Adam Torres and Mets Kramer discuss the AED Summit.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Associated Equipment Distributor’s annual summit coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Mets Kramer, CEO & Founder at Vizybility DMS, explores Vizybility DMS and the Associated Equipment Distributor’s annual summit thanks to the support of our sponsor, Vanguard Captive Management.
About Mets Kramer
An experienced consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the construction equipment industry, he has held roles covering nearly all aspects of equipment dealer operations. Now, through coaching and team building, he collaborates with clients to develop key areas of their business and introduce new innovations. He believes that a strong focus on information and education is the most effective way to empower teams and support growth.
Speaking and teaching are among his passions, and he has presented at several key industry conferences, including, most recently, the IEDA conference.
About Vizybility DMS
Vizybility believes it is time for a DMS system that is not built on insecure legacy technology or outdated accounting platforms. Designed from the ground up in the cloud, Vizybility’s Dealer Management Software leverages modern technology to deliver a secure, user-friendly, and cost-effective solution for dealerships of any size.
Vizybility equips dealers in the construction equipment, crane and lift equipment, and commercial truck industries with the essential tools needed to streamline their operations.
Integrated with multiple platforms, Vizybility simplifies Finance, Digital Marketing, Sales, and Operations, making dealership management more efficient and effective.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, head on over to missionmatters. com to click on be our guest to apply. Today’s episode is sponsored to you and it comes to you from Vanguard Captive Management.
So you can learn more at vancap. com and my guest is Matt Kramer. Matt, welcome to the show. All right, thanks Adam. So Matt to talk about here today. We’ve been putting together a full series based on the AED conference, which I, or summit, which I was able to go out to , in Orlando as well.
And I understand that’s where we met you and VanCap sent us out there to go get some great content. So I’m glad to connect with you. And I want to learn more about visibility, DMS, your company, and really what you’re doing in the software industry to help the industry overall modernize.
But just to get us started here how did you get started in software? I’m curious about that. Like, where’d all the tech side come with from with you? Well, I tried to avoid it most of my career, but I keep getting stuck back into it. So I started as a management trainee in service at a cat dealership and this particular cat dealership had a very strong internal software The team, , they didn’t feel like sitting around waiting for a cat to supply something and typically found that they could build something faster and cheaper than, you know, trying to source it in the market.
And so as a young service supervisor, I got involved in one of their projects, a scheduling system. And then in my next role there, I took on contract management. And once again, I had to build software there. To do all the contract management. And so it always became sort of a secondary part of my primary role, which is in the dealership, but everywhere I went, it kind of followed me and the ability to just pull it over to together and build a product or build a, tool that we needed just kept happening.
So. 7 years ago, when I started consulting I ran into dealers that, aside from the help I could give them and how to run aspects of dealership or looking to problems with always. Well, we don’t have something that does this or this doesn’t integrate with that. And it just kind of came from there during cobit.
A couple of dealers approached me and said, look, we hate our old rental software. Can you replace it? And I said, sure. I’m sitting around doing nothing because it’s COVID. Um, So we got started and, and built this ability. it’s from the ground up. We didn’t take something that’s out there and then, you know, try and skin it or, build on top of some existing platform.
We just built it from scratch. Wow, that’s so interesting and could you maybe talk about the overall industry and kind of since you’ve been consulting or otherwise, even working there, like, where these loopholes tend to fall when it comes software and just in general that you’ve noticed one of the.
Things I’ve there’s probably 2 things that I’ve noticed that have led to this point. You know, that 1st project I mentioned where we built the contract management software. We sat around with the developer and brainstormed for a month or 2. and then he went away and for like 6 months and then he came back and he said, okay, I’ve got some basics going.
You can see something, in that time in 20 years, that process has been shortened to a matter of days, really, certainly no more than a week. If we have a new idea for a tool, we can typically build that in a week now. And so the idea that software should be expensive and time consuming and slow when you want to do your own that’s sort of wrong now.
Yeah. You can build faster, you can build faster than your purchase process. Now, there’s certainly lots of horror stories out there about people who go down this road without knowing the pitfalls and they fail to deliver something, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is now that straightforward.
And so this is sort of the sad part has been that. In the industry, we’re surrounded in it in general by a lot of legacy platforms that you don’t understand the core application anymore. They don’t have developers that understand the core code. And yet there’s so much built on top of it. They’re too scared to try and rebuild.
Take everything they know. And try and rebuild something new. And so, you know, that’s what we’ve been able to do. And that’s with the experience of seeing lots of places. It’s been really interesting to re teach people like our customers too. Like if you ask for something, then you can typically do it in a couple of days.
Not like six months. That’s an amazing story. Yeah, it’s a great story. And I’m curious about the AED, the AED Summit. Had you been there before? I know you’ve been in the industry a while. Or was that one of your first times? And by the way, , that was my first time and I was blown away. I had so much fun.
I met so many amazing people. I mean, that’s where we met you, of course. and we met a whole lot of others and , I’m just loving the industry and also covering it in these interviews. it’s a whole nother side of the platform that we’ve been building. And so again, going back to the question, that your first time at the AED summit?
Have you been there before? Oh, I’ve been there numerous times. I, used to attend just as a dealer member in the 10, the training sessions and the key, you know, the, the general sessions and to meet with some of my counterparts at other dealerships. Yeah, I’ve done that side of it. When I first started consulting 1 of my 1st gigs was a speaking in 1 of the.
Educational series called a strategic approach to sales, a granular data driven approach to sales and talking about how to use data in CRM. So I’ve done that side of it, and so now this showing up, this is only my second year at the AD Condex in the trade show component of it meeting dealers from the perspective of a software partner.
What do you think what makes the conference so special? And like, , what keeps you coming back? A , a lot of different things you could do. A lot of different conferences, a lot of things you could do with your time. What keeps you coming back? I mean, it is a place where you can sit and talk to people.
there’s a lot of different things going on at the same time, right? There’s OEMs meeting with their dealers. There are these training sessions and general sessions, and then there’s lots of mixers. To get a chance to talk to people and, you know, we tend to be pretty busy people especially the smaller dealers, I often have to put my, training session or something on hold because a customer walked in and someone’s going to walk in and deal with the customer, so it’s, it’s hard not to.
So I think this season, this, Early part of the year where there’s a couple of these shows is really the best chance to go out and talk to people and exchange ideas. Yeah, and I feel like it’s got to be for, reconnaissance for your products, for everything else. Like, how has that been received? This concept for visibility DMS of, of upgrading and of going forward with software.
Is that a message that’s really received or like, how does that go over? How does that message go over? I, think. There’s definitely some relief and interest that there is something new coming and that’s an exciting part. You know, you’ve always got to get over the hurdle of people believing that it’s real that we could do this in this kind of timeline.
But we’ve found, you know, dozens of dealers that are happy to give us a try and work with us. And we can also just start to change the perspective of what it means to have or acquire software. What software really is. And I think that AED is great for that in the sense that you can have that conversation, you know.
I actually trained a dealer before they went. To the conference and just put some ideas in their head and how to look at these kind of software tools with software platforms and how to evaluate, you know, what’s a good one with, you know, maybe not the best fit for them long term. So amazing. Last question here, Matt.
So visibility, DMS, this is a big entrepreneurial audience, entrepreneurial base, a lot of business owners that listen to this show. What’s your vision for the company going forward? Let’s stream. what’s the vision. My vision is really to try and change the perspective of that people in our industry have been trained by, which is this idea of sort of captive business systems.
Everything would be in your business system. Everything would be captive. Your data would be hard to get at. And that’s why we didn’t try and change. Like, we call ourselves visibility DMS. But really, we are DMP, we’re at Dino Manifold Platform, and we’re trying to introduce this idea that, you know, your information platform should be an open platform, where you own data, and you’re really looking at, what are the tools I need to plug into that platform for where I am with the business, and for various things.
Aspects or divisions or departments of the business, you know, because the demand of a tool is constantly changing. And so when you take this perspective that I need to be looking at software platforms that I can migrate things in and out of, I can connect other things, but I’ll always own my data, that’s what doesn’t bottleneck my business long term.
And that’s, really my long term goal is to To change that perspective, because so many people have been taught that, you know, you get this big system and then the data is hard to get. And, you know, things are hard to change. And that just doesn’t have to be that way. You know, if I have a dealer come to me and say, look, we’re, using HubSpot.
We really like it for its marketing capabilities. I say, great, like, let’s connect your core data to your HubSpot. So that at least it’s in sync. And everything you do there is accessible to the other tools who are trying to access the same data. Instead of saying, Oh, no, no, no, we’re like, we have a CRM, you should use our And everyone has different needs. When I was in contract management with CAT, I spoke at a bunch of CAT conferences. And I really learned that everyone has a different perspective and everyone has a different current focus. On what they’re trying to accomplish, you know, at my dealership, we were very mark focused full maintenance contracts.
And then we would talk to all these dealers like, oh, no, no, we don’t, that’s not our strategy. We want to do lots of PMs and we want to make sure that all the extra work we pick up, we can recognize that we’re getting that because we’re doing the PMs. And so everyone’s at a different place. They all have different business goals.
Amazing. Matt, if somebody’s listening or watching this and they want to follow up and they want to learn more about VisibilityDMS, how do they do that? I mean, we’re pretty straightforward to find online. Visibility is spelled funny with Z and a Y. And most people in the industry know me as well. I’m a member of AED, so it’s easy to find us there.
I’m also a member of IEDA, which is a smaller independent dealer association. So yeah and what we are trying to do is, you know, make information about this easier to find and understand what it is that the platform does rather than you force, a demo is the only way to find out anything.
It’s the analogous to the industry change. People research their software, their machines online and tend to call the dealer when they know exactly what machine they want to buy. When we’re trying to do the same thing, you’ll find that a lot of our information is available. You can see exactly what we’re doing, how it works, etc.
Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so you can connect with Mets and his team over at Visibility DMS. And just to remind everyone that today’s episode was sponsored by Vanguard Captive Management, which enables manufacturers of all sizes to harness the power of innovative captive equipment.
Finance strategies. So you can check them out at van cap. com. And if you’re a first time listener to mission matters, don’t forget, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and mess man been a lot of fun next year, I already know I’m going to the ad summit again, and next time we’re going to meet in person, man. Good to meet you. Yeah, come play some Super Mario. Alright, yeah.