Same job, five stores, same chaos
I've been in dealership F&I since 2014. Five different stores since then. Mostly independent lots, one was a bigger multi-location franchise store. Different owners, different showrooms, different logos on the wall. Same problem, every single time.
It's rarely one big blowup. It's smaller than that, and it happens on almost every deal. I tell a customer their car will be ready in two days. Nobody tells me the shop is actually waiting on a part. Someone forgets to disclose a rental. Now I'm the one on the phone explaining why the truck he already told his wife about still isn't ready.
That's the job. Selling the car is the fun part. The job is being the last stop for every piece of information nobody upstream bothered to pass along.
“As good as I am at my job, the communication level across a dealership is the real bottleneck.”
It's not a paperwork problem
I used to think if I just got faster at paperwork, this would stop. It doesn't. The paperwork isn't the problem, it's the symptom. At every one of those five stores, nobody owned their part of the file. Sales owns the sale. The shop owns the shop. F&I owns whatever's left standing when the deal's supposed to close. Nobody's looking at the same version of the truth at the same time.
That's what Lot Jacket is actually built to fix. Not “e-sign a form faster.” One file, everyone sees the same thing, at the same time.
What burnout actually looked like
It wasn't one dramatic day I can point to. It was just: sell all day, go home, and still be doing paperwork or talking a customer off the ledge at eight at night. Do that for years, across five stores, and it adds up quietly.
I started with a spreadsheet
I didn't set out to build software. I built myself a spreadsheet to track what I was already keeping in my head, then turned it into something I could actually use day to day, at zero cost, because I wasn't about to ask anyone for a budget for a tool that started as my own cheat sheet.
It kept growing because it kept solving the exact thing that was burning me out. Lot Jacket now runs real deals inside two working Ontario dealerships, Afghan Automotive in Toronto and Momo Cars in Niagara Falls. Not a demo. Real deal files, every day.