Driving Technology Into the Automotive Industry

Bobby Adams comes from a long lineage of automotive aficionados. His grandfather, father and uncles all owned dealerships, and he soon followed in their footsteps.

Cars are in his blood. And having owned an auto dealership, he knew the ins and outs of the industry quite well, which put him in a prime position to spot inefficiencies. Deep industry knowledge teamed with an entrepreneurial spirit then spurred him to actually act on solving those inefficiencies.

It all started when he was running his classic car dealership. Collectors began approaching him to help sell their cars on consignment. As the service took off, Bobby was inundated with requests but was facing a logistical setback: a lack of space to store cars.

But Bobby knew there was something there. He had forged a mutually beneficial arrangement where sellers didn’t have to deal with the hassle of selling a car and buyers trusted his reputation and vetting process to offer quality vehicles they couldn’t find elsewhere.

Eager to solve the inventory storing problem, the wheels began to turn as Bobby considered how he could streamline the process of connecting buyers and sellers. This is how Motovera came to be. The platform, as it exists today, allows sellers to upload their vehicles and a vetted list of auto dealers to offer their bids, all digitally. And often, these vehicles are commanding close to full retail values.

Growing a platform has brought its own set of challenges and Bobby has placed a great focus on building a reputation of transparency in an industry where that hasn’t traditionally existed. Keep reading or check out the video below for more of Bobby’s story and the strategies he has employed to find success in a competitive market.

What is Motovera?

Motovera started off as an offer comparison site. It’s now evolved to be more of a consumer-to-dealer platform where consumers submit their vehicles and dealers place bids on those cars. The options right now to sell your car are to put it up for sale on Craigslist and deal with people spamming and calling you.

You can also go through one of big players like Carvana, CarMax and Vroom, which give an instant cash offer for a vehicle. Many people are using that option. Our platform opens that up so that instead of getting one offer, you’re getting multiple offers from local dealers in town and that results in higher offers 95% of the time.

How did Motovera come to be?

I’ve been in the car business my whole life. I’m actually the third generation. Since 1950, my grandpa was dealing cars and owned car dealerships and then my dad and my uncles followed in his steps. I basically grew up around car dealerships and even owned my own car dealerships, mostly in the classic car world. I’ve owned all types of cars too. In 2018, I wanted to expand beyond just the specialty.

With classic cars, consignment was a big thing. People would consign their vehicles to dealers and they’d help sell them and they would get more money for the vehicles. The dealers could use their tools and resources to help finance them.

I opened a company called Used Car Club which was a consignment dealership for late-model cars. I loved e-commerce so I used to run ads on Facebook and Instagram for people wanting to sell their cars. That’s how we got all of our inventory. We were doing really well with it but we had to store a lot of cars.

I started noticing that bigger dealerships were buying cars from our dealership and putting them on their lots to sell because we were getting these clean, one-owner cars directly from private parties which they couldn’t get at auctions. I was looking at it and thought I could really scale it if I helped other dealers get inventory. So I closed Used Car Club down and took the model and started adding technology to it and created the platform where sellers would submit the vehicles to us but instead of us taking the vehicles on consignment, we could expedite the process and actually sell their vehicle to these large dealership groups.

What’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome in growing Motovera?

One was the inventory shortage when I started it. A lot of people began to advertise for the same thing. Competition started coming up but I knew we were doing it better.

Another thing was people who submitted cars that dealers didn’t want. We had to figure out what to do with those cars. We started filtering out the cars we couldn’t take but established a partnership with another company that could take those cars and we make a kickback on those.

Another big challenge is that people don’t like dealerships. They have it in their mind that a dealership is going to chop and grind them on price and not hold their word. We worked really hard to vet the dealerships that we work with. We don’t work with every dealership. That’s why we really focused on the big franchise stores. We interview them to make sure they’re good because they’re representing us too. We had to really prove ourselves and show customers they weren’t going to have a bad experience. In fact, we’re getting them almost retail, sometimes even more for their vehicles. They don’t have to deal with showing it, test driving it, or waiting for people to come with the money.

What’s been one of the biggest contributing factors to growth?

One thing we do is we compare all the prices from the big competitors, namely Carvana and CarMax. CarMax is the number one used car dealer in the country right now. Just last year, they bought 1.4 million cars from private parties directly. That’s basically a car every second.

We really believe in total transparency. We show our customers the competitor’s offers. We show who our buyers are, what they’re offering, and how they transact. It doesn’t matter if the offers from Carvana, CarMax and Vroom are higher or not, we show them to our customers. We know that 95% of the time our offer is higher so it works in our favor.

What has been one of the best things that has come from being a part of the Collective?

The connections are great and also the monthly meetups. Hearing other peoples’ challenges and discussing how to get through those issues is helpful. It’s great to have people to talk to and get feedback from.

What’s next for Motovera?

We’re getting our name out there and focusing on building this up in Phoenix so we can master the platform and start bringing it to other cities in the country. We’re a digital-first company and we’re a platform, which makes it a lot easier for us to scale. We can go to Vegas right now and not have to be there. That’s a big plus with our platform.

What advice would you give to other startup founders in Arizona?

For me, it’s been helpful to get down and dirty and know every part of the business. Do everything in your business and don’t try to skip any steps or you’re just going to backtrack. I found myself trying to jump to the top of the mountain before crawling and it put me back a little bit. It’s had me doing things I didn’t think I should be doing, but you need to do everything in your company, especially if you’re a startup so you can know where there are flaws in the system. I did that very recently and we are actually having our best month ever and we’re going to reach profitability this month too. That’s a result of me stepping back and immersing myself into each step of the business.