- Dec 30, 2009
- 1,883
- 480
- First Name
- Yago
We'll... yes, there is a risk to get out of bed every morning but we work to minimize them. Understanding those is an important part of the business. So when I say that there is no risk I mean as no more than the normal risk of life. We all understand that there is a risk to advertise on Cars.com even thought they are an incredible website, perhaps our inventory is not dialed properly, but we certainly don't expect that we could get banned for life from using their website nor that we could get dragged into a lawsuit.
I've been 17 years in business and sued once by a dealer that thought that another dealer was getting a better price in one of my magazines. They had to pay both attorneys fees and that costed them over $30,000. Go figure. But my father, both grandparents, and several other close relatives are attorneys, so I grew up looking at the possible downfalls to the actions that we take in the business. How can I protect me and my clients?
I'm concerned with the companies that tell the dealers that "everything will be ok" the same way some of them claim they have "inside knowledge on how CL works", just like when people tell you "they know someone at Google". I'm concerned that an internet manager will do it on its own and the dealer will get blind sighted. There was a dealer group in Seattle, Huling Brothers, they got hammered and closed in big part because of Paul R. who stole from an elderly man with dementia. FBI involved and all. The owner, with a business in the family for several generations, was not involved at all nor he could have known that these clowns went to this man's house and took $75,000 from him, but he took the brunt of the blame by local newspapers. You have to be aware of what's going on in the business. I certainly try.
CL used to have a captcha years ago when the postings were done manually, we paid people to to those by hand. Back then IP switching didn't work, the IPs were blocked too fast and after we got 2500 IPs the FTC paid us a visit and ask why we needed so many IPs (they are used for credit card fraud so they wanted to know what was our deal). That year we did over $1M in CL business. We posted a lot. We tried everything to automated the systems and lower the costs. Had hundreds of cell phones, walls full of computers, IP routers in China, you name it. In the end CL blocked us when they wanted, sometimes just flat out shutting the ability to post vehicles, period. A few companies got sued during those times. They seemed OK with the manual entry for as long as we took a few seconds per entry, so the secret was having 4-5 computer per person wth unique connections so they could post from one to the next. We tried everything!
But back them CL cost 15-20X what cost today in big part because of the manual labor, so that's why I mentioned the cost issue.
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