Driving Change: How Team Velocity’s CEO is Steering Auto Retail Into the FutureDriving Change: How Team Velocity’s CEO is Steering Auto Retail Into the Future

WASHINGTON – David Boice first got interested in auto retailing as a temp worker for various dealerships.

He’d fill in at different short-staffed stores throughout the week. It’s an employment setup that no longer exists, but it gave him a taste for the dealership world and he liked it.

Boice, with no formal technology training, went on to found companies that provide digital auto retailing tools and platforms for dealers.

He is the CEO and co-founder of one such enterprise, Team Velocity based in Herndon, VA.

In a WardsAuto Q&A at the company’s inaugural Automotive Leadership Roundtable in Washington, Boice talks about life in the digital fast lane and more. Here’s an edited version of the interview:          

WardsAuto: How’d you get into this business?

Boice: Gosh, I think I was 22 years old when I started my first tech company. Now I’m almost 60.

WardsAuto: How’d Team Velocity come about?

Boice: We had started a company called AutoMark that we sold to Reynolds & Reynolds in 2000. At the time it was the largest transaction of its kind. In 2005, a couple of us said, “Let’s put the band back together.”

WardsAuto: The reunion tour?

Boice: Yes, that’s how Team Velocity started. We had a wide vision for an all-in-one solution that would create a customer experience for shopping, purchasing, servicing, recalls, you name it.

We ended up calling it Apollo after the space mission because it was a mission for us and not uncomplicated. We had setbacks but it was worth it.

We created a platform that solved the digital integration problems between tiers 1 and 3 (automakers and individual dealers).

Ford has done one of the best jobs in the industry of providing data to its certified partners. It makes it much easier for customers to do business with dealers.

For instance, when the oil sensor goes off in a (connected) Ford car, we get notified and then can immediately start communicating with the customer digitally. Dealers are blown away by that.     

WardsAuto: It seems mutually beneficial.

Boice: Everybody wins. The more you use personalization with a customer, the more likely they are to do business with you.

We’re the first company to develop this platform. It’s now being broadly utilized in the industry.

WardAutos: What’s your background?

Boice: I’m kind of a serial entrepreneur. I started out in the car business by accident, like a lot of people. I fell into it and fell in love with it.  

WardsAuto: Is your background in technology?

Boice: My day job in the early years was working at dealerships for a company that provided backup help in F&I and aftermarket services.

If someone at a dealership were off, we’d fill in for them. Like a temp service. That doesn’t exist anymore.

WardsAuto: I was going to say that seems like an unusual way for dealers to staff their places.

Boice: To me, it was great exposure to the business. In a given week, I might be at five or six dealerships.

Six months in, I realized dealers were missing a lot of technology. These were the green-screen days, around 1989. So, I decided to start a tech business with my father, who was active in the military in Washington.

We put concepts together. I started selling them to the dealerships that I was at as a temp worker. In a way, it was a way for me to do my dealership job better.

WardsAuto: You must have a technological mindset.

Boice: I don’t have a formal education in technology. I have a big appetite for it, though. And my father and some family members had degrees in computer science. That helped. But I understand technology well.   

WardsAuto: What is the 30-second-elevator-ride description of Team Velocity?

Boice: We’ve created an all-in-one customer experience platform. It solves three problems. The main one is integration. It is one platform that was natively designed to integrate all the major functions that a dealership needs to sell and service cars, outside of the DMS. It doesn’t do what the DMS does but otherwise we cover it all.  

WardsAuto: You mentioned the challenge of making complicated things simple for end-users.

Boice: Einstein defined genius as taking the complex and making it simple. I don’t know if it’s genius on our part, but it’s a labor of love – driven a lot by client feedback and ideas. We try to keep it simple. That has served us well.