December 17, 2024 • 30 mins
Mom died, the dog died, the wife took off, and John Clay Wolfe became paralyzed all in the short span of about a year. Then came the worst news: someone had been stealing his company's money, and he was millions in debt. John Clay Wolfe, the founder of GiveMeTheVin.com and the host of the John Clay Wolfe Show, tells his astonishing story of recovery—both in business and life.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from one of the largest car wholesalers in the
world and the host of the John clay Wolf Show.
We're talking about John clay Wolf. Here's John to tell
the story of his love of all things automotive and how,
through the worst of circumstances, he created Give me the
(00:31):
vin dot Com Take it away.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
John, I always paid more attention to cars than I
should have. A friend of mine in grade school, I
think his parents were drug dealers, really, because his dad
drove a Coontash and this is probably nineteen eighty and
his mom drove a Roles Now they both went to jail.
But the cars really stuck out to me. My first
(00:59):
car that I loved, love, loved was a nineteen eighty
eight K five Blazer. It was a newer version of
the nineteen seventy seven K five Blazer that my grandfather
gave me the keys to when I was about nine,
that I drove around on the ranch and that's what
I learned to drive in was a seventy seven K
five and that was going to be my first car
with my license. So I had this whole list of
(01:22):
modifications I wanted to do to it, and I showed
it to my dad. It was lyft wheels, tires, wench,
all the stuff I saw in four x four magazines
that I always grabbed when I was at the newstand,
and he surprised me with a new one. He was like, Hey,
we got to go buy Wayne Bell's ranch and look
at a horse. And Wayne Bell is the guy that
owned a company called Western Hauler, and Western Hauller was
(01:45):
one of the first conversion cowboy Cadillac companies that ever was.
Wayne and my father both were into dressing up their
duly trucks. They were in the horse world cutting horses,
so they were always trying to outcompete each other with
how they could dress up their dooley's. And Wayne was
in the car business. He owned a Chevy store. So
he's like, hey, we got to go by Wayne Bell's
place and look at a horse. I'm like whatever, I
(02:06):
did this whole time. So on the way back from work,
we stopped at Wayne's and he went in there and
was messing with the horses, and there was this white
K five blazer sitting out by the barn and had
a window sticker sixteen three seventy three was the window
sticker price. And I was just sitting there licking the
paint off of that thing. And you know, he's like,
come in here and look at this horse. Like, no,
I'm looking at this truck. And I was just dying,
you know, in love with it. And then I went
(02:28):
in and messed with the horses with him, and we
came back out and I was getting in his car.
Said what are you doing. I'm like, we're going home.
He's like, yeah, you're in the wrong car. I'm like,
what do you mean? He said, that's yours Happy birthday.
I was just floored. You know, it's your first car, man,
you just it's your first real freedom ride. It just
opens the door to the world too. So I drove
(02:52):
that truck home and put it in the garage and
I slept in it that night, like literally leapt in
the car, and I started messing with the radio. I
took the speakers apart, I took the head unit out.
I had my tools, and I started messing with it already,
and he came out and he said, dude, I bought
you this new one so you wouldn't do anything to it,
because you were going to build that other K five
(03:13):
Blazer dought I was over. He said, I really don't
want to mess with this one. I'm like, okay, And
that lasted about two months. I got him to give
me a lift for Christmas and put larger tires on it.
And then the next thing I did was put wheels
inside those tires. There be of good Rich all terrains
thirty three by twelve fifties, and I put a stance
on it. And then I cut the exhaust pipes off
(03:35):
and put glass packs on it, and man, it looked good.
I had the best car in the high school parking
lot for sure until my jun year summer and I
was at my brother's house in Fort Worth and I
heard it start up, and I looked out the window
and I saw it drive off. I was so mad.
(03:55):
So that would be the first car that I ever sold,
which was sold to an insurance company. I've sold half
a million cars since then. I was always wanted to
be mobile. I was always wanting to leave the house
and go somewhere. I was always tinkering, I was always
moving always. My parents were divorced when I was really young,
on two or three. I don't even remember them married,
(04:17):
but about fourth grade, I really wanted to live with
my dad. He lived on a ranch and it was
just more fun out there. So anyway, I moved out
to the country with my dad and in the mornings
I would drive to his construction office and I had
a couple of hours hour and a half before it's
time to leave for school when I was about nine,
and I'd start messing with this equipment. Then I started
(04:37):
working on his jobs in the summertime and Christmas break
and whatever break we had from school. And he would
come out to those job sites when I was in
fourth grade running that equipment and tell them to get
me off that little piece and put me on that
bigger piece of equipment duty. He's only eight years old.
He can do it better than you. Get out of
my way. Who owns this company, John Clay, Get over here,
(04:58):
get up there and do it. I mean there was
days when the operators for I'm talking huge equipment would
like not show up for work, and my dad would
grab me out of school to go fill in for
the guy. So that work ethic, that responsibility that I
feel today. This has been going on forever and it
was a family business, and this construction company had like
three hundred employees, and my granddad started it from a
(05:21):
bicycle running the wires. Is that Westinghouse. They would deliver
messages teletypes between Southwestern Bell Telephone Company offices from his bicycle,
and that's what he started ABC Utility Construction with. And
he built this thing up to a full service underground
construction company that worked for the telephone company, the power company,
(05:41):
the gas company. So I watched all that, I mean
not all of it. I watched the part of it
that I was alive for and watched him work crazy
hard and have crazy success, and it was very inspiring.
And my grandfather wilf you know, he's the one that
was making me drive at eight years old. We would
go through gates. He was like keep going, quick, crawling,
go through it. Remember I hung a fender on the
gate one day. I was just crying. I just knew
(06:04):
I was dead. You know, He's like, it's okay. And
he would push me to do things that I wasn't
comfortable to do. And if I made mistakes, he didn't,
you know, beat me up about it. And I remember
one thing that was really important to him is that
I had the ability to stop. If you're driving, you
better be able to stop. And he's like, when I
say stop, at any time you stop, show me you
(06:24):
can stop. And we were driving down the road and
I was going about thirty miles an hour and he
said stop, and I mean I just laid on and
threw him into the dash and he hit his head
on the windshield started bleeding and I looked at him.
I'm like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. He said, no, son,
you did exactly what I told you to do. Now
I know you can stop. I still do that with
my kids when I take them out riding dirt bikes
(06:45):
and teach them how to ride four rowers and stuff.
I I yell at them stop. I mean, if you
can't stop, then you can't be safe. And that goes
along with a lot of things. You've got to know
when to tap the brakes. In business, You've got to
know when to be able to pull back and stop
when things are getting out of control. I mean, I'm
in the middle right now of a twenty million dollar
buy of a gazillion sprinter vans, and the excitement of
(07:08):
the money potential is wonderful, but I keep hitting the
brakes on the deal to make sure we're following my
guidelines and rules of being careful and not getting screwed.
When you're doing a deal that big, it's so easy
to be like, yeah, yeah, everything's great, but you always
have to look at it with an evil eye. How
do I get hurt here? How do we get screwed?
Wire fraud, trade fraud, title fraud. You just have to
(07:31):
be able to be reserved and don't let the greed
or excitement get in front of you where you go
make a big mistake being a liar and a crook
in a sneaky and tricky Yeah, there's plenty of people
that are successful financially from that. But the guys that
had good teams around them and really built something, they
had integrity. I had an opportunity to work when I
(07:51):
was eighteen at Ford in Fort Worth, and I went
there as a salesman and went through their salesman training
where they taught people how to lie, which is really
I mean, that's not what they said. But when you're
looking at what's going on in the manipulation tactics they
were teaching salespeople, I'm like, there's a better way to
do this. You can do this without lying. And I
was there for three months and I was salesman the
(08:13):
month my third month, but I wasn't lying, like I
was just being more straightforward and here's the price. And
I'd get in trouble for it too. I'd get written
up because they wanted to get you on payments so
that they could manipulate the payments and forget about the price.
Because the price and the payments obviously add up together.
But if you can focus the customer on the payment ranges,
(08:33):
then they agree to this payment, and they sign off
on this payment. Then when they get to the back room,
the price is high. And I was like, man, that's sorry,
that's just not who I am. You can tell these
people the truth and not have to do that. Do
what you say you're going to do when you say
you're going to do it. And that's hard to find
in any car dealer at this time, even worse back then.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
And you've been listening to John Clay Wolfe tell his
story and in his own way, his family's story brought
up on solid traditional American values, Texas values and the
end old school values of hard work, risk taking, and
my goodness, that grandfather of his He said, he pushed
me to do things and didn't beat me up when
I made a mistake. What a wonderful, wonderful grandfather. And
(09:18):
my goodness, his father buys him that car. The car
gets stolen in the first car he ever sells, as
he put it, was to an insurance company. And by
the way, when his dad bought him that new car,
he was hoping his son wouldn't modify it, ah hopes.
And what did he do? He did exactly what he
would do the rest of his life, be obsessed with automobiles.
I love that line about being able to stop, be
(09:40):
able to stop entrepreneurs and any other type of daredevil
risk takers who can't stop or a danger to themselves
and everybody around them. When we come back, more of
the story of John clay wolf the Howard Stern of
cars here on our American Stories. And we returned to
(10:10):
our American Stories and with John clay Wolfe, the host
of The John clay Wolf Show and the founder of
one of the largest car wholesalers in the world, give
me the ven dot com. When we last left off,
John was telling us about how his love for cars
started at an early age, but he never thought he'd
make cars his career. Let's return to the story. Here
(10:32):
again is John Clay Wolf.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I went to college broke. I went to college brooke.
I didn't realize I was broke. Dad wasn't telling me
the complete truth. Dad went broke. That company that my
grandfather built, it was going bankrupt. We didn't have money anymore,
and it was scary. I was going to play football
at SMU, and I remember it was during two days.
(10:55):
He gave me one hundred dollars bill. Two days of football,
he gave me a hundred dollars bill. He said, this
is probably the last one hundred dollars bill, and you'll
give you for a while. I'm out of money. You know,
my dream was to be a big college football player.
You want to make your parents proud, right, I mean,
that was the common ground my dad and I had.
We had work and we had football. But I'm like,
(11:15):
I can't be here. I've got to go to work.
So I quit football. Man, I went in the bathroom
cried like a baby. They'd killed me to give up
on that dream. But one of my best friends was
at TCU and at SMU in Dallas, which is forty
five minutes away. We had some really good bars. TCU
did not have that. I'm like, Carter, this would work
(11:35):
at TCU. And his parents had just both died. His
father killed his mother and killed himself, and Carter got
a life insurance check. So I convinced him that we
should open this bar at TCU. At that time, we
were nineteen or maybe twenty, I don't remember. We weren't
old enough. So I got one of my best friends
that was twenty one to own the stock of the
(11:58):
company that was going to hold liquor license. I gave
him four hundred dollars to own the bar, and Carter
he had advisors that were handling his estate from his parents' death.
They came over there and we were working on They're like,
do you know what the success rate on bars and
restaurants are. It's like negative, this will not work. You're
going to lose your money. And I'm like, don't listen
to him. It is gonna work fine. He was in
(12:19):
the best fraternity on campus, The Kappa SIGs at TCU
are basically going to have their own bar. This place
is going to be pat It's going to work like
a champ. And it did. Carter and I opened this
bar on fifty grand. It was our junior year, and
it paid itself off in ninety days. And then we
(12:40):
were making one hundred thousand dollars a year apiece within months.
And then we put a guide next to us out
of business and we bought that one. It was Blast.
It was wold, I mean were.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
God.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
There were a lot of fights. Barrett Robbins, who was
the center for the race, he's the guy that missed
the super Bowl because he went to Tijuana and got
so drunk the night before the super Bowl. He was
our bouncer. Turned into a fight pit. Actually we had
to get Fourth PD to come be the bouncers. And
then also if you had a cop that you were
(13:15):
paying to be your security guard, the TABC would leave
you alone because the place was full of fake IDs.
I mean that's just the way college works. But it
was worth, you know, paying two hundred fifty dollars a
night to a police officer to actually inspect the IDs
because then you're off the hook and you're clean. But
the girls were so pretty and the cops loved them
that they were letting a lot of people in. You know,
you just get these experiences, the knowledge you do it enough,
(13:38):
the old ten thousand hour rule when you start figuring
things out. I could open the ice box at the
bar at the end of the night and I could
guess within one hundred dollars of how much money we
ran on the register by the amount of ice we use.
But I'll jump forward. So I started buying cars sight
unseen from the public because I was in a wheelchair.
(14:05):
It's ninety six, and I'm like, I need to get
in the internet business. The bar life was great for
a young man, but it was nothing for what I
wanted to do. And I came up with a product
that I patented called the Automated Telenet computer. It was
a floating email system for business travelers, which back then
you had to be at your desktop to get your email.
I'm like, how do I get this thing sold? So
(14:27):
I'm looking through Fortune magazine and on the cover there
was this guy, what was his name, Steve Appleton was
on the cover of Fortune magazine and he was on
a Kawasaki KX two fifty motocross bike jumping and I
tried to reach Appleton and I couldn't get to him.
So I started calling Simplot's office, Jr. Simplot, who was
the potato magnate of Idaho. He's an old man and
(14:50):
he was the main investor in Micront. Couldn't get to him.
Wound up sending flowers to the secretary twice, broke her down,
got her to get me on the on with Simplot
and this eighty year old man, seventy five year old man.
He's like, boy, I don't know the difference between microchips
or potato chips, but I know somebody that's got some spirit,
and I'm going to get you up here and introduce
(15:11):
you to these boys. So he sends his private jet
down from Idaho picks me up. I never even met
the guy. I showed him what I had. They said, cool,
big deal, we have, you know, a thousand patents. But
I do like the idea and I like your spirit.
Why don't you move up here. We'll work on the project.
I was up there about eight months and I opened
up the Wall Street Journal and there's my machine front
(15:32):
page of the Wall Street Journal right there. Larry Ellison
from Oracle did it. I was like, it's over. They
beat us to the punch, because back then, these guys
are getting wealthy off being first to market. So I
loaded up the car and headed back to Fort Worth,
back to a boiler room talking to car dealers. My
cousin had a car lot called Eurospecks Sales on altimere
(15:52):
and he was junkie. And that's where the auction thing
came on. And I went to the auction for the
first time where you buy the cars for retail line,
and I was like, wow, I was pretty hooked right then.
An auction floor is like a Chinese fish market with
car dealers. It looks like the customs department at the
Miami Airport. I mean everything Indians, Persians, white boys, black boys,
(16:16):
every kind of boy there is. The used car business
is a Shmorgas board of nationalities. I remember the first
time I walked into the Dallas auction and I walked
down those steps and Mercedes was running their factory sell
and I was watching these Mercedes sell one after the other.
I bought a nineteen ninety five BMW seven forty I
and we retailed it for like I don't know, it
(16:37):
made like five grande profit quick. I was like, okay,
this is good, this makes sense. So I had the
eye to go pick the right cars. Shane would buy
cars for us and they didn't sell very well. I
would buy cars for us, and they sold very well.
You know, an old wholesaler told me there are no
bad cars, there are just bad prices. And that's a
(16:57):
true statement. And there's also the statement that there is
an a for every seat, and that is true too.
But it's your job as the trader to know what
price to score them at. I was always good at estimating,
and that was a strength that came on strong in
this wholesale car business. Business kept getting better. I was
a really successful guy. I had a hell of a twenties.
(17:18):
I mean I was one of the most you know,
financially successful guys of anybody I knew before I got
hurt and I got down to my last two hundred grand.
Doesn't that don't don't you feel so sorry for me?
Poor guy got last down to his last two hundred grand.
But to do this car business thing, you've got to
have money. I mean I was so broke I couldn't
even get a checking account for business. What happened was,
(17:44):
you know, I'm not gonna blame it on my ex wife,
Blame it on me. She got on drugs. She wouldn't
tell me what was going on. I had no idea
what was going on. She wouldn't talk to me. So
all of a sudden, I'm living in this ranch just unfinished,
and I was kind of spilling my guts to this
guy every evening, like I just don't know what's going on.
I'm like, hey, dude, we've got to get this place finished.
This is where I live. And I was living with
(18:05):
him and having beers with him on the porch in
the evenings, and I'm noticing he has a brand new
star Tak phone with an Internet connection, Like, where'd you
get that? He said, oh, I just got it to
Da Da And the phone rang. His phone rang on
it while I was holding the phone and I didn't
recognize the number, and I answered the number like him
with it. He had a Greek accent. I said hello,
and she said is he still there? And right then
(18:28):
I knew. I was like, darling, we've got a problem.
I jumped on him and I whipped his butt pretty good,
gave him a few stitches. He went on his merry way,
but I was pretty distraught, to say the least. So
my mind was gone, and I said let's I'm going
to start riding dirt bikes again to get my mind
off of it. I got to do something, So I
went and practiced motocross a few times, and then that
(18:49):
Sunday I went out and raced at the Nakoona Race
Park and was passing a guy on the finish line
jump and looped it out, landed on my butt and
broke my l two vertebrae burst fracture. I remember laying
there and you know, the medics were all over me
and they're like, I like, if you'll just take my
boots off, I can show young move my feet. Did
we cut your boots off? Like five minutes ago? I
was paralyzed voice dw at that moment, I had nothing zero.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
And when we come back, what happens next in John
clay Wolfe's journey, We'll find out here on our American stories,
(19:38):
and we continue with our American stories and the final
portion of our story with John clay wolf the host
of The John clay Wolf Show and the founder of
Give Me the Vin dot Com, one of the largest
car wholesalers in the world. When we last left off,
John's home life had been turned upside down, after his
then wife became addicted to drugs and left him. He
(20:00):
then become paralyzed from the waist down. But that it
would turn out would just be the tip of the iceberg.
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
So mom dies, the dog dies, the wife takes off,
We reconcile. I have the wreck. I'm paralyzed for life.
She sends the papers back over We're getting divorced, and
I'm like, I've got to get back to work because
I just bought wolf Ford, Wolf Dodge, Chrysler Jeep, and
Wolf Chevrolet, and I had this big wholesale company called
Inventory Management Specialist IMS. But the worst day was September
(20:40):
twenty first oh five when I got a call from
Chase Bank. Hey, John, it's Doug Eller did Chase Bank. Hey,
what's going on. Hey, We've got a problem here, and
we've been doing some research math and it shows that
you're two and a half million dollars overdrawn. I'm like, no,
I'm not. They were saying that they saw an overflow
in the system that looked like we were kiting money
(21:02):
and I didn't know about it. And I had my
office managers come out to the ranch and reconcile all
of the checkbooks in front of me, and I'll never
forget this. And I'm in a wheelchair. All day long,
we're doing this. Each of them are working on their
individual buckets. And at the end of the day they
were all done. And I went and looked at one
of them and it showed, you know, negative six hundred thousand.
(21:23):
And I went and looked at the other one and
it showed negative eight hundred thousand. I went and looked
at the other one that showed negative whatever, and the
number was about negative two point two million. And I
remember being very scared right then. I'm like, oh my god,
they're right. I told these ladies like, hey, you should
go ahead and go We're good. I was so paranoid.
I didn't want them to talk and compare numbers because
(21:43):
they would know. I was in so deep, you know,
I was dead. And I was like, oh my god,
where'd all this money go? Where the hell did all
this money go? And I couldn't figure it out. And
then I did figure it out. It was very much
like the nurse at the hospital that's going around saving everyone,
but everyone keeps dying. She was my person because I
couldn't walk right. I couldn't even really go to the office.
She was the person fixing all the problems that I
(22:05):
was telling her to fix. But what I didn't realize
is she was pumping the numbers, stealing from me while
I was out, and redistributing money to her lover. She's married,
he's married, he owns a couple of car dealerships. He's
gone broke, and she is keeping him alive with my
company's money. It was pretty bad, and the controller didn't
make the nine forty one payments for almost a year.
(22:27):
So the IRS calls me again this is wheelchair time
and say, hey, you realize yous four hundred fifty thousand
dollars like on what like you had made nine to
forty one payments on Wolford Dodge. I'm like, huh, go
research it again. Same thing. They're right, and that is
the payment where you withhold the money from the employee's taxes.
That's called the trust account, and that's the money that
the government can come take the clothes out of your
(22:49):
closet and the paintings off your wall. So that's serious.
And the banker at Hairing Campbell Burgess, I said we're bankrupt.
But here's what we can do. I've got this airplane
that's paid for. I've got this ranch that has a
lot of equity in it. I've got this Chevy store
that's got a lot of equity in it. And we
can sell these properties off and gather back a lot
(23:10):
of money and work out of the rest or. We
can file bankruptcy and let someone else do it for us.
And he said no, no, no, no, no, do it your way.
He said, you can handle it way better than a
bankruptcy can. Figure out a way to fix this mess.
You've got that magic touch. And I knew that I
had the gift to gab and I was like, you
know what, I'm going to be the next Howard Stern.
I'm going to start this radio show. I'm going to
(23:32):
fix this dealership with this radio show. I'm going to
learn how to do this radio thing. And I would
do the car thing, but I'd also do the Howard
Stern thing, so it's kind of Howard Stern on cars.
So I wound up going full time radio on the
weekends with the car show, having dealerships help support it.
And I was pitching the dealerships in the car show.
I was so determined, like I'd made friends with the
(23:54):
program director over email on a KROLDFM, the fan big
sports station, but we never could connect. And I literally
went to the station one day. I saw somebody open
the door, and I snuck in before it closed, and
I lient my cripple back there and sat in his
office and like, Gavin, Hey, I'm John Wolf. And it
scared the hell out of him. How did you get
in here? I'm like, the door was open. He's like,
(24:15):
what's going on? Man?
Speaker 1 (24:16):
You know?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
And I started talking and tell them what I wanted
to do. They wanted no more of the hot talk business.
They wanted out. Stern had just made the move to
Sirius XM from Terrestrial. I think he got paid ninety
million dollars or something. So the dude, if you want
in this business, you better learn sports talk, because that's
what we're doing. We're not doing that grab Sterny hot
(24:37):
talk anymore. We're done with it. We can't sell it.
The advertisers don't want it. To lose that out of
your head if you want to do this. But we
made a deal that day for me to start doing
my Saturday show and then it started growing and growing
and growing, and the car thing was kind of coming back.
I had no intention of getting that big into the
wholesale business like I was before, and I could not
(24:59):
get to the auctions anymore. But I had those big
dreams of being a big business operator, so I had
to figure out a way to get the cars coming
to me. So customers were calling in and I was
giving them prices over the air, and they would show
up and if the car was close to what they described,
I would pay for it. And I was bidding cars
over the air and not doing the car dealer hustle
where I tell you I'll give you twenty grand for it,
(25:20):
you show up and then I change it to eighteen.
That's what all car dealers do. They can't help it.
And I was given the twenty grand when it would
show up unless it was grossly misdescribed, but rarely it was.
And I was realizing I can buy cars from the
public's description better than I'm buying cars from the dealer's
description over the phone, because the dealers are liars so much,
(25:41):
and the public might lie about things they don't realize
because they have a scratch or a dent that they've
been living with for a long time and they forgot
it was there. But the dealers would lie intentionally for profit,
and I was having more success buying these car sight
unseen from the public than I was from the dealers.
So I'm like, Okay, I need to broadband this. I
need to do more of this. And I was explaining
(26:02):
to my dealer friends what I was doing. They're like,
you're crazy. I can't believe you're buying that car sight
unseen without touching it. I'm like, I'm imagine a casino.
This is a shady look at it, but this is
the comical look at it that I feels really real.
I'm putting money on the street with gamblers and they're
investing my money in cars that they're speculating on. But
(26:23):
I didn't want to tell them what I was onto
because the dealer space is so competitive, and know if
I bragged about it, they would start paying more attention
and copy me. And the name give me the VN
hadn't even started yet. But back then the dealers, when
we were sending each other cars to bid for each other,
it was always give me the VEN, send me the VEN,
text me the VENT because we could take these VEN
numbers and drop them into a coder an app and
(26:45):
get valuations and car faxes and all that. So I'm like,
why am I just name the company? Give me the book.
And I went to a trademark attorney. I got the trademark,
and I went ahead and got give me the VN,
Text me the VN, Send me the VN, and then
I went and got about forty ls around that. Send
us the VEN send the vent. Because car dealers start
stealing from you and they start trying to poach on
(27:07):
your branding. I mean Carvana completely copied me. They copied
my whole questionnaire list online. They copied my short form,
they copied my auto bid, they copied everything. And I
knew they would do it because I really believe this
would work. I knew it would work. There was no question,
and it did. Would we get lied to and screwed? Absolutely?
But did the averages outrun it? Absolutely? So just do
more of it. Here's your margin of air, run with it.
(27:30):
Score that in just like insurance companies do. I mean
insurance companies have losses. We have losses. We lose twenty
five percent of the time. They give me the vent
but you know, we wound up being the largest wholesaler
in the world. We did two billion dollars in sales
two years ago, and now the banks are lined up
wanting our business. It's pretty weird. It's the same people
that turned me down to in the past. I mean
(27:50):
turn me down pretty hard, to be honest with you.
There's one particular that came over to call on me
the other day, and I mean it took everything I
had not to be a jerk, Like, hey man, you
remember that meeting fourteen years ago when you told me
to get the hell out of your office. I just
wondering if you remember, because I remember we broke a
Guinness Book of World records, selling like seventeen hundred cars
in one day. Seventeen hundred. I think it was fifty
(28:13):
five million. Maybe it was more than that I forgot.
And it is amazing to have reached this level starting
at that little chicken crap car lot note lot on
ALTIMEIR in Fort Worth, Texas. So that's fulfilling. It's nice
to have success. It's nice to be secure. That's really
what all this is about, because I know what it's
(28:35):
like to be broke. But let me put some another
entry in here. I don't know if there was one
day that I walked again. I mean it was so slow.
I mean like the first three steps are two steps
that I took out of balance and fell on the bed.
That would be the first steps I took. If you're
ever around me, you'll always notice I'm touching something. I'm
leaning against the car, I'm leaning against the countertop. I
(28:56):
can walk from point A to point B, but when
I get to point B, I have to have something
to touch. I mean the easy way around that is
used a cave. But I don't want to use a cake.
Do you want a wheelchair? Hell no, I don't want
a wheelchair. I'll work forever. Get in that wheelchair. I'd
rather not go anywhere than use a wheelchair. And I
got everything I wanted.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Back and a terrific job on the production, editing and
storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery. And a special thanks
to John clay Wolf, who's the host of The John
clay Wolf Show and founder of Give Me the Vin
dot com. And indeed, it's true Carvana stole so much
from him, but not before he had a big head start,
(29:33):
and that's what business is all about. Being first is
really important. That first move or advantage you get, and
then just well dealing with the averages. You win some
and you lose some in factor those losses into the winds.
What a great attitude about so many things, but mostly
about his own life and the humility and the ups
and downs will give you that humility. And boy did
(29:54):
John Clay Wolf's story have some ups and some downs.
I always paid more attention to cars than I should have,
is how he started the piece. And he's still paying
attention to cars, sold seventeen hundred of them in a
single day, making it a Guinness Book record. The story
of John Clay Wolfe the story of American entrepreneurialism. Here
(30:15):
on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, a
story from one of the largest car wholesalers in the
world and the host of the John clay Wolf Show.
We're talking about John clay Wolf. Here's John to tell
the story of his love of all things automotive and how,
through the worst of circumstances, he created Give me the
(00:31):
vin dot Com Take it away.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
John, I always paid more attention to cars than I
should have. A friend of mine in grade school, I
think his parents were drug dealers, really, because his dad
drove a Coontash and this is probably nineteen eighty and
his mom drove a Roles Now they both went to jail.
But the cars really stuck out to me. My first
(00:59):
car that I loved, love, loved was a nineteen eighty
eight K five Blazer. It was a newer version of
the nineteen seventy seven K five Blazer that my grandfather
gave me the keys to when I was about nine,
that I drove around on the ranch and that's what
I learned to drive in was a seventy seven K
five and that was going to be my first car
with my license. So I had this whole list of
(01:22):
modifications I wanted to do to it, and I showed
it to my dad. It was lyft wheels, tires, wench,
all the stuff I saw in four x four magazines
that I always grabbed when I was at the newstand,
and he surprised me with a new one. He was like, Hey,
we got to go buy Wayne Bell's ranch and look
at a horse. And Wayne Bell is the guy that
owned a company called Western Hauler, and Western Hauller was
(01:45):
one of the first conversion cowboy Cadillac companies that ever was.
Wayne and my father both were into dressing up their
duly trucks. They were in the horse world cutting horses,
so they were always trying to outcompete each other with
how they could dress up their dooley's. And Wayne was
in the car business. He owned a Chevy store. So
he's like, hey, we got to go by Wayne Bell's
place and look at a horse. I'm like whatever, I
(02:06):
did this whole time. So on the way back from work,
we stopped at Wayne's and he went in there and
was messing with the horses, and there was this white
K five blazer sitting out by the barn and had
a window sticker sixteen three seventy three was the window
sticker price. And I was just sitting there licking the
paint off of that thing. And you know, he's like,
come in here and look at this horse. Like, no,
I'm looking at this truck. And I was just dying,
you know, in love with it. And then I went
(02:28):
in and messed with the horses with him, and we
came back out and I was getting in his car.
Said what are you doing. I'm like, we're going home.
He's like, yeah, you're in the wrong car. I'm like,
what do you mean? He said, that's yours Happy birthday.
I was just floored. You know, it's your first car, man,
you just it's your first real freedom ride. It just
opens the door to the world too. So I drove
(02:52):
that truck home and put it in the garage and
I slept in it that night, like literally leapt in
the car, and I started messing with the radio. I
took the speakers apart, I took the head unit out.
I had my tools, and I started messing with it already,
and he came out and he said, dude, I bought
you this new one so you wouldn't do anything to it,
because you were going to build that other K five
(03:13):
Blazer dought I was over. He said, I really don't
want to mess with this one. I'm like, okay, And
that lasted about two months. I got him to give
me a lift for Christmas and put larger tires on it.
And then the next thing I did was put wheels
inside those tires. There be of good Rich all terrains
thirty three by twelve fifties, and I put a stance
on it. And then I cut the exhaust pipes off
(03:35):
and put glass packs on it, and man, it looked good.
I had the best car in the high school parking
lot for sure until my jun year summer and I
was at my brother's house in Fort Worth and I
heard it start up, and I looked out the window
and I saw it drive off. I was so mad.
(03:55):
So that would be the first car that I ever sold,
which was sold to an insurance company. I've sold half
a million cars since then. I was always wanted to
be mobile. I was always wanting to leave the house
and go somewhere. I was always tinkering, I was always
moving always. My parents were divorced when I was really young,
on two or three. I don't even remember them married,
(04:17):
but about fourth grade, I really wanted to live with
my dad. He lived on a ranch and it was
just more fun out there. So anyway, I moved out
to the country with my dad and in the mornings
I would drive to his construction office and I had
a couple of hours hour and a half before it's
time to leave for school when I was about nine,
and I'd start messing with this equipment. Then I started
(04:37):
working on his jobs in the summertime and Christmas break
and whatever break we had from school. And he would
come out to those job sites when I was in
fourth grade running that equipment and tell them to get
me off that little piece and put me on that
bigger piece of equipment duty. He's only eight years old.
He can do it better than you. Get out of
my way. Who owns this company, John Clay, Get over here,
(04:58):
get up there and do it. I mean there was
days when the operators for I'm talking huge equipment would
like not show up for work, and my dad would
grab me out of school to go fill in for
the guy. So that work ethic, that responsibility that I
feel today. This has been going on forever and it
was a family business, and this construction company had like
three hundred employees, and my granddad started it from a
(05:21):
bicycle running the wires. Is that Westinghouse. They would deliver
messages teletypes between Southwestern Bell Telephone Company offices from his bicycle,
and that's what he started ABC Utility Construction with. And
he built this thing up to a full service underground
construction company that worked for the telephone company, the power company,
(05:41):
the gas company. So I watched all that, I mean
not all of it. I watched the part of it
that I was alive for and watched him work crazy
hard and have crazy success, and it was very inspiring.
And my grandfather wilf you know, he's the one that
was making me drive at eight years old. We would
go through gates. He was like keep going, quick, crawling,
go through it. Remember I hung a fender on the
gate one day. I was just crying. I just knew
(06:04):
I was dead. You know, He's like, it's okay. And
he would push me to do things that I wasn't
comfortable to do. And if I made mistakes, he didn't,
you know, beat me up about it. And I remember
one thing that was really important to him is that
I had the ability to stop. If you're driving, you
better be able to stop. And he's like, when I
say stop, at any time you stop, show me you
(06:24):
can stop. And we were driving down the road and
I was going about thirty miles an hour and he
said stop, and I mean I just laid on and
threw him into the dash and he hit his head
on the windshield started bleeding and I looked at him.
I'm like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. He said, no, son,
you did exactly what I told you to do. Now
I know you can stop. I still do that with
my kids when I take them out riding dirt bikes
(06:45):
and teach them how to ride four rowers and stuff.
I I yell at them stop. I mean, if you
can't stop, then you can't be safe. And that goes
along with a lot of things. You've got to know
when to tap the brakes. In business, You've got to
know when to be able to pull back and stop
when things are getting out of control. I mean, I'm
in the middle right now of a twenty million dollar
buy of a gazillion sprinter vans, and the excitement of
(07:08):
the money potential is wonderful, but I keep hitting the
brakes on the deal to make sure we're following my
guidelines and rules of being careful and not getting screwed.
When you're doing a deal that big, it's so easy
to be like, yeah, yeah, everything's great, but you always
have to look at it with an evil eye. How
do I get hurt here? How do we get screwed?
Wire fraud, trade fraud, title fraud. You just have to
(07:31):
be able to be reserved and don't let the greed
or excitement get in front of you where you go
make a big mistake being a liar and a crook
in a sneaky and tricky Yeah, there's plenty of people
that are successful financially from that. But the guys that
had good teams around them and really built something, they
had integrity. I had an opportunity to work when I
(07:51):
was eighteen at Ford in Fort Worth, and I went
there as a salesman and went through their salesman training
where they taught people how to lie, which is really
I mean, that's not what they said. But when you're
looking at what's going on in the manipulation tactics they
were teaching salespeople, I'm like, there's a better way to
do this. You can do this without lying. And I
was there for three months and I was salesman the
(08:13):
month my third month, but I wasn't lying, like I
was just being more straightforward and here's the price. And
I'd get in trouble for it too. I'd get written
up because they wanted to get you on payments so
that they could manipulate the payments and forget about the price.
Because the price and the payments obviously add up together.
But if you can focus the customer on the payment ranges,
(08:33):
then they agree to this payment, and they sign off
on this payment. Then when they get to the back room,
the price is high. And I was like, man, that's sorry,
that's just not who I am. You can tell these
people the truth and not have to do that. Do
what you say you're going to do when you say
you're going to do it. And that's hard to find
in any car dealer at this time, even worse back then.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
And you've been listening to John Clay Wolfe tell his
story and in his own way, his family's story brought
up on solid traditional American values, Texas values and the
end old school values of hard work, risk taking, and
my goodness, that grandfather of his He said, he pushed
me to do things and didn't beat me up when
I made a mistake. What a wonderful, wonderful grandfather. And
(09:18):
my goodness, his father buys him that car. The car
gets stolen in the first car he ever sells, as
he put it, was to an insurance company. And by
the way, when his dad bought him that new car,
he was hoping his son wouldn't modify it, ah hopes.
And what did he do? He did exactly what he
would do the rest of his life, be obsessed with automobiles.
I love that line about being able to stop, be
(09:40):
able to stop entrepreneurs and any other type of daredevil
risk takers who can't stop or a danger to themselves
and everybody around them. When we come back, more of
the story of John clay wolf the Howard Stern of
cars here on our American Stories. And we returned to
(10:10):
our American Stories and with John clay Wolfe, the host
of The John clay Wolf Show and the founder of
one of the largest car wholesalers in the world, give
me the ven dot com. When we last left off,
John was telling us about how his love for cars
started at an early age, but he never thought he'd
make cars his career. Let's return to the story. Here
(10:32):
again is John Clay Wolf.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I went to college broke. I went to college brooke.
I didn't realize I was broke. Dad wasn't telling me
the complete truth. Dad went broke. That company that my
grandfather built, it was going bankrupt. We didn't have money anymore,
and it was scary. I was going to play football
at SMU, and I remember it was during two days.
(10:55):
He gave me one hundred dollars bill. Two days of football,
he gave me a hundred dollars bill. He said, this
is probably the last one hundred dollars bill, and you'll
give you for a while. I'm out of money. You know,
my dream was to be a big college football player.
You want to make your parents proud, right, I mean,
that was the common ground my dad and I had.
We had work and we had football. But I'm like,
(11:15):
I can't be here. I've got to go to work.
So I quit football. Man, I went in the bathroom
cried like a baby. They'd killed me to give up
on that dream. But one of my best friends was
at TCU and at SMU in Dallas, which is forty
five minutes away. We had some really good bars. TCU
did not have that. I'm like, Carter, this would work
(11:35):
at TCU. And his parents had just both died. His
father killed his mother and killed himself, and Carter got
a life insurance check. So I convinced him that we
should open this bar at TCU. At that time, we
were nineteen or maybe twenty, I don't remember. We weren't
old enough. So I got one of my best friends
that was twenty one to own the stock of the
(11:58):
company that was going to hold liquor license. I gave
him four hundred dollars to own the bar, and Carter
he had advisors that were handling his estate from his parents' death.
They came over there and we were working on They're like,
do you know what the success rate on bars and
restaurants are. It's like negative, this will not work. You're
going to lose your money. And I'm like, don't listen
to him. It is gonna work fine. He was in
(12:19):
the best fraternity on campus, The Kappa SIGs at TCU
are basically going to have their own bar. This place
is going to be pat It's going to work like
a champ. And it did. Carter and I opened this
bar on fifty grand. It was our junior year, and
it paid itself off in ninety days. And then we
(12:40):
were making one hundred thousand dollars a year apiece within months.
And then we put a guide next to us out
of business and we bought that one. It was Blast.
It was wold, I mean were.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
God.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
There were a lot of fights. Barrett Robbins, who was
the center for the race, he's the guy that missed
the super Bowl because he went to Tijuana and got
so drunk the night before the super Bowl. He was
our bouncer. Turned into a fight pit. Actually we had
to get Fourth PD to come be the bouncers. And
then also if you had a cop that you were
(13:15):
paying to be your security guard, the TABC would leave
you alone because the place was full of fake IDs.
I mean that's just the way college works. But it
was worth, you know, paying two hundred fifty dollars a
night to a police officer to actually inspect the IDs
because then you're off the hook and you're clean. But
the girls were so pretty and the cops loved them
that they were letting a lot of people in. You know,
you just get these experiences, the knowledge you do it enough,
(13:38):
the old ten thousand hour rule when you start figuring
things out. I could open the ice box at the
bar at the end of the night and I could
guess within one hundred dollars of how much money we
ran on the register by the amount of ice we use.
But I'll jump forward. So I started buying cars sight
unseen from the public because I was in a wheelchair.
(14:05):
It's ninety six, and I'm like, I need to get
in the internet business. The bar life was great for
a young man, but it was nothing for what I
wanted to do. And I came up with a product
that I patented called the Automated Telenet computer. It was
a floating email system for business travelers, which back then
you had to be at your desktop to get your email.
I'm like, how do I get this thing sold? So
(14:27):
I'm looking through Fortune magazine and on the cover there
was this guy, what was his name, Steve Appleton was
on the cover of Fortune magazine and he was on
a Kawasaki KX two fifty motocross bike jumping and I
tried to reach Appleton and I couldn't get to him.
So I started calling Simplot's office, Jr. Simplot, who was
the potato magnate of Idaho. He's an old man and
(14:50):
he was the main investor in Micront. Couldn't get to him.
Wound up sending flowers to the secretary twice, broke her down,
got her to get me on the on with Simplot
and this eighty year old man, seventy five year old man.
He's like, boy, I don't know the difference between microchips
or potato chips, but I know somebody that's got some spirit,
and I'm going to get you up here and introduce
(15:11):
you to these boys. So he sends his private jet
down from Idaho picks me up. I never even met
the guy. I showed him what I had. They said, cool,
big deal, we have, you know, a thousand patents. But
I do like the idea and I like your spirit.
Why don't you move up here. We'll work on the project.
I was up there about eight months and I opened
up the Wall Street Journal and there's my machine front
(15:32):
page of the Wall Street Journal right there. Larry Ellison
from Oracle did it. I was like, it's over. They
beat us to the punch, because back then, these guys
are getting wealthy off being first to market. So I
loaded up the car and headed back to Fort Worth,
back to a boiler room talking to car dealers. My
cousin had a car lot called Eurospecks Sales on altimere
(15:52):
and he was junkie. And that's where the auction thing
came on. And I went to the auction for the
first time where you buy the cars for retail line,
and I was like, wow, I was pretty hooked right then.
An auction floor is like a Chinese fish market with
car dealers. It looks like the customs department at the
Miami Airport. I mean everything Indians, Persians, white boys, black boys,
(16:16):
every kind of boy there is. The used car business
is a Shmorgas board of nationalities. I remember the first
time I walked into the Dallas auction and I walked
down those steps and Mercedes was running their factory sell
and I was watching these Mercedes sell one after the other.
I bought a nineteen ninety five BMW seven forty I
and we retailed it for like I don't know, it
(16:37):
made like five grande profit quick. I was like, okay,
this is good, this makes sense. So I had the
eye to go pick the right cars. Shane would buy
cars for us and they didn't sell very well. I
would buy cars for us, and they sold very well.
You know, an old wholesaler told me there are no
bad cars, there are just bad prices. And that's a
(16:57):
true statement. And there's also the statement that there is
an a for every seat, and that is true too.
But it's your job as the trader to know what
price to score them at. I was always good at estimating,
and that was a strength that came on strong in
this wholesale car business. Business kept getting better. I was
a really successful guy. I had a hell of a twenties.
(17:18):
I mean I was one of the most you know,
financially successful guys of anybody I knew before I got
hurt and I got down to my last two hundred grand.
Doesn't that don't don't you feel so sorry for me?
Poor guy got last down to his last two hundred grand.
But to do this car business thing, you've got to
have money. I mean I was so broke I couldn't
even get a checking account for business. What happened was,
(17:44):
you know, I'm not gonna blame it on my ex wife,
Blame it on me. She got on drugs. She wouldn't
tell me what was going on. I had no idea
what was going on. She wouldn't talk to me. So
all of a sudden, I'm living in this ranch just unfinished,
and I was kind of spilling my guts to this
guy every evening, like I just don't know what's going on.
I'm like, hey, dude, we've got to get this place finished.
This is where I live. And I was living with
(18:05):
him and having beers with him on the porch in
the evenings, and I'm noticing he has a brand new
star Tak phone with an Internet connection, Like, where'd you
get that? He said, oh, I just got it to
Da Da And the phone rang. His phone rang on
it while I was holding the phone and I didn't
recognize the number, and I answered the number like him
with it. He had a Greek accent. I said hello,
and she said is he still there? And right then
(18:28):
I knew. I was like, darling, we've got a problem.
I jumped on him and I whipped his butt pretty good,
gave him a few stitches. He went on his merry way,
but I was pretty distraught, to say the least. So
my mind was gone, and I said let's I'm going
to start riding dirt bikes again to get my mind
off of it. I got to do something, So I
went and practiced motocross a few times, and then that
(18:49):
Sunday I went out and raced at the Nakoona Race
Park and was passing a guy on the finish line
jump and looped it out, landed on my butt and
broke my l two vertebrae burst fracture. I remember laying
there and you know, the medics were all over me
and they're like, I like, if you'll just take my
boots off, I can show young move my feet. Did
we cut your boots off? Like five minutes ago? I
was paralyzed voice dw at that moment, I had nothing zero.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
And when we come back, what happens next in John
clay Wolfe's journey, We'll find out here on our American stories,
(19:38):
and we continue with our American stories and the final
portion of our story with John clay wolf the host
of The John clay Wolf Show and the founder of
Give Me the Vin dot Com, one of the largest
car wholesalers in the world. When we last left off,
John's home life had been turned upside down, after his
then wife became addicted to drugs and left him. He
(20:00):
then become paralyzed from the waist down. But that it
would turn out would just be the tip of the iceberg.
Let's return to the story.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
So mom dies, the dog dies, the wife takes off,
We reconcile. I have the wreck. I'm paralyzed for life.
She sends the papers back over We're getting divorced, and
I'm like, I've got to get back to work because
I just bought wolf Ford, Wolf Dodge, Chrysler Jeep, and
Wolf Chevrolet, and I had this big wholesale company called
Inventory Management Specialist IMS. But the worst day was September
(20:40):
twenty first oh five when I got a call from
Chase Bank. Hey, John, it's Doug Eller did Chase Bank. Hey,
what's going on. Hey, We've got a problem here, and
we've been doing some research math and it shows that
you're two and a half million dollars overdrawn. I'm like, no,
I'm not. They were saying that they saw an overflow
in the system that looked like we were kiting money
(21:02):
and I didn't know about it. And I had my
office managers come out to the ranch and reconcile all
of the checkbooks in front of me, and I'll never
forget this. And I'm in a wheelchair. All day long,
we're doing this. Each of them are working on their
individual buckets. And at the end of the day they
were all done. And I went and looked at one
of them and it showed, you know, negative six hundred thousand.
(21:23):
And I went and looked at the other one and
it showed negative eight hundred thousand. I went and looked
at the other one that showed negative whatever, and the
number was about negative two point two million. And I
remember being very scared right then. I'm like, oh my god,
they're right. I told these ladies like, hey, you should
go ahead and go We're good. I was so paranoid.
I didn't want them to talk and compare numbers because
(21:43):
they would know. I was in so deep, you know,
I was dead. And I was like, oh my god,
where'd all this money go? Where the hell did all
this money go? And I couldn't figure it out. And
then I did figure it out. It was very much
like the nurse at the hospital that's going around saving everyone,
but everyone keeps dying. She was my person because I
couldn't walk right. I couldn't even really go to the office.
She was the person fixing all the problems that I
(22:05):
was telling her to fix. But what I didn't realize
is she was pumping the numbers, stealing from me while
I was out, and redistributing money to her lover. She's married,
he's married, he owns a couple of car dealerships. He's
gone broke, and she is keeping him alive with my
company's money. It was pretty bad, and the controller didn't
make the nine forty one payments for almost a year.
(22:27):
So the IRS calls me again this is wheelchair time
and say, hey, you realize yous four hundred fifty thousand
dollars like on what like you had made nine to
forty one payments on Wolford Dodge. I'm like, huh, go
research it again. Same thing. They're right, and that is
the payment where you withhold the money from the employee's taxes.
That's called the trust account, and that's the money that
the government can come take the clothes out of your
(22:49):
closet and the paintings off your wall. So that's serious.
And the banker at Hairing Campbell Burgess, I said we're bankrupt.
But here's what we can do. I've got this airplane
that's paid for. I've got this ranch that has a
lot of equity in it. I've got this Chevy store
that's got a lot of equity in it. And we
can sell these properties off and gather back a lot
(23:10):
of money and work out of the rest or. We
can file bankruptcy and let someone else do it for us.
And he said no, no, no, no, no, do it your way.
He said, you can handle it way better than a
bankruptcy can. Figure out a way to fix this mess.
You've got that magic touch. And I knew that I
had the gift to gab and I was like, you
know what, I'm going to be the next Howard Stern.
I'm going to start this radio show. I'm going to
(23:32):
fix this dealership with this radio show. I'm going to
learn how to do this radio thing. And I would
do the car thing, but I'd also do the Howard
Stern thing, so it's kind of Howard Stern on cars.
So I wound up going full time radio on the
weekends with the car show, having dealerships help support it.
And I was pitching the dealerships in the car show.
I was so determined, like I'd made friends with the
(23:54):
program director over email on a KROLDFM, the fan big
sports station, but we never could connect. And I literally
went to the station one day. I saw somebody open
the door, and I snuck in before it closed, and
I lient my cripple back there and sat in his
office and like, Gavin, Hey, I'm John Wolf. And it
scared the hell out of him. How did you get
in here? I'm like, the door was open. He's like,
(24:15):
what's going on? Man?
Speaker 1 (24:16):
You know?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
And I started talking and tell them what I wanted
to do. They wanted no more of the hot talk business.
They wanted out. Stern had just made the move to
Sirius XM from Terrestrial. I think he got paid ninety
million dollars or something. So the dude, if you want
in this business, you better learn sports talk, because that's
what we're doing. We're not doing that grab Sterny hot
(24:37):
talk anymore. We're done with it. We can't sell it.
The advertisers don't want it. To lose that out of
your head if you want to do this. But we
made a deal that day for me to start doing
my Saturday show and then it started growing and growing
and growing, and the car thing was kind of coming back.
I had no intention of getting that big into the
wholesale business like I was before, and I could not
(24:59):
get to the auctions anymore. But I had those big
dreams of being a big business operator, so I had
to figure out a way to get the cars coming
to me. So customers were calling in and I was
giving them prices over the air, and they would show
up and if the car was close to what they described,
I would pay for it. And I was bidding cars
over the air and not doing the car dealer hustle
where I tell you I'll give you twenty grand for it,
(25:20):
you show up and then I change it to eighteen.
That's what all car dealers do. They can't help it.
And I was given the twenty grand when it would
show up unless it was grossly misdescribed, but rarely it was.
And I was realizing I can buy cars from the
public's description better than I'm buying cars from the dealer's
description over the phone, because the dealers are liars so much,
(25:41):
and the public might lie about things they don't realize
because they have a scratch or a dent that they've
been living with for a long time and they forgot
it was there. But the dealers would lie intentionally for profit,
and I was having more success buying these car sight
unseen from the public than I was from the dealers.
So I'm like, Okay, I need to broadband this. I
need to do more of this. And I was explaining
(26:02):
to my dealer friends what I was doing. They're like,
you're crazy. I can't believe you're buying that car sight
unseen without touching it. I'm like, I'm imagine a casino.
This is a shady look at it, but this is
the comical look at it that I feels really real.
I'm putting money on the street with gamblers and they're
investing my money in cars that they're speculating on. But
(26:23):
I didn't want to tell them what I was onto
because the dealer space is so competitive, and know if
I bragged about it, they would start paying more attention
and copy me. And the name give me the VN
hadn't even started yet. But back then the dealers, when
we were sending each other cars to bid for each other,
it was always give me the VEN, send me the VEN,
text me the VENT because we could take these VEN
numbers and drop them into a coder an app and
(26:45):
get valuations and car faxes and all that. So I'm like,
why am I just name the company? Give me the book.
And I went to a trademark attorney. I got the trademark,
and I went ahead and got give me the VN,
Text me the VN, Send me the VN, and then
I went and got about forty ls around that. Send
us the VEN send the vent. Because car dealers start
stealing from you and they start trying to poach on
(27:07):
your branding. I mean Carvana completely copied me. They copied
my whole questionnaire list online. They copied my short form,
they copied my auto bid, they copied everything. And I
knew they would do it because I really believe this
would work. I knew it would work. There was no question,
and it did. Would we get lied to and screwed? Absolutely?
But did the averages outrun it? Absolutely? So just do
more of it. Here's your margin of air, run with it.
(27:30):
Score that in just like insurance companies do. I mean
insurance companies have losses. We have losses. We lose twenty
five percent of the time. They give me the vent
but you know, we wound up being the largest wholesaler
in the world. We did two billion dollars in sales
two years ago, and now the banks are lined up
wanting our business. It's pretty weird. It's the same people
that turned me down to in the past. I mean
(27:50):
turn me down pretty hard, to be honest with you.
There's one particular that came over to call on me
the other day, and I mean it took everything I
had not to be a jerk, Like, hey man, you
remember that meeting fourteen years ago when you told me
to get the hell out of your office. I just
wondering if you remember, because I remember we broke a
Guinness Book of World records, selling like seventeen hundred cars
in one day. Seventeen hundred. I think it was fifty
(28:13):
five million. Maybe it was more than that I forgot.
And it is amazing to have reached this level starting
at that little chicken crap car lot note lot on
ALTIMEIR in Fort Worth, Texas. So that's fulfilling. It's nice
to have success. It's nice to be secure. That's really
what all this is about, because I know what it's
(28:35):
like to be broke. But let me put some another
entry in here. I don't know if there was one
day that I walked again. I mean it was so slow.
I mean like the first three steps are two steps
that I took out of balance and fell on the bed.
That would be the first steps I took. If you're
ever around me, you'll always notice I'm touching something. I'm
leaning against the car, I'm leaning against the countertop. I
(28:56):
can walk from point A to point B, but when
I get to point B, I have to have something
to touch. I mean the easy way around that is
used a cave. But I don't want to use a cake.
Do you want a wheelchair? Hell no, I don't want
a wheelchair. I'll work forever. Get in that wheelchair. I'd
rather not go anywhere than use a wheelchair. And I
got everything I wanted.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
Back and a terrific job on the production, editing and
storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery. And a special thanks
to John clay Wolf, who's the host of The John
clay Wolf Show and founder of Give Me the Vin
dot com. And indeed, it's true Carvana stole so much
from him, but not before he had a big head start,
(29:33):
and that's what business is all about. Being first is
really important. That first move or advantage you get, and
then just well dealing with the averages. You win some
and you lose some in factor those losses into the winds.
What a great attitude about so many things, but mostly
about his own life and the humility and the ups
and downs will give you that humility. And boy did
(29:54):
John Clay Wolf's story have some ups and some downs.
I always paid more attention to cars than I should have,
is how he started the piece. And he's still paying
attention to cars, sold seventeen hundred of them in a
single day, making it a Guinness Book record. The story
of John Clay Wolfe the story of American entrepreneurialism. Here
(30:15):
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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