Advertise on podcast: The David Spisak Show

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 most dealers only talk about in 20 groups, led in part by a son who has never sold a car. It started with one question from his wife, Karen: "Peter, what's it like for a woman to buy a car from you?" He said it was easy. He spent months defending that answer. Then he rebuilt the entire business. In this conversation with David Spisak, Peter breaks down: Why dealers who negotiated well were only closing 3 out of 10, and why nobody talked about the other 7The $36 move that puts the exact car a shopper wants in their driveway before they spend a dollar, and why he calls Carvana's return model backwardsWhat David found inside a Carvana-owned store in Sacramento: 110 cars sold in a month, 109 to people who never saw or drove themThe labor rate decision from his first days in business that his own team called impossibleWhy a warranty take rate under 40% says nothing about your customers and everything about your processThe hidden cost of using AI to cut the entry-level people who were supposed to become your next managersHow dealers in their 60s are quietly setting their families up for a disaster they won't be around to fixMost dealers are still asking how to squeeze more gross out of this month. Peter stopped asking that decades ago, and built a business customers find almost impossible to walk away from. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 on automotive retail and mobility, and hosts SiriusXM's Cars and Culture, where he's interviewed guests like Jay Leno, Roger Penske, and Mark Wahlberg. In this episode, he talks about where capital is currently flowing in automotive retail, what that signals about where the industry is heading, and why he believes AI adoption is at a genuine tipping point rather than another overhyped trend. He also shares what he's learned building Presidio's Auto Technology Summit, an invite-only event where the majority of attendees are CEOs, CFOs, and founders, and what he's seen happen in that room in the years since it started. If you want to know where the smart money and the smart operators are paying attention right now, before it becomes obvious to everyone else, this is the episode to hit play. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 pulling the numbers apart to find where the money actually hides. In this episode, Perdikis walks through the real math behind that $8,500 mistake, then hands over results most dealers would never show on record: 3 rooftops, 9,102 past customers, 120 booked appointments, just under $191,000 in gross. Zero added headcount. He also explains why "we already mined our database" is the excuse costing dealers the most money right now, and what separates AI that just texts customers from AI that actually builds trust with them. If you run a store, lead a BDC, or manage fixed ops and think your customer base has nothing left to give, this episode will change your mind before it's over. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 the human behavior behind how businesses actually use it.  Here's the uncomfortable truth this episode exposes: dealers have had DMS, CRM, e-commerce, social, and now AI. The average is still 10 cars a month. Same as the '80s. The technology changed. The dealers didn't. Tim explains exactly why, and what separates the dealers about to pull ahead from the ones about to get left behind. Inside this conversation: The real reason your ChatGPT "shortcut" for grading leads may have already violated the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and what a breach like CDK's actually looked like from the insideWhy "perpetual competitive advantage" has nothing to do with buying better software, and everything to do with what most dealers get wrong about their own dataTim's two-year prediction on unified customer records, and what happens to the dealers still renting theirs when everyone else owns theirsThe one word separating "mechanic" from "technician," and why that same shift is coming for every role in your dealershipWhy the smartest dealers are quietly turning EV charging stations, parts departments, and used inventory into entirely new revenue streams nobody's counting yetIf you're still thinking about AI as a tool instead of a liability sitting on a server rack somewhere, this episode will change how you look at every system in your dealership before your next board meeting. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 has since trained more than 30,000 leaders across 1,000+ speaking engagements. Her book, The Bravery Effect, makes a research-backed case that bravery isn't a personality trait. It's a trainable skill. She walked into Officer Candidate School in hot pink silk shorts and heels. An upperclassman told her, flat out, she'd never make it. Two years later she was battalion commander, outranking hundreds of male candidates who never doubted themselves for a second. That gap, between the girl who almost quit in week one and the officer who came out the other side, is the entire episode. Jill breaks down exactly what happened in between, and it's not what most leadership content tells you. Confidence doesn't come first. Action does. She lays out the Bandura research behind it, and once you hear it, you'll understand why you've been waiting for a feeling that was never going to show up on its own. Inside this conversation we discuss: The one-word mindset shift that turns "I can't" into a solvable problemThe real difference between bravery and reckless bravadoWhy the people closest to you might be the worst ones to ask before a big decisionThe "future self" test Jill uses to cut through fear in under sixty secondsWhat it actually took to walk away from a six-figure corporate career, a pension, and every safety net, and why staying would have cost her more than leaving ever couldGood is comfortable. Good is also, as Jill and David get into, the single biggest threat to becoming great. If you've ever sat on a decision because you weren't "ready yet," this episode hands you the exact mechanism for why that readiness was never coming, and what actually builds it instead. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 seat where every one of Mazda's numbers gets built or broken. And the numbers are the kind other OEMs don't want dealers to see: 3 straight years leading the industry in IIHS Top Safety Pick+ awards. Service retention at 59%, with stores clearing 60%. A 14% smaller dealer network that grew sales by nearly 40% anyway. $2.5 billion in combined Mazda-and-dealer investment. This isn't a brand riding momentum. This is a brand that engineered it, on purpose, in public, for a decade. So why does almost nobody talk about it? That's the exact question that kicks off this episode. Tune in to find out more! Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 bought AI tools this year and still can't answer "what did this actually do for my business," you need this conversation. Gabriel breaks down the five questions almost no dealer asks a vendor before signing, and why skipping them is how a $50,000 contract turns into a liability nobody saw coming. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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% of their profit, and what's coming next as AI search reshapes how car buyers find dealerships. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 that's landed her on Automotive News' 40 Under 40 list and at the center of one of the industry's most disruptive operating models. In this episode, David sits down with Erikka to unpack: Why Walser's no-commission, four-day workweek model is outperforming traditional dealershipsThe real reason single-price, single-point-of-contact stores fail everywhere else and succeed at WalserWhat Erica learned building Audi's first pilot BDC, and why she thinks OEM steering committees are brokenThe burnout trap of hustle culture, and the moment she realized working 12-hour days was hurting her team, not helping itWhy WOCAN exists, what's actually stalling progress for women and people of color in dealership leadership, and what change requires from everyone in the room, not just the people already convincedThis is a conversation about culture, leadership, and what it really takes to build a dealership people want to work for and buy from.  Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 simulated experiences is uncomfortable. Only 3.7% of people could separate their intentions from their actual judgment under pressure. Managers showed less than half the awareness of frontline staff when a subtle bias played out in real time. And the gap between how people handle a customer problem versus an internal one exposes exactly where dealerships are quietly bleeding money. This is the conversation that explains why the best resume in the stack might be hiding your worst hire, and why the quiet ones on your floor might be your next rockstars, if you knew where to look. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 just track the deals. He's the guy dealers call before they make one. This is the conversation happening in boardrooms at the top 150 dealer groups right now. If you're trying to buy, sell, or just understand where the next eighteen months are heading, you cannot afford to be behind on this one. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 a management platform and an engagement platform is costing dealerships more than they realize. Why 140 dealerships a month are making the switch to DriveCentric. And why Matt believes the CRM category is more relevant now in the age of AI than it has ever been — just not in the way most people think. I've been in this business since 1981. I've watched technology promise to change everything and deliver very little. If part one made you think differently about where great leaders come from, part two will make you think differently about where your dealership is going. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 truth about your business before the market does it for you. One of them is the same question Kevin O'Leary uses to gut-check founders on Shark Tank, and it draws a hard line between a real business and an expensive hobby. Another question takes ten seconds to answer if your value proposition is actually strong... and most entrepreneurs can't do it. If you've been avoiding the hard conversation with yourself about what's really holding your business back, these five questions will find it. Twenty-five questions total. Five parts. This is where it starts. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 sporting event, recital, or graduation. He wanted to be Michael J. Fox in Secret of My Success. He wanted Wall Street. He got something better. I've interviewed hundreds of people in this industry. This is the first time I've ever done a two-part episode. After sitting down with Matt Leone, CEO of DriveCentric, I didn't have a choice. There was too much here, too much story, too much substance, too much that this industry needs to hear, and I refused to cut a single thing. Part one is about the man. Part two is about the mission. Start here. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

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 he didn't even know he was carrying. What he found wasn't a gimmick. It wasn't smoke and mirrors. It was something far more unsettling for the industry: a different set of questions producing radically different outcomes. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: [email protected]: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now! 🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679