The David Spisak Show
What happens when you get access to uncommon conversations with people who achieved the highest levels of success? Join David Spisak as he brings you inside the room where success stories are told by the people who lived them so that you can achieve your definition of success at an accelerated pace.
Episodes
275 episodes
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 tell...
Matt Leone: How DriveCentric Is Changing the Way Dealers Win Customers (Part 2)
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 tec...
25 Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask Themselves (Part 1)
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...
Matt Leone: The Long Road to DriveCentric (Part 1)
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...
What Carvana Knows That We Don't
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....
Brian Ankney: AI Found Your Customer First
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. Auto...
Jim Fitzpatrick: The FTC Trap Dealers Are Walking Into
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 Fi...
The Scoreboard That Actually Matters [ASOTUCON Keynote]
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 ...
Paul Faletti: The Silent Killer of Dealer Growth
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 g...
Matt Ober: Data, AI, and What's Actually Coming Next
Matt Ober helped manage $30 billion. He saw the AI wave coming years before anyone else. Now he's talking about what actually happened behind the scenes.Matt is the Managing Partner at Social Leverage, a seed-stage venture capital firm f...
From $400 to $50 million company: the Danny Chaves story
Danny Chaves didn't go to college. He didn't have a business plan. He didn't have investors, a mentor, or a safety net. What he had was $400, a couch in his mother's house, and a stubbornness that would quietly build one of the most remarkable ...
The Trade-In Con Costing Dealers Thousands Per Deal with Frederick Grimm
Frederick Grimm is the co-founder and COO of FIXD — the company behind America's most widely used vehicle diagnostic device with over 4 million units sold. After scanning millions of cars, his team discovered dealerships had a problem they didn...
The $1M Trade-In Blind Spot with Keith Benkel
What does it actually take to run used cars across 35 stores — profitably, consistently, every single month?Most people in this industry will never find out. Keith Benkel has been doing it for over two decades.From buying a...
The FTC Just Changed the Game for Dealers!
The FTC just made things very clear. Federal law now overrides state law. The total price has to be the most prominent price. Add-ons have to be genuinely optional. Rebates have to be real and available to everyone they're shown to. And whoever...
Love People More Than You Love Cars with Paul Daly & Kyle Mountsier
Paul J. Daly and Kyle Mountsier built one of the most unlikely communities in American business — inside an industry most people fall into by accident.In 2020, Paul fired up a LinkedIn Live from his basement with one goal: make people in...
How CarEdge Is Making Car Buying Simpler for Everyone with Ray and Zach Shefska
Buying a car has always felt more complicated than it needs to be. Ray and Zach Shefska built CarEdge to fix that.In this episode, Ray who spent 43 years on the inside of the automotive industry — and his son Zach sit down with David Spi...
Why Dealers Are Paying for Their Own Data?
Let's be brutally honest.You didn't get into this business to log into 12 different systems before 9am. You didn't invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology just to feel more confused, more frustrated, and more blind than you...
The Hidden Math Problem Killing Dealership Profitability Right Now with Matt Lasher
What if the single biggest leak in your dealership's profitability has nothing to do with your ad spend, your inventory, or your closing rate?What if it's hiding inside a problem so familiar, you stopped seeing it?This week I sat ...
The Startup Odds Are 9,000 to 7. What That Says About the Future of Automotive with Quin Garcia
What if the biggest threat to your dealership isn't a competitor down the street? What if it's a startup you've never heard of, funded by capital you don't yet understand, solving a problem you didn't know you had?This week, I sat down w...
How Dealers Are Accidentally Wasting Millions Because of Bad Data with Todd Smith
What if the biggest competitive advantage in your dealership isn’t more leads… but finally owning your data?In this episode I sat down with Todd Smith, retail automotive lifer, tech founder, surfer, and the CEO of QoreAI and what started...
Why AI Is Useless Without This One Thing — And Most Dealers Don't Have It | Danny Zaslavsky(NADA26)
Most dealerships are trying to solve the future with more tools.More software.More dashboards.More “AI”.But what if the real problem isn’t a lack of tools?What if the real problem is that none of the systems actu...
How Dealers Are Losing Six Figures in Fixed Ops with Mark Queen (NADA26)
Are you unknowingly leaking six figures a year through your service lane?In this episode, I sat down with Mark Queen, Founder and CEO of Skaivision, for one of the most practical, eye-opening conversations we’ve had about dealership acqu...
The 2026 Dealer Reality Check with Inga Maurer (NADA26)
Most people come to NADA looking for the thing that’s going to “save” their year.A new tool.A new strategy.A new shortcut.But here’s what hit me after sitting down with Inga Maurer, McKinsey Senior Partner at the Encore ...
How Tekion Is Redefining AI in Car Dealerships with Jay Vijayan (NADA26)
What if the biggest risk in your dealership isn’t AI… it’s using the wrong AI?Live from the Tekion booth at NADA 2026, in what might be the busiest corner of Las Vegas that week, I sat down with Jay Vijayan for a conversation that goes w...
How Smart Dealers Are Beating the Used Car Shortage (Without the Auction) with Dom Pope
What happens when a guy from Manchester flies across the pond, challenges how dealerships think about inventory, and casually drops 40% conversion rates into the conversation?You sit him down in the studio, and press record.This e...