🚗Product philosophy

With a background in running dealerships and a vendor I've seen the challenges from both perspectives. For dealerships it's never been more complicated to run their organizations. Dealerships are adding more vendors than ever to create experiences for their customers and employees alike. This creates an overlap in expense, and all too often vendors are added and unfortunately cancelled shortly after. The revolving door distracts the key leaders in the org from their primary focus.

There is a lack of transparency on vendor features, pricing, and terms. Leaving all product discovery on dealerships meeting with vendors on demos or at conferences. Vendors have pushed dealerships for over 20 years to be more transparent in their merchandising and product pricing, yet almost never do it themselves.

It’s also quite challenging for the vendors building the new innovations our industry needs. These products and the teams that build them need to break through the noise among a sea of companies all making similar claims. Vendors will often use language that portrays their products in ways that sound good but lack substance.

After evaluating the first 300 vendors it was obvious there is a common trend of avoiding clear concise language; here is what my product does, here is how it does it and how much it costs to do it. Most of the communication is on how it benefits the dealership, which ends up being very subjective or based on metrics that likely won’t translate into the goals the dealership has. The vendors are under tremendous pressure to sell and grow. They struggle to partner with dealerships that are the right fit, depending on what phase their company is in.

Our aim is to pursue the truth of what is helping dealerships win and create a community-based platform for those companies to showcase their results. Our roadmap is based on the philosophy that every dealership should have access to this platform and its core services at no charge. To ensure this happens we will charge vendors when the dealership successfully connects with them for a demo of their product. As this service grows, we will design new ways to help dealerships select vendors and save money.

The amount of waste in from misalignment of partners, overspend and overlapped features has never been higher paving the way for LVL Up to make a big difference for dealerships.

Jon Berna Founder