In 2013, while six months pregnant, Julie Douglas lost her job with a technology company. She didn’t wallow in her circumstances.
Douglas instead decided to get into business herself, launching Dealer Pay LLC, a provider of payments and point-of-sale software for automobile dealerships.
While entrepreneurship was a new venture for Douglas, the payments and dealership industries weren’t. The nascent entrepreneur had previously worked for more than a decade at financial technology firm Global Payments Inc. (NYSE: GPN), where she specialized in working with automobile dealers.
Even so, launching St. Louis-based Dealer Pay was a gamble for Douglas, who tapped into her own savings to establish the company.
“I pulled some out of the savings account, started the business and just brought one dealer on at a time,” she said.
To create Dealer Pay’s software, Douglas says “a lot of sacrifices that had to be made personally” to make it happen.
“Even though the road was bumpy, somehow we managed to get it done,” she said.
Douglas’ hard work has paid off — literally — with Dealer Pay today providing its software to about 500 U.S. dealerships and announcing earlier this month it has been acquired by Draper, Utah-based Convenient Brands in a deal that also includes a growth investment Douglas says positions the 15-person company for expansion.
Dealer Pay will become the latest technology firm to join Convenient Brands’ portfolio of software firms focused on payments and the automobile sector. The portfolio also includes ROME Technologies, Mainstreet Computer, Digital Business Controls and IntelliPay. Convenient Brands is financially supported by New York-based private equity firm The Beekman Group.
“Dealer Pay is a terrific complement to our footprint in the auto-related software and payment services industries and expands the product suite that we can offer customers,” said Casey Leloux, CEO of Convenient Brands. “The enterprise payments technology that Dealer Pay has built is exactly what the market needed, and we look forward to working with Julie and the rest of the Dealer Pay team on a range of initiatives to support additional growth.”
Dealer Pay currently operates with a client roster mostly based in the Midwest, with its software processing about $1 billion in payments annually. Local dealers using Dealer Pay’s software include Bommarito Automotive Group, Lou Fusz Automotive Network and Dave Sinclair Auto Group.
Douglas envisions rapid growth for the software firm, contending it has a competitive advantage over other payments providers because of how it has tailored its software for dealerships.
“I see this company getting to 5,000-plus (dealerships),” Douglas said. “I think our brand name is getting recognized quite a bit more in the space.”
Douglas said the investment provided by Convenient Brands will be used add to its sales teams to target customers outside the Midwest and in states like Florida, Texas, California and New York. Dealer Pay also plans to attend industry trade shows now that it has the budget to travel to the events, Douglas said.
For Douglas, finding a partner that would commit to investing in Dealer Pay and expanding the business was a necessity in closing an acquisition.
“My goals were, if I was going to sell this company, it would have to be to someone who was interested in helping me continue to grow it,” Douglas said.
While Douglas says she never initially envisioned one day selling her company, she’s confident her decision to ink an acquisition deal will propel the company to its next stage of growth.
“There’s a lot of emotions involved when you’re selling your business because it’s something you create from the ground and build it to something and now it belongs to someone else. The good news about this specific deal is these guys want to help support me and help me to even continue to make it bigger,” she said.
Sign up here for The Beat, St. Louis Inno’s free newsletter. And be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
