Connected Podcast Episode 194: Building a Narrative with Paul J Daly

NADA2026_ConnectedInterview_PaulJDaly.mp3

 

Speaker 1 [00:00:04] Hi, I'm Greg Uland with Reynolds and Reynolds, and this is Connected live at the NADA show. One of my favorite conversations when I get to have it is with Paul J. Daly, who's sitting across from me today, founder and CEO of More Than Cars. Paul, thanks so much for sitting down.

 

Speaker 2 It is so nice to be a guest on your show today. It really is.

 

Speaker 1 And I'm just happy to have you. You're running around like crazy for, I think, the whole week. Not just the show.

 

Speaker 2 [00:00:25] It's a lot. I just got the notification on my phone to check in for my flight home. So, that's like after the long trip, it's like the exit door just opened. There's a little light coming through. It's like I think we're going to make it. I think we're going to be okay.

 

Speaker 1 [00:00:38] Yeah, but on the flip side is, you go, wait, what day is it?

 

Speaker 2 [00:00:42] I’m so confused. It feels like Saturday. It's actually, what is it? Thursday?

 

Speaker 1 [00:00:45] Thursday, yeah.

 

Speaker 2 [00:00:46] And then Tuesday felt like Monday and Monday felt like Friday. We're all messed up. But I can say though, this has been my favorite show that I've been at, and I haven't been to as many as some people. I've been to eight NADAs, three of them here. This would be my fourth one here. It's like this mix of people feeling anxious and excited, and that really is kind of the same feeling. Am I anxious or am I excited? I think people are afraid that they're going to get behind if they're not here, which I think contributes to the record turnout. I don't know if it's a record turnout. I was talking to Mike Stanton this morning, and I said, "Are we at record turnout?" He goes, "I don't know yet." Because believe it or not, he goes, "we'll have thousands of people register at the door," which blew my mind. Did you know thousands of people come here without a ticket?

 

Speaker 1 No.

 

Speaker 2 [00:01:36] Well, now you know.

 

Speaker 1 Now you know!

 

Speaker 2 [00:01:38] Yeah. So, I mean, it's been long. It's been tiring, but we draw. You do. I do. Your team does. Your booth has been packed. I'm looking across at it right now. And it's literally a sea of people and a sea of conversations. And I think that gives us energy.

 

Speaker 1 [00:01:54] Oh, for sure. You know, and for me, at least, I need that 30 minutes between the show and dinner where it's like, okay, I need to decompress. Just give me a second.

 

Speaker 2 [00:02:02] The adrenaline is real. There's this place where in the Las Vegas convention center, they can run two conventions at once. And the other side, I just happened to wander over there trying to get to the press room, and it was quiet. And I just stood there. I probably just stopped. People were probably thinking, what happened in that guy's life? He's just staring, and he stopped. But it was a decompression moment. Because you're going to go out to dinner. And you're a podcast host, right? So you're doing all these shows, and when you do that, you're not just awake and walking, you're mentally focused, you have to be elevated. I don't think people understand how emotionally draining that can be. So that decompression time before you go out to dinner and do it all again is important.

 

Speaker 1 [00:02:42] Yeah, it's all fun, right? There's no complaints. It's a blast.

 

Speaker 2 [00:02:44] Yeah, don't feel bad for us. I was recently, I don't know whose podcast he was on, you know, Will Gadara on reasonable hospitality. He was on, and he was sitting across from somebody, and he was reading this thing that said, what a blessing it is to be exhausted from things that we chose to do.

 

Speaker 1 [00:03:03] Yeah, I like that. That's a good quote.

 

Speaker 2 [00:03:04] And I was like, that's how I feel at the show. What a blessing it is to be exhausted from things that we chose to do. And the fact that we get to choose what we do and the fact we get tired doing it means it's meaningful to us.

 

Speaker 1 [00:03:14] That's right, it's worth it. No, I love it. All right, well, hey, I want to dig in with you because I think one of your superpowers is leveraging storytelling. And I think you do a really good job of it at a macro level for our industry. Season two is coming out of The Truth About Car Dealers. It shifted that name this year. I had to look down and make sure I got it right.

 

Speaker 2 [00:03:34] No, it makes more sense.

 

Speaker 1 [00:03:35] It does, it does. So, you know, I love that season two is coming here. But I do think that you're a master at using stories to create, or in some cases, change a narrative. And I think there's some lessons to learn. So you're doing it in a macro level, but I think some lessons learn at a store level too. I don't know, share with me some of your thoughts on how to leverage storytelling when you're trying to create a perception, or you're trying to create a narrative.

 

Speaker 2 [00:04:00] I think if we back up and we talk about why story is so effective, all of history, people communicated, culture, and things that happen through stories. We are hardwired as creatures to connect with stories and convey information that way. We fast forward to 2025, 2026. We're in 2026. But the reality is that there are stories all over the place because we have social media. And some of those stories are false stories, some are true stories, but a story at its core is a sense-making device. It is how humans make sense of complex things, and it's how we move closer to simple things. I could tell you a story about this water bottle, like, did you know? And start to open a story loop, and it would make sense. If it were a good story, it would help you make sense of something. And those are the things that we remember. So that's why storytelling will always be relevant. And it will always be an important part. We have all this technology, and we have everyone talking about AI. But the reality is, if we're not leveraging that technology to tell a story of some sort, it's going to start to become less important to our brains. And the more you have to explain, the more cognitive load sets in, the worse the story gets, and we get distracted, the brain moves on to something else. And probably the best example, I can say, are you a Mission Impossible fan?

 

Speaker 1 [00:05:25] Uh, yeah, I mean, I haven't seen them in forever. I actually saw the first one at the drive-in movie theater, you know, 30 years ago or whatever it was.

 

Speaker 2 They're still around.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, we still got a couple.

 

Speaker 2 [00:05:36] So, if you want to watch a really bad movie, watch the latest Mission Impossible movie. And they spent how much, two, three hundred million dollars to make this thing. What they did in the beginning is they literally went through like five minutes of narrative, and throughout the movie, they are explaining and explaining and explaining and explaining. That's because it's a terrible story. Bad story plot. They didn't find a concise way to make sense of anything, so it got really confusing, and it was a terrible movie because they were explaining. In story, if you get to the point where you're explaining, you're losing, but you have to quickly make sense of something. That's why we can have seven-second videos that we move toward. They usually tell story. And so I think it's a very underutilized tactic, albeit an ancient tool to communicate. And I think dealers and automotive, whether you're an industry partner, whether you are a dealer on the front line, we can always leverage story in a better way.

 

Speaker 1 [00:06:32] So two things I want to dig into there, pop the hood on a little bit. So the first one is...

 

Speaker 2 [00:06:35] Mission Impossible. Tell me about the second one.

 

Speaker 1 [00:06:37] No, can you tell me your perspective on the difference between a story and an analogy? Because I do think that it's an easy trap to fall into, where you just want to make an analogy. You know, it's like this, right?

 

Speaker 2 [00:06:50] Yes. So, an analogy is an effective tool to compare it to something that you're already familiar with, right? It's, it's like, this is like that. It's very simple. A story has a few elements. Number one, a story has a hero. A story has a subject. This is who we're talking about, and we're following that person or that item or that thing. Person is ideal through a narrative. And that person wants something, but there's something in the way of them getting it. No one wants to hear a story about like, oh, there was a guy, and he woke up one day, looked at his bank account, and he had five million dollars. And so he went, and he had poached eggs for breakfast, and he went to sleep, and he said, this is so great, I'm going to do it again tomorrow. I don't want to listen to that story, right? There was a guy, and he woke up, and he had $5,000,000 in his account. He had his poached egg, and then he logged in saw that he had zero dollars.

 

Speaker 1 [00:07:40] Now you're interested.

 

Speaker 2 [00:07:41] Now I'm interested. Right, so I'll talk about hooks in a second. But you have a character who wants something, and there's something in the way that character getting it, and that makes him feel a certain way or him or her feel a certain way. And then somebody comes into the story and says, this is how you get what you want. You have to do these things. And it calls them to action. And they go to action, and they either succeed or they fail. We have a comedy. We of a tragedy. So story has to have an arc of, you know, a hero. And there's got to be conflict, and there has got to be resolution for comedy or tragedy. That's what makes a story; that's why it's different than an analogy. Analogy is a bit of a sense-making device, but it also requires you to have a core understanding of something else to say this, like that. And that's more of a comparison than an actual narrative. Like no one connects with an analogy. It might help them make sense of something though, and in that way it could be similar.

 

Speaker 1 [00:08:33] Yeah. Okay. No, that's good. That's good, so you kind of answered the second question, which was how do you build that story, right? So you went over the arc, thinking about it from a tangible, dealer's perspective, because there's a lot of ways to get attention, and I think, again, attention is different than story, too. You can be funny. You can have a skit.

 

Speaker 2 [00:08:52] You can be shocking. Look at Jackass. Right?

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

 

Speaker 2 You just injure yourself.

 

Speaker 1 [00:08:56] But that's not going to help people connect with you. I don't know, is there a key to having people connect with the story, too? You have a character, and I understand the arc. But is there is there way for focusing on dealers specifically? You know, if I'm in my market, is there a playbook where it's like, okay, these are the five things to check off or the five things that if I can check one of those off, I'm going to be able to connect.

 

Speaker 2 [00:09:20] So there are different levels of connection. I think if you're a local dealer, there are several stories you want to tell because the broad story is why you do what you do in the community that you do it in. This is who we are. These are the things that we believe. That's not a story. That is a mission, that is a vision, so no one naturally will lean in on that, like tell me more about your mission… said no one ever. But that dealership is made up of people. It has owners, it has people that work there, service advisors. So, I think the micro stories in the dealership are never ending. You cannot run out of them. Connecting the story of why you're doing what you're doing, executing that through the people's lives. I say story and brand are so connected that you can't separate them if you understand them both. Brand also is not me telling you about me, which is what we think brand is. Well, some people think, you know, it's we've talked about it's not the logo. It's not the tagline. Brand is the feeling that you get when you think about me. That's actually my brand is like when they say Paul Daly, what is that? What is all that thing that gives you some kind of gut feeling? Like I moved toward him, I moved away from him. I like him, I don't like him. And once you have that, you have to realize that that brand and that feeling is influenced by the stories you tell through it. When dealers are telling their story, it is also building their brand. It's the same exact thing. And it's developing through micro engagements, the gut feeling that people have to move closer to you or away from you. What brand does… if you say, I like Paul, that doesn't say as much about me as it says about you, because I think a brand reflects your own values back at you. And you either say, I like the way this mirror looks, or this picture doesn't look good, I'm going to move on. You think about it with clothing brands, fashion brands that people like or don't like. Why does one person wear Nike and one person wears Under Armor? Now some people might just be like, I like the fabric better. They're not thinking about brand. They're thinking about utility. But someone who thinks about brand is thinking, well, when I look at Nike, I might think about the athletes they sponsor. I might think about their labor practices overseas. Those are very different things. But what that's doing is now reflecting my values back at me. And I'm saying, I'm cool with that. I'm saying no, I'm going to go look at Under Armor. And dealerships are the same way. If you understand the values of your community, and you reflect those values back to them through your brand and your story, that's authentic to you. You can't say you do if you don't really because people will sniff that out. And story is a way to reflect your values. And hopefully, if there's good synergy, you're doing that in a way where people look at you and say, I think like them, I believe like them.

 

Speaker 1 [00:12:14] That's great. I love every bit of what you just said. It actually reminded me when you're talking, you can't just tell somebody about yourself, right? You have to act in a way, you have to tell a story.

 

Speaker 2 You can if you want people to avoid you when they see you.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, absolutely.

 

Speaker 2 [00:12:27] I met a few of those. Yeah, we're here at the show. We all know. We know who they are.

 

Speaker 1 [00:12:31] There's a book from, I don't know, it's probably 15 years ago, it's called Conversations That Win, I think, if I remember right. And it talks about, the thing that stood out to me in this book was it's talking about how to create a narrative for a presentation. And you know, there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle, but the one that I'm getting at is a lot, of presentations from a company start out with, hey, we started in 1950, hey, we serve 6,000 customers… all you're doing is we, we, we-ing all over them. Nobody likes that. Don't do that.

 

Speaker 2 That's awesome. I'm going to remember that one.

 

Speaker 1 I know those little nuggets stick with you, but it's so true. It's not about you, right? It's tell the story and focus.

 

Speaker 2 [00:13:16] People don't want to hear about you. There's an old sales adage in the car business, but get the customer talking about themselves, and they'll talk your ear off. And it's still true because people want to hear about what's interesting to them, and it doesn't make them a bad person. It makes you just naturally want to move toward things. The brain is naturally filtering things like primally. Where am I aligned? Where am I not aligned? And how can I move from the things I'm not aligned with and move closer to the things I am aligned with?

 

Speaker 1 [00:13:46] No, it's a good framework, though. All right, shifting gears. This is another topic I want to talk to you about that I think you're also really, really good at, which is, I mentioned getting attention, and this is a little different, but making something a big deal and creating awareness. I've seen you do it over the years in a lot of different capacities, and you do such a good job leaning in. But most recently, you can tell me the timeframe. I mean, it was within the last four months, probably.

 

Speaker 2 [00:14:13] Yeah, no, you're talking about the launch when we merged the companies together. I can't actually remember exactly when it was. It was probably like October, November, something like that. There was no snow in Syracuse yet.

 

Speaker 1 [00:14:25] Right. So probably October. I mean, you did such a good job of making it a big deal, and you leverage every platform to do it. There's a big unveiling. You hosted an on-site event. Talk about that a little bit because I swear it doesn't matter the size.

 

Speaker 2 [00:14:43] Yeah, there weren't a lot of people there.

 

Speaker 1 [00:14:45] It's perception, right? Talk about that a little bit, creating a perception, making something a big deal.

 

Speaker 2 [00:14:51] I think that when you authentically are into what you're doing, and it's something you're like, I believe everyone should be this passionate about this. That's where you start. I've heard bands say before, like great bands, especially as they're coming up through the ranks, they're playing at empty clubs. They're playing to nobody. And they're like, we enjoy playing this music and whether there's two people out there or there's 20,000 people out there. We've decided that when we play, we're going to play because we love it. We want everybody else to love it too, but maybe they don't right now. I think when you head in with that, and you can cultivate the team and culture, you have enough people where you're like, I always have your back. You're in Ohio, 21 Pilots is one of my favorite bands from Ohio. And they've made a pact with one another because there's only two people. You don't even have like four or five people. It's like, you know, if I go for it, like that person's going with me, right? So you're playing a show, there's two people there, but you're playing in the show. And I think it starts there for us. When you believe in what you're doing and you can cultivate people, you don't have to manufacture enthusiasm. It does come across as authentic. And that is where people start to like lean forward because that's at the core. Now, when you start talking about how do we create attention around that? Our macro vision is we're trying to make retail auto an industry that people fight to join.

 

Speaker 1 Yeah, I love that.

 

Speaker 2 It's not a reality right now, but I think there are enough people around here, especially here, that believe that should be true. When we were launching the new brand, we're like, okay, this is what this brand is about, a big goal. We are art kids too, so we're going to be a little bit outside the box. You have to break the mold because if it looks like anything else... This ties into AI quite a bit. AI is very good at getting better every day at creating videos and pictures and words and putting them together and coming up with good ideas. But what AI doesn't have and will never have is imagination. And I think that is where art comes in. AI will never be an artist because art comes from a soul. Art doesn't come from an algorithm. Art comes from the soul who has had experiences and believes in things and has had hurts and has pain, which is why so many people turn to art when they're broken and when they are hurting. It's why music makes people cry. AI music is not going to make people cry like human produced music makes people cry because something is in it. We have this thing we believe in and then we're like, how do we make it artful? How do we use imagination? Because a lot of the stuff that we created, we're always using AI tools to do this. But there's a difference between deploying an AI tool with an imaginative concept that is backed by actual passion. And then we just start to like deploy some good brand marketing practice. We're big on like the underground thing. We don't want to spend a lot of ad dollars. We want to organically throw a lot out into the world. And I think that's where people go wrong to get attention. They think like, we are going to have this one curated brand. We're going to this one, curated design esthetic, and we're going to go for it. And if you go back and you look at that stuff, it was all over the map. But the cool thing about it was, it all kind of had a thread. It was connected by a thread, and if you look at creative, I think it's going in that direction. Where if you want attention, you can't assume that you know what people like. And so we did a bunch of stuff. We used AI to deploy an imaginative thing to stack on top of a passion. And then when you get people together for us, getting people together is kind of like the special sauce. It's the hardest thing of all of that to do. And it takes the most work and intentionality. But it's the thing that gave you the impact that you feel. We had this live stream. We probably had 20 people come into town for it. 20 people. But you know what they did? Some people flew in. They brought brisket, right? We set up an environment even for 20 people. And we were like, this is going to be fun. Let's make it a big deal because the people that were there really believed in what we do. And even if it's a small group of people that believe in what you do, that's why it felt like a really big thing because to everyone in that room, it was a really big thing. And I think when you do that, and you're very clear about why you're doing it, it's like putting up a beacon. The other people, that reflects on, and they're like, I want to move closer to that beacon. And even it's broad like 50,000 people in this industry looking at it, but it's like hey look, if we get 5,000, if we have 1,000. I think it was Seth Godin, he's like, if you get 1,00 people that are fans and believe what you do, like that's the crux. And I think we've done that. We've built that over the last five years. We have definitely more than a thousand people are like I'm a ride or die with the More Than Cars mentality. So I know there's a lot there. And also, I believe dealerships can do this. I believe industry partners can do it. But it takes time, intentionality, work, and you're not going to do it in a prompt. You know what I mean?

 

Speaker 1 [00:19:47] Well yeah, and talk a little bit too about performance because I do you think that performance has a really big impact on how much people care. I think about your live stream. I mean, you guys ran through backstage, you ran through the doors for 20 people.

 

Speaker 2 [00:20:05] Oh yeah, performance.

 

Speaker 1 [00:20:07] Right. So you're performing, but you're doing it certainly because you're passionate, certainly for the people that came there, but also for the people that are watching or the people that are going to see a clip of it on LinkedIn later on. But you have to perform. You have to be on for anything to feel big. It can't be like, hey, we're here.

 

Speaker 2 [00:20:23] Unless you're a neurophysicist, right? Where you're trying to explain some intricacies. But guess what, if you had a neurophysicist that had a little bit of stagecraft, they would be super popular, and neurophysics would become super awesome. When people want to be entertained, and when they're on social media, sometimes they're looking for education, but people want to be entertained, so you have to be willing to say like, what makes people smile? Excitement is contagious. We're going to have the camera. We're going bust through the doors. Al went in there. He's like okay, here's what we're going to do. They're going roll up in an F-150 Lightning. These doors are going to bust open. And when they do, we are going to cheer like we just won the Super Bowl. And that's what we did. It just felt like a special moment there, but it felt even bigger if you were looking through the camera or looking through the screen. And I think until you experience that, you understand how that works, but most people feel like, well, I'm just here, I'm holding my phone, it's not a big deal. It's like, oh, no, no. It's like you move that camera in a certain way, and it's what they see. You have to understand what it translates to on the other side. So, yes, there's some performance and craft to it, but you need to do that if you're going to get attention, back to attention. But if it's tethered to a real belief, and it’s tethered to a really operational practice, that's where it makes a huge difference. And I think you can ask any dealership that does that well, and they'll tell you like, oh yeah, I mean, it might not happen immediately. It's different than spending 20 grand on auto trader ads or whatever ads you're spending money on. This takes a long time, and most people don't have the stomach for it. A lot of time could be six months. It could be two years. The people that are willing to put the time in and stay committed and learn and try… you can't replace what happens in that moment because the credibility that you gain, the connection that you gain with people doesn't dissipate. Like when an ad spend goes away, the value goes away with it. When you connect with people, and you tell stories, and you build brand… if you stop doing it would depreciate slowly. But the thing is, you're going to have your people committed to it in a way that they're going to perpetuate it. The best part is when your customers start defending you. You know, when I see people walking around with love people more than you love car shirts, I was like, oh yes. If I stop wearing this shirt, you still wear it, you know?

 

Speaker 1 [00:22:48] No, that's a good point. Do you have any examples of, as you're kind of talking and thinking through live events and whatnot, do you any examples of dealers that do these types of events just in their community, not at their store though. So, we're going to be at the local community center today, and we're doing this thing, whatever it is, financial literacy or whatever… are there any of those connection points that you've seen somebody execute really well that they've made feel like a bigger deal.

 

Speaker 2 Like that they've produced content around it?

 

Speaker 1 Yeah.

 

Speaker 2 [00:23:23] I mean, Mohawk Chevrolet does a great job. They do a fantastic job of showing what they're doing. Andy was very smart to shift his marketing strategy over to, we're going to make a lot of content. And it takes a lot a stomach to do that. He made that shift probably, I don't know, five years ago. And he will tell you it's the best decision he's ever made. A lot of people have seen that office mockumentary, the dealership. The reason that could be made, and he got a huge bump out of that and got huge national attention, and it really did great things for his commercial business because now people are paying attention. The only way they got to the point, it's easy to look at them like, oh my gosh, we can never like script and perform and shoot a thing like that. That started with one person talking to a camera, and that environment that was cultivated around that over three or four years produced an environment where that show was even given a chance. So, I think he does a good job of talking about what they're doing, and they do a lot in the community. They do live streams. They do radio shows. They do lots of this stuff. A person that does really well, his name's Patrick Abad, at Beaver Toyota, not as much from the content standpoint though, but more from actually doing the stuff. Now you start blending this with showing on video and through media what it is that you're doing… how do you get the impact out of it? Sometimes, we have a lot of generous people in this industry, and a lot of them don't want the credit for being generous

 

Speaker 1 [00:25:05] Yeah, you're right.

 

Speaker 2 [00:25:06] Right. That's something I hear more than not. You have to talk about what you do now. No, I don't want them. Finding a sweet spot in there where I think that generosity begets generosity, and I think talking about the things you're doing inspires other business leaders. Dealers are like, no, I don't want to like try to be the guy. But I think a dealer has a very unique opportunity, through talking about the things they're doing, the good things, the literacy, the financial, a lot of stuff going on with the technician training… I think that is a great platform to say to the other business leaders, you can do this too. That's why I think the auto industry should be the leader. I think they are the leader, but I don't think people necessarily see them as the leader in community like involvement and development and things like that.

 

Speaker 1 [00:25:50] No, that’s a good point. A lot of takeaways there. All right, I got to let you get back to your job. I could sit here and talk to you for like… we could go three hours.

 

Speaker 2 [00:25:58] I'm enjoying this. It's nice to just shoot the breeze. I do feel like everything's not existing around us. And then as soon as we stop, we're going to be like, oh yeah, there's 30,000 people in here milling about.

 

Speaker 1 [00:26:13] All right. Well, Paul, I can't say thank you enough for taking time off the floor to come sit with me and talk. It was a lot of fun. We'll do it again soon. And I'll see you I hope before ASOTU Con in May.

 

Speaker 2 I hope so too. It's truly my pleasure. Thanks.

 

Speaker 1 All right, thanks.