The David Spisak Show

If you listened to part one, you know where Matt Leone came from. Now it's time to talk about where he's taking the industry. In part two, we get into the conversation that I think every dealer, every GM, and every person making technology decisions in this business needs to hear. We talk about why the traditional CRM was broken before most people admitted it. Why the difference between...

Most entrepreneurs won't fail because of the economy. They won't fail because of competitors, funding, or bad timing. They'll fail because they never asked themselves the questions that actually matter, and by the time reality forces the answer, it's too late. In Part 1 of this 5-part episode series, David Spisak opens with the foundation: five questions designed to expose the...

Matt Leone didn't grow up dreaming about the car business. He grew up watching his Italian immigrant grandfather work three jobs and build houses by hand in Newton, Massachusetts. He watched his aerospace engineer father get laid off when Boeing scrapped a supersonic jet program. He grew up in San Diego, raised by parents who woke up at 4:30 AM to make breakfast and never missed a single spor...

David Spisak walked into a dealership that had nearly 1,000 vehicles listed online. The lot was empty. No salespeople. No tower. No showroom buzz. Just a quiet operation that by every traditional measure shouldn't be working. It's working. In this episode, David takes you inside Carvana's CDJR store in Sacramento for an unscripted, unfiltered walkthrough that challenged assumptions...

Most people in automotive have never heard of Brian Ankeny. That's exactly the problem. Brian has spent 21 years inside the industry's most underestimated media company, watching every major shift before it happened. AI search. Autonomous vehicle charging. Tread depth data as a dealership revenue stream. He saw all of it coming, and he's been quietly helping the companies that pay a...

The letters went out. 97 of them. And buried inside each one is a compliance framework so broad, so technically demanding, that a single sold car, still live on your website three hours later, could cost you half a million dollars. Jim Fitzpatrick sits down with David Spisak, CEO of Disruptive Growth Solutions, and they don't soften it. Sixteen categories of violations. Salespeople's Ins...

Most people never figure out what actually matters until it's too late. This episode is the keynote David delivered at ASOTUCON, and it's the most personal thing he's ever said on a stage. His father walking out. A counselor who told him not to bother. A Navy enlistment at a stoplight that changed everything. The dealership that outsold Mercedes-Benz nationally by 38% with zero adve...

Over half of the most powerful companies on earth in the year 2000 don't exist anymore. Not struggling. Gone. They had the customers, the capital, the brand. They had everything, except the willingness to question whether what made them great was becoming what would make them irrelevant. Paul Faletti has led NCM Associates, the company that invented the automotive 20 Group, for 17 years. Befo...

Matt Ober helped manage $30 billion. He saw the AI wave coming years before anyone else. Now he's talking about what actually happened behind the scenes. Matt is the Managing Partner at Social Leverage, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on fintech and vertical AI. Before that, he served as Chief Data Scientists at Third Point, one of the world's most elite hedge funds, and was pa...

Danny Chaves didn't go to college. He didn't have a business plan. He didn't have investors, a mentor, or a safety net. What he had was $400, a couch in his mother's house, and a stubbornness that would quietly build one of the most remarkable service companies in the automotive industry. Today, Danny's Detailed Services processes 125,000 cars a month, employs over 800 peo...

Frederick Grimm is the co-founder and COO of FIXD — the company behind America's most widely used vehicle diagnostic device with over 4 million units sold. After scanning millions of cars, his team discovered dealerships had a problem they didn't even know existed. He built Appraisal Pro to solve it. Now used by over 1,100 franchise dealerships, it tells any dealer in under 2 minutes the...

What does it actually take to run used cars across 35 stores — profitably, consistently, every single month? Most people in this industry will never find out. Keith Benkel has been doing it for over two decades. From buying a broken 1967 Mustang GT for $400 as a teenager, and getting it running the next day, to becoming the National Used Vehicle Director of one of the largest automotive groups in...

The FTC just made things very clear. Federal law now overrides state law. The total price has to be the most prominent price. Add-ons have to be genuinely optional. Rebates have to be real and available to everyone they're shown to. And whoever controls the ad owns the ad. Not your agency. Not your OEM. You. But here's what I really want you to understand. The FTC is not even your bigges...

Paul J. Daly and Kyle Mountsier built one of the most unlikely communities in American business — inside an industry most people fall into by accident. In 2020, Paul fired up a LinkedIn Live from his basement with one goal: make people in automotive feel less alone. Thousands showed up. What followed became ASOTU, More Than Cars, and a growing movement convinced that how you treat the person in fr...

Buying a car has always felt more complicated than it needs to be. Ray and Zach Shefska built CarEdge to fix that. In this episode, Ray who spent 43 years on the inside of the automotive industry — and his son Zach sit down with David Spisak to share exactly how CarEdge is simplifying the car buying experience for everyday people across the country. What they've built, why they built it, and...

Let's be brutally honest. You didn't get into this business to log into 12 different systems before 9am. You didn't invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology just to feel more confused, more frustrated, and more blind than you were before. And you sure didn't build your dealership from the ground up just to rent access to data that is already yours. But that is exac...

What if the single biggest leak in your dealership's profitability has nothing to do with your ad spend, your inventory, or your closing rate? What if it's hiding inside a problem so familiar, you stopped seeing it? This week I sat down with someone who not only found it... he built the solution from the inside out. Matt Lasher , is the President of Streamline.auto and let me tell you, t...

What if the biggest threat to your dealership isn't a competitor down the street? What if it's a startup you've never heard of, funded by capital you don't yet understand, solving a problem you didn't know you had? This week, I sat down with Quin Garcia, Founder and Managing Director at AutoTech Ventures out of Silicon Valley, one of the sharpest minds in automotive and mo...

What if the biggest competitive advantage in your dealership isn’t more leads… but finally owning your data? In this episode I sat down with Todd Smith, retail automotive lifer, tech founder, surfer, and the CEO of QoreAI and what started as a curiosity-driven conversation turned into one of the most important discussions I’ve had in a long time about the future of our industry Todd and I come fro...

Most dealerships are trying to solve the future with more tools. More software. More dashboards. More “AI”. But what if the real problem isn’t a lack of tools? What if the real problem is that none of the systems actually work together? In this episode of The David Spisak Show, I sit down with Danny Zaslavsky to talk about one of the biggest challenges dealers are quietly struggling with right now...

Are you unknowingly leaking six figures a year through your service lane? In this episode, I sat down with Mark Queen, Founder and CEO of Skaivision, for one of the most practical, eye-opening conversations we’ve had about dealership acquisition strategy and fixed ops performance. And I’ll be honest… This one exposed some uncomfortable truths. We talk about why most dealers are chasing more leads...

Most people come to NADA looking for the thing that’s going to “save” their year. A new tool. A new strategy. A new shortcut. But here’s what hit me after sitting down with Inga Maurer, McKinsey Senior Partner at the Encore in Vegas… The optimism is still here. The math is not. Inga and I went places in this conversation that most people avoid on the show floor. Not because they don’t care, but be...

What if the biggest risk in your dealership isn’t AI… it’s using the wrong AI? Live from the Tekion booth at NADA 2026, in what might be the busiest corner of Las Vegas that week, I sat down with Jay Vijayan for a conversation that goes way beyond buzzwords. And trust me… this one matters. Because while everyone is talking about “AI agents,” very few are asking the harder question: What happens wh...

What happens when a guy from Manchester flies across the pond, challenges how dealerships think about inventory, and casually drops 40% conversion rates into the conversation? You sit him down in the studio, and press record. This episode is different. For the first time, I’m not behind the desk. I’m sitting face-to-face with Dom Pope, founder and CEO of Sell My Ride, who’s been on a mission to he...

Buying a car should feel exciting… so why does it still feel like pulling teeth? In this episode of The David Spisak Show, I sit down with Matt McDonald, Director of Product at Cars Commerce, for a conversation that hits right at the heart of where automotive, technology, and the modern consumer collide. Matt isn’t just another tech leader, he’s a lifelong car guy with deep roots at Amazon and Gam...