I sold the company I built for $342 million. Then I went back to sell Fords in the town where I grew up. People ask me why. Here is the honest answer.
There is a version of my story that ends in 2016. That is the year Web.com acquired Yodle, the local-marketing company I started as a Wharton student with a $30,000 loan. It is the clean ending — founder builds company, founder sells company, founder rides off. It is also not what happened.
What actually happened is that a few years later I came home to Milford, Connecticut, to run my family’s Ford dealership. Stevens Ford was established in 1955. My father ran it. His father was part of the story before him. And when my father passed, the question in front of me was not a business question. It was a family question with a business attached.
The dealership was never a backup plan
I want to be precise about something, because it is easy to misread. Coming back to run Stevens Ford was not a step down from technology, and it was not a retirement. The dealership is where I learned everything that made the technology work in the first place.
When I was a teenager, I ran internet sales for the dealership — this was the early 2000s, when most local businesses still treated the web as a phone book with pictures. I watched customers research cars online for weeks and then show up to a sales process that had not changed in decades. The gap between how people shopped and how local businesses sold was enormous. That gap became Yodle. It became Punchey. It became the entire thesis of my investing. Every one of those companies is, at bottom, an attempt to give local businesses the tools I wished we had on our own showroom floor.
What a $342M exit does not buy
An exit is a wonderful thing. It validates a decade of work, it takes care of the people who took the risk with you, and it gives you options. What it does not do is replace the thing a seventy-year-old family business has, which is continuity. Stevens Ford has sold cars to three generations of some Milford families. You cannot raise that. You cannot acquire it. You can only inherit it and try to be worthy of it.
When my father passed, walking away would have meant letting that continuity end on my watch. I was not willing to do that. So I stepped in as CEO and Dealer Principal — and I brought with me everything I had learned building software for businesses exactly like ours.
What I am building now
Today I run three things at once, and to me they are one thing. Stevens Auto Group is the operating business — real cars, real customers, real Main Street. Punchey is the software for businesses like it. Stevens Ventures is the capital behind the next wave of that software. Founder, operator, investor: three seats at the same table, all pointed at the same belief — that local service businesses are the most under-served important market in the economy, and the people who give them great tools will build great companies.
So when someone asks why a guy who sold his company for nine figures went back to sell Fords, the honest answer is that I never really saw them as different jobs. They are the same job, viewed from different chairs. And the dealership is the chair I started in.