… And that brings us to today

If you were to look at the DNA of DealerOn under the microscope, you’d see base pairs of Opportunity , Ownership , Camaraderie , and Determination comprising the genes that are directly responsible for the success and rapid growth DealerOn has experienced over the last decade.

Rolling the clock back to around 2012-2013 and you’ll find a young Jon Rothbard and Tim Eisenhardt just getting started at what will turn out to be challenging, yet rewarding careers. Tim and Jon cast some of the longest shadows here at DealerOn and were largely influential in setting up the current culture and “family oriented” mentality that has become a staple of our everyday work life. When asked about the roles they played along the way, Jon simply replied “What roles didn’t we play?”

Tim will grow to be the Principal Solutions Architect of the Development Team, and Jon will skyrocket to the position of VP of Operations.

But in 2012, Jon is making his mark as a Junior Web Designer , and by coincidence of where the last open desk was, Front Desk Clerk.

Meanwhile, Tim, a recent casualty of the Government shutdown, is starting his position as a Junior Developer , with no clue what to do and a fresh heap of gratitude for being given a chance to prove himself, despite lacking any real development experience.

Shortly after starting, Tim is approached with the task of converting the entire Platform of DealerOn (responsible for serving up the websites and inventory for a large number of automotive dealerships) from a Flex-based system into a new Responsive-based one, something that very few web platforms, and no competitors, have accomplished at the time. Tim has no idea where to begin, but riding on the high of all the trust that is being placed in him, he rose to the occasion and saw the project through to completion in record time. This is Tim’s first taste of the level of ownership possible in projects at DealerOn.

“A shared sense of ownership, to me, is the best driver of quality. Period.” — Tim

Fast forward a few years and DealerOn has hit numerous growth milestones by taking on several new OEMs (original equipment manufacturers)and large dealership groups like AMSI as customers. Jon is now running no less than 4 different departments; DealerOn is in the middle of some department shuffling and division in order to better position itself to handle the rapid growth it’s experiencing, like the break out of Creative Operations from the Design group, and the formation of a QA team; and Tim is now Lead over the entire development team, which has exploded to nearly 3–4 times the size it was when he started.

“Jon and I have lamented plenty of times over the years that this growth pattern is just unprecedented and unmetered, and to be able to account for that we’ve had to do some stuff that we would all agree were hacks, and bear the brunt of that technical debt as the time came. “ — Tim

It’s a crazy, hectic time at DealerOn. Code’s flying left and right, features are going up, bugs are going down, and commits are at an all time high. Knowing the current pace isn’t sustainable indefinitely, Tim and Jon set forth a goal to keep quality up while keeping throughput high:

“To ensure we are not only creating new, quality products, but also facilitating the quality of life improvements for our employees, as well as our clients.” — Jon

“Finding the communications channels and the strategic channels to make that live side by side with new features, and requests for customers, and stuff that’s coming from new contracts” — Tim

And that brings us to today. I managed to track down these two titans of DealerOn and asked them a few questions about their time here, their thoughts on the company and it’s journey, and their goals and perspectives on teamwork, team growth, and the culture they’ve helped to foster.

Interviewer: To begin with, can you each state your name, title, and how long you’ve been here.

Jon: My name is Jon Rothbard, I have been here for 6 years, and my title is currently VP of operations.

Tim: Tim Eisenhardt, I’ve been here for 5 years, Principal Solutions Architect

I: And what were your titles when you started?

J: Junior Web Designer

T: Junior Developer.

I: Okay, first question. What does DealerOn mean to you?

J: What does it mean now, or what did it mean then?

I: Your call.

T: What does it mean to me professionally or personally.

I: Again, it’s your answer.

J: Right, I think my answer is a combination of both, for the fact that DealerOn is a collective family built on a culture that has brewed into what its turned into

today; of a technology company that is cutting edge…

T: And to me it’s opportunity. Right, because we have the desire to be family-cultured, and to be results oriented, we don’t treat any idea as a bad idea until we’ve vetted it and gone through it, and we don’t treat any candidate as though they’re a bad candidate until we’ve seen what they have to offer.

When I joined, I’d just been laid off because of the impending government shutdown. I found the job because the job posting said all levels, which was my keyword search on the job boards. And they kind of saw that I had potential, despite having no on-paper experience in the field, and gave me a shot.

And that inspired me to work hard. And they also encouraged me when I had ideas that I wanted to flesh out, or wanted to try and do new things, to see where those lead, despite the fact that the growth was insane and there was always too much work to do anyway. And I think that that’s persisted over the 5 years.

On the topic of DealerOn’s milestones, and which ones stood out the most, Tim and Jon were in agreement that bringing on a new OEM is a significant milestone each and every time. The continued growth of departments, and formation of new departments, the Training department being the most recent, are also significant milestones that speak to the growth of the company as a whole, and not just the development-related departments. In addition, formalizing our product catalog with the newly formed Product department has been substantially beneficial. A product catalog helps spread the use of more ubiquitous language across all levels of the company and minimize communication barriers between the technical and non-technical staff.

“[B]y force of sheer will … it’s evolved at each of these kind of checkpoints.

…

We’ve had to find procedural and programmatic and technical solutions to the problem of scale and rapid growth.” — Tim

Tim reflected on the formation of the Product department and recalled what it was like in the early days, stating that “… (Chief Creative Officer, Michael) DeVito WAS the product department, and Jon and I made sure whatever came out of his face was implemented.” Management and Leadership from within the Development team are additional key milestones for the group, allowing the large pool of technical expertise contained within the team to be cultured into “leadership roles and be[ing] a part of the decision making process.”

“The fact that people go out of their way to mentor each other, go out of their way to help each other when, you know, the shit hits the fan” — Tim

When asked about any sacrifices made along the way, Tim and Jon replied in unison: Time. Getting to the place they’re at professionally in their careers, and collectively as a company required immense sacrifices of time over the years. Stepping back from their professional passions and stepping into the necessary roles to “steer the ship”, as it were, was a necessity. Sometimes things don’t go to plan, and you have to step back, assess, and react. Tim recalled an instance just over a year ago:

We had concrete positions filled in QA and DevOps, full time, where we’d finally gotten head count and done a lot of interviewing and get those people in. And fast forward a couple of months, they were both open head count again which meant that those roles fell to us and so we couldn’t focus on architecting solutions for the future, we had to get back in there and solve some more day to day problems, just to make sure that stuff kept running smoothly.

It all comes back to ownership, being able to accept a problem, identify a solution, and owning that implementation. DealerOn is “being able to kind of be the master of your own destiny. … It’s opportunity to make a name for yourself, to work on what you want to work on, to make sure that things are done the way that you feel is best.”

One quote that I felt described that mentality the best came towards the end of our interview:

“Everybody buying in, understanding that you may have a disagreement, you may have a flawed assumption …, but if you’re all on the same page about what the objective is, and that you all have group ownership over reaching that objective, you’re going to have a high quality product at the end of it.” — Tim

The forward momentum isn’t over yet though. One of Jon’s goals for the development team is more self-sufficient teams, allowing for Tim and himself to move farther out of the day to day details of the work and focus more on big picture strategy and long term goals of the company. Giving teams the bandwidth and resources they need to accomplish the individual team’s goals enhances the overall department and company trajectories by improving autonomy and reducing inter-departmental and cross-team abrasion that too many layers of process can cause.

As a final note, I asked Tim and Jon to address future readers directly:

T: I think the key word is opportunity. I think you’d be hard pressed to find somebody that’s been here for a considerable amount of time, that they couldn’t point to at least one chance where there was a meeting where it didn’t matter that they were brand new to the company or whatever it was, and their voice was heard and really felt equal.

Because we try to make that the feeling from the top down. We don’t care if you’re here 90 days, we don’t care if you’ve had 20 years of experience, or no years of experience, being able to solve problems, make suggestions, and be a part of the solution is the most important thing.

J: Yeah, being a part of the solution is a good way of saying it. People do have a voice, but it’s also you can make your own destiny. You can start like me and Tim have, … we [the company] have grown a lot, but you still have the opportunity to do the same thing.

If you want to work your way up the ranks, or if you want to create a new department: Often someone may mention that they have ideas that we should spin up a new department, for Training or for QA or such and so on and so forth. [Anyone] could do that if they have the drive and motivation to want it and build it.

…

We have a developer that wanted to switch from Development to Product, so there’s plenty of opportunities regardless of what track. And if you want to start as one, you can always hop over to another.

T: Yeah, there’s no shortage of people on the Development team that started in Customer Support positions; there’s no shortage of people on the Graphic Design team that started in support positions; and there’s people, we were just in a meeting, basically an executive level meeting, talking about customer retention and everybody in the room started as a junior employee in one team or another.

As a final shout out to the folks at DealerOn that have made this journey possible, Jon had this to say:

“This goes without saying: we could not have done this without the support of the initial hard working, dedicated execs at DealerOn. Shout out to the b rothers [CEO/Co-Founder, Ali A. and Co-Founder Amir A.], [Chief Operating Officer] Amir S., [Chief Creative Officer, Michael] DeVito and [VP of Customer Experience, Mike] Somerville who’ve been along for the ride with us and made the company what it is today. (Sorry if I left anyone out)” — Jon