The David Spisak Show
The David Spisak Show is hosted by David Spisak where he discusses a variety of topics impacting retail automotive, entrepreneurs, investors, and the market.
Bill Cariss: How to Grow Your Dealership Without Hiring More
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.
John Ellis: Buying Used Cars Is About to Get Harder for Dealers
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.
Brian Kramer: Why AI Search Is Skipping Your Dealership
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.
Ron Frey: Most Dealers Will Get AI Wrong
Before Carvana existed, Ron was delivering 10,000 cars a year sight unseen, with no negotiation and a seven-day buyback. His customers knew he wasn't getting them a better price. They bought anyway. The reason why still separates the dealers who win from the ones who don't.
Danelle Delgado: What Makes Great Salespeople Great
In this episode, Danelle Delgado 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.
Peter Cooper: Why Customers Don’t Want to Come to Your Dealership
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.
Jason Stein: Where the Smart Money Is Moving in Automotive
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.
Alex Perdikis: The DMS Strategy Behind $191K In Gross
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.
Tim Hayden: What Separates the Next Generation of Dealers From Everyone Else
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.
Jill Schulman: The Science of Bravery (Explained by a Former Marine)
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.
Tim Manning (Mazda's SVP): The System Behind Mazda's 59% Service Retention
Last month, the average new car payment broke $800 for the first time ever. Prices are up from $39,000 to over $50,000 in a few years. And in the middle of that, David posted a reel calling Mazda a "sleeper brand." Mazda's own account replied. So David brought on the person actually running the numbers behind that reel: Tim Manning, Senior VP of Retail Operations for Mazda North American Operations.
Gabriel Millien: The Real Cost of AI in the Dealership
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.
John Fitzpatrick: 99% Of Dealers Get This Wrong
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.
Erikka Tiffani Wells: From $6 An Hour To General Manager of Walser Hyundai
She started at $6 an hour in a daycare. Today she's running one of the most talked-about dealership models in the country.
Napo Rumteen: Why Simulation Beats Interviews
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.
George Karolis: Building Auto Retail's $22 Billion Playbook
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.
Matt Leone: How DriveCentric Is Changing the Way Dealers Win Customers (Part 2)
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.
25 Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask Themselves (Part 1)
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.
Matt Leone: The Long Road to DriveCentric (Part 1)
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.
What Carvana Knows That We Don't
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.