Below are links to companies, resources and tools that I use on a daily basis. Much of these are oriented towards the powersport industry and are easily applicable to automotive dealerships. The group I work for recently acquired a new business that specializes in marine motor rebuilding and sales. Additionally, you will find resources here for that market segment.
- Lightspeed EVO – this is the dominant DMS for powersports dealers. We maintain 3 instances of this software as well as connecting it to other systems using their API’s.
- Dealerspike – currently hosting 3 powersports dealership websites.
- BigCommerce – currently hosting our marine motor website.
- NetSuite – amazing cloud based ERP/Financial software for our marine business. This was implemented in January 2023 and we are still bringing all of its potential online.
- Nextiva – We have moved five businesses to this IP phone system. The administration is straight forward with lots of capabilities. The analytics and automated reporting is a key management tool.
- SMS Traffic Software – We use this at the three powersports dealerships to track and compare door swings by date, hour etc.
- Google Workspace – Four businesses use this for day to day software applications, email and infrastructure management.
- Google Analytics – Absolutely essential to determine baseline performance for all of our websites. Do not trust your hosting provider, your marketing agency, or a manufacturer-assigned agency to tell you what is really going on.
- HostGator – Our dedicated server provider that we use to host different tools including SQL Server, mySQL, WordPress instances and approximately 30 additional websites that we use primarily for marketing.