Jonathan Ord talks about his early days like badges of entrepreneurial honor.
Like the time he worked for free at an auto dealership, or when he spent a business trip on the floor of his brother’s college dorm room.
“It was and still is a wild ride,” he said.
Ord is chief executive and cofounder of San Clemente-based DealerSocket Inc., which provides software to auto dealers to help them manage sales, maintenance and other customer interactions.
He started the company with Brad Perry in 2001.
Ord was one of five entrepreneurs honored at the Business Journal’s annual Excellence in Entrepreneurship award luncheon held March 17 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.
DealerSocket has some 1,200 dealers as customers, including Crevier BMW in Santa Ana, Audi Mission Viejo and Power Toyota of Irvine.
The company is expected to do about $25 million in sales this year. DealerSocket has about 140 employees in San Clemente and another 40 salespeople across the country.
It was a tough sale going after auto dealers, which tend to be more focused on selling cars than updating technology.
Many first balked, according to Ord. He said he was practically ushered out the door after one meeting.
Dealers were used to having multiple programs that handled the things Ord wanted to do with his one application, he said.
His pitch: efficiency.
The software “helps them sell more cars, service cars more profitably, raise their customer satisfaction scores and reduce their marketing expenses with better use of customer data,” Ord said.
DealerSocket’s software collects information about auto shoppers. Once someone’s bought a car, it automatically can reserve a loaner vehicle when they bring theirs in for maintenance and estimate how long a job will take.
The software also sends out marketing to try to get customers to return for maintenance and gets feedback from customers via e-mail surveys.
Ord said he got the entrepreneur bug from his dad, a real estate developer in Utah.
His first startup was Utah’s First Names First Inc., a gifts concession operator at theme parks. He sold the company to earn money to pay for his master’s in accounting and information systems.
While attending Brigham Young University, he met up with Perry, who was getting his master’s in accounting.
After graduating, Ord joined the Irvine office of New York-based Ernst & Young LLP, running operational systems consulting for the real estate industry as part of the Kenneth Leventhal Real Estate Group.
“I learned a ton but realized I didn’t like working for big companies and wanted to get back into entrepreneurism,” Ord said.
He left in 1998 to help start Foreshock Inc., a software development consultant, where he served as the vice president of strategic services, sales and marketing.
He recruited Perry to Foreshock.
“We grew that company out over a five-year period and during the late 1990s had the opportunity to sell it,” Ord said.
Ord again recruited Perry to start DealerSocket. They took their pitch to a couple of friends who owned auto dealerships.
“We quickly found out we weren’t car guys,” Ord said. “We had the technological prowess and process knowledge but no idea how a dealership ran.”
Working at Dealers
So Ord and Perry took a year off from developing DealerSocket’s software to work in every facet of dealerships.
The pair worked in the service department filling out reports, selling cars and in the business development phone rooms.
“We worked for free so they wouldn’t fire us because we asked way too many questions about everything and anything,” Ord said.
They came out with their software in 2002 and hit the road pitching big dealership groups.
“We went after the top dogs,” Ord said.
On a trip to Salt Lake City’s Mike Hale Acura, Ord said he slept at his brother’s dorm room to save money. The Acura dealership turned him down but pointed him to another dealer who might be interested, Blake Strong of Salt Lake City’s Strong Audi.
“Blake was bought and sold on all three of his stores,” Ord said.
By the end of 2002, DealerSocket had 16 dealerships.
In the past couple of years, DealerSocket has had to contend with the worst downturn for auto dealers since the 1970s.
“Two years ago, we saw the downturn coming and we thought this could be a great opportunity for us, but it could also create some stress,” Ord said.
Dealers have used the lean times to overhaul their systems, according to Ord. And bigger dealer groups already using DealerSocket have taken over smaller dealerships, brining more business for the company, he said.
Competitors include Dayton, Ohio-based Reynolds and Reynolds Co. and Roseland, N.J.-based Automatic Data Processing Inc.
Ord and Perry sold 20% of the business to Palo Alto-based Meritech Capital Partners, a private equity firm, in 2007.
The company has acquired others in the past two years, including Chatsworth-based CarMinds Inc., an online sales and process training company.
