Hi, I'm Chris Abouraad

I own and run Simon's Service and Sales, an independent used-car dealership in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. It's a small lot — I close maybe a deal a week on a good week — which means I'm the buyer, the finance manager, the person who prints the RMV-1, and the one answering leads at night. If you run a lot like mine, you already know that job.

For years the thing slowing me down most wasn't inventory or customers — it was a Windows desktop DMS from before I was born, a USB dongle to log in, three folders per deal, and a spreadsheet on the side because the software couldn't show me what I actually needed. Selling a car meant forty-five minutes of printing forms and hand-writing the parts the software couldn't fill. So I built the DMS I wished I had, and my own lot has run on it every day since. That's the whole origin story, told in full in why I built DealerVLO.

Because I use it to close real deals, DealerVLO is opinionated in ways software built by a committee isn't: it fills the actual state forms, does the trade-in tax math the way the RMV does, and doesn't nickel-and-dime you with modules — one flat $29/month, everything included. When another dealer emails a workflow gap, it usually ends up on the roadmap, because I hit the same gaps.

I also write everything on the blog from that same seat — buying at auction, reconditioning, pricing for turn, marketing a small lot, and lately how AI actually helps (and where it burns you). No invented statistics, no filler. If I haven't done it or seen it, I don't write it as though I have.