Chad Nethery

I started on the floor at 18. I’m not a tech founder.

I sold my first car in Redding, California in 1998. I was eighteen years old. I spent the next thirteen years working through every position in the sales department — green-pea salesperson to closer, used car manager, sales manager, finance manager, desk manager. I ran every chair I now build software for. I’m not a Bay Area founder who saw a pitch deck and decided dealerships looked interesting. I came up in the business the way everybody who actually runs one came up in it.

Two California franchise stores. From a $300K loss to $2.1M net.

In 2012, my partners and I took over two franchise dealerships in California. They’d had four consecutive losing years before we walked in. The previous year had closed at a $300,000 loss. Most operators would have walked away.

The first move was consolidating both rooftops onto one campus to cut overhead. Then we rebuilt the floor — the way you’re supposed to. New playbook. Daily coaching. Real accountability. Hard process discipline on phone-ups, T.O.s, F&I, and CSI follow-up.

Inside 24 months, sales volume was up 300%. We pushed our market-share rating consistently over 200%. The net went from a six-figure loss to $1,000,000 in 2012, then $2.1 million by 2015 at a 39% net-to-gross. We owned the surrounding markets and never gave them back. Late 2017, a strategic acquirer came in with an offer that was too lucrative to turn down. We sold.

Those were the years that taught me what a dealership looks like when it actually runs the way it’s supposed to. They’re also the years I learned how rare that is.

Then I went corporate. Multistore GM at one of the largest dealer groups in America.

After the sale, I was recruited into one of the largest publicly traded new-vehicle dealership groups in the country — a Top-5 retailer with hundreds of rooftops nationwide. I ran two stores in the Mountain West as multistore General Manager and helped run variable operations at two more.

The receipts, two years running:

• Top-30 General Manager company-wide — out of more than 250 store locations, in 2019 and 2020.
• Top-performing store for net finance average across the entire group, in 2019 and 2020.
• All six of my Finance Managers consistently ranked in the top 25 of the entire company every month.
• Trained Sales Managers, Finance Managers, and Assistant General Managers from across the network. Many went on to run their own stores. I still mentor several of them.

Why I built DealerSpark.

Every store I ever ran had the same problem.

The job description said: run weekly 1:1s with every salesperson. Coach phone-ups daily. Sit on T.O.s. Audit desk logs. Build the Saturday meeting deck on Friday. Hold the veterans accountable. Walk every green pea through the first 90 seconds of an up.

The reality: half of that got eaten every single week. Vendor calls ran long. A walk-in turned into a 90-minute deal. A manager called out. A factory rep showed up unannounced. The development work — the slow, repeatable, daily coaching reps that actually grow people — was always the first thing to bump.

I trained AGMs and sales managers across one of the largest dealer groups in the country. Not one of them had a knowing problem. Every single one of them had a doing problem. They knew exactly what the floor needed. They just never had the hours in the day to execute it.

The technology finally caught up. Voice AI got good enough — about a year ago — that I could put a real coach on every phone, in every rep’s pocket, running the practice reps a great GSM would run if she had the time. That’s DealerSpark. The AI GSM I needed when I was the one on the desk at 7:50am trying to slap together a meeting deck before the lot meeting started.

What I’m building now.

I’m a co-founder of EchoRange AI Montana LLC — the parent company. We build production voice AI for industries where every conversation has stakes.

DealerSpark.Ai is our automotive retail brand. It’s the AI GSM for car dealers — sales, F&I, and service — built for the floors the incumbents pitch in glossy decks but never actually serve every shift. Coach Maverick on the sales side. Coach Sterling for F&I. Coach Atlas on the service drive. One platform, voice-first, on every phone, every shift.

The same voice AI engine that powers DealerSpark also runs our second production line — a national skip-trace and collateral-recovery operation that holds surrender negotiations with people actively hiding their vehicles, every day, for major institutional lenders. If the tech is rugged enough to hold a real conversation with somebody who doesn’t want to give up their truck, your service follow-up call is the easiest thing it does all shift. We didn’t build DealerSpark on a demo stack. We built it on a stack that already gets results in some of the hardest conversations happening on a phone in this country.

And that’s only what we’ve put in front of customers. Behind the curtain, we have additional production builds underway in wearable field intelligence (smart-glasses AI for operators in the field), autonomous creative production (an end-to-end pipeline that ships studio-grade video without a studio), and sovereign-cloud infrastructure for tribal partnerships on reservation-sited energy. Each one is a different industry, all built on the same EchoRange foundation: real conversations, real outcomes, real stakes.

We build from Montana, not a Bay Area garage. We don’t do proofs of concept. We ship voice AI and agent systems that talk to real people in real situations and get results.

Personal.

I’m 46, based in Montana. Married 23 years to my wife Jennifer. Two daughters. When I’m not on the desk or in the build, I’m hunting, fishing, or somewhere in the high country trying to get a few hours of quiet before the inbox catches up.

Everything I’ve built was built so my family eats well and the dealers I came up with finally get a coaching layer that respects how hard the floor actually is. That’s the whole pitch.

— Chad Nethery, Montana