Never Quit: Chris Miller’s Business, Boxing, and Addiction Recovery Journey | Auto Industry Series

Intro: Welcome to another edition of Inspired Stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes how they’ve overcome adversity and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti: Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Kodespode and today’s guest is Chris Miller, President of Dutch Miller Auto Group, a collection of 13 different car dealerships across West Virginia. We’ll hear how Chris’s grandfather overcame a tough childhood to find his way into the car business. We’ll also get to hear about Chris overcoming struggles of his own and how he and his brother grew the business from two to 13 dealerships in the past 10 years. And he’s not just a leader in the car industry.

In 2022 he was rated number one in the country by USA Boxing for his weight class in age division. They own 26 different businesses, not all of them in the car industry, and Chris recently ran for Governor of West Virginia and he plans to run again and win. Now before we get into all this good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, the Ad Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our proprietary programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at adbackbenefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the President of Dutch Miller Auto Group. Chris Miller, I appreciate you making the time to share your story today. Take a look, Pink, to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun. All right. So, Chris, let’s dive in with the story of your grandfather, Dutch. Was this a guy predestined for success, smartest kid in the class?

Chris Miller: Absolutely not. My grandfather was born on a dirt floor in Bear Creek, Kentucky. And when he was five, his mom died and his dad remarried. And Dutch’s new mom didn’t want him.

And so they sent him away to live with his sister, who was 18. And so the only thing he knew was death and abandonment from the time he was a kid. He was also dyslexic, and that was kind of back before they really figured out exactly what that was, and so he had a learning disability.

And so they just told him he was dumb, all throughout school. He was really athletic and charismatic and used his personality to make his way through stuff. And then when World War II popped up, he decided he was going to fight for his country. And the Marine Corps figured out that he was way smarter than anybody realized, and they taught him how to fly airplanes. So he flew for the Black Sheep Squadron during World War II and the Korean War, which was a legendary fighter pilot group that were the renegades. They were the ones that could do the stuff with the airplanes nobody else could do, and kind of marched to the beat of their own drum.

And we’re a, I don’t want to call it a ragtag militia. These guys were really, really smart, really, really aggressive, incredible pilots that made waves in World War II and the Korean War. They were known throughout the Pacific as being just absolutely feared by anybody that came across. My grandfather fought in World War II in the Korean War, and then came back home and met my grandmother. And she was, you know, interesting history of acting and modeling in New York City, but she was an Ashland, Kentucky girl named Betty Ann Sheets. And her parents owned a car dealership. Her dad owned a dealership in Ashland, Kentucky. So the first thing that her parents told her was, you know, whatever you do, don’t you date that Dutch miller. So she started dating my grandfather.

And then the next thing, you know, they got married and Dutch didn’t want to work for his father-in-law. So he went across the river from Ashland, Kentucky to Huntington and started working at Roger Dean Chevrolet, worked his way up from sales to management, then eventually general management. And we got our shot moving into the automotive space and owning car dealerships because Roger Dean wanted to buy stores in Florida.

And General Motors said, that’s fine, but you need to sell this store to Dutch. And so he is my grandfather. There’s also the only guy to ever buy out Roger Dean.

And Roger Dean’s long gone passed away. It was a mega dealer in Florida for a long time. So that’s how we got into the family business. That’s how Dutch Miller Chevrolet started, which is the flagship store for our group. And, you know, we’ve been in the business ever since that was 1963.

Anthony Codispoti: Wow. What a fun story. What a neat background of your grandfather, that trajectory he took into the military and sort of took that for somebody else to discover how bright he was and where some of, you know, some of his talents had kind of been hidden by the fact that, you know, he was dealing with dyslexia, which was largely misunderstood at the time.

Chris Miller: Incredibly so. Yeah. And it all worked out in the long run, right? But it’s the whole fall down seven times stand up eight thing. And that’s kind of, in my opinion, the essence to life is to never, ever, ever quit.

Anthony Codispoti: So the business went from your grandfather to next generation. And were you and your brothers working at the dealerships from a young age?

Chris Miller: No, we did eventually. I’ve been working since I was 10 and a half years old. When I was 10 and a half, I told my dad I wanted to pair Air Jordan tennis shoes.

And when he found out they cost $125, he told me to get a job. The only job I could find was the paper route. And so woke up every single morning, delivered newspapers, didn’t have as rainy or sleeting or snow outside. You had to get the job done and did that for two and a half years. Eventually did start working in the family business.

My dad, my dad had me and my brother going to 20 group meetings from the time that we were kids. And so we would sit in these meetings and just, I guess, learn stuff through osmosis. Because when you’re, you know, when you’re 12 years old, you don’t necessarily understand the financial statement of the business. But you learn stuff and you pick up stuff and you hear things. Eventually as well, I started selling cars. I got to rewind real quick because I did some other stuff before we got into the car business.

Right. Let’s hear it. My parents bought a farm. My dad decided that he wanted to teach me and my brother what real manual labor was like. And so my dad bought a farm and put bison on it. And my brother and I worked every summer from the time I was 14 until the time I was 18, doing manual labor on a farm.

And we built the entire infrastructure for this thing from, you know, running barbed wire fence all around 500 acres to building, you know, wooden fences to cutting down locus trees and skinning them and curing to make fence post corners. And I don’t know if you’ve ever done that or not, but anybody that’s listening to mess around with wood. Locust is an incredibly dense hardwood. And it makes the absolute best fence post corners you will ever find. But you have to let it cure and then skin it, take the bark off. And when you take the bark off, it’s got this layer of slime underneath it that smells like sewer and it gets all over the place. It’s awful. But those fence post corners are still there today. And this is back in the, you know, mid 90s when we were doing this stuff.

Anthony Codispoti: And your father, I’m going to guess, like he wanted you to learn the value of this manual labor so that you weren’t just sort of handed, you know, the dealership, the family business, and not understand the value of hard work.

Chris Miller: There’s no doubt that that was part of the method to the madness. The other part is I’m a pretty high energy guy to begin with. And I think it was kind of exploiting that. My brother’s similar and he, you know, turned us loose. We got stuff done, man. We worked eight, nine hours a day every single summer, Monday through Friday, just on that farm. And our friends would come up and help with us sometimes if they needed extra money. They’d come work for a week and we’re exhausted afterwards. But it, you know, became a family affair too. We still have this bison farm and still go worm, bison, quarterly as a family. Wow.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah. So was a lots of hard physical labor there in your teenage years. When did you get involved in boxing? Because I’m going to guess this would have been really good training, physical training.

Chris Miller: Boxing is always, yeah, boxing has always been a part of our family. My dad was a boxer. My uncle was a boxer. My grandfather, Dutch was a boxer and also a golden gloves announcer.

He just had this legendary voice and the golden gloves used him for years to announce boxing matches. So boxing has always been a part of our family. And I always, you know, we always played around. We were always kind of gritty. I mean, I was always a tougher kid and was never shy from anything. And later on, I got into boxing.

I had lots of experience because when you, when you’re a kid and you’re learning from, you know, when you’re five years old, you’re hitting the myths with your dad, you know, you pick some of this stuff up through osmosis. And so when I did finally start competing later on in life, it was because I’d realized, man, you only go around the sun so many times and why in the world would you want to say what is? Because I’ve been a huge boxing fan my entire life. And so I found out there was a master’s division in USA boxing for 35 and up. And that’s when I started competing.

Anthony Codispoti: Not until you were 35. Correct. You hadn’t done it up until that point. Okay. Correct.

Chris Miller: And I think I really started competing when I was about 38 or 39. But, you know, regardless, like that, that’s what I started doing.

Anthony Codispoti: And absolutely. I mean, that’s a pretty, that’s a pretty quick, because we were saying you were at one point, the top rated boxer in your age and weight class, like to not even have started until you were age 35 and reach that, that’s a pretty fast process.

Chris Miller: The muscle memory thing, the fact that I’ve been doing it from the time that I was a kid, that always helps. I just never really competed or trained. And there’s a difference between knowing how to box and then actually training and competing.

There’s a difference. And you have to get yourself an incredible shape. And that’s the funnest thing about boxing to me is that the discipline in managing your weight, getting into incredible shape, it’s what wins fights quite frankly. You can fight someone that is way more talented than you. But because you have an aerobic capacity, they can take him into deep waters and drown him in the later rounds.

And that was always one of my strategies. So high energy, relentless work rate, and just go, go, go, go, go, go. I can’t tell you how many fights I’ve won just because I was in better shape than the other guy.

Anthony Codispoti: You were just able to take more punches, huh?

Chris Miller: Yeah, keep moving, right? Because part of the thing in boxing is you don’t want to get hit. So it takes a lot of effort and energy in your legs and in your cardiovascular system to keep moving your head to avoid getting punched. And so yeah, I’ve got a chin. I can take a knock or two. But I use my brain for a living, so I don’t want to damage it too much.

Anthony Codispoti: So did you hang up the gloves eventually or are you still competing at all?

Chris Miller: That is a topic of discussion in our family as we speak. And I’m married, right? I’ve been married for over 20 years to a fantastic woman. We have three kids.

I’ve got a, what is now a 17-year-old son, a 15-year-old son, and then a 12-year-old daughter, who I think we’re all going to wind up working for one of these days. But my wife is my favorite person on planet Earth, and she’s also one of the reasons why I’m sober to this day. And I should have been married for 20 years, but my first year of marriage, I had to choose between drugs and alcohol and my wife.

And it was a very direct decision. And so I locked myself in my apartment for two weeks, went through the detox and everything. And then it was a struggle for about a year and a half because you mess with your brain when you’re using narcotics and drinking alcohol and excess. And it takes an adjustment. Your body’s got to learn how to recalibrate itself. And that’s kind of hard too, because up until you get right in the mind where you don’t have to worry about ever using again, there’s all these fears because you get temptations coming from everywhere. You have to remain incredibly disciplined and incredibly hard headed up until you figure out that you’ve got it all under control. And it took me about a year and a half or two years.

Anthony Codispoti: So can we talk about a little bit about maybe what led you there? Like were you like a party guy? Were you trying to cover up some internal pain? Did it just kind of come on without like slowly without sort of like realizing where you were going with all this?

Chris Miller: I think it’s genetic and it’s personality driven. If I’m being totally honest, I’m probably a dopamine junkie. And I’m good at math, good at risk mitigation and calculation. And that’s one of the things in business that I’m always go, go, go, go, go, go, do, do, do. Part of that is probably the dopamine junkie in me. But that’s also the same reason why in my 40s running a bunch of businesses, I’m getting in the ring and fighting people because it is the greatest rush I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. It is greater than any high I’ve ever experienced. There’s something about the adrenaline rush and the incredible focus that you have to have when you’re in there in that ring. That it it’s awesome like nothing else.

Anthony Codispoti: But even with somebody pounding your head, like it’s still like you’re loving this. Absolutely.

Chris Miller: It is the greatest rush ever. But that’s also my personality, right? And it’s also why I got addicted to drugs and alcohol pretty quickly. So I have that go, go, go kind of personality. And if one beer was great and 36 had to be fantastic. And the next thing I’d be running down Fourth Avenue in the Leopard Print Thong Streaming Anarch. Bad combination. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: And so at some point your wife said, hey, you got to choose here. Yeah.

Chris Miller: And my wife, I’d love for you to meet her one of these days, but she’s very, very strong willed, but also has a unique way about her. And she didn’t ever give me that definitive deadline. She did not say, this is it. And it took me, what happened was that she actually pulled me out of a bar one night. And I told her I was going out, she was teaching, I was working. I told her I was just going to go out and sing karaoke and not drink at all.

Of course, lying through my teeth, because that’s what addicts do. And I went to a bar and started drinking. And she just had that suspicion, that instinct. And she found me and walked into the bar and looked at me and said, I thought she weren’t going to drink. And I looked back at her and I said, well, those aren’t mine. And then that thing in my head clicked and I was like, wait a minute, man, you just lied to the most important person in your life over a liquid.

A liquid. And that was the moment in my head that I knew that I had to stop. And I stopped that day. And that was April 1st of 2004. And I haven’t had a drink since.

Anthony Codispoti: And so you did this detox at home? Yeah, I did. With some assistance or because I mean, what I’ve heard, like that’s a pretty brutal process.

Chris Miller: Can be. So I never really used drugs unless alcohol was involved. I never just sought them out. But it was always the catalyst. If I boil it down to what it was, alcohol is always the problem. And I just did what I know how to do, which is, okay, let’s beat this. And it’s all in the mind. And went through the whole process. By yourself?

Yeah. With your wife? She would wake up and check on me, go to work.

She taught, come home, check on me. And it was kind of funny because you think about it, alcohol really turns into sugar in the bloodstream. So those next two years or so, I had this crazy affinity for drinking vanilla pepsis. And I probably put on 10 or 15 pounds because I had this rampant sugar craving.

And at that time, I didn’t correlate what was really happening inside of my body with it. But all I know is that I had to have something sweet. I got to have something sweet. So I started drinking massive amounts of Pepsi and vanilla Pepsi in particular, for some reason, I liked that a lot. And then a couple of years later, I was like, okay, enough of this. You’re drinking six or seven of these a day. That’s a problem.

Anthony Codispoti: So cut that one out. So for that year and a half after you went through detox and you talked about it being pretty rough, what helped you through that? Who were you able to lean on? What processes or help groups or what did that process look like for you?

Chris Miller: My uncle is an alcoholic and an addict as well. And so I had him to kind of rely on and talk to him through things. And he tried and tried and tried to get me to go to meetings and I just never would. In my mind, in AA, you have to first admit that you are powerless over your addiction and you have to surrender yourself to God.

And that is the only way that you can then gain control over the addictive substances that run your life. And I was at the point in time and the whole God conversation, separate conversation. But at that point in time, in my life, I thought, well, that doesn’t make sense to me because the only person that’s going to be in charge of this is the end of the day is me. And I don’t want to go listen to a bunch of people make excuses about stuff because I need to hold myself accountable for my behavior. And so I didn’t do the AA thing.

And looking back, I don’t think it would have hurt because having a place to go and talk about things and camaraderie and realizing that what you’re going through that’s not unique to you is beneficial to people when it comes to healing and actually getting a handle on stuff. But I didn’t. And I just, it didn’t make sense logically in my mind that progression. And so I thought, uh-uh, no, I’m not doing that.

Anthony Codispoti: I’m in charge. I do have control over this. I’m going to fight it and I’m going to be the one who beats it. Exactly right.

Chris Miller: And I literally believe that we’re living in a time right now as well where we’re taught that something happens and your emotional reaction is okay and justified because it’s the trigger that caused it. And I think that that’s leading to like creating a culture and a way of living that makes people addicted to their own emotions. And that’s another form of an addiction. And literally at the end of the day, we can, the only thing that we can control are our own thoughts and our own feelings.

We’re not taught that, but it’s the truth. And there’s a chemical process that happens inside of the body to elicit every single emotion in some way, shape, or form. Hypothalamus produces peptides that then rush into the bloodstream, bind with cells, that creates that particular reaction. That’s kind of the overgeneralized process behind it, but it is the exact same thing with addiction.

And the more that you do something, the more that your cells are prone to have the receptor sites of those particular peptides as they grow, then the more you’re prone to have those particular emotions. And I’d rather control that. So I can’t stop what you’re doing. I can’t control what you’re thinking, control what you’re doing, but I can inside of my own body.

Anthony Codispoti: And you can’t, you can’t control if I cut you off in traffic. Nope. You can control what your reaction is to that. Exactly. And so what are the techniques that you’ve employed to help steer your reaction to outside events?

Chris Miller: Boy, that takes a lot of work and a lot of practice in having to be very, very honest with yourself, because I think we all kind of innately deceive ourselves in our minds sometimes. And you have to be really brutally honest with why you’re feeling a certain way and understanding it before you can even correct it or fix it. But it takes a lot of awareness and work. It’s not something that happens with a snap of the finger and then all of a sudden ban.

I’m now a stoic. Doesn’t work that way. It takes just like business, right? Just like anything else that you’re doing in life. It takes constant work and focus for it to be effective.

Anthony Codispoti: Everything is a process, right? Everything is. Personal development, recovering from an addiction, building a business. A lot of people from the outside look in and they think it’s a flip of a switch, right? Oh, look at Chris. He owns all these car dealerships. Like he just overnight, he just, everything was successful. Nope.

There was a lot of work that went to get there. Oh, look, Chris, he used to have a problem with substances, flipped a switch and now he’s off. No, they don’t see the in between, right? There’s a lot of work that goes into it.

Chris Miller: When it comes to work, the 14, 15 hour days, I can’t tell you how many times, when the recession hit in 2008, how many times I cut my pay just to make sure that all my people, I mean, I could make payroll and pay all my people. There’s a lot of discipline and sacrifice that goes on behind the scenes to get stuff done. Then the other thing is it takes a lot of resources to actually open a business, get it operating, cash flow a business and make them functionally run. And so it doesn’t come from the sky.

You’ve got to actually create that some way to then have the option to do it. So, man, one of the most memorable times I had in the business or just in business in general was operating car dealerships through the recession in 2008 because it teaches you, like it’s the hard things that teach you the best lessons. And one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned in business is learning how to manage to cash in a recession. And when you make every single decision managing to cash, the business always operates better, but sometimes doing that, they’re not easy decisions.

It’s everything goes, what does this do to the cash position? Why is this the right thing to do? And through that process, you learn a lot of stuff like how to staff apartments, how to create pay plans that are directly tied to human behavior to make sure that the people that are doing a good job are rewarded the right way. It teaches you how to perfect just every single step in the process when it comes to paperwork.

Because in our business, we’re dealing with banks, you have to perfect lanes, you’re dealing with titles. You think about one $50,000 car that you’re selling. And you might make $2,000 off of that. You also have a trade-in that’s worth $20,000 and it’s got to pay off of $25,000. So that one transaction, because it’s $50,000 and a payoff of $25,000, I’m shucking and jiving around $75,000 in cash. Plus making sure the taxes are all paid, all the fees are paid and everything like that, just to perfect lanes and secure one transaction to make $2,000.

So there’s a complicated little dance there and you have to dial that system in very, very quickly because you can’t wait and be hanging because you missed a document and don’t get your $75,000 back. So some of the best experiences I’ve ever learned in business came from managing through really hard times.

Anthony Codispoti: Was there ever any thought that you might have to close up shop? No. Okay. No. It wasn’t an option. It was not an option. Don’t like to fail. Don’t like to lose. You had employees who were counting on you. Exactly. You had your own family that was counting on you to provide.

Chris Miller: Yeah, exactly right. And the challenge, right? There’s something about the challenge that’s just a lot of fun. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti: When did you get, Chris, your first opportunity to own a dealership? 2008. Right in the recession. Right in the recession.

Chris Miller: It’s kind of funny how that worked out. We had a Kia dealership in Barborsville, West Virginia and we were in the middle of buying a Hyundai store, me, my brother and my dad, in Charlotte, North Carolina. And Wacoby was right there in Charlotte and that day they announced the whole Wacoby, if you ask, go in the Wells Fargo thing and the bottom dropped out. And we had discovered the business we were buying, we weren’t given honest information during due diligence. We figured that out and so we backed out of that deal and came back up and had a general manager at our Barborsville location that resided. And so I was running our Chevrolet Hyundai store and used car department at that time and told my dad, I want to go fix that Kia store but I want to shot an ownership. Well, because of the recession and the position that we were in with the businesses, the value had been diminished to the point where I was able to buy 24.5% of the stock for a very small amount of money. And I say small amount of money for me at that point in time, coming up with $15,000 or whatever it was, was a lot of money.

But everything has to be legal and done the appropriate way. So I acquired the stock and went up there and started running it. I think my dad loved the fact that I was ready to take a risk and take on a challenge. And then through a lot of work and blood, sweat and tears, we created a team that then turned that Kia dealership into one of the most, one of the highest market penetrations with Kia in the country. There was a point in time in Barborsville, West Virginia, we sold more Kia Sorrento’s than any other dealership in the country. Why?

Anthony Codispoti: How? What were you doing? It’s always about the people.

Chris Miller: It is always about the people. It is always about the team that you’re able to put together and the people that you’re privileged enough to work with. And when you create the right synergy with the right leadership and the right mindset, that’s when the magic happens. And I was selling 120 Kias a month and another 60 to 80 used cars on a regular basis out of a small Kia dealership in Barborsville, West Virginia. Went through the recession, learned a lot about real management and then built a team.

And we turned it into a monster. And it was the creation of that in several years of managing those businesses that put us in a position where we can start buying dealerships and growing and expanding.

Anthony Codispoti: So I want to peel back the layer of the onion here just a little bit because, you know, there are a lot of people who might have been in a position where they get their first shot at owning a business and, man, they’re hit with some headwinds like you were with.

And something that was totally out of your control with like the recession. And they may have just looked at that and thrown their arms up and be like, well, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be throw in the towel. But as I’m hearing you talk, you’re like, no, that was never even a consideration.

It wasn’t an option. I’m curious if there’s a way to sort of quantify where that sense of your being comes from. Is it something that you were born with? Is it something that was taught through, you know, your upbringing? Was it the hardship of going through, you know, overcoming the addiction? Like not everybody would have been in that spot and decided to persevere and push through and do the hard work?

Chris Miller: I’ve never been asked that question before in my life and that’s interesting. I think it’s a combination of all three of those things. You know, it’s personality, it’s upbringing, it’s circumstance and a lot of hard work.

But I don’t want to say I’m a lost for words, but I don’t… It’s a mindset thing. It’s a mindset thing. I’ve met a lot of incredibly brilliant, smart people that, you know, they might be able to do a, you know, write an incredible research paper on chemistry, but can’t do that kind of stuff because that’s not either A, what they’re wired for or B, um, don’t really understand the risks. And I’ve seen people over and over and over again, really, really smart people talk them out of doing something. They will talk themselves out of doing something because of the risks or the potential possibilities. And yeah, risks exist in anything that you do, but the idea is to create a plan and to work incredibly hard to minimize all of those risks. This is risk. I mean, we can walk out in the street and get hit by a car tomorrow. There’s a risk.

There’s a risk in putting on your shoes and going outside every day. It doesn’t stop people though, but there’s something about really doing the hard things, though, that some people just don’t want to do. Working 15 hours in a day is hard, over and over and over again. It’s hard. But if that’s what you have to do to win at that point in time, that’s what I’m going to do.

Anthony Codispoti: So talk me through a little bit about how you guys grew so quickly. There were like one or two dealerships in the family and you guys are now at 13 and sort of a span of 10 years. Is that right?

Chris Miller: So yeah, we’ve done all that without private equity or any sort of financial backing either. And we have a really simple principle of philosophy and that is pay your people well, staff each department like it’s one man short and when it gets to be two men short, that’s when you add a person. And manage your expenses. Don’t overpay yourself.

A lot of car dealers live luxurious lifestyles. We don’t do that. We don’t overpay ourselves. We keep all the money in the business. And then that put us in a position to grow. And we did it with conventional banking and good old fashioned elbow grease. But we are living through the age of the death of the mom and the pop car dealer as well, which is interesting.

Why is that happening? Lots of factors. Each manufacturer has capitalization requirements for owning a car dealership. So not only do you have to be an experienced car dealer and you have to go through an approval process with the manufacturer to actually get a dealership. And that’s after you buy it, by the way.

So you have to pay for it and have expertise to do it. And the prices of everything keep increasing. All the regulations and stuff that we put on cars that have made them safer and also more efficient, dramatically drive up the price. And then all the inflation and everything else that’s been baked into our system over a long period of time, drive up the price.

The capital requirements from the manufacturer are formula. And so as the cost of cars goes up, the amount of cash that you have to have that you’re required to have to run the car dealership also goes up. And so that’s kind of what has pushed out the mom and the pop car dealers.

The other thing that has is you’ve got private equity and a lot of publicly traded companies that have professionalized the automotive industry itself. And they’re flushed with cash. And they can make, a couple of years ago, they can make 3% in the money market account or make 4% of sales owning a car dealership and owning the real estate. And in theory, make 4% in sales. But you got to be good to do that. And it takes a lot of work and so there’s always mistakes that happen along the way.

But that’s the gist of the mathematical equation and why that’s happened. So you’ve got all these big, huge publicly traded companies and these big groups going in and acquiring all these things. So guys like me have to be very, very smart because I can’t compete with paying seven times earnings on something.

So we’ve got to be smart about it. And we’ve done it with, I don’t like to be beholden to anybody. And so we have a great banking relationship, but I’m not beholden to private equity. I’m not beholden to any bankers. I’m not beholden to anybody at all. And I get to have the autonomy and the free will to do this stuff on my own. And I’d rather do that than I could go buy 10 more car dealerships tomorrow with somebody else’s money. I don’t want to do that. That’s just me.

Anthony Codispoti: Are you looking? Are there growth opportunities?

Chris Miller: Yeah. Always and yes. Always looking at the right market. And the other thing you really have to do to grow is you have to have people. You have to have people that you can trust that understand how you do things and understand the why behind what we’re doing. And it is always the people that make a business successful.

Anthony Codispoti: So what’s your secret to finding and holding on to good folks? Don’t be a dickhead.

Chris Miller: Be good to people, man, and take care of them and listen to them. You gotta make tough decisions sometimes, but when you set it up the right way, those tough decisions are evident playing this day. You have to have expectations.

You have to manage the expectations, but you’ve got to be good to people. And I do believe that we’re moving into a time of what I kind of call capitalism 2.0, which is, you know, from my perspective, no business is a business is only as good as the people that are in it. And it is a privilege to run that business. And it is also directly attached to any sort of community that that business is in. And that business also has a moral and a social obligation to use its growth and its revenue to help make the community that it’s privileged enough to do business and better. And that’s just kind of how I see it all. So we’re very, very active and heavily involved in all the communities that we’re a part of. It’s just the way it should be, man.

Anthony Codispoti: You know, are there many opportunities that come available in the auto space? Always.

Chris Miller: Yeah. Always. They’re always popping up all of the time, and you’ve got to evaluate them the right way and do what’s, you know, right for you. You’ve got to have the people in place. You have to have the resources to acquire it. You also have to have the connections. You have to have the strategy getting yes to a 70 million dollar deal. You know, there’s a there’s a science behind it, and there’s an art to it too.

So I’m always looking. We are in the middle of a couple of them right now that are turning out to probably work out, and it’s going to be a lot of fun over the next couple of years too. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti: I understand you’ve got interesting take on monetary theory. What’s that?

Chris Miller: Okay. So follow me here. A couple of months ago, you remember when the Federal Reserve cut rates and by 50 basis points and then rates went up? Well, here’s how that happens. The Federal Reserve sets a rate target, and then they buy and sell 10 year Treasury securities to get to that market rate.

And so they control the supply and demands to make sure that the overall return that they want to pay is there. Well, why in the world did that not happen? There are two things that occurred. One, the Chinese were dumping Treasury securities because they need cash. They need cash big time. Their one child policy has put them in a declining population scenario, but they have GDP reporting and growth that they have to constantly manage maintain where it affects a lot of stuff.

And so the amount of productivity per person that they’re going to have to maintain just to stay stable is ungodly. And the Chinese are different than us. You know, America’s founded on these Judeo-Christian principles and it functions into our reasoning. The Chinese are different. They kind of think that they’re the center of the universe. And it’s like, if I am strong and you are weak, I am right and you are wrong.

Therefore, anything I do to you, you can’t stop me from, is righteous. It’s just a different mindset. And you might want to fact check this one, but I don’t think that there is a word for liar and Mandarin. Like there’s something about that culture where everybody just lies.

It’s just part of the expectation. So the Chinese have been stoking some stuff geopolitically because they have to, because their backs are up against the wall. And the other funny thing is that the Chinese calculate their GDP like Enron estimated earnings.

Kind of the only way I know to summarize that. Enron used something called mark the market or look the book accounting. And so they’ve created a power plan in India, book all the profits, stock prices go crazy. And then they’d start building it and then amortizing off the difference. And so then they just throw two more projects on the book.

Anthony Codispoti: They started to book the profits before they were even built the facility.

Chris Miller: That’s how Enron did what they did. So that’s how the Chinese calculate their GDP. In the United States, we calculated on the sale. China, they calculated on the value of the built. So they’ve got all of these other institutional issues. So back to the monetary theory thing. China’s one thing. Investors around the world in the United States were going because of all the inflation. The United States, the Treasury, Security, Steel, the safest investment on planet Earth is backed by the sanctity of the United States government.

Yes. But with all the inflation and all the national debt, we’re just not interested in that kind of return. It’s just not good enough for us. So that’s one of the things that’s happening. Most of the time when the Fed cuts rates sets that target and then they can’t effectively do that, those are indicative signs of a recession or depression. Could be scary things, but the dollar is still incredibly strong, which is fascinating. And the Chinese, by the way, also are doing everything they can to remove the dollar as the reserve currencies of the world and the petro dollar.

And that’s deliberate strategic as well. But back to America. I think that Bitcoin is definitely going to be a major player in the economy globally moving forward. And it’s because what I’ve seen is that the dollar is a fiat currency.

There’s no more gold standard at all. And it’s backed by the belief in the United States government. And in a world of cow pies, the United States of America is still the best patty on the field. But we have all of this debt. We’ve got about 40 trillion in debt. And that doesn’t even include the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security Trust Fund and the Medicare Trust Fund. So Social Security, a bunch of boomers retiring, less people my age paying into the system, eventually gets upside down and you start paying out more in benefits than you’re bringing in in taxes. And that over the next 20 years is going to turn into probably another 45 to 50 trillion dollars in insolvency. And it’s the same thing with Medicare. And those numbers are probably going to be even bigger. And so there’s some structural stuff.

We’re in great shape compared to the rest of the world. There’s some structural stuff we’re going to have to deal with. And Bitcoin, I think, is turning into something that is nothing more than a commodity that is gauged on potential for inflation, relationship of the dollar to the rest of the world in gold, and in particular, the money supply and the money velocity inside of the United States.

And it’s kind of going to just be like pork belly or soy or corn. And it’s just another commodity that’s used to hedge against anything with the future. And it’s built on an incredibly fascinating technology, the blockchain is fascinating, because it’s secure. And at least before artificial intelligence breaks apart. But I do think that we’re in this really interesting time financially where particular cryptocurrencies are going to be of very impactful value because of what’s happening with the United States economy. But at the same time, the rest of the world isn’t going to be able to keep up. So that’s my…

Anthony Codispoti: So some people get really excited about Bitcoin and Ethereum and some of these other digital currencies. Some people are still naysayers and say, well, they’re just speculative things. It’s sort of like the tulip craze that the Dutch back hundreds of years ago. There’s no practical value to them. And you’re clearly in the one camp that says, no, there’s use here.

This is going somewhere good. I hear your point about the commodities. And this is something that people invest in. They trade in and it’s sort of a signal of what’s going on in the bigger economy. Do you also see there being more everyday real world practical uses of these different digital currencies and the underlying blockchain technology?

Chris Miller: I think a lot of the digital currencies are just nothing more than like pyramid schemes. And if you look at how they’re designed, they just are. The fascinating thing about Bitcoin is that there’s a finite number of tokens that will ever be produced. There’s a finite number of Bitcoin. So there’s rarity or scarcity. And that also plays a part in its value. But what is the dollar?

It’s perception and values, all that it is. And as long as the world and or any market sees perception and value in something, because of a devaluing of something else, then it’s going to grow. And so it’s nothing more than another hedged vehicle against what’s happening with the current state of the economy. And that really is what Bitcoin is. A lot of the other cryptocurrencies, there are a couple of them that are interesting, but they don’t excite me in the same way that Bitcoin does because there’s a finite number of them.

Anthony Codispoti: And it’s that scarcity that gets you particularly excited about this.

Chris Miller: Being built on the blockchain as well is very appealing because it’s secure and it’s impossible at least at this point in stage and technology to reverse or change that at all. And every single transaction is recorded in instantaneous time. So with cell phones and all of this digital ability we have nowadays, Bitcoin will be something you can use anywhere to bypass exchanges and stuff. Remember, think about traveling to Europe in the 80s.

You either had to buy pounds here in the United States and take them over with you or take your cash and exchange them or do it through American Express. But there was always a scoop that happens, right? Coming and going, there’s always commissions that have to be paid to do that. So you’re never with the same exact value. And if I look at any sort of successful technology, any sort of successful anything, they solve problems. And what Bitcoin does is solves a problem of taking out the middle man. And so it’s directly through you and me. And so we use our phones to actually exchange a fraction of the Bitcoin immediately. So that’s the problem that I think Bitcoin has solved. And it’s one of the interesting things that’s going to legislative changes can happen. Regulatory environments can change. But it’s kind of tough to regulate that, aside from just telling people it’s illegal to hold it. And good luck with that. So back to the whole, I don’t like people telling me what to do. It’s one of the other things that I’m kind of…

Anthony Codispoti: There’s a common thread here, we’re weaving through the story. So, Chris, you’ve got 26 businesses. There’s 13 car dealerships. There’s a bison farm. Any others that are worth kind of mentioning here?

Chris Miller: We’re in insurance and reinsurance. I’ve got a data company as well that don’t let that fool you. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got a whole bunch of guys in a big room analyzing that all the time. It’s actually kind of easy to do nowadays. You can figure out trends just by finding the data, knowing how to buy it or acquire it, and extracting it and assimilating it.

And so this data company that I’ve got, we kind of use it for digital marketing and that kind of stuff. But it’s taught us a lot of things too. And there’s… We’re in the middle of a demographic shift in our country. And it happened because of the pandemic. Anytime throughout history, there’s been a pandemic. It doesn’t matter if it’s influenza, bubonic plague, or the Spanish flu, 1919, yada, yada, yada. It’s all the same thing.

You get a ruling government entity that creates a set of guidelines that human beings have to respond to. And so what happened during the pandemic was we locked a bunch of people down in urban areas surrounded by concrete, and they couldn’t go to church. They couldn’t go to the gym. They couldn’t get their hair cut. They couldn’t go to comedy shows. They couldn’t see their friends and their family.

You have to be mashed up. It made people really uneasy because that’s not natural for, you know, humans. I mean, we learn more interacting with people directly one-on-one than we do anywhere else. One, but we are very social creatures. We’re social by survival mechanisms. I mean, we gathered in groups of 50 when, you know, we were out competing within the Anderthals, and that’s kind of how we were able to outcompete them.

And it’s that unique kind of tribal collection that is, you know, part of humanity, and you can’t take people away from that. So locking them all down in urban areas surrounded by concrete made them uneasy. And so there’s some social and some cultural stuff that’s driving the movement.

There’s also economic stuff that’s driving the movement. So three of the four fastest growing states post-pandemic or Tennessee, Texas, and Florida, and they all have one thing in common, that’s a zero state income tax. The Trump tax cuts got rid of the salt deductions. And so it used to be that you could deduct all your state level taxes from your federal ticket before you sent your check in. Well, the rates went down, but all those deductions went away. And so it states very, very high tax states.

It became even less appealing to live in them from a financial standpoint. And then, like kind of seen it with this most recent election, but getting to the social and cultural stuff that’s creating a lot of the movement in our country. The news media and what’s happened with free speech and what’s happened with reporting and what’s happened in what the propaganda the media has been telling us versus what every day Joe’s see on the ground and understand to be truthful and not truthful have been so disconnected for so long that there’s a large distrust there. And people want to get away from urban areas. They want to get away from larger cities living there.

They don’t want their families to be part of there. They kind of want to get back to the, I don’t want to say the Mayberry lifestyle of a smaller town, families, yards, that kind of stuff, but that is an appeal to people. So people want to move away from places that don’t literally look at the world the same way that they do. And they want to come to places where people do look at the world the same way that they do. And there’s just kind of natural movement. And we’ve seen it in the most recent election, but it’s in the data and it’s been in the data for the past four years of getting kind of back to old good old fashion values. And that’s kind of coming. So it’s really interesting the stuff that you can learn just analyzing data.

Anthony Codispoti: And so what are you doing with this data? Are you using it? Are you collecting it analyzing and reselling it? What’s the purpose?

Chris Miller: I haven’t done anything with it at all to that extent. And when I did this back in 2020, this was a lot of elbow grease. We were just bored during the pandemic and figuring out stuff. Artificial intelligence has come in. All of the other big players have gotten involved and started looking and figuring this stuff out. So we basically back in 2020 started figuring out that, hey, it looks like there’s going to be a demographic shift coming.

And now here in 2024, moving into 2025, all that stuff’s kind of played out. And quite frankly, it takes an incredible amount of money to invest to be able to keep up with all of the other technology companies out there. And it’s really not the smartest use of my resources. It’s more of a, that’s a fun place to go to learn stuff, you know, fast than anything.

Anthony Codispoti: So it’s clear from a lot of the comments that you’re making that you have an interest in politics. But I’ve got to ask you why you’re, you’re a nice guy. You’ve got successful businesses.

Sounds like you’ve got a wonderful family. Like, I don’t know, maybe I’ve got the wrong view of it, but I see politics as just this dirty place to play. Like, what’s, what’s your attraction to it? How much time you got? How much time you want to spend on it?

Chris Miller: It would be very, very easy for me to and live a life under the, not really under the radar, because one of the things that we did to really grow our businesses is that I did a bunch of crazy wild entertaining commercials. And I’ve done them for years and years and years and years. And in an age where people can fast forward through commercials, we figured out that if you do something just crazy and entertaining enough, it makes people want to slow down and look at the car accident. And so entertaining marketing has always been a part of what we’ve got.

Anthony Codispoti: Well, like chicken suit kind of thing or what?

Chris Miller: And then some, you should go check, go onto YouTube and check out Dutch Miller Kia commercials. You’ll laugh for, for, you know, a couple of hours. But it would be easy, right? That would be an easy thing.

And I think that if you have the aptitude and the ability and you see a serious set of problems, then you are morally and socially obligated to get involved and fix them. And so I’m not a DC guy. I don’t like that place at all.

That’s not anything that is a part of what I want to do. But I do look at the state of West Virginia that I love with all my heart. And I see a serious set of problems. And the politicians, one, weren’t smart enough to figure it out.

And two, they don’t have the aptitude and the ability involved to do the things that are necessary at the exact time that we are in right now as humanity. So layers of problems, but with the state, we’ve been declining in population and have an aging population. And it’s going to create the perfect storm where eventually the bond ratings get cracked and dramatically raises the cost of government.

And we have a state that has too much government to begin with. And so there’ll be some deep austerity. And that will be a bad day for West Virginia. It’ll be bad. The flip side, we know there’s a demographic shift in the country and we know there’s movement and the way to really solve what’s happening in West Virginia is to grow the population.

Why do you do that? You have to grow the economy. And people that are best at growing the economy are business people. And I know with the exact unique time that we are in, no one else could do what needed to be done. I lost the election that I ran in, but I’m going to get right back and do it all over again as soon as the opening happens because it’s the same thing. The problems still haven’t changed. And West Virginia has been extracted for a really long period of time. We produced a bunch of coal. We powered basically the growth of our country from World War II on.

And even before then, and don’t have a lot to show for it. And so we’ve kind of been extracted. And if you think the world that we’re in right now, you think about it, we’re witnessing the formation of technological oligarchies.

Nvidia, Facebook meta, Tesla, Starlink, Amazon, Google. And when artificial intelligence comes into all of this stuff, I’m not involved in the coding. I’m not involved in the ownership. You’re not involved in the coding.

You’re not involved in the ownership. And the single entity that is going to impact humanity more than anything else that we’ve ever done since interchangeable parts. We aren’t West Virginia is not going to have any say in that. But we do have value added. And our value added in what the emerging 21st century economy is going to be is the ability to produce massive amounts of power. So we have an incredible amount of coal. We have an incredible amount of natural gas.

We have more water that passes through the state of West Virginia than any other state in the country. Is that right? Yeah. And we also own the Ohio River to the high watermark of Ohio. So the greatest wars of my great grandkids’ lifetimes not going to be fought over diamonds or dollars or gold or cryptocurrency.

It’s going to be fought over water that is the single most important entity in life on planet Earth. You think about what’s happening out West. Lake Meads drying up the Colorado rivers drying up dams in Nevada or shrinking to the point where we’re uncovering bodies.

The mafia threw in there to build Las Vegas. California has got its own unique water issues. And we’re the birthplace of water for the East Coast. And there’s also this underground ocean underneath us. And so it should be leveraged. And it’s something that we should capitalize on. What’s the underground ocean?

Anthony Codispoti: What’s that?

Chris Miller: So there’s an aquifer system. Okay. You can get online and check them out. There’s aquifer systems that are underneath the ground that show the flow and availability of water. And there’s a huge one under West Virginia. It’s like a big huge ocean basically.

Anthony Codispoti: And for you, the importance of water is not just the hydropower that you can extract from it, but also just what we need to use water to live to consume and to water our plants. Is that right?

Chris Miller: Manufacturing chips takes an incredible amount of water and the water contaminated it afterwards. That is a reason why. The second one is water is the essence to life, like you touched on its perpetual power that we aren’t harnessing properly. It’s all of that stuff. And so it’s realizing that we’ve got something the rest of the country is going to need and the rest of the world is going to need. And we should leverage it to do something to benefit our people for once. So the grand idea that I had was to leverage all the cold, the natural gas, all of the water and then geothermal power. According to the Department of Energy, we can produce more power with geothermal heat than Saudi Arabia can generate and B2 use of natural gas. Like West Virginia.

Anthony Codispoti: Yeah, we are a hotbed for geothermal power. Yes.

Chris Miller: So when you add all that stuff up, I think that we could dramatically increase the production of power and also drive down the cost dramatically for our people and use that as the foundation of all of our economic growth in the future. And I’m talking about reducing power costs by like 80%. And that would make a competitive advantage for West Virginia and it would bring people and businesses to us.

Anthony Codispoti: Draw the factories in, who wouldn’t want to take advantage of that much less expensive power? Exactly right.

Chris Miller: And so with the water and the power thing as well, artificial intelligence is going to require an incredible amount of power, incredible amount of power. You’re going to have to keep producing. That’s why they’re already looking at buying up nuclear power plants to fuel a lot of the artificial intelligence growth that’s going to happen. And the rest of the country has power needs, big time. And so we need to be able to provide power. We’ve got a dilapidated utility grid system in our country that’s going to have to be refurbished because we like in the automotive business just the one decision to try to turn 10% of the cars on the road today to electric vehicles would cause rampant brownouts and blackouts countrywide.

10%. So there’s a game to play here because the technology that’s coming, we need to play a part in it. And the way that we can do that in West Virginia is by power and natural resources. And my thought is instead of being a state that’s very, very poor, doesn’t have a lot to show for it. I want us to be a rich state that manages the state more like a business and looks at where we are and makes calculated strategic decisions to benefit the value added we can have in the emerging 21st century economy. And at the same time, take care of our people because you think about cutting power by 80%. Yeah, businesses will come to us.

That’d be great for economic activity, but our state is very poor too. And so you think about Jim and Susie Adkins and both of them are on social security and they’re 70 years old and they’re living on a double Y with a white picket fence. You cut their power bill by 80%. You’ve done something incredibly impactful for their lives as well. And that’s what I think good government is. So those are all the reasons why I wanted to get involved.

Anthony Codispoti: So Chris, you’re a guy who likes to win. This is accustomed to winning. What was it like for you losing that election? It hurts, man. Something that happens in a very public way.

Chris Miller: Yeah, losing hurts. I’ve got pretty thick skin and what really got me was there was an outside group that spent $20 million in the primary, the governor’s primary in West Virginia. 90% of that was spent attacking me, I guess, because I was the dangerous entity. I don’t know, but I

Anthony Codispoti: could get out of that. Was this a primary election or the main election? It’s a primary election.

Chris Miller: I ran in a primary for West Virginia and there were four of us. I was the only business person and there was this big, large pack from out of state that had a favorite candidate that was running and they spent all this money attacking me. And they used to talk about the crazy commercials that we’ve done to grow the business. They used all of that stuff and just said all kinds of terrible things about me that weren’t true, but that’s politics.

Anthony Codispoti: And so you want to get back into this? You want to go back into this dirty cesspool of politics?

Chris Miller: I’ve got thick skin. I really don’t care what people say about me. I just want to do the right thing. And there was a large group of people that really thought I was going to do a great job as well. And now the one thing that I had that was a problem was I didn’t have name ID all around the state. Well, when all that money spent attacking you, guess what you’ve got now? Name ID. So I now have more money that’s been spent saying my name all around West Virginia than anybody else. So there’s a benefit to it. You just got to find the upside.

Anthony Codispoti: So there’s a common thread here, your personality and the course of your life you don’t give up like throwing in the towel, not an option. So you’re coming back for round two.

Absolutely. What’s the game plan this time? What did you learn the first time around that you think gives you a better shot at being successful? I did a lot of things right.

Chris Miller: Politics is kind of a fickle thing. I would crash the campaign around the culture that I’d created inside of the businesses and replicate that. That’s what I would do differently. I would take what I know works and what I’ve always done and replicate that inside of the structure of the campaign. That’s what I do differently. I’d make it less sterile and more fun and warm and entertaining.

Intro: But it was that you make mistakes, right?

Chris Miller: Anything that’s new or different, you have to learn as you go and you rely on really, really smart people and consultants to guide you. You make decisions and that creates what the culture of the campaign is. I’d much rather be directly involved in those decisions and controlling that culture moving forward. That would be the one thing that I do differently, I think.

Anthony Codispoti: Is there any way to proactively combat what I’m going to assume is more negative attacks coming your way? Clearly, they see you as a threat. The pattern is likely to repeat itself.

Chris Miller: I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve that include copywriting and trademarking that I didn’t quite pull out previously. But now we’ve got it all set up to where it’s going to be very, very difficult for that to happen again in the future.

Anthony Codispoti: Is it appropriate to say more about that at this time or is that better left unspoken?

Chris Miller: Right, better left unspoken. But I guess I dare you.

Anthony Codispoti: Come and get me. So, Chris, you’re a father. You’ve got three kids. I think you said two teenage boys, 15, 17, and an 11-year-old daughter that you’re all going to end up working for someday. How do you take and teach your kids all of the experience, the knowledge, the wisdom that you’ve accumulated over the years? What’s your approach to parenting like?

Chris Miller: I married a fantastic, fantastic one. My wife, Cassie, is absolutely the best thing about me and she’s a better person than they. And she’s a fantastic mother. She’s the reason why I’m sober. And I’m her biggest fan on planet Earth and watching her be a mom is like watching, Da Vinci’s sculpt. She’s just really, really good at it and I get to at least help and take part in it.

You’ll laugh at this. My daughter, when she was like three or four years old, really instantly saw, you know, Daddy’s the boss at work. Mommy’s the boss at home. Like she saw that and got it really, really quick.

From the mouths of babes. I’m 5’10”, 5’11”, and about 210 pounds. And my wife’s 5’0 and 110 pounds soaking wet. And she’s probably the only human being on planet Earth that I’m scared of. She’s a tough little cookie.

And she’s a great mom. And, you know, my job is, I talk to the kids all the time. I talk to them like they’re real people.

I talk to them about real world experiences. And, you know, we have a parenting philosophy that we want to raise honey badgers. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the honey badger videos.

They’re honey badgers are these creatures in Africa that will like fight lions. And they’ll like bite the heads off of cobra snakes after they’ve been getting bitten. And then they’ll pass out from the venom of the wake up and eat the snake. They’ll, you know, they’ll grab, you know, beehives and just eat all the honey while the bees are stinging them, pass out from the bee stings, wake up and keep eating the honey. They’re just, they’re incredible creatures and they’re just relentless.

And my wife and I figure that if we just raise honey badgers that are nice to other people, they’re going to be okay. And in the world that they’re coming up into, they’re not as, they’re not as tough as are, you’re a Gen Xer, aren’t you?

Anthony Codispoti: I don’t know what, I’m 50 years old. I forget which bucket that puts me in.

Chris Miller: I’m a Gen Xer, I’m 45. And you know, we’re a pretty tough generation just on the aggregate. And the generation that’s coming up, I think a lot of these kids are smarter than anybody realizes. That’s probably the smartest generation in human history that’s coming up.

But they’re also emotionally a little more caudal and a little softer. And so, you know, everybody’s staring at screens all the time. Yada, yada, yada. I figure we should make our kids relentless hard workers that are good to other human beings. That it’s going to be easier for them to be successful than it was for us.

Anthony Codispoti: Do your kids work with you at all? Do they get to see how you engage in a work setting? All the time.

Chris Miller: They see me work from home. You know, they see me at work a lot. They know what, you know, what dad does. And we talk about it a lot.

Anthony Codispoti: So, how do they feel about your political ambitions? They got it.

Chris Miller: They got it. They understood. And they’re relentless kids. They, you know, handled it really, really well. So, we talk about these things at dinner all the time. We talk about life. We talk about the world. We teach our kids, you know, everything that we, you know, everything that we can.

And part of that’s being brutally honest, right? You can either look at the world the way that it is or the way that you wish it to be with, you know, unicorns and rainbow sprinkles. And the only way that you can actually turn the world into the way that you wish it to be is to truly understand the way that it is. And that’s that. And people are the most amazing things on planet earth, but also at the same time can be challenges and how you treat people matters.

But also being very, very, you know, factual about stuff when you’re talking about educating your kids really does matter. One of the things sugar coated. Yeah.

Don’t sugar coat it. And any scenario that happens, one of the first exercises we always go through, we’re talking about it is follow the money. So this is happening. This is what’s being reported. But what’s really going on here?

What’s really happening? And then digging into the details to show every, I show my kids that really most of the stuff that happens in the world today is about money in some way, shape or form. And that really is what influences how decisions are made. And when you understand that, you’re better off because it is what it is.

Anthony Codispoti: Chris, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. Everyone listening today, you loved today’s content. I’m sure please hit the like, share, subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. Chris, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you, whether it’s they’re interested in what you’re doing in politics, they’re interested in some of the business stuff that you’re doing or the boxing, whatever it is, how should they connect with you?

Chris Miller: I’ve got emails, cmiller at DutchMillerado.com, if you want to email me personally. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. I think my Facebook is my name, Chris Miller. There’s also still a Miller for Governor Facebook page is up there and all the consultants told me, you need to get rid of that.

I thought, eh, let’s just see what happens. So it’s still up and running. And I’m on Twitter as well, which is Chris Miller of West Virginia, or Chris Miller, Chris Miller of WV. And I’m on Instagram as well.

And that’s, and I remember what that one is real quick. When’s the next election? That depends. Okay. If there is a vacancy in the governor’s office, then there’ll be a special election that occurs.

Anthony Codispoti: And a vacancy might happen because he moves on to a presidential appointment or

Chris Miller: or runs for Senate with an opening in a Senate seat. Okay. And then if not, it’s four years from now. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti: So four years is sort of the scheduled time sooner if something else transpires. Correct.

Chris Miller: And it’s Chris Miller of Dutch is my Instagram handle.

Anthony Codispoti: Okay. We’ll have all those handles and email addresses and everything in the show nets for folks. But Chris, the last question I have for you is I’m kind of curious as you look into your crystal ball, what do you see being kind of the big changes coming to the car industry in the next couple of years?

Chris Miller: Technology is going to streamline stuff. It’s not going to change the way that people think. It’s never going to be Walmart. Technology will influence and improve what happens with the availability of financing. It will improve a salesperson’s ability to sell a car faster and with less management involvement. And so kind of where I think it’s one of the next five years is that salespeople are going to be walking around with tablets and scanning and information, loading it in the computer algorithms are going to prepackage and let you understand exactly the right car that that customer needs to be at based on their own credit criteria.

And then there’s clicks and stuff and the documents will be all done through thumb drives or emailed and be electronic. And it’ll be a faster system because one of the things that you go, anybody goes around the country buys a car right now, it takes too long. Most of the time, in the instantaneous world, we want stuff done now. And you’ve got all of these different things that take time, bank applications, submitting your information to a bank for approval, finalizing any sort of leans on anything else that’s out there, making sure and moving around the money to perfect the transaction, perfect the leans.

Those things just take time. And so narrowing the three hour window it takes to buy a car from start to finish down to 15 minutes is one of the things that I think is going to be coming in our industry over the next five years that will be the most impactful thing. The rest of it is though, it’s a car, there’s new ones and there’s used ones and there’s the free market and people get to choose what they like and we get to help them do that.

Anthony Codispoti: So that’s the safe side. You see the dealership model itself changing or going away? Tesla’s obviously decided not to go that route, but most of the other major car manufacturers are using it. Do you see that structure modifying at all or that’s here to stay?

Chris Miller: Anything can happen, but I do think that it’s here to stay. And one of the things that really makes that so appealing is the amount of cash that it takes to operate a car dealership and perfect all the leans with every single transaction. And so that’s one of the reasons why Tesla, for example, hasn’t grown way further when it comes to these dealer distribution points because they’re doing it themselves. That’s one of the reasons why is because it would take massive amounts of capital and cash to be able to do that even further. So, yeah, that’s kind of what I see happening with the industry and I don’t think the franchise model is going away very often because, or very soon because it makes sense.

It makes sense for the stage that we’re in. And one of the things that car manufacturers have always taught us is that if they’re really, really good at building cars, they’re not really, really good at selling cars. So, back in the 90s, Ford bought all the car dealerships, all the Ford dealerships around Indianapolis, paid a premium form in an experiment where they wanted to run everything and see if they could use that and expand it out through the rest of the country and they failed miserably. Why? Because there’s a difference between building a car and manufacturing and selling a car and in particular used cars, which fluctuate in value all of the time and you’ve got to get that right every single time when it comes to how much you’re a praise a used car for and what your liquidation strategy is.

Because if you put $15,000 in a car that is worth $10,000 and then hold it for too long and go to sell it, you’re going to have a larger loss than $5,000. And so, it’s those decisions like that that became their issue and their Achilles heel. And so, they’re two totally separate businesses. They’re different art forms.

Anthony Codispoti: So, one of the large manufacturers has tried to sort of take over the franchise model, didn’t work. They’re seeing, as they have for decades, a great deal of success with the current model and so likely to stay put.

Chris Miller: Yeah, one of the other things that is pretty impactful all around the country with car dealerships in mid-sized and smaller communities in particular, not as much in large cities now is that they have a direct connection inside of a community. And so, all the employees that are there are members of the community.

Their family members are a part of it. They sponsor baseball teams, little league stuff. They do food drives. They help out with charitable giving. They’re just directly involved inside of communities. And that’s also important. And big business, big manufacturers don’t do that at all. So, that’s one of the other needs and the differences.

Anthony Codispoti: Well, Chris, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I’m really grateful for it.

Chris Miller: I really enjoyed the conversation and, man, thanks for thinking of this. It was a lot of fun.

Anthony Codispoti: Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.