The David Spisak Show

Hosted by David Spisak

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270

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Jun 2026

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About the show

What happens when you get access to uncommon conversations with people who achieved the highest levels of success? Join David Spisak as he brings you inside the room where success stories are told by the people who lived them so that you can achieve your definition of success at an accelerated pace.

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60 recent

June 11, 202654 min

Brian Ankney: AI Found Your Customer First

Most people in automotive have never heard of Brian Ankeny.That's exactly the problem.Brian has spent 21 years inside the industry's most underestimated media company, watching every major shift before it happened. AI search. Autonomous vehicle charging. Tread depth data as a dealership revenue stream. He saw all of it coming, and he's been quietly helping the companies that pay attention build for what's next.This conversation goes places most automotive podcasts won't.We talk about why 30–40% of car buyers are already finding dealerships through AI search — and why your SEO budget is becoming irrelevant. Why your empty service drive at 2am is actually a revenue opportunity sitting right on your lot. And why the dealers who figure out the mobility dollar shift now are going to look like geniuses in five years.Brian isn't loud about any of this. He doesn't have to be.The people who know, know.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

June 4, 202634 min

Jim Fitzpatrick: The FTC Trap Dealers Are Walking Into

The letters went out. 97 of them. And buried inside each one is a compliance framework so broad, so technically demanding, that a single sold car, still live on your website three hours later, could cost you half a million dollars.Jim Fitzpatrick sits down with David Spisak, CEO of Disruptive Growth Solutions, and they don't soften it. Sixteen categories of violations. Salespeople's Instagram posts counted as advertising. Third-party listings you don't control triggering fines you can't afford. Vendors with zero legal exposure leaving dealers to absorb every hit alone.But here's what this conversation actually is: two people who've lived inside this industry since the '80s, watching a decades-long pattern finally come due, and being honest about who lit the fuse.And underneath all of it: a real question about what a sustainable dealership actually looks like from here.This is the conversation the industry is having behind closed doors. It's happening on the record now.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

May 28, 202647 min

The Scoreboard That Actually Matters [ASOTUCON Keynote]

Most people never figure out what actually matters until it's too late.This episode is the keynote David delivered at ASOTUCON, and it's the most personal thing he's ever said on a stage. His father walking out. A counselor who told him not to bother. A Navy enlistment at a stoplight that changed everything. The dealership that outsold Mercedes-Benz nationally by 38% with zero advertising. And the boardroom moment involving one single dollar that made him walk away from a seven-figure career.Most people spend a lifetime chasing the wrong thing and never realize it. David figured it out, and this is exactly how.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

May 21, 202633 min

Paul Faletti: The Silent Killer of Dealer Growth

Over half of the most powerful companies on earth in the year 2000 don't exist anymore. Not struggling. Gone.They had the customers, the capital, the brand. They had everything, except the willingness to question whether what made them great was becoming what would make them irrelevant.Paul Faletti has led NCM Associates, the company that invented the automotive 20 Group, for 17 years. Before that, executive roles at BMW, Maserati, and Jaguar. He came into NCM with an outsider's eye and an operator's instincts. And instead of riding a 78-year winning formula into slow decline, he started dismantling what was working before anyone told him he had to.What he shares here will quietly rearrange the way you think about leadership and what it means to be irreplaceable in a market that has never been more ruthless about making things obsolete.The companies that survive the next 20 years are already doing what he describes.The ones that won't — aren't.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

May 14, 202656 min

Matt Ober: Data, AI, and What's Actually Coming Next

Matt Ober helped manage $30 billion. He saw the AI wave coming years before anyone else. Now he's talking about what actually happened behind the scenes.Matt is the Managing Partner at Social Leverage, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on fintech and vertical AI. Before that, he served as Chief Data Scientists at Third Point, one of the world's most elite hedge funds, and was part of the founding team at WorldQuant Ventures, where he spent six years traveling the globe acquiring data that helped grow a $500 million fund into a $30 billion operation across 25 countries.In this episode Matt Shares what the world's smartest investors figured out about data that most businesses are only now waking up to. The decision separating winners from everyone else over the next five years. Why EQ is overtaking IQ in the age of AI. And the one thing most companies are doing right now they'll deeply regret.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

May 7, 202646 min

From $400 to $50 million company: the Danny Chaves story

Danny Chaves didn't go to college. He didn't have a business plan. He didn't have investors, a mentor, or a safety net. What he had was $400, a couch in his mother's house, and a stubbornness that would quietly build one of the most remarkable service companies in the automotive industry.Today, Danny's Detailed Services processes 125,000 cars a month, employs over 800 people, and generates more than $50 million a year — numbers that would be impressive for any business.This is not an episode about detailing cars. This is an episode about what a human being can build when they refuse to believe their starting point is their destiny. When they decide that money is not the finish line, it's the fuel. When they realize that the business is the microphone, and the message is what lasts.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

April 30, 202642 min

The Trade-In Con Costing Dealers Thousands Per Deal with Frederick Grimm

Frederick Grimm is the co-founder and COO of FIXD — the company behind America's most widely used vehicle diagnostic device with over 4 million units sold. After scanning millions of cars, his team discovered dealerships had a problem they didn't even know existed.He built Appraisal Pro to solve it. Now used by over 1,100 franchise dealerships, it tells any dealer in under 2 minutes the exact mechanical condition and true reconditioning cost of any trade-in.Tune in to find out more!Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

April 23, 202651 min

The $1M Trade-In Blind Spot with Keith Benkel

What does it actually take to run used cars across 35 stores — profitably, consistently, every single month?Most people in this industry will never find out. Keith Benkel has been doing it for over two decades.From buying a broken 1967 Mustang GT for $400 as a teenager, and getting it running the next day, to becoming the National Used Vehicle Director of one of the largest automotive groups in the country, Greenway Automotive Group. Keith's path is the kind of story the industry desperately needs more people to hear. Not because it's inspirational in the greeting-card sense. Because it's 'instructive' in every way that matters.In this conversation, Keith pulls back the curtain on what separating a great used car operation from a mediocre one actually looks like at scale. Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/davidspisak for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

April 21, 202615 min

The FTC Just Changed the Game for Dealers!

The FTC just made things very clear. Federal law now overrides state law. The total price has to be the most prominent price. Add-ons have to be genuinely optional. Rebates have to be real and available to everyone they're shown to. And whoever controls the ad owns the ad. Not your agency. Not your OEM. You.But here's what I really want you to understand.The FTC is not even your biggest risk right now. We are entering a world of AI driven search where everything gets indexed. Every complaint. Every review. Every violation. Every questionable ad your dealership has ever been connected to. And when a consumer asks AI if your dealership is trustworthy, it pulls from that data. Not your website. Not the keywords you paid for. The data.And you can't remove it.Whether you're a dealer who's always done it right and wants to stay protected, or you're somewhere in the gray zone wondering how much longer you can operate there, this episode is the conversation you didn't know you needed to have today.The cost of being wrong is no longer temporary.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/spisakd for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679

April 16, 202648 min

Love People More Than You Love Cars with Paul Daly & Kyle Mountsier

Paul J. Daly and Kyle Mountsier built one of the most unlikely communities in American business — inside an industry most people fall into by accident.In 2020, Paul fired up a LinkedIn Live from his basement with one goal: make people in automotive feel less alone. Thousands showed up. What followed became ASOTU, More Than Cars, and a growing movement convinced that how you treat the person in front of you matters more than the transaction.This conversation covers what Will Guidara's number one restaurant in the world teaches us about human connection, why most managers would lose a third of their team if they asked 12 simple questions, and what it looks like when an entire industry decides to stop hoarding its secrets.Paul and Kyle are the co-founders of ASOTU and hosts of the daily automotive morning show. This is their story.Connect with David Spisak to Achieve Exponential Growth:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidspisak/Website: https://www.davidspisak.comEmail: david@disruptivegrowthsolutions.comPhone: +1 (510) 604-0308Visit https://linktr.ee/spisakd for all our linksLike this show? Please leave us a rating and review where you're listening right now!🎧 Subscribe on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-spisak-show/id1602552929🔊 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6oPjFeHfnxNXPTHXxNwIsm?si=4fc3f546d07a4679