What's Working in Auto

About What's Working in Auto

What's Working in Auto looks for the dealerships with the best reviews in the country and tells their story. How do they run the business to make customers happy? So happy they praise the experience in reviews? Powered by the Widewail Index, host Jake Hughes, Widewail Director of Marketing, finds the leaders in customer experience, the groups and stores that stand out in the eyes of their customers, and brings the people who run them on to explain what is happening behind the feedback. The conversations are operational. How the work gets done day to day, what got standardized, what still comes down to one person doing the right thing, what they tried that did not work, and what a peer could put to use this quarter. Dealers teaching dealers, in 20 to 30 minutes. Made for operators, GMs, fixed ops directors and marketing leaders who want to hear what worked from the people it worked for. Hosted by Widewail Customer intelligence for automotive retail widewail.com

Publisher

Widewail

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Sept 2026

Latest episode

5 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

6 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   5 Nov 2026

   His First 24 Days as GM | Tim McGaha Fred Anderson Acura

   Tim McGaha had been the general manager of Fred Anderson Acura for twenty-four days when we recorded this. He is a variable operations guy by background, with twenty-one years of it across Toyota, Nissan and Chrysler Dodge Jeep before Acura, and he spent his entire first month in service and parts instead of on the desk. That choice is the episode. His argument is that sales, service and parts are a triangle that feeds itself and that most dealership cultures teach the opposite, so he wanted to understand the half of the business he had never run before he started making decisions about it. The sharpest line in the conversation is about culture. Tim says that without accountability, the word culture just sounds good. He is equally direct that his store is not preparing for reviews at all. It is preparing for the customer experience, and the review is the scoreboard you look up at the end of the month. Three things you’ll take away: Why a GM who came up through sales spent his first month in the service lane, and what actually surprised him once he was out there The hundred-yard field: what moving the goal line does to a team that already ran ninety-five yards Publishing KPIs downward instead of holding them for upper management, and why people can’t chase a number you won’t show them We also get into coaching people on different timelines, from the twelve-month employee to the twenty-year one; the advice he’d give a GSM who wants the next seat; Fred Anderson’s internal leadership academy, where a technician sits in the same class as a GM and everyone stands up to define their own leadership in front of the owners; and the purpose he found at seventeen that most people are still looking for at fifty.

2. 

   22 Oct 2026

   Convenience Is Survival | Robert Larson on Competing With Carvana

   Robert Larson is the third generation to run Larson Ford in Lakewood, New Jersey, a store his family opened in 1956 and that just marked its seventieth year. Around seventy people work there, some of them for more than thirty years. Most dealers get praised by customers for their people and their process. Larson Ford gets praised for the repair itself, which is much rarer. Robert's explanation is not a program or a vendor. It is that he refuses to throw a technician under the bus to rescue a review, and he says so plainly on air. The episode is about what that costs and what it buys. Robert takes the position that the customer is always right, right up until the point where you have to say no, and that a team which knows you will back them behaves differently with customers than one that does not. What Jake and Robert cover: - Why he thinks corporate and private-equity stores struggle to hold the same culture - The open-door policy, and how an owner actually keeps that door open - Where the sales-to-service handoff breaks, and the quarterly meeting he is adding to fix it - Mobile service after the manufacturer push: what it is genuinely good for, and the staffing math - What Carvana got right about points of contact, and why he still likes his odds Larson Ford holds a 4.89 adjusted rating, 38th of 18,207 US franchise rooftops, with a negative review rate of 0.78%, or roughly one negative review in every 129. Service accounts for 71% of the store's review volume. Figures from the Widewail Index, built on more than 20 million customer reviews across US auto retail.

3. 

   8 Oct 2026

   AI Beyond the BDC with Dustin Schuler, Marketing Director Bud Clary AG

   Ask most of auto retail what AI is for and you get one answer: the BDC, after hours. Dustin Schuler is somewhere else. He runs marketing for Bud Clary Auto Group, 14 stores in Washington State, and six days into October he had used, by his own count, 5.7 billion tokens. He spoke at Claude for Dealers in Atlanta, a sold-out two-day workshop where operators built things they could take back to the store the same day, and he joined me the week after to unpack it. In this conversation he walks through the workflow that now builds the specials and banners for all 14 websites at 6am the morning incentives drop, about 30 minutes of machine time against a day and a half of a designer's, and how he runs it from a desktop app rather than a terminal. He explains why "another dang dashboard" is the enemy, why MCP has gone from nice-to-have to a requirement when he evaluates a vendor, and where he still pays for software on purpose. He also describes what unlocked the beginners in that Atlanta room, why strangers across the country were independently building the same customer data platform, and what it means that one of his sites logged 830 sessions from LLMs last month. Three things you'll take away: The specials automation, end to end: what it pulls, what it builds, where it places it, and how long it took to set up A framework anyone in a dealership can use: name the task that eats eight hours of your week, describe it out loud, and let the model take half Why he will build a workflow but not a CRM, and what he now asks every vendor before he signs Dustin Schuler is Marketing Director at Bud Clary Auto Group, a third-generation family-owned group with 14 franchise stores and eight brands across Washington State. He started there as an intern fixing website errors, has trained AI models for Outlier, and chairs an NCM 20 group for automotive marketing directors. Connect with Dustin on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustin-schuler/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustin-schuler/) Claude for Dealers returns to Atlanta January 5-7, 2027: https://www.learnclaudefordealers.com/ (https://www.learnclaudefordealers.com/) This episode pairs with REV #083, which has the chart on what AI-referred shoppers do once they land: https://www.widewail.com/REV (https://www.widewail.com/REV)

4. 

   1 Oct 2026

   WOW Moments: Unreasonable Hospitality in the Service Drive with Roger Pipher, WE Auto

   Roger Pipher runs fixed operations for WE Auto Group, a four-store group that has been named a Best Dealership To Work For two years running. He has been in the business 41 years, starting as a technician when training meant being handed a manual and pointed at a bay. The conversation is about what replaced that. WE Auto built its own internal school, WE Auto University, where classes run most days in a conference room somewhere in the group and the instructors are their own managers and technicians. The curriculum runs from walk-arounds and CSI to goal setting and how to read a financial statement. Then there is the program that came out of a workshop on Unreasonable Hospitality. Every service advisor gets $100 a month and the authority to spend it creating a moment for a customer. They write up what they did, the team votes, and the winner gets a bonus and their photo on a plaque in the waiting room. Roger reads one of the winning stories on air. What Jake and Roger cover: Why a documented onboarding process is rare in this industry, and what WE Auto uses instead The ninety-day "pitch count" that limits how many repair orders a new advisor writes Treating each guest as one size fits one, rather than moving a line like a bank teller Why communication, not price, is among the top reasons service customers defect The Fixed Ops Leadership Circle, the free monthly call Roger runs for other fixed ops leaders At Gallatin Ford, one of the group's stores, 99% of customer reviews that mention staff are positive. Among US rooftops averaging 30 or more reviews a month, that is the top 1%. Figures from the Widewail Index, built on more than 20 million customer reviews across US auto retail. WE Auto Group is a Widewail client.

5. 

   17 Sept 2026

   What Comes After Reputation Management with Cuyler Owens

   Reputation management is no longer a strategy. It's table stakes. That's where Widewail CEO Cuyler Owens starts, and he doesn't mean reputation stopped mattering. He means the hard part moved. Asking for reviews, responding to them, showing up in search and now in answer engines: every operator serious about this business is already doing it. So the question becomes what else all that feedback is good for. His answer is that dealership decisions have run on two inputs, the numbers coming out of the DMS and what the staff says they need, and that the customer's own voice has been the missing third. Not because nobody wanted it, but because free-text feedback at scale was unreadable until recently. In this conversation he walks through what changes when review content gets connected to DMS transaction data, what a dealer can learn from what sits behind a competitor's five-star rating, why he'd take an open-ended review over a survey, and why he thinks this data ends up in front of every role in a store rather than sitting in marketing. Three things you'll take away: What happens when you tie a review to the repair order: matching went from roughly 7% of transactions to more than half, which turns a handful of coaching conversations into dozens What competitive benchmarking makes visible, and why a high rating tells you the result without telling you the cause Why an open-ended question beats a leading one, and where surveys still hold their place Cuyler Owens is CEO of Widewail. His first job out of college was running an Enterprise desk inside the service drive of a Mazda store in Austin. He later built Dealerware out of the Silvercar platform, reaching roughly 4,000 dealerships over six years, and served as CRO of the B2B review site TrustRadius before joining Widewail. Learn more about Customer Clarity: https://www.widewail.com/clarity (https://www.widewail.com/clarity)

6. 

   2 Sept 2026

   How Garber became the highest-rated dealer group in America with Robert Norcross, Marketing Director

   We ranked the 150 largest dealer groups in the country by group-level Google rating. Garber Automotive Group came out first, at a 4.9. So we asked their marketing director how. Robert Norcross has been building Garber's reputation program from the inside for over a decade, and his answer starts somewhere unexpected: the group that would win the industry benchmark is the one that refuses to use it. In this conversation, he walks through the app his team built in-house to make review requests automatic, the weekly store-versus-store ranking that actually changes what happens on the floor, why he treats the industry average as a ceiling instead of a target, and where he thinks the biggest untapped opportunity in dealer reputation is sitting. Three things you'll take away: The system Garber built to make review requests automatic at the point of delivery Why Robert throws out the industry average, and what he tracks instead The opportunity he thinks the whole industry is sitting on: the service drive Robert Norcross is Marketing Director at Garber Automotive Group, a third-generation family group founded in 1907 that runs 25 new-car dealerships across six states, plus roughly 50 RightWay Auto Sales locations. Ratings from the Widewail Index, our database of 20M+ customer reviews across US auto retail. Subscribe to our weekly data newsletter based on the Index, the REV. widewail.com/rev (http://widewail.com/rev) Garber is a Widewail client, and we are proud to work with them.

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