Winner
Emerging
Dale Pollak has always understood that the used vehicle operations of a car dealership needed to operate on principles of investment rather than simply the principles of merchandising as was commonly accepted.
He also recognized that the Internet was transforming the used vehicle business from an inefficient market that favored dealers to an efficient market, creating parity between buyers and sellers. Recognizing that efficient markets are driven by the economic principles of supply, demand and price sensitivity, Pollak founded vAuto Inc. and created an innovative technology solution that quantified these key metrics for any vehicle in any market at any time.
Rather than simply making decisions based on a vehicle’s aesthetic appeal, dealers could now make decisions on what to stock, how to value a vehicle and how to price a vehicle with quantified metrics of supply and demand.
To accomplish this new approach, Pollak created technology that harvests the Internet and then quantifies and temporalizes supply and demand data from more than 40,000 Web sites containing used vehicle listings. Drawing from his many years of retail automotive experience, he has been able to inject sophisticated investment disciplines into a relatively unsophisticated user environment.
To bridge the gap of understanding and acceptance, he uses his unique ability to communicate the ideas of sound investment practices to his industry audience. Dealerships across the country that have adopted Pollak’s management system have experienced dramatic performance improvement. He has demonstrated there is no limit to the practical applications of his data. The vAuto system has an aggressive product road map that helps dealerships achieve excellence from what he calls “paint to pixels” — meaning that the “paint” is the traditional used car tasks including purchasing, appraising and pricing, and the “pixels” are the virtual merchandising responsibilities: knowing how your vehicles appear online with respect to prices, photos and descriptions.
How to reach: vAuto Inc., (630) 590-2000 or www.vauto.com
