The Automotive Journey | 17,000 Deals & the Software Behind Them

Chapter One · The Floor

I was good at selling cars. Not because I was slick or a good talker — but because I took care of my customers and always did the right thing by them.

Of the 17,000 car deals I was personally involved in, I can count on one hand the people who didn’t have a good experience. That reputation got me handed the internet department at the Honda store — and within months, the numbers exploded.

Then my boss asked me to train the other internet managers in the group. “Train them on what?” I asked. “All of it. How you do everything, soup to nuts.” So I wrote it all down — every email, every phone script, every voicemail, the website fonts, the photo angles, the pricing logic. When I was done, the manual was 127 pages at 11-point font.

“My presentation ran 82 minutes. Then came the applause — like I’d won the Super Bowl. At that exact moment, I knew what I wanted to do.”

Four months later I quit and went all-in on selling that book to dealers across the country. I just needed a website to sell it. That’s where the other half of my career began.

Chapter Two · HTML for Dummies

I paid a developer $1,500 to build my site. Three months later: nothing.

So I went to Barnes & Noble, bought “HTML for Dummies,” and built it myself. FTP, hosting, cPanel, CSS, image compression — I got slapped in the face by all of it, and got through all of it. I built my first website, landed my first clients online, and then got greedy in the best way: I wanted it in front of every dealer in the country.

I mailed my list of 1,500 dealer contacts. One called — not to buy the book, but to buy the list.I blurted out “$5,000” and held my breath. He said “Done.” By 2006 I was making $50K a month selling data through email.

But I wanted to build more platforms, and that meant building a real team. I learned the hard way that front-end and back-end are different jobs, that developers don’t design, and that plenty would happily get paid to learn on my dime. It was rough — until 2009, when I decided to stop messing around and hire the best developers in the world, whatever it cost.

“Since that day in 2009 — same two lead developers, same system administrator, same designer. Full-time. Even when there was nothing to build.”

I kept paying them through the dry spells because I’d learned the most expensive lesson in software: the team is the asset. Everything I’ve built since sits on top of that decision.

Chapter Three · Write Once, Execute Forever

My old database developer drilled one rule into me: write the code once, and use it forever.

Every platform needs the same bones — login screens, user management, email and SMS, content management, triggers and automation. So we stopped rebuilding them. We wrote each piece once, in a bulletproof framework, fully interchangeable, and reused it across every project.

That discipline is the reason I can move fast today. Twenty-five years of “write once, execute forever” added up to something I now lean on every single day.

25Years of code

A quarter-century of code

Twenty-five years of writing code — plus the APIs, integrations, scripts, and processes around it. When a dealer needs something built, we’re not starting from a blank screen — we’re assembling proven parts. That’s what lets a custom build ship in days, not quarters.

Built for the car business

Every product solved a problem I was living.

I never built software to chase a market. I built it because I hit a wall on the floor, in the finance office, or in the service drive — and nothing out there fixed it. So we did.

Finance · F&I

OpenCarDeals.com

CIT & STIPS management

I was drowning in contracts-in-transit and missing stipulations at the finance desk, with no tool built for it. So we built the first-ever CIT & STIPS management platform — to get funded faster and stop chasing paper.

First of its kind

Marketing · Social

RePostable.com

Social & referral marketing for dealers

Off-the-shelf social tools never understood a dealership. RePostable was built to reward staff for sharing offers and to actually generate referrals — not just count likes nobody acts on.

Built for auto retail

Reputation · Service

Videmonials

Video testimonials, the easy way

When all that existed was YouTube and Dropbox, collecting a clean video testimonial from a happy customer was a nightmare. We built a platform to capture them effortlessly — because a real face beats a star rating every time.

Before video was easy

Growth · Referrals

InstantReferrals

A referral engine that actually refers

Every “referral module” I tried generated zero referrals. So in 2017 I built our own — a referral platform engineered around how customers actually share, not how vendors wished they would.

Built because nothing else worked

Why this matters for AI

The scars are the credential.

AI is the newest version of an old story I’ve lived through over and over — a hot new technology, a wave of vendors, and dealers left to guess. Here’s what 25 years of building taught me that no demo will.

Frameworks change overnight

I sank $250K and two years into MobileWebsites — then responsive HTML made it obsolete in a season. I know how fast a “must-have” becomes a write-off, and I'll keep you from betting the store on one.

The team is the moat

Anyone can buy a tool. Almost no one keeps elite builders on staff through the dry years. That's why we ship — and why I can tell real engineering from a slick interface.

Build only what should be built

With 25 years of code to draw on, I know exactly when building beats buying — and when it's the other way around. Most dealers are sold the expensive answer. I'll give you the honest one.

17,000 deals. And the software behind them.