s just the number that everybody’s-
Shelli Hawkins:
Standard.
Kevin Leigh:
… set as standard. Yeah.
Shelli Hawkins:
Sure.
Kevin Leigh:
Good question.
Shelli Hawkins:
I love that. I love how you explained it that it was kind of like the first form of AI ish because you’re saying, I’m comfortable with this bid and let’s go… So there are folks out there that are on these Auction Simplified platforms and they’re out there, they’re buying these vehicles, they’re reselling them, they’re using parts-
Kevin Leigh:
Sorry for cutting you off. You have to think like this, there are buyers out there, big buyers, they’re buying for multiple salvage yards. So they’re not going from auction to auction anymore. They’re sitting in what we call bidding cockpits. They’ll have three and four monitors running with multiple auctions running at the same time. And if they can trust that the proxy bid is doing its job, they can drop bids in and kind of move to the next auction and then come back and look and see if they won the cars. So trust is an important factor. For example, we don’t reveal to the seller what a person’s proxy bid is because it’s private to them, they’re the buyer. The buyer is saying, I’m willing to pay five, I don’t want anybody to know that, but I want to be able to bid automatically.
So it’s a great tool and it works very effectively. I will say that the majority of buyers, as you’ve probably seen if you’ve ever bid on eBay, the majority of buyers wait to the last few seconds and drop bids in, which is another cool feature of Auction Simplified. We found that there’s a lot of buyers that aren’t as technically savvy as maybe those big buyers. We have a lot of public buyers that maybe this is the first car they’ve bought in years, so they’re not experienced. So we are very kind in the way we run an auction. We allow people to bid at the last second and we automatically put extensions in place to give them a chance to keep bidding. And this benefits the seller as well, benefits our impounds because we want to get top dollar for every car. We want to give everybody the opportunity to bid.
And there’s also language barriers and technology restrictions. So you might have a person that’s on an older Android phone in a parking lot on 3G, who might be mashing that bid button and it’s not going through fast enough. You’d like to give them an extra minute or extra 30 seconds so they can keep bidding. So we have proxy bidding, which is what you just mentioned, advanced bidding. We have live bidding for people that are there and present. And we’ve also online bidding where they can just keep mashing the button until they win the car.
Shelli Hawkins:
Mashing the button.
Kevin Leigh:
That’s what they call it, yeah.
Shelli Hawkins:
So actually there’s a phrase for that.
Kevin Leigh:
I heard that from a customer once, and I can’t get it out of my head anymore.
Shelli Hawkins:
No, I’m going to educate you, mashing the button is called rage tapping. Did you know that?
Kevin Leigh:
I love it.
Shelli Hawkins:
In the tech world, it’s rage tapping. So your person mashing the button is rage tapping. We learned it here it at TRAXERO On-The-Go. Love it.
Laura Dolan:
It’s interchangeable.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. So we do-
Shelli Hawkins:
Absolutely.
Kevin Leigh:
… have auctions that only run online that don’t have the in lane experience as well, and they work equally as well. It’s just a different tactic and sometimes it’s different requirements based on the town that they’re in or the municipality that they sell for.
Laura Dolan:
Now, is that something that came out of COVID or has that always been around?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, we were lucky that we hadn’t had it ahead of schedule because when COVID came, I hate to say that we benefited from a terrible time in history, but we did, the calls that we got the first few weeks of COVID, especially California, who were one of the first to close. One of our big clients was quite frankly one of our customers that called like, you need to help us. We can’t have an auctioneer anymore. We can’t have people in the lane. Can you get us up and running? And we have a record for the fastest launched auction in our history, which was nine hours. It was for SoCal PAA, which is Southern California Public Auto Auction. They went from having an auctioneer to being online in nine hours.
Laura Dolan:
That’s incredible. And I’m sure that really came in handy. The momentum of auctions didn’t have to stop just because of the pandemic.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. Well, I think all online companies benefited, unfortunately, from this negative situation. Companies like Zoom that we’re on right now, they didn’t really exist in the level that they are today until it was just needed for work from home communication, for sure.
Laura Dolan:
Yep, that’s right.
Shelli Hawkins:
So I’m going to ask you some really tough questions. Are you ready?
Kevin Leigh:
Sure. Fire. Yeah.
Shelli Hawkins:
This is not really a tough question, but I do have some tougher ones saved for later, how in the world did you stumble in to the towing world? You were in the dealer world originally, correct? And that’s what you really built this for originally was the dealer world. I’m going to say it like this, how did the towing world find you? Because that’s usually what happens.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, it was great actually. So our original idea was for car dealers only, and we tried to be the anti-auction auction company, teach dealers how to unhook from auction houses. And right away we started getting calls from actual auction houses saying, hey, hold on, before you take my customers away, can you do this for us? Can you provide online bidding? Can you provide proxy bidding? Can you provide link to pay and all the things that we do? And we were like, eh, yeah, why not? It’s another customer. Let’s take it.
Shelli Hawkins:
I’m going to pause you real quick because I think I understand what you mean by unhook from the auction houses, but I want you to unpack that a little bit.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so unhook meaning if you send cars to an offsite auction, and I’m not going to name any names just because they’re all great people, but if you send cars to an offsite auction, you have the expense of shipping the car there, you have the expense of a seller fee and the buyer has the expense of a buyer fee, where if you run your own auction, which is what we were teaching dealers to do, you don’t have to move the car, you don’t have to pay a seller fee because you own the auction and you get to keep the buyer fee because it’s your business and you pay us a service fee to do that and you’re off and running. So that was our model. Does that answer your question?
Shelli Hawkins:
Yeah, absolutely.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. So if you’re going to start a business, you better give a value proposition to the seller. In our case with the towers, the value proposition is we’re going to get you more money per car, we’re going to bring you more buyers, and you’re going to get to keep the buyer fee. As opposed to other agencies that by design, they charge you a seller fee, they charge the buyer fee, and it’s not your auction. So they’re branding themselves, not you. So our main mission is to brand the tower, brand the auction, brand the dealer. So if you look at any of the Auction Simplified auctions that are running, it won’t say Auction Simplified on it, it usually says the name of the business. So it’s Merl’s Towing or it’s RoadOne Auction. It’s not Auction Simplified.
Shelli Hawkins:
Pop quiz, what is the website for the Weil Wrecker auction? Is it weilwreckerauction.com? I don’t know.
Kevin Leigh:
I think it’s weilwreckerauction.com. Let’s make sure.
Shelli Hawkins:
Can look it up. That’s super important. I love that we give our customers control. We purchase that website or however that works, I’m not sure. And they set up their auction the way they want 100%. They’re in control, it’s their auction. There are no minimums, maximums. There are certain things that we want you guys out there that are listening to this to make money from these vehicles that potentially have just gone to salvage in the past, I think.
Kevin Leigh:
So just back to Weil for a second, the spell Weil is W-E-I-L and it’s Weil Wrecker Auction, or if you want to look at RoadOne, that one that I mentioned earlier, it’s R1AA, standing for RoadOne Auto Auction. But your point is well taken. We want the brand to be the business, not our business. We want to help you sell your own brand because ultimately those buyers who are buying their cars from you could become towing clients, they could become service clients depending on what you have inside your business. If you have a body shop, they could become body shop clients. Your brand is the value.
And that’s one of the things that I think really differentiates us from everybody else. While we love the TRAXERO brand, we love the Auction Simplified brand. We also love our towers to make money, and we want to have them make money not just from auctions, but from all the other divisions of TRAXERO, and quite frankly, from all divisions of their own businesses, including anything that they can sell.
So for example, in the auction business, a customer comes to pick up a car, the first thing they usually want is that car to be shipped. So hey, your towers, why not put that right on the invoice? So they buy the car for $2,000 and you add 400 bucks for shipping, that’s a profit now to your towing division. They may want you to put a battery in it. You might have used batteries laying around. So you get 85 bucks for that upsell. Again, it’s your business now. So it’s not like an outside auction making all those extra fees. It’s you making those extra fees, which is critical to the success of any businesses finding ways to increase revenue $50 at a time.
Shelli Hawkins:
This sounds too good to be true. I’m just going to say that. So how does Auction Simplified make money? How do we make money? Because we are all entrepreneurs and we are all in the business of making money. So how do we make money? Because I know that folks out there are asking that question, this sounds too good to be true.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so we do charge a fee. We charge a fee per car. It’s typically half of the buyer fee that the tows charge for their auctions.
Shelli Hawkins:
So for example, it is 100% your auction once again. And so you set what you want your buyer fee to be. What is typical for a buyer fee?
Kevin Leigh:
It’s 10 to 12%, or in some cases they’ll do it in increments of 25, 50, 75, depending on the price of the car.
Shelli Hawkins:
And then half of that goes to us.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, it averages out to about half. Yes. So the point is that the buyer ultimately is paying for the auction. So it really doesn’t cost the tower anything. We don’t like to advertise it that way because reality is we’re sending you an invoice at the end of the month for the cars you sold, no doubt. But two things, really important. We earn that money and we earn it in three ways. One is we give you the software, the software is included in that per car. Second is we give you a marketing team. So this is really unique to the business. So we have employees that we used to call business development reps. We now call them buyer development reps, BDRs. Their job is to find buyers for your auction. So if you said Kevin or Shelli or Laura, I want to start an auction this week, the first thing we would do is sick this team on your market and register as many people as possible for that auction.
Because unless there’s buyers, you can’t sell anything. So typically from start to finish, I know I mentioned a 12-hour turnaround and all of that, but reality is you take a little bit of time to develop a buyer base, especially if it’s a new market. So we give you an auction website, we give you great software, we give you a buyer development team, and then after they register all these buyers, we also help you market. So we will do broadcast texting and broadcast emailing to your customers to get them to show up for the auction because ultimately we need them to bid. And then we even teach our auction houses or our impound yards how to do Facebook marketing, we provide tools like simple things like brochures that they can give to customers that come to the window, signage for the cashier’s cage that says things like cars must be picked up in so many days and things like that. Basically, we jokingly call it an auction in a box.
Shelli Hawkins:
That is fantastic.
Kevin Leigh:
It really is everything you need from an auction.
Shelli Hawkins:
I think we just got the title of the podcast, Laura.
Laura Dolan:
There you go.
Kevin Leigh:
Auction in a Box.
Laura Dolan:
Auction in a Box.
Shelli Hawkins:
There are so many parts to this that intrigue me because I also recently found out that not only can you curate this entire journey of the auction for you and your business, like Kevin mentioned, but you also can have an auction open to the public. That means anyone in the public that breathes air can attend your auction or bid online or your auction. Or you can say, this is only open to wholesalers.
Kevin Leigh:
Correct. Yeah, very true.
Shelli Hawkins:
Talk about the difference between those two.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so we focus on customers with licenses. So when we register buyers, we’re registering salvage yards, pick and pulls, used car lots, wholesalers, people that have licenses because the value there is they may come back week after week after week or month after month, depending on how often you run. Public buyers are very different. They’re looking for a car and then they may not look for a car for a while, maybe two or three years. So it’s a different strategy, but both are welcome in most cases. So to sell to the public, you’ll need a dealer license. You need to have the ability to sell to the public, that’s a requirement. And most of our towers have that already. Go ahead.
Shelli Hawkins:
How does a tower get a dealer’s license?
Kevin Leigh:
So they probably already have it in most cases, but if they need it, every state has a licensing setup that’s relatively easy. I’m in New York State, I’m outside of Niagara Falls area. And to get a dealer license here is you have to have garage liability insurance, which they already have, and I think it’s 600 bucks to get the license per year. So it’s not a terrible struggle. But we’ve had one just recently had their license acquired within three days if they didn’t have one. But for the most part, when we ask, they’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, we’ve been selling cars for years. A lot of our customers are running existing auctions, maybe pen and paper auctions that we augment and make way better and get them more per car, or they’re startups. So we have quite a few that have never done it before. And we’ll walk you through all those steps. So if you call in and are looking for a way to start an auction, rest assured we’re going to guide you through it. We know how to do this really well.
Laura Dolan:
It’s amazing that you take clients and you take them on the journey from start to finish. You give them the opportunity to brand and customize their own auctions so that their bidders not only recognize that it’s them and they don’t have to worry about bidding for some X, Y, Z company that they’re not familiar with, but this is also an opportunity for them to get their inventory in front of as many bidders as possible. So it’s just absolutely awesome.
Kevin Leigh:
Agreed.
Shelli Hawkins:
Kevin, I talk to towers every single day and the towing business, towing companies are swirling tornadoes of chaos because they have so many things coming at them from every single direction, whether it’s consumer based or commercial based, there’s rollovers of tractor trailers on the highway, there are calls coming in potentially from motor clubs in network and out of network, they’re coming through their software, they’re coming in on the telephone. All these things are happening simultaneously, a hundred million things at a time.
And so I’ve heard from a lot of my friends that they literally don’t have the real estate to have an auction or they don’t have the time. They just want two or three salvage people to come get their cars off their lots so that they can impound more for whatever entity they’re impounding for. Different folks for impounding, for the police, for PPI, all kinds of different reasons, private property impounding. So what do you say to those folks when they genuinely come to us and say, I want to make more money, I don’t know how to get there, and this is the current structure of my business today. Help me squeeze out more money from these vehicles. What do you say to them?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so you made a few points there. Space being a big one. So space is definitely a condition of running an auction. You need to have a place to store those cars while they’re in auction status. But you can run more often. So for example, we talked about RoadOne earlier on. They run 70 cars every two days in auction because they literally have no space. They’re in San Diego, and real estate is incredibly expensive there. So that’s the way they managed it. There’s always a way. I’m a business person, and the first thing I always say when I’m looking at a project is how is it going to benefit me and how much more money can I make? Is it worth the cycles that I’m about to put in, the brain cycles of my staff, myself, is it worthwhile?
Shelli Hawkins:
In Crabtree Holler, we would say, is the juice worth the squeeze?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, exactly. Well said. So yeah, so that’s a big question. In the business, we used to call it flavor of the month. We’d always have, oh, they got a flavor of the month. Let’s try this one and see what it does. It’s not like that. This is not a flavor of the month. This is such a big change for your business that if you put some thought into it, it’s worthwhile. So the first thing we always recommend is that there’s somebody heading it up inside the company, somebody that’s trusted, we call them auction manager, but they could be a title clerk that’s also managing this. In one case, we have a person that was running the detail shop because he knew how to take photos, so they made him the auction manager as well. But once you have that person in place, it becomes way easier.
So trying to manage it as the owner is impossible. It’s very unlikely that it will work. Way too busy. I had one of my clients the other day, I called them and they’re like, it’s a train wreck over here. And I’m like, yeah, I get it. It’s always busy here too. And he goes, no, no, really, I’m at a train wreck. You’re really that busy. So having the owner try to manage an auction is probably unrealistic. But once you establish the person, and sometimes it’s just repurposing somebody that already works for you and giving them a little bit additional role, maybe paying them a dollar per car for sale is a bonus or something, some sort of an incentive, you’re up and running. But space is a restriction. And if you don’t have the space, an auction probably isn’t for you if you really don’t have it. But if you can find a way to carve out 30 spots for a week, you can run a weekly auction. And if you don’t have those spots, then run more often, like what RoadOne did.
Shelli Hawkins:
I had a friend of mine reach out to me and he said, we are analyzing every part of the business for 2024. We know the money that we’re making on light duty consumer stuff. We know the money that we’re making on impounding. We know the money that we’re making when we salvage things. We know the margin that we’re making on the medium to heavy duty and all the different contracts that are floating around. We’re really doing this huge in-depth analysis, and we know that we are leaving money on the table when we just salvage these vehicles. Shelli, can you help us going into 2024? Absolutely.
Kevin Leigh:
And no attack on salvage businesses, but if you just pull up Google Maps on the addresses of these salvage business owners, you’ll notice that they’re all in multimillion dollar homes. They’re making money off of us. And one of the things that really appealed to me about coming to TRAXERO was we could teach and show towing businesses how to maximize the dollars out of these impound vehicles. And in many cases, we’re doubling the number that they were getting in the past. In many cases, we’re adding an extra a hundred or two for the people that were already doing it well. It’s exciting to watch it happen, for sure.
Laura Dolan:
So I want to ask a little bit of a silly question, Kevin, because I am learning this industry, I’m very new to it. So when these auctions happen and people are bringing in their inventory, is it usually cars? Because I’ve heard that people will actually literally bid on parts of cars, like just the door or just the tires, does that happen? And what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen go up for auction?
Kevin Leigh:
So yeah, it’s everything. So a very common thing is they’ll tow in a truck from an accident, and it might’ve been a rollover, and the contents of that truck becomes available for auction. So the weirdest one recently was pallets of toilet paper about two years too late. Oh, yeah. Pallets of toilet paper.
Laura Dolan:
See, three years ago, that was gold.
Kevin Leigh:
I know. I know. Now they can’t sell it. They got $10 a pallet or something. But Weil Wrecker, for example, the one that Shelli mentioned earlier, they had pallets of generators, which was a really big seller. They sold a lot of them. We had one with some boat parts and it did pretty well. So yeah, as long as there’s a serial number on it, we can sell it in our auction and even if it’s a made up serial number. So we’ve seen all kinds of wacky stuff from boats to mopeds to airplane parts, to cars, to trucks. And we have one auction, he’s not with us anymore, but the poor guy passed away, but he was selling Pez dispensers. So who knew that Pez dispensers were a collectible? But they are.
Laura Dolan:
Oh-
Shelli Hawkins:
Of course he was.
Laura Dolan:
… hundred percent.
Shelli Hawkins:
And to kind of springboard off what Kevin just said, that Hellcat that was for sale at Weil Wrecker, Laura, someone could be restoring a current Hellcat that they have and they’re like, I need these five items out of that one to put into mine. There are all kinds of people that are doing collectibles or I just got in a wreck and I only damaged my door and it’s a 2012 Nissan Altima, and here’s one in the Weil Wrecker with the door, and it makes sense for me to buy this and just use that door and get it painted. So yeah.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. So when we were first testing to come to TRAXERO and to get into the towing side of the business as opposed to the dealer and auction house side, we did a test with one specific customer and we asked them to go into the back lot and find the worst car they had, and we were going to stick it in an auction to see how it did. And he started laughing. He goes, I have one for you. He goes, I’ve got a car with a tree growing through it. It’s been back-
Shelli Hawkins:
What?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, there was a tree growing through the front windshield of this car. I remember it was an AMC Javelin. Like an ancient one.
Shelli Hawkins:
Oh my word, yes.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. So as the test, and this is how I am, I kind of do scientific testing, so I said, what I want you to do now is call your biggest buyer and your second-biggest buyer and ask them what they would give you for the car. And the biggest buyer said, 600 bucks. And the second-biggest buyer said 1200 bucks. So then we stuck it into the auction and it got $6,800.
Laura Dolan:
Unbelievable.
Kevin Leigh:
So I immediately called the buyer at 6,800 and said, what is going on? Why are you at that number? Well, it turns out the rounded window, the rear window of a Javelin, they’re rounded, it has a curve to it, they’re incredibly rare. That window alone he thinks is worth $10,000. So he thinks he’s making four grand just on the windshield. So that’s the kind of stuff that happens with these auctions. What we think is just junk in the parking lot, actually, it’s the old line, one man’s junk is another part-
Laura Dolan:
One man’s trash, another man’s come up.
Kevin Leigh:
There you go. Thank you. But to Shelli’s point a minute ago, looking for incremental small bits of additional income inside every business is something I do every day. I’m always looking for what’s the $50 per going to be this year? And then sometimes I divide it into 180-day segments. What can I do to make an extra 50 in 180 days on every car or every transaction or every little thing? And this is what this is. Running an auction and doing it successfully with an organized auction manager running it will generate incremental revenue for you that you can count on, that can become part of your marketing budget and your business budget and your success budget.
Shelli Hawkins:
Agreed.
Laura Dolan:
Awesome.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, agreed.
Laura Dolan:
Well, Kevin, it’s been a pleasure having you on. We appreciate your time. We’ve taken up a lot of it, but one last question I wanted to ask you is how did you end up at TRAXERO? How long you’ve been with the company, and how has your experience been?
Shelli Hawkins:
When did we come knocking? Did we have breakfast at Denny’s, perhaps? I don’t know.
Kevin Leigh:
No, I have to say it was LinkedIn. I got a LinkedIn message. Actually, my partner got a LinkedIn message, and we used to get a lot of them. There’s a lot of companies will text you or call you and say, we’d love to buy your company, we’d love to buy your company. We’re like, yeah, right, sure. And it turns out they’re trying to sell you their lending service or something. But we got this call and it was interesting because the thing that they really sold us on was the idea of this consolidated piece of software. And the way I described it to my partners after the meeting was, this reminds me of a Microsoft. So Microsoft is the entity and Word and Excel and Access and all these are the products, these guys are trying to create the Microsoft of the towing industry, which is what TRAXERO is.
So at that point, we had TOPS and Beacon and a few other products already. And the concept was, like in Word where you can drop an Excel spreadsheet into Word, could you imagine if we can drop the vehicle from the towing management software straight into an auction without any intervention from the customer? The customer just says, I want this to go to auction, and it goes to auction. And we were like, okay, that’s called integration or APIs, a term we use. But it’s wonderful because anytime you can eliminate keystrokes for an employee by passing data from system to system, at the end of the day, it’s better for everybody because they can get more work done and make it much easier. So our name is Simplified for a reason. So here was a simplification model that we hadn’t heard of before, which is build a company that gives the towers everything they need to maximize simplicity in transferring data from section to section.
And it was like, okay, I got to listen to these guys. So we took some meetings and we actually, as a test, decided to sell a towing customer before we joined. And the first towing customer we sold, it was like we were like a nine-year-old overnight sensation. They had never seen some of the things that we were doing because we were doing it for the dealer world. It wasn’t in the towing space at the time, and the rest is history. So we made the decision to join and we’re super glad we did. It was a great, great time for us. And so far, to answer your question, working with the team, and I say with, because there’s nobody playing boss in this company. It’s very much-
Shelli Hawkins:
So true.
Kevin Leigh:
… an inclusive, everybody works together in every level, there’s no lower person or higher person. They’re all equals. I love that about this company. It’s a very kind place to work.
Laura Dolan:
It really is. It’s one of the most positive places I’ve ever worked at. The culture here is fantastic. Everybody’s so supportive of each other, hard work never goes unnoticed. I joined this company in January of this year, and it’s just been some of the best people I’ve ever worked with.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, and what’s good about that is if you have a good attitude about your job, if you enjoy where you are, that translates to your customer service.
Laura Dolan:
Definitely.
Kevin Leigh:
You just enjoy what you’re doing and you know that if you have a suggestion, like I mentioned earlier, that it’s not just going to be on deaf ears, it gets implemented, and this way you can come back to your customer, say, great idea. Guess what? It’s now on our business plan for October. Thanks for giving it to us. So it’s been fun. It’s been a nice ride.
Shelli Hawkins:
Love it.
Laura Dolan:
That’s awesome. Is there anything that we haven’t covered, Shelli? Any other questions that you have that-
Shelli Hawkins:
Oh, yeah.
Laura Dolan:
… our audience should know? Oh, yeah.
Shelli Hawkins:
For sure.
Laura Dolan:
You want to go back to rapid fire questions really quickly?
Shelli Hawkins:
No, so we have very thoroughly explained AuctionSimplified.com. So we’ve piqued the interest, no doubt, of many, many folks listening to us right now. How in the world do they find us? How do they find us? How do they see a demo of this? Conversations are free. If you want to see a demo of Auction Simplified, what is the best way to reach out to us?
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah, so you can either go to AuctionSimplified.com or TRAXERO and just click on the impound section and we’re right there. There’s a form you can just fill out and one of our reps will schedule a meeting with you. I’m very easy to reach. My phone number is 716-818-4444, just call me directly, text me or it’s Kevin.Leigh, spelled L-E-I-G-H @TRAXERO.co: kevin.leigh@traxero.co
Laura Dolan:
And I will be placing all of these links in our podcast blog. So if you’re reading along with the transcription, all of these will be hyperlinks so you can very easily click on them, go to our site, go to Kevin Leigh’s profile on LinkedIn, reach out to him directly, send him a message, send him a text. He’ll be really happy to help you.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. So the process by the way, just to end, if you decide you did want to have an auction, the first thing do is we assign you an auction account manager, which is really unique to this industry. So you won’t be calling an 800 number for support. You’ll be able to talk directly to an account manager as you’re launching. We do this typically-
Shelli Hawkins:
You have their direct phone number, direct email, they are your best friend.
Kevin Leigh:
That’s right. And we do it deliberately because we know that we are successful when you sell cars. We only get paid if you sell cars. So we do everything in our power from providing websites to great software to people to make sure that your auction is a success. So having that account manager is critical and they’re really good at their job. I would say they know more about auctions than I do at this point. So that’s an exciting part of it. And then we take our time with you. If you’re quick and efficient and you think you can launch quickly, we can do that.
If you want the time and have multiple meetings and training for different staff members, we can do that. We do whatever it takes at your pace to make it successful. Typically, from start to finish, if you said go right now, it takes about three weeks. Most of that time is developing buyers for your auction. And of course you can help us with that by providing people that bought cars from you in the past, and we can call them and get them registered for you. But it’s a great process and it’s very effective. Typically, from start to finish, like I said, three weeks to 45 days, and you’re up and running.
Shelli Hawkins:
Fantastic. I’m going to put it out there that the very first person that reaches out to you sends you a text message on your cellphone, you’re going to do a demo with him on Auction Simplified completely with your Irish accent. Are you up for that? And I want to be a part of that. I want to see that. I want to see that. And I want to see an Irish accent demo from the amazing Kevin Leigh. You guys have his cellphone number. I cannot wait until the Irish demo of Auction Simplified.
Laura Dolan:
I want to be a fly on the wall for that AKA I just want to be on the Zoom call and just be off camera.
Shelli Hawkins:
You’re blushing, Kevin. You’re blushing. This is the best. This is the best.
Kevin Leigh:
Well, thank you Shelli, and thank you, Laura. This has been really enjoyable. Thanks for putting up with my story.
Laura Dolan:
Oh, this has been fantastic, thank you, Kevin, for your time and your expertise. I learned a lot today. I always learn a lot during these podcasts, so I really appreciate it.
Shelli Hawkins:
Thank you.
Kevin Leigh:
I just want to say thanks to all the leaders of all the different divisions of TRAXERO. Part of our success is because of how willing they were to show us how to do all of this with the towing industry. So a shout-out to everybody. I can’t name every name here, it’d sound like an Academy Award thank you. But great team. Thanks so much for everything.
Laura Dolan:
You can send us the names and I could put them in the blog.
Kevin Leigh:
Just everybody in TRAXERO.
Laura Dolan:
Exactly.
Shelli Hawkins:
There you go.
Laura Dolan:
You know who you are.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. You know who you are.
Shelli Hawkins:
Thank you.
Kevin Leigh:
And thanks to our customers, too, that have taken a chance with us, especially the first ones that take a chance with us when we were first getting into the towing space and now to the ones that are with us. Some of these are just amazing success stories. We have a channel in Slack where the account managers talk about the successes of the customers, which I love because they’re called Customer Success managers. But some of these stories are just like from start to finish, we were able to launch an auction with a hundred percent sell rate, and it’s so exciting to watch.
Laura Dolan:
It has to be really rewarding too, just to see how we’re helping these people generate a lot of business and just seeing the success behind it. So that’s really, really cool.
Kevin Leigh:
Yeah. For sure.
Shelli Hawkins:
Fantastic. Well, it’s been great. Thank you so much. Thank you Kevin Leigh for joining us.
Kevin Leigh:
Great job on the podcast. Well done.
Laura Dolan:
Thank you. All right, see you all next time. Thanks for tuning in.
Laura Dolan:
Thank you for listening to this episode of the TRAXERO On-The-Go podcast. For more episodes, go to traxero.com/podcast and to find out more about how we can hook your towing business up with our towing management software and impound yard solutions, please visit traxero.com or go to the contact page linked at the bottom of this podcast blog.