Daryl Kenningham: John, this is Daryl. We’re — we invest heavy in parts and service. And we find when we acquired dealerships, which we’ve done quite a bit of acquisition over the last couple of years, we almost always find underinvestment in parts and service, and that is the first place we invest, whether it’s capacity, equipment, staffing, training, and we do that as quickly as possible with all the new acquisitions. And given all the stores we’ve acquired over the last couple of years, I think that’s part of the puzzle. Another part of the puzzle is the technician recruiting. We have significant efforts underway there, and the four-day work week is certainly part of it. We have other programs that we do that support tuitions and training and uniform sponsorships and mentoring programs and where we have a career pathing in place for our technicians.
And so I think there’s a whole combination of things. I can’t tell you there’s a secret sauce. It’s we — we just try to put a lot of focus on a number of areas. And then we really — what I see happening right now is we’re all benefiting probably from some pricing in the market over the last couple of years, which I think has come to an end and coming to an end. And I think the game is turning to throughput again here in the future. And a lot of our focus and efforts will be towards that. And we still see a lot of demand out there. Carpark is still really aged. There’s still a lot of repairs to be done on vehicles that have been — that are older units, older vehicles. And — so I believe that there’s still — the outlook is for parts and service is still bright, it’s really bright, still opportunistic.
John Murphy: And just one follow-up on AcceleRide. You mentioned that 50% of your customers were going through five steps of the transaction with AcceleRide. I’m just wondering if you can kind of explain what exactly those five steps are? How many steps there are that you count in a transaction? And when will this ultimately start saving you cost or helping you maybe reduce headcount? And I don’t know if you can quantify that, but how do you think about that potential savings over time?
Daryl Kenningham: Well, we saw — we saw our — we saw productivity improvements in the quarter. We didn’t mention them in the script, but we did see productivity improvements with our sales teams year-over-year, and we attribute that to AcceleRide. We also — there’s about 10 steps in AcceleRide. And the thing we want to do is engage customers as much as we can through AcceleRide. And so — and we’re testing a few things around the country. We don’t — we’ve done some — a few things here in the last six months or so where we are focused on the way we’ve been using AcceleRide and then we’re also trying a few new things in some markets, determine how that affects engagement, how it affects closing rates, how it affects the customer experience as well.
So we’re still in the early days of AcceleRide we feel like. I don’t — I can’t tell you what a number is. I don’t think we’ll see a day where 100% of our customers are going 100% of the time through AcceleRide. We’ve designed it so that customers can choose where they engage and don’t engage. We try not to make it lockstep, and we try not to make it where — if they want to take another path, they can. So it’s flexible. So long-winded answer to your question, John, but I think we’re still learning as we go.
Daniel McHenry: John, just — it’s Daniel here. And just to add to what Daryl has said. To put it into perspective, salesperson productivity has increased by 32%. That’s the average number of units a salesperson would sell versus pre-pandemic. And as Daryl says, we see that continuing to increase.
