My parents didn't start Gateway Auto because they had a dream of owning a business. They started it because they had to.
My dad had been selling salvage cars on the side for years. Driving to Iowa to buy wrecked vehicles, fixing them up, flipping them out of our garage. He got good at it, kept getting better, until at some point the volume got high enough that what he was doing needed to operate as a formal business entity. So in 2002, they turned it into a business.
That's how Gateway Collision Center was born. No grand vision. No business plan. Just a family doing what it had to do to stay afloat.
My first job was there at 13, detailing cars. By 18 I was trying to get them on Facebook and they thought I was out of my mind. By the time I'd actually built a real career – graduate degree paid off, years at Google, a book and a documentary – they finally decided I was qualified enough to help.
The problem was the business wasn't ready for me yet.
When I looked at what we were working with, my instinct was that jumping in full-time would be like putting a V8 engine into a go-kart. The horsepower would destroy the frame. So I made a different commitment: I'd help them hire someone, I'd manage and mentor remotely, and I'd start by fixing the thing that was most obviously broken.
The brand.
Gateway Collision Center was what the company had always been called. It was named after the Gateway Business Park in Omaha where it started – a small industrial pocket that, if you blinked, you'd miss. By the time I got involved, the business had long since moved to 110th and Harrison, expanded from 5,000 square feet to 15,000, added mechanical repair in 2007, and was running used car sales, mechanical work, and collision all under one roof.
But the name still said "collision center." It wasn't even close to describing their business
I studied the industry. I thought about what we actually did and what we stood for. And I kept coming back to the word automobile — auto meaning individual, autonomous, mobile meaning freedom of movement. The word itself literally means individual freedom. That's what American car culture was built on, and that's what we were really delivering, whether we were fixing someone's brakes or getting them into a used truck.
We became Gateway Auto. Individual freedom of mobility became our north star. It could apply to anything with wheels and carry the company as far as it wanted to go.
The rebrand included:
It worked. But only so well, because the website was still a disaster.
That's where my then co-founder Alex came in.
I had gone to speak at a marketing class at the University of Nebraska. Afterward, this kid came up to me – sharp, ambitious, loved cars, already doing digital transformation work for Berkshire Hathaway but clearly itching to build something bigger. I found out he'd been in the same fraternity I was in years earlier.
I told him I couldn't make him an entrepreneur, but I could make him an intrapreneur. He joined us, and that was the beginning of everything that followed.
When Alex first walked in, here's what we were dealing with:
I'm not exaggerating when I say it was a Flintstones-era operation. We weren't behind by a year or two – we were behind by a decade.
While I was in the air keynoting and promoting a safer internet, Alex was at the shop every day. I taught him everything I knew remotely: how to build websites, how to think about SEO, how to evaluate technology and actually get a skeptical team to adopt it. He executed on the ground while I provided structure and vision from 30,000 feet.
Over about two years, we:
My parents thought half of this was science fiction. But it stuck, because Alex was there every day making sure it did.
By 2019, I'd been on the road for about three years straight. I looked at what we'd built and decided it was time for me to get more directly involved. I spent six months studying the company's financial history, mapped out the growth levers, and built a real plan. I pitched it to the team in March of 2020.
Ten days later, the world shut down.
COVID hit our business the way it hit every service business, all at once:
I sat with my mom week by week for three months doing the finances, figuring out how to survive. It was the hardest stretch of the whole journey. And in May we decided to put all our cards on the table and juice used car sales to support the entire company, fingers crossed.
It wasn't easy making that decision. If it was wrong we might not have had a business to speak about today. I went to my parents and made the case: everyone in the country is locked inside, staring at their screens. There is no better time to rebuild our entire digital presence than right now, while the world is distracted and most of the competition isn't moving. Let's gut it and start over.
Within about six weeks, we tore out the old website completely. My parents didn't realize how screwed they had been by the agency they'd hired. They'd been paying around $25,000 a year to a vendor who was basically just collecting a check. I managed a team of interns as we rebuilt it from scratch. Custom code. Real photography and video. Proper navigation. A blog structure built for SEO. All of it designed to rank, not just exist.
By the end of that summer, we were showing up at the top of searches for used car dealerships across Nebraska. CarGurus called us. Dealer Car Search called us. They wanted to know how we were pulling so much organic traffic.
I just shrugged. But I knew exactly what had happened – I plugged all my Google knowledge into an industry that was still largely operating on pen and paper.
That website rebuild was the turning point. From there, we kept layering on the digital capabilities. Every new inch of profitability got reinvested into digital. We slashed spend on mailers and newspapers, added call recording, dialed in ad spend until we had something that ran like a machine. You could turn a dial and it would work.
The results over the next four years:
With that growth came problems I hadn't fully anticipated. Managing SEO across multiple zip codes. Figuring out how Google handles two of your own locations that are technically across the street from each other. Building SOPs that could survive the chaos of scaling fast. Reconfiguring customer bases as people started choosing between locations that hadn't existed a year ago.
Every one of those problems taught us something: about how local search actually works; about how customers make decisions before they ever pick up the phone; and about what it takes to systematize something that everyone in the company kept saying would be impossible to systematize.
That knowledge, all of it, became the foundation of what we built next.
Next: Why we built LeadFoot Analytics, what we got wrong, and how the failure led us somewhere we never expected to go.
