How I got here

Built in the back of a dealership

Dealr began as a few tools I wrote for my family's dealership. Here's the longer version, mostly so you know where our point of view comes from.

Growing up on the lot

I started working at Insight Automotive, my family's dealership, when I was 14. My first job was lot tech. Over the years I sold a lot of our cars, worked deals in the finance office, wrote service and eventually took over much of the accounting. I never worked as a mechanic, but I spent plenty of time around our shop and the technicians in it.

We were running seven different systems, and none of them talked to each other. Some felt like they were built for a different century, and even basic things I wanted to do weren't possible. So I taught myself to program and started building small tools for my own work. Piece by piece, those tools spread to other departments, and eventually they became one system that ran the whole store. That system was the beginning of what's now dealr.cloud, our all-in-one dealer management system.

My hardest customer

To this day I say my dad was my hardest customer. I was still in high school when I started moving the dealership onto software I'd written, and he had every reason to be skeptical. Would it work? Would it work correctly? Changing systems breaks processes, creates conflict and touches every part of a business. By the time he stepped away from the business, I still hadn't moved him onto our own accounting system.

That taught me more about change than anything since. A lot of dealers I talk to today feel exactly what he felt, and they're right to take it seriously.

Fixing bugs across the desk

Because I used the software while I built it, I found problems fast. I'd be desking a deal and a form wouldn't print on the dot matrix printer, or the bank would come back with something I hadn't thought of. I'd fix it and deploy it while the customer sat across the desk from me. That was before we had a single outside customer.

I don't want to make too much of my own experience. Still, running a dealership is its own world, and few people outside it really understand it. Not much dealership software gets built inside a dealership by someone who has sold cars, and I think that has shaped everything we do.

From one store to many

Our first customers outside Insight came through relationships at a local auto auction, in early 2017. Honestly, the software wasn't ready for them. It was built for one business with one workflow, and every dealership is different.

So I sat in the back of other dealers' finance offices and watched finance managers and salespeople work. I saw inefficiency everywhere: how cars get valued, stocked and advertised, how phone calls get handled, how sales talks to the shop, how deals get desked compliantly. That list is more or less what we've been working on ever since.

For a couple of years it was just me, doing the cold calls, the demos and the printer troubleshooting visits. We hired our first employees in 2019.

Building the hard parts ourselves

A few pieces of dealr.cloud started as dares to myself. We used to rely on a popular market data tool, and the common belief was that kind of data couldn't be built independently. So we built our own appraisal valuations by gathering market data ourselves. It was expensive, but today we pull data on more than 4 million vehicles every day.

Accounting was another. I originally built a QuickBooks integration, then killed it because it created more problems than it solved. QuickBooks is a great product for the general small business. A dealership, though, has to write down cars, handle floor plans, commissions, chargebacks and payroll, and keep service and parts in the same books as deals. So we built dealership accounting that moves in lockstep with deals, inventory and service.

It had to be easy enough for someone coming off QuickBooks and capable enough for a large multi-store group. Moving a car from one store's books to another means buying and selling it on both sides, and getting that right is something I'm really glad we figured out. We still run our own company's books on it.

Then came titles. In 2023 I started looking hard at electronic titling in Colorado. I'd done titles in the dealership, and as any title clerk knows, getting a clean stack of paperwork out of the finance office is a small victory. We built Dealer Title Solutions, our Colorado electronic title and registration (EVTR) service, from scratch with that in mind.

One of my favorite stories from it: a long-time customer lost their title clerk, and their finance manager was able to keep titles moving for a fairly large operation until they were ready to hire again.

Why dealerships

People ask why I've stuck with this industry. I love small businesses, and the car business has a way of pulling you in. When I ask operators how they got started, a lot of them say family business, sometimes across generations. Plenty of others loved cars and figured selling them would be fun. Then they woke up running a business that's far more complicated than selling cars.

I'm a tech person, but I'm more of a business person and a car person. My job is running a company and leading a team I'm lucky to work with. In my experience, what makes the difference is the culture and how much you care about your customers' success.

Our mission is to empower dealership success by making the complex simple, and our vision is joyful automotive experiences. Those words are on purpose. Dealerships, and independents especially, have been underserved by software for a long time, and there's a lot of good we can do for them. Today Dealr works with independent and franchise dealers in more than 40 states.

We still use our own products every day, including our accounting, our CRM and our websites. Living with what you build, and dealing with your own problems, is the best way I know to keep making it better.