The Car Business

The car business is where I became “the web guy.” Before hats, before AI, before any of it, my career started on dealership lots — and almost everything I know about running a live commercial catalog online, I learned there first.

It started with dealership websites. My earliest paid web work was building sites for Kelowna Motors, Westgate RV, and Valley Trailer Sales — a car dealer, an RV dealer, a trailer dealer. Three different lots, the same underlying problem: a yard full of expensive, one-of-a-kind units, and a website that was supposed to sell them. From day one the job was never “make a nice site.” It was “get this specific inventory in front of the person who wants that unit.” That framing never left me.

Then Florida — special events, then a credit program I helped build. I moved to Florida to run a dealership special-events program, CSI Events — the high-tempo, promotion-driven side of car retail, where a lot orchestrates a weekend push to move metal. That was a short chapter, about a year, but it taught me the tempo of the business: dealers live and die on turning inventory. It then evolved into American Credit Center, which ran three years and taught me something deeper. That was a dealer program built around a real problem — the customer a dealership can’t finance. Dealers referred their bad-credit buyers to us; we worked to repair their credit, tracked every account through a custom CRM I built so the dealer had full oversight of where their referral stood, and then delivered the customer back to the showroom now able to qualify for a new car. It closed a loop most dealers just wrote off — and it’s where I first built the software to run an automotive program end to end, not just market it. The model worked well enough that it started to expand beyond auto, into mortgage brokers and larger lenders, at which point it had really outgrown the car business and become something closer to financial-services marketing — which is exactly where the automotive chapter of my career ends and another one begins.

AutoTrader was the marketplace vantage. From 2012 to 2015 I was an Online Sales Consultant at Trader Corp, responsible for the digital success and retention of roughly 400 dealer websites on AutoTrader.ca — one of Canada’s largest automotive marketplaces. I wasn’t a transactional rep. I treated every dealer as a business case: pull their inventory and traffic data, advise on pricing, merchandising, and ad placement, and prove value on a repeating rhythm. Doing that consistently is how I increased client retention by about 20% across the portfolio. That’s where I learned the marketplace side — how listings compete, how buyers actually search, and how a dealer’s inventory has to be merchandised, not just posted.

Then five years in-house, hands-on. After AutoTrader I spent about five years doing in-house, hands-on digital marketing for dealers — not consulting from a slide deck, but running the campaigns, the feeds, and the sites myself. This is the stretch where the domain got deep: real dealer accounts, real inventory feeds, real ad spend, with me on the tools.

AIM Experts was the syndication side. For part of that period I was Digital Marketing Manager at AIM Experts — a B2B automotive platform owned by my friend Rick Balkan (going back to boarding-school days), later acquired by AutoVerify, a major automotive-software player. My job there wasn’t the engineering; it was the demand-gen — running the B2B Google Ads, SEO, and email that brought dealerships onto the platform. But being close to it taught me the hard technical core of the business: taking a 17-digit VIN and decoding it into a rich listing, then generating and continuously updating compliant inventory feeds for Google Merchant Center (Vehicle Ads) and Facebook Automotive Inventory Ads, and syndicating accurately to third-party portals. That’s the plumbing under the whole industry.

Here’s the thing the domain taught me, that I still carry everywhere: a dealership’s real online problem was never the website. It’s the inventory. A car lot’s catalog is the hard case of commercial data — high-SKU, every unit unique, prices and availability churning daily, keyed on the VIN, and it has to arrive accurate and current in a dozen places at once (the site, the marketplaces, Google, Facebook). Get the inventory pipeline right and the marketing almost takes care of itself. Get it wrong and no amount of ad spend saves you. That’s the same instinct I now bring to WooCommerce and to SIE: the live catalog is the source of truth, and everything downstream is hydration. Cars taught me that before hats did.

And it’s still live. The thread runs straight into today: Lynx Digital’s Dealer Services is a current offering — inventory management and merchandising, SEO vehicle descriptions, AdWords and Facebook feeds, syndication to Kijiji and AutoTrader, and lead parsing into the CRM — with Martins managing many of those dealer accounts now. So this isn’t a closed chapter of a résumé. It’s a domain I’ve worked in from my first website to a product line I still stand behind, which is exactly why I can speak about the car business as something I know, not something I once did.