CARY, N.C. -

“I think I was born to play the drums,” Tom Kontos says in a mid-October phone interview.

Long before the KAR Global chief economist was crunching numbers and dispensing auction market analysis, he was taking his mom’s silverware and tapping on tables as a child.

Or, to the chagrin of his teachers, turning a rhythm in his head into a bongo beat on his desk at school.

Kontos said he eventually made “a more productive use” of his inclination to drum, taking lessons beginning at around 10 years old at a local drum shop in the Washington, D.C., area and starting to play gigs with a local Greek music band before he could even drive.

These days, the rhythm Kontos keeps is that of the auto industry, particularly the wholesale auction side of it, and the melodies of macro-economic factors at work.

Kontos, who still jams with other musicians, is a “rock star” in his own right within the remarketing industry. He has a knack for taking even the most complicated economic and market phenomena and distilling it down to easily digestible analysis for auction industry stakeholders, media, company clients and others.

And last month, Kontos celebrated 20 years with ADESA and its parent company, KAR Global.

While he said it’s hard to pinpoint the exact correlation between drumming and the work of an economist, Kontos did make this analogy: “A drummer is always someone who accompanies another musician. You're not going to be the person that's going to go on stage by yourself, unless you're on 'America's Got Talent' … so my role is to support the rest of the effort within my company and within the industry.”

That support extends to providing context that helps in company decision-making and forming strategies, and even “tactical things” like determining the return on investment in vehicle reconditioning, he said.

Before COVID-19 impacted the industry, that work for Kontos involved a lot of traveling for conferences or client meetings. It was something he enjoyed, but it didn’t afford him as much time at his desk as he currently has, which has changed the “cadence of information” when it comes to data analysis.

“It used to be, I kind of looked at things monthly. And that gave me a good sense of the pulse on what was going on,” Kontos said. “But more recently, especially during the pandemic, I was going daily and then going maybe towards a weekly cadence. (That) seems to be where I’m at right now. So that makes for a fairly busy week.”

His weeks also involve a ton of reading, even beyond automotive and into broader economic and political analyses. That is necessary in understanding any potential impact to the auto industry, as Kontos said he fields questions on everything from fuel prices to the potential impact of political candidates to the economy.

“If you’re intellectually curious anyway, you’re going to want to do a lot of reading. So, it's actually kind of not a tedious (task) in any sense. It is challenging to keep up. But the interest in the information, it's there and like you said, it's got to be pretty broad, because you just never know what factors might become important,” Kontos said.

For instance, Brexit.

While that may seem like a world away from the U.S. auction industry, it could impact a macroeconomic variable that ends up affecting the industry down the road, Kontos said.

And then there’s the more micro piece of it: the meat-and-potatoes process of keeping tabs on all the data points within the auction industry, which can change daily.

And that’s something Kontos appreciates about this business.

Before joining ADESA in 2000, he was at ADT Automotive, having been hired from the metals and mining industry, which Kontos said is more product-oriented than the auction industry, which is more service-oriented.

“There's so much you can apply from general economic understanding … the understanding that I have of economics from having worked in the mineral industries and just from my training, I found great application within the auction industry, because there's so much daily information that's coming out on vehicle values,” Kontos said.

“That’s one of the great things about this business, from an economist's perspective, it's an industry that really is a competitive marketplace, with vehicle values being established on a one-by-one basis between buyer and seller,” he said. “And those transactions are then captured and aggregated, providing wonderful data for analysis for a guy like me.”

So how does a guy like Kontos keep tabs on all that data, which tends to change daily?

From the outset of days at ADESA, he made sure to use the most comprehensive data set possible to provide him the best understanding.

“And I knew, no matter which company I worked for, if I only used the company's data, I would only have a subset of the total market. So, early on in my days at ADESA, I made sure I started accessing what's called AuctionNet data, which is the NAAA and NADA joint venture to capture auction transactions, not only at ADESA but at all the major auctions in the U.S.,” Kontos said.

“Having that data, building sort of a data infrastructure to capture and maintain that data was one of the first things that I did when I joined ADESA,” he said. 

"One of the things I wanted to do was make sure I could (make) that data one or two steps better by maybe looking at model class segmentation, so I could look at what SUVs were doing versus what small cars were doing,” Kontos continued.

“So, there's work we've done with that database to enhance it, and then of course always cross-referencing that information against other data that I can use directly from ADESA” when it comes to things like vehicle grade or reconditioning data, he said.

And that work to analyze the data ends up helping ADESA and KAR Global, their clients and the industry at large.

All the while, a longtime drummer keeps his beat on the marketplace.