The David Spisak Show

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 business without adding more employees?

That future is already taking shape. Holman Robotics is putting autonomous robots to work moving parts through dealership service departments, and a major publicly traded dealer group has already selected the company as its robotics supplier.

But robotics is only part of a much bigger shift.

Joining David Spisak at the Presidio Group's Automotive Technology Summit, Bill reveals why the next competitive advantage in automotive may have less to do with adopting more technology and more to do with how intelligently dealers connect their systems, protect their data, and deploy AI.

Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/
• Website: https://www.davidspisak.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!

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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 industry can no longer afford to ignore.

What happens to dealerships that keep buying and managing used cars the same way they have for decades?

John joins David Spisak to talk about the future of used car acquisition, the discipline separating high-performing dealerships from everyone else, and what it really takes to build a business when the odds aren't guaranteed to be in your favor.

Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/
• Website: https://www.davidspisak.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like 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
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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, Brian joins David for a candid conversation about a growing problem in automotive retail: dealers are investing in more technology, spending more on advertising, and still losing opportunities they don't even realize exist.

And as Carvana, Amazon, and AI-powered search reshape how customers find, evaluate, and purchase vehicles, the traditional dealership playbook is being challenged in ways many operators aren't prepared for.

David and Brian dig into:

• The leads you're losing without knowing: Where dealership pipelines break down and why more advertising isn't always the answer.
• Why AI might be overlooking your dealership: How seemingly small inconsistencies in your online presence can cost you visibility and opportunities.
• The expensive mistake dealers are making with AI: Why adding more tools doesn't necessarily create a smarter or more profitable dealership.
• What Carvana understands about selling cars: Lessons from David and Brian's firsthand visit that could change how you approach the customer experience.
• The dealership org chart of the future: Which roles deserve priority as technology reshapes automotive retail.
• The hidden risks inside your technology stack: What dealers should know about disconnected data, vendor access, and AI-related liability.

The real question isn't whether AI, Carvana, or changing consumer behavior will disrupt your dealership.

It's how much business you could already be losing because your dealership hasn't adapted.

Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/
• Website: https://www.davidspisak.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!

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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. Including what it means for AI. And that right now feels a lot like 1998, when the internet had everyone confused. Except this time, it's moving much faster.

And the dealers who get scared and pull back? He says they'll be proven right. It will be really bad. 

We also talk about:

• The one distinction about technology that decides whether it makes your store better or does the work for you.
• Why customers bought from him even though they knew he wasn't getting them a better price.
• The principle that keeps people he worked with 20 years ago calling him first when the stakes are high.
• Why being right 51% of the time is enough to win.
• The relay race lesson he ends up having with almost every founder he works with.

His advice on what dealers should do right now isn't the exciting answer. It's the one that will matter. 

Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/
• Website: https://www.davidspisak.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!

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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 tracked more than 3,000 success plans for the people she coaches.

Years ago, she had none of that.

But what makes this conversation interesting is that her approach to dealership performance doesn’t start with the CRM, the script, the process, or even the car.

It starts somewhere else entirely.

In this episode, Danelle breaks down what she learned after working inside dealership organizations and why some of the biggest performance problems in automotive can’t be fixed with more technology or another round of traditional sales training.

She shares the framework she uses to separate good performers from the people who become indispensable inside an organization, and why trust, confidence, communication, and personal accountability can have a much bigger impact on sales than most teams realize.

Learn more about Danelle and Team Engage at davidspisak.com.

Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/
• Website: https://www.davidspisak.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like 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
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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 7
• The $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 backwards
• What David found inside a Carvana-owned store in Sacramento: 110 cars sold in a month, 109 to people who never saw or drove them
• The labor rate decision from his first days in business that his own team called impossible
• Why a warranty take rate under 40% says nothing about your customers and everything about your process
• The hidden cost of using AI to cut the entry-level people who were supposed to become your next managers
• How dealers in their 60s are quietly setting their families up for a disaster they won't be around to fix

Most 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.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!

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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.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!

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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.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like 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
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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 inside
• Why "perpetual competitive advantage" has nothing to do with buying better software, and everything to do with what most dealers get wrong about their own data
• Tim's two-year prediction on unified customer records, and what happens to the dealers still renting theirs when everyone else owns theirs
• The one word separating "mechanic" from "technician," and why that same shift is coming for every role in your dealership
• Why the smartest dealers are quietly turning EV charging stations, parts departments, and used inventory into entirely new revenue streams nobody's counting yet

If 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.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like 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 problem
• The real difference between bravery and reckless bravado
• Why the people closest to you might be the worst ones to ask before a big decision
• The "future self" test Jill uses to cut through fear in under sixty seconds
• What 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 could

Good 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.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Phone: +1 (510) 604-0308
• Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our links

Like 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