Spireon Case Studies

Marvin Sibert, Jr., General Manager: My name is Marvin Sibert, Jr., General Manager, Global Imports Mini. Before we used LoJack, things just weren’t as efficient, we were mainly refocusing our steps all the time trying to find the cars, trying to see about the batteries, and it just wasn’t a great, crisp guest experience. After we installed LoJack, it’s just been a blessing. Now it’s about enjoying the guest’s time – making better use of their time.

Alexandra Jerral, Manager in Training: The way we use LoJack in the sales process, first and foremost, is that we’re able to know where all of our vehicles are. We have two different lots outside of just the interior of our showroom. We have a front lot and a back lot, and sometimes customers don’t want to wait.

Asif Dossani, Sales Manager: Having LoJack, the salesperson can just put in the VIN number, a red color, or whatever, and they can find the car exactly where it is.

Marvin Sibert, Jr.: That time that the guest doesn’t get back walking, wandering the lot – that stops. Now they can go directly to a car. And not only go to that car but also to know that the battery is going to be charged.

Tyler Walton, Finance Manager: We started seeing immediately the benefit that it had to our customers. We get a lot of folks who come in buying for their sons or daughters first car, so we’ve had parents come back and be like, “Hey, it’s been really great because I can monitor their speed and I know where they’re at.

Alexandra Jerral: Customers love the peace of mind behind it. They’re able to save a lot on their insurance premiums as well as they know where their vehicle is at all times.

Tyler Walton: Our inventory manager knows exactly where every car is at any given time, and plus it’s a security tool for us when we’re not here that we’re able to monitor vehicles and get alerts if the vehicle is moved off the premises.

Marvin Sibert, Jr.: Any time you have a product that the guest loves as much as they do, profit will always go up because they don’t question about it, they inquire about it. And then you get to retarget them. Maybe sometimes not about a new vehicle but maybe their warranty is coming up – is coming past due. Maybe there’s an oil change coming you can send them an oil change coupon. Any time I can see my guest and keep them around is always the best and every dealership will understand that.

Jon Hansen, General Sales Manager: My name’s Jon Hansen; I’m the General Sales Manager at Burien Nissan. We took over the store about a year and a half ago. And when coming to the store, we decided to do things really different for our customers. When we first started selling LoJack, we went through a few different stages on how we were going to present it to our customers and how we were going to sell it. Obviously, it is installed on all of our vehicles at the time of a PDI or used car inspection. The biggest benefit that LoJack has had for our dealership is that we are in a high crime area, and so we have had roughly 20 cars stolen off our lot. And so coming in the morning and noticing that cars are missing, I’m able to just jump on the website and track those vehicles. Aside from the thefts, if I’m ever missing a car with flooring or anything like that, I can actually track those to where they are and help speed up the process, with either my salesman who’s looking for a car, or for dealer trades or anything like that. I really appreciate LoJack. One, their team is amazing to work for – everyone that I talk to. Two, again, just being able to sell a product that I find value in to our customers and making it a revenue generator for the dealership has been really big for us. So, I would certainly recommend LoJack to any dealership looking at it.

Andrew Fortin, New Car Director: Here at Audi Ft. Worth, LoJack has really helped our profitability. We’ve been able to run, depending upon the month, between 65-80% penetration with LoJack, so for us it has been a huge improvement.

Mike McLeod, Finance Manager: We incorporate LoJack systems into all of our retail sale units. The LoJack system for our dealership has helped us in recovery of a couple of vehicles.

Mustafa Mousa, Technology Specialist: With extended test drives, we actually let the client take the vehicle home overnight to kind of get a feel of it. Having LoJack on those cars lets us monitor if they are going above speed or whether they are going outside the metroplex, for example. It gives us a sense of safety that the car will be returned the next day.

Andrew Fortin: I had a client that was out and was supposed to bring the car back the next day and then didn’t answer the phone or wouldn’t show up, wouldn’t return texts, and we were able to locate the car immediately, go pick it up and not have any issues with it.

Mike McLeod: It also helps us determine where our vehicles are when the customers come in to take a test drive. We’ve got three different facilities that we work off of, so we can pinpoint where that car might be in a matter of minutes by using the LoJack app.

Mustafa Mousa: In the past we had so many problems finding vehicles. The customer would wait 20 minutes just for us to go pull a vehicle up. Using LoJack, I just pull up the app, type in the stock number, and it literally pinpoints the exact location of the car. And, I get to know if the battery is low or if there is anything wrong with it.

Andrew Fortin: We have had to replace a lot less batteries. That can be a large expense. It is really good to stay on top of that without having to find out when it’s too late that a battery is already dead has also has been a big advantage.

Mike McLeod: On the consumer side, they like the advantage of having that, knowing what is going on with their car, knowing if there’s any issues that need to be dealt with as far as servicing or battery issues, that kind of thing. And then also, they also like the aspect of if they’ve got kids driving the vehicle, that they can keep track of how fast they’re driving, where the car has been – different things like that with the geofencing features. And we have also received feedback from most of our clientele that have this unit installed in their vehicles, that they are receiving premium discounts on their auto insurance as well.

Andrew Fortin: I definitely recommend LoJack to other dealerships. There is a huge benefit. There’s a lot of peace of mind and the profitability is great as well.

Pat Hickey, General Manager: Good Morning, my name is Pat Hickey from Peoria Ford. We’re the number 1 Ford dealer in 44 states, number 1 in Arizona for the past 5 years. I’m proud to be a partner with Lojack. Since we’ve instituted the [LoJack] program, our profit has gone over $1 million per year. Our gross per copy has gone up over $400. Our penetration of our alarm has gone up 60%, every single month. LoJack is a great partner to manage your lot because half the time you are trying to do your inventory, and you are missing five cars, it takes countless hours of manpower to go search out if the car has been DCA’d, if it is an unwind, if the car was sold by the wrong VIN. You can, by a click of a button, tell exactly where the car is at within four feet; that’s saving countless man hours. Countless. So, I would tell everybody that’s looking to save your people’s time and energy to go with LoJack.

Juan Ramirez, Finance Director: My name is Juan Ramirez, I work for Precision Toyota. We sell anywhere between 400-500 cars a month. When we are dealing with 500 cars in inventory, when we are dealing with that many sales and customers, we’re trying to be as efficient as possible. Not only do we have all of our vehicles in our on-site lot, we actually also have 3 off-site lots, so you can imagine that makes it that much more difficult to find a specific unit, especially when you are finding that one red Camry or that one red Prius and it can be anywhere. On the average it probably took about 30 mins to find a unit [before LoJack]. You never want to run into the situation where you are showing a customer a vehicle and when you take them out to that lot, and the car is dead. LoJack is one tool that we use to help avoid that situation.

Matt Asanovich, Sales Director: Hi, my name is Matt Asanovich; I work with Precision Toyota of Tucson. The process before LoJack was a bit complicated. What would happen would be that the salesperson would actually leave the customer on the property and go and find out where the vehicle is located. Customers are always in a hurry and for them to come in and feel that we are not organized, or that we don’t know where our inventory is, was actually embarrassing. We introduced LoJack to the sales staff and they were all relieved because time is everything. The quicker you get the customer in and out of the door the better off we all are, and LoJack saves us at least 35-45 minutes minimum.

Juan Ramirez: It benefits every single department. Sales, of course, is huge. We talked about actually locating a vehicle, cutting the time down as far as the customer coming into the dealership and driving off with a brand-new car. Me being a finance guy, of course I always think of my department first, and it is a very profitable product and that’s the main reason we sell it, and we are successful with it. It is important to bring our customers back in for service because that’s where the dealership makes their money. LoJack can tell how many miles a vehicle has. So, maybe it hits 15,000 miles or maybe it hits 14,000 miles and you want to remind them for their 15K mile appointment. We want to provide service to them not only for that initial sale, but for the longevity of their actual ownership, whether it is oil changes, whether it is tires, brakes or anything like that. And, of course, we have our parts department and our body shop and different departments of the dealership that can benefit from having that loyal customer.

Matt: The way customers are programmed, they think we make the most money in the sales part of it, when in fact that is not true. We make most in our service department. If we are not servicing the customers the right way, we are going to lose that business. [For customers using LoJack] Sometimes you come out of a mall, and you don’t remember where you parked, you can simply go to your phone and find out exactly where it is at, and it is live time like a GPS system.

Juan: Nowadays, the big goal of dealerships is not only to keep customer satisfaction up, but also to speed up the process of the sale and LoJack is a huge tool that we use for that. I absolutely recommend LoJack to other dealerships because it benefits all aspects of the sale. It benefits all the departments within the dealership, and it is a profitable F&I product.

My name is Joe Soto, President of Savon Financial. Some of the problems I had before GoldStar were minor but nevertheless they were problems. One of them was the air time and another is that the units were not so efficient. They worked sometimes and sometimes they didn’t. And getting a hold with a company representative to help us with the technical support, we would get voice mails and stuff like that and they would get back with us probably too late. Spireon has helped quite a bit because your devices work all the time and your support system is always there. I would like to mention the name Stacy. Stacy is very efficient. The [devices] are easy to install and there are no issues at all. Anyone can install them, I have even done it myself. It is easy to track them on my system. I am not very computer-wise but when I do it, if I can do it, anybody can do it! I love that. I would recommend definitely and I have recommended you guys to other dealers. These people have from time to time purchased units from you and if I am unable to provide a unit, they provide that one for us. You guys are so good, I would recommend you anywhere. Your units are the best thing there is. Don’t change anything. I like your prices. I like your quality. I like your service. Don’t do anything different, OK. Please.

Hi, I am Brandon Ogden, President of Sol Acceptance & Blackfish Capital. We are two finance companies located in California. Before using GoldStar, I had two issues that come to mind. First, I had bought several hundred devices off a [another] company, only to find out several months later that that company was completely out of business and gone and our devices had never been paid for. So we lost several hundred units that we were never really able to recover from. That was a pretty massive problem that we had. The other issue we had before was multiple device failures, a high percentage of device failure rate was occurring within our portfolio, which of course, caused collection deficiency issues for us as we were unable to locate our collateral and took some big hits. So those are probably the two largest issues prior to GoldStar. GoldStar has helped my business by providing reliable and consistent data. Over the last few years, we have bought between 5000-6000 units from GoldStar, and I can say to date, we have only one lost car. That being said, I think those are incredible statistics. I’m not going to say that we don’t have devices go out from time to time, but there is historical data that is provided to us and enough information where we can always locate our vehicles. So out of 5000-6000 units and only one lost car, I am a happy customer. I would definitely recommend GoldStar, as it is pretty clear from my other answers, and how I feel about the company, its stability and what it has done for my business. I do business with lots of dealers and it is pretty much a prerequisite to do business with us that they be on the GoldStar platform and it is what we recommend.

I am Jim Aubuchon, CEO of Premier Trailer Leasing. Premier Trailer was founded in 2005. In the last 3 years it has grown from 10,000 to 30,000 trailers. Since taking the helm in 2012, one of the first things we did was go out and build a partnership with Spireon FleetLocate. We’re a big believer in technology and having an open platform for our customers to see information real-time. Before trailer tracking it was more difficult to do yard checks, and difficult to know how many miles each trailer was running. Now that we have those solutions, it helps our employees manage their inventory much better, allows us to understand where the trailers are, if we have a customer not paying us, it allows us to locate the trailer and get them home. My name is Larry Hall, EVP of Sales at Premier Trailer Leasing based in Louisville, Texas. We now have 26 locations in 20 states. We are early adopters of technology which gives us a competitive advantage. We use Spireon’s product FleetLocate on our fleet. Spireon’s open platform has been a big advantage for Premier because it allowed us to customize a solution to our customer base. The device itself, the data that you get from it, is a tremendous advantage. To my knowledge, there is no one else out there that is providing a solution that Spireon is providing, and it gives us a real competitive advantage in the market, I am convinced of that. One of the primary reasons we picked Spireon’s FleetLocate was the open platform and their willingness to take our data and integrate it into their system, so that our customers could see their trailers in real-time. Since the inception of our relationship, Spireon has been very open and listened and been very flexible to what we needed and they accommodated us and developed those products as we needed. We truly appreciate what they have done for us.

Hi, I am Dan Eggleton, President & CEO of Eggleton Trucking. We haul bulk commodities, mostly mulch and compost throughout the Southern California are. We work in about a 200 mile radius in Southern California. We have 8 trucks right now and I’m taking delivery on 2 more today, actually, so we are going to 10. We handle anywhere from 110-120 loads a week. We have been using FleetLocate for about a year and a half now. It has changed a tremendous amount in our business. I constantly know where everybody is at and when a customer calls me in the middle of the day and asks me, “Hey can you pick up an additional four loads today?”, within probably ten minutes, I can have everything redirected to satisfy whatever special needs the customer has. Before FleetLocate, I didn’t have that ability. Since using FleetLocate, we have noticed big savings in fuel and time, and probably more time than anything. The fact that we are not picking a truck to go to Fontana that is 20 miles further away from Fontana than one of our other trucks. Huge difference. Because of that, we pick up close to a load a day additional just from knowing exactly where the trucks are. That translates during the week to sometimes 4 or 5 loads a week additional. Each load is about $400 a load so it grows revenue with the same amount of equipment. From a customer service aspect, what FleetLocate has done is make me look a lot smarter than I am, because a customer will call me asking for those 2 to 3 extra loads, and I can tell him over the phone while I am talking to him that I have 2 trucks that are 30 minutes away and another truck that is an hour and a half away and I will have those over to you. And they show up and the customer sees that. I did have a customer ask me, “You know I was at one of our facilities in Riverside and there were 3 Eggleton trucks sitting there, and then a little later in the day I was in Fontana, and there were four Eggleton trucks sitting there, how many trucks do you have, anyway?” He thought I had twice as many trucks than I did, because we work efficiently, and the reason we work efficiently is because we know where the trucks are all the time. The biggest tool for me in FleetLocate is the mobile app because I spend most of my day in my pickup. So, the mobile app is what I use 90% of the time. I can’t remember the last time I sat at a desktop and used FleetLocate. It gives me the ability while driving my pickup to know exactly where all the trucks are, and acts like a dispatch on the fly to make sure the day gets done. That’s the biggest feature, the mobile app, absolutely for us. If you are in the rucking business and you don’t have trackers today, you are operating at a huge disadvantage. It’s a no brainer, it really is. And, this is coming from a guy who thought he had fingers on everything, I’ve got a small fleet, they’re local, I know what’s going on, but I had no idea how much improvement there would be when I put trackers in the trucks, but it has been huge.

Scott Flerl, Director of Equipment Procurement at Covenant Transportation Group, a publicly-held trucking company in Chattanooga, TN that specializes in team-expedited, refrigerated and automotive-dedicated service offerings. We have about 2700 trucks and 6500 trailers and our specialty in the industry we are known for our premium service. We have been a Spireon customer since July of 2012 and we have built a strong partnership that continues to evolve. Historically, we used a satellite trailer tracking option that provided one ping a day that basically told us here is where your trailer is. We knew as technology had evolved that there was a better way to do things and that we could do more with trailer tracking but that wasn’t available with the current product that we had used. We were looking to gain efficiencies in our trailer fleet similar to the technology advancements in our tractors. Working with the Spireon team has been very easy, both to me personally, and for the company. Whether it is a small issue, or a big idea for the future, they have been very, very reachable and very professional to work with and we continue to evolve our relationship as time passes. Having that breadcrumb history of where all of our trailers are has enabled us to more efficiently manage our customer trailer pool, and in doing so, we have been able to reduce the trailer fleet size itself, and the associated capital costs with that. Historically, the best way we could get an idea of where our trailers were was to conduct manual yard checks that the drivers performed riding around the yard, writing down unit numbers and calling it into dispatch. That was riddled with errors, came sporadically through the day, but now we have one person who can sit at their desk and see every yard and every customer across the United States, geofenced in the portal, and give real-time yard check information to the dispatchers. We have had several trailers stolen, and through the covert installation, the thieves are unaware that tracking devices are on the trailers. We were quickly able to work with local law enforcement agencies to recover the trailer and the load. I would recommend Spireon to any fleet looking to take control of their trailers and gain operational efficiencies.