About

My partners and I took over a group of franchise dealerships that had been losing money for years before we walked in. Most operators would have walked away. We didn’t.

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 two years, we’d flipped them from chronic losses to one of the top-performing operations in our market. Net-to-gross numbers that made our manufacturer reps drive out just to see what we were doing. We owned the surrounding markets and never gave them back. Eventually a strategic acquirer came in with an offer that was too good to walk away from. 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.

After the sale, I was recruited into one of the largest dealer groups in the country. I ran multiple stores as multistore General Manager and helped run variable operations across additional rooftops in the group.

The receipts, two years running:

• Top-30 General Manager company-wide — out of hundreds of store locations.
• Top-performing store for net finance average across the entire group.
• Every Finance Manager on my team consistently ranked in the top 25 of the 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.

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.

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 production conversations for partners in other regulated industries — high-stakes phone work we don’t discuss publicly by client agreement. 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.

DealerSpark is a stack, not a single product. DealerSpark Intelligence is the AI used-car buyer — Street Buyer, Smart Stock, Recon IQ — built for the independents the legacy procurement tools forgot. DealerSpark Voice puts AI phone agents on every line in sales and service: real conversations, real outcomes, 24/7. Each piece sells on its own. Together they replace a stack of vendors most dealers have been stitching together for a decade.

And that’s only what we’ve put in front of customers. Behind the curtain, we have additional production builds underway in 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.

I’m 46, based in Montana. Married to my wife Jennifer since 1998. 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.