I've been in this business for over 30 years. I've watched markets crash, inventories dry up, and technology change everything about how we sell cars. But the most interesting shift I'm seeing right now isn't about EVs or AI chatbots. It's about who's buying and building dealerships.
A new generation of entrepreneurs are entering the independent used car space. And they're approaching it with a mindset that every established dealer should pay attention to.
They're Starting Younger and Leaner
Americans filed 5.5 million new business applications in 2023, a record-breaking year according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That number even topped the 2021 pandemic surge. A meaningful chunk of those applications were in automotive retail. Browse any dealer forum today and you'll find 19 and 20-year-olds asking serious questions about licensing, floorplanning, and lot acquisition. These aren't daydreamers. Many of them already have five or six car flips under their belt and real money in the bank.
What's different about this generation? They skip the parts that don't make money. No fancy showroom. No bloated staff. They start with a dealer license, a small lot, and an internet connection. They buy at auction, photograph the cars themselves, list on every marketplace that exists, and handle their own social media.
It sounds scrappy. It is scrappy. But the margins are real. And independent dealers sold 9.8 million vehicles in 2025, the third straight year of growth, according to NIADA's Used Car Industry Report. The independent space isn't shrinking. It's growing, and it's attracting new blood.
The College Flipper Who Built an Empire
One of the best examples of this trajectory is Sam Mahrouq, now Chairman and CEO of Ikon Technologies and owner of 11 dealerships. Sam started by flipping a VW Rabbit during college for a $1,000 profit. That led him to discover the overseas demand for American cars, and by graduation he was exporting 20 to 30 used vehicles per month to the Middle East.
He took that experience and opened one independent dealership focused on subprime retail. His approach was simple: sell $6,000 to $10,000 vehicles, offer in-house financing, and build a portfolio of notes. "Within a few months, six months, I had $200,000, $300,000 worth of notes," Mahrouq recalled on the Car Dealership Guy Podcast. Today his dealerships move around 700 cars per month, and his tech company, Ikon Technologies, generates $55 million in annual revenue.
Sam didn't start with connections in the auto industry. He didn't inherit a dealership. He saw a gap, started small, and scaled by solving real problems. That's the playbook this next generation is following.
First-Generation Dealers Are Rewriting the Rules
Sam's story isn't an outlier. Take Kyle Coleman, owner of Coleman Automotive. Kyle started selling cars at 18 alongside his brother at a Hyundai store. His father worked at a union job. No family connections to the industry. No inheritance. By his mid-20s, he'd taken a struggling Honda dealership's new vehicle department from losing money to roughly $2 million in net profit within 12 months. When his company refused to promote him because of his age, he left and landed a general manager position at a competing store.
Today Kyle owns his own dealership. He says the biggest surprise about going from employee to owner wasn't the financial challenge. It was how eager investors were to back someone with a proven track record. "The struggle for investors isn't a lack of money," he explained. "It's a lack of talent to invest money into."
That's a lesson for every young person in this industry who thinks ownership is out of reach.
What They Do Differently
I talk to dealers at NIADA events and conferences across the country. The young operators I meet consistently do three things that set them apart:
They treat their phone like a storefront. While some established dealers are still debating whether to invest in digital retailing, the next generation built their entire business on it. They list inventory before the detail is done. They respond to leads in minutes, not hours. Their customers often complete 90% of the deal before stepping on the lot.
They build personal brands. This generation grew up on social media. They don't see a TikTok video as marketing. They see it as the cost of doing business. One dealer told Car Dealership Guy he sold "millions of dollars worth of vehicles off social media leads" and moved five cars in a single Monday from TikTok leads alone. TikTok automotive content averages a 3.8% engagement rate, far above what traditional advertising delivers. They understand something that took many of us years to learn people buy from people they feel like they know.
They obsess over data. Pricing isn't a gut call for these operators. They cross-reference KBB, Carfax, and market data before setting a number. They track days-on-lot religiously. They know their cost-per-acquisition on every marketing channel. A 22-year-old running 15 units might have a better handle on their true cost per sale than a 200-car operation running on instinct.
The Tools are Catching Up to How They Work
For years, most dealer technology was built for larger franchise operations: expensive systems, layered workflows, and implementations that often required more time and infrastructure than a ton of independents could justify. That model never fit the way many younger dealers run their dealerships. They need tools that are simple to adopt, mobile-friendly, and able to support faster decisions across sourcing, transporting, pricing, and inventory management.
That is the value behind Kinetic Advantage’s Core and Pro subscriptions, powered by OAV technology. Rather than adding more complexity, the goal is to reduce friction in the daily grind of finding, evaluating, transporting, and pricing inventory.
OneAuctionView helps dealers search multiple auctions from a single screen, compare vehicles side by side, build watchlists, and review vehicle history before bidding. In practical terms, which can mean broader visibility into available inventory and fewer missed opportunities.
VIN Insights addresses a common issue in auction buys: vehicles that appear to fit but create problems once they arrive. By helping confirm OEM trim, equipment, and local market fit before the purchase, it reduces the chance of buying a unit that does not match a dealership’s retail strategy.
OAV Transport brings more visibility to the logistics side of the business. Digital Bills of Laden should not be optional! Dealers can book transport, track progress, and better plan reconditioning around expected arrival times rather than guesswork or delayed updates. This is also a fantastic way for shipping that out of state customer’s vehicle to them in a transparent, secure way.
Inventory Report Card highlights aging units, pricing misalignment, and local market signals in a centralized way. For Pro users, it also adds local competitive data around days-on-lot and pricing. That kind of visibility can help dealers react faster without building their own manual tracking process.
Sales Lens, included in Pro, adds yet another layer by showing what is actively moving in a dealer’s market. Giving operators a clear view of real time demand at the point of the buying decision, this can improve inventory mix and reduce time-to-sale.
What matters most about a tool is the value they create for the dealership. For lean operators, better visibility and faster decisions avoid costly buying mistakes, tighten their inventory strategy, and make day-to-day execution more efficient. In today’s environment, even one better purchase decision or one avoided mistake can have a meaningful impact on the bottom line.
The Fundamentals Haven't Changed
Here's what I want established dealers to hear: these young entrepreneurs are proving that the fundamentals of this business are still working. Relationships still matter. Treating customers fairly still builds repeat business. Managing cash flow is still the difference between growth and going under.
John Bergstrom, Executive Chairman of Bergstrom Automotive, has said it directly: the hospitality principles he learned running a bar translated directly to automotive retail. "If I could get people that really felt we cared about them, they would come every day," he recalled. He built that philosophy into a 50-plus dealership empire, going as far as to write annual letters to target dealership owners for over a decade, building trust before deals were ever discussed.
The next generation agrees with Bergstrom. They just express it differently. Instead of remembering a customer's name at the bar, they're sending a personalized follow-up text with a video walkaround. The medium changed. The principle didn't.
Lessons for Every Dealer
Whether you run 3 cars or 300, there's something to take away from how these young operators think:
Start with what you have. Sam Mahrouq started with a single VW Rabbit. Kyle Coleman started at a Hyundai dealership making cold calls at 18. Plenty of today's young dealers started with Copart builds and a driveway. You don't need a massive lot to test a new idea or enter a new segment.
Move faster on technology. If a 20-year-old can build a profitable operation using nothing but a smartphone, auction access, and a CRM, then every dealer reading this can find at least one process to modernize this quarter. Tools like Kinetic Core and Pro exist specifically to consolidate what used to require a dozen platforms into one workflow. The barrier to adopting better technology has never been lower.
Invest in your personal reputation. Whether you're 25 or 65, your reputation is your most valuable asset. The difference now is that reputation lives online. Google reviews, social media presence, and how you show up in search results matter more than a billboard on the highway.
Don't dismiss the next generation. Learn from them. The young dealer who just opened down the street isn't your competition. They might be your future business partner, your next hire, or the person who teaches you a better way to reach customers under 35.
The Road Ahead
The independent dealer space has always attracted entrepreneurs willing to bet on themselves. That hasn't changed. What's changed is the barrier to entry. Technology, online auctions, and digital marketing have made it possible to start a profitable dealership with less capital than ever before.
For those of us who've been doing this for a while, that's not a threat. It's a signal that this industry still has enormous opportunity. The young dealers entering the market today will face the same challenges we faced tight margins, difficult customers, and economic uncertainty. The ones who survive will do it the same way we did, by outworking and out caring the competition.
I'm excited to see what they build.