The David Spisak Show

Charles Gallaer has seen the automotive industry from three sides most people never will: inside a major automaker, behind the desk of a dealership general manager, and across the negotiating table as a dealership attorney. A partner in the automotive group at Arent Fox Schiff, Gallaer has represented buyers and sellers in major multi-dealership transactions and helped secure a $1.185 million jury...

Bill Cariss of Holman Ventures is helping shape what comes next in automotive technology. With investments spanning AI, robotics, and emerging technologies, he's seeing firsthand which innovations are gaining traction, where investors are placing their bets, and what dealerships need to prepare for before the industry catches up. What happens when your competitors can grow their service busin...

John Ellis has seen the car business from almost every seat. ADP. Autotrader. Gulf States Toyota. Cox Automotive and Manheim. Over 25 years, he’s worked inside dealer stores across fixed ops, F&I, variable, and wholesale. He’s a US Marine Corps veteran and a former Salesperson of the Year. At 55, he walked away from a successful corporate career to tackle a problem he believes the used car ind...

Brian Kramer is Executive Vice President at Cars Commerce and former dealership general manager, has spent decades challenging how dealerships operate, adopt technology, and serve customers. Having worked on both sides of automotive retail, he brings a firsthand perspective on what's changing, what's working, and where dealers are falling behind. In this episode of The David Spisak Show...

Plenty of dealers are hoping AI is the magic bullet. Ron Frey says if you think it is, you're wrong. He's earned the right to say it. Ron was a founding partner and COO at TrueCar, Chief Strategy Officer at AutoNation, and Global Chief Strategy Officer at CDK Global. He's delivered 10,000 cars a year sight unseen. Ron says nothing about why that worked has changed since 1985. Includ...

Danelle Delgado is known worldwide as the Millionaire Maker. She is the CEO of Engage Training and The Internal Alliance, a bestselling author, and a business and results strategist whose training systems are used by entrepreneurs, sales teams, and major dealer groups like Carter Myers Automotive. She has built multiple seven-figure companies, been featured in Forbes, and personally built and trac...

Peter Cooper opened his Lexus store in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1990, in a market that would never let him be the biggest dealer in America. So he chased something harder to copy: becoming people's favorite place to do business. More than 20 years ago, he went one price, single point of contact, no haggling, while the rest of the industry bet the other way. Today his store runs on a culture...

Jason Stein has spent three decades inside automotive media, from running Automotive News across Jason Stein spent nearly three decades in automotive media, most of it as publisher of Automotive News and its properties in Detroit, Europe, Canada, and China, before moving to the deal side of the business. He's now Managing Director and Partner at the Presidio Group, an investment bank focused...

Most dealers think they're passing on $500. They're actually walking away from $8,500 and don't even know it. Alex Perdikis knows exactly why. He's President and CEO of Koons Auto Group and founder of Trade Agent AI, the agentic AI platform now running inside his own Ford, Lincoln, and Mazda stores. Ten years after buying his first dealership outright, he's still the guy p...

Tim Hayden built his career helping brands stop renting their own customer data back from Big Tech. He ran Edelman's $20M North American mobile program, spent two years in Silicon Valley watching generative AI emerge before it had a name, then co-founded BrainTrust Partners. Tim has worked with brands including Dell, Hilton, Bacardi, and Walmart, and is known for connecting technology with th...

Jill Shulman is a former U.S. Marine Corps combat engineer officer, one of the first women ever commissioned into the role, who led platoons through mine-clearing and bridge-building operations at 23 years old. She went on to spend over a decade in corporate leadership development at Abbott Laboratories, earned a master's in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and...

Tim Manning has spent 20+ years inside Mazda North American Operations, and he's run almost every department that matters. Port logistics. Regional GM. Customer service. VP of Aftersales. Dealer Network Operations, where he took Mazda's image-commensurate stores from 40 to over 300. He's a Berkeley grad with a Notre Dame MBA, and he's now Senior VP of Retail Operations, the sea...

Gabriel Millien has architected AI systems for Nestlé, Pfizer, and UL. He's advised Fortune 100 leadership teams on transformation projects most consultants never get close to. Over 550,000 people follow him on LinkedIn for one reason: he never sells anything. He just gives away the exact frameworks other people charge five figures for. In this episode, he gives them to you. If you've bo...

Force Marketing CEO John Fitzpatrick has audited the data of 1,400+ dealerships, and he says 30-40% of what's sitting in your DMS and CRM is unusable trash costing you real money. In this episode, David Spisak sits down with the Force Marketing co-founder to break down exactly where dealership ad dollars go to die, why 99% of stores spend $5,000 or less marketing the department that drives 75...

She started at $6 an hour in a daycare. Today she's running one of the most talked-about dealership models in the country. Erikka Tiffani Wells is the GM of Walser Hyundai Brooklyn Park and co-founder of WOCAN (Women of Color Automotive Network). Her path into automotive started with a broken-down car she couldn't afford to fix and a trade for marketing flyers. It turned into a career th...

Every hiring decision is a bet on a resume. Napo Rumtin built a way to see the truth before you sign the offer letter. David sits down with Napo Rumteen, the guy who scaled Tekion from zero to $100M+ ARR and built Interactive EQ, a platform that puts candidates and employees inside immersive, high-pressure simulations instead of asking them to describe themselves on paper. The results from 7,500 s...

He's advised on over 315 dealership transactions worth more than $22 billion. He's watched Park Place, one of the largest deals in industry history, fall apart at the height of COVID and come back together within weeks. And right now, he's telling us this could be the most active M&A year the auto industry has ever seen. George Karolis, President of Presidio Group, doesn't...

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...