Built by an operator, not a vendor.

Daniel Kim is the Director of Operations for Barnes Crossing Auto Group - 16 rooftops - and he builds the software that runs it.

That's the idea behind Vespoke. He doesn't sell dealers a roadmap and disappear. Everything he builds has to survive contact with a real store first: real staff, real data, real month-end. If it doesn't hold up in his group, it doesn't ship to yours.

He's not a software engineer - he runs operations, and he says so on purpose. For years, building software in-house meant climbing a wall most operators were never going to climb. That wall came down. Now all it takes is the willingness to put on boots and walk through the rubble. The bottleneck isn't coding anymore - it's knowing what's actually worth building. Creativity is the constraint, not engineering.

So he built it - the warehouse, the pipelines, the dashboards, the widgets, the automations - for a 16-store group, and uses it every day to run the business. Vespoke is Daniel bringing that same stack to other operators who want to own their intelligence instead of renting it.

His thesis is simple: better data → better AI. Most dealerships are trying to bolt AI onto data they don't trust and don't own. Fix that foundation and the rest gets easy. That's what Vespoke does - get the data out of the silos, make it agree, and put AI on top of it. What Vespoke builds, the client owns. It's an asset, not another monthly bill.

Two things he will not sell, because he would not buy them himself. Software pitched as a way to cut the staff - the best operators in the country consistently say the store runs on people, and the stack exists to make those people better, not replace them. And a teardown of a vendor that's earning its keep - plenty of tools fail because nobody ever used them properly, and sometimes the honest answer is "keep what you have and actually use it." You get that answer for free. The work starts where the vendors stop.