What Byrider Taught Me: Jim DeVoe, the Franchise Classroom, and Three Changes Owners Doubted

By David McMahon ·

Four Byrider logos in order: the original J.D. Byrider oval with a car, a later blue and gold J.D. Byrider logo, and the current byrider wordmark with an orange arrow, on blue and on black.
The Byrider logo over time: the J.D. Byrider logos of 1992 and 1995, then the 2019 rebrand, shown on blue and on black (dates per Byrider's own timeline). Byrider logos are trademarks of Byrider Franchising Partners, LLC, shown here for historical context.

The lot in Marion

James DeVoe Sr., commonly referred to as Big Jim, ran his family’s Chevrolet-Cadillac dealership in Marion, Indiana. Interest rates were high, many people in town were being turned down for bank financing, and he started financing customers himself in 1979. In 1989 he founded J.D. Byrider with the goal of franchising that model so other owners could help customers the same way.

I never met him. But when I taught franchisees, the story of that original lot was part of the class, and the photo of that original lot was its own slide in every training class.

The classroom

I joined corporate in 2009. In early 2010 I took every training class myself, and by 2013 I was teaching some of them. Franchisees came from all over the country for two- and three-day classes on sales, service, underwriting, and collections. Training also ran through an internal learning management system, which was later upgraded to an external one.

My favorite session was the P&L review. We built budget projections by hand and ran scenarios against different sales and collection targets. It sounds like a cliché, but it worked: it pulled owners out of the day to day and moved them from working in the business to working on it.

I also moderated 20 Groups, where operators shared best practices and helped each other get better. The rooms were open. People gave away what worked.

Leaders Read came up often. It was a recurring reminder of Jim’s commitment to continuous improvement, self-discipline, and intellectual curiosity, and the training newsletter regularly carried it with specific examples.

Around 2013 the whole corporate team went through Stephen M.R. Covey’s Speed of Trust at a franchisee support event. What stuck with me was how much it ties back to everyday relationships.

How the model works

Buy here pay here is vertically integrated. A dealership sells the car, and a related finance company often holds the loan. High-risk loans come with a known default rate, so a firm can predict its loss rate and discount the loan paper to match. Then it tracks how the portfolio actually performs against the expected loss curves.

That is why static pool data matters so much. It lets you compare each group of loans to what you expected, month by month. It is also why Byrider’s proprietary CRM, Discover, and the Automated Risk Evaluator were such important innovations when they rolled out, years before I arrived.

The human side of the numbers

The part of Speed of Trust that landed hardest for me was how closely it matched what Byrider had been doing for years: the sales flipchart and the finance interview and budget underwriting process. The scoring model, the Automated Risk Evaluator (ARE) inside Byrider’s Discover software, was technology. But the human element is where relationships with customers were built and where value was added to the process.

Owners faced tough decisions all the time. When I left in 2017, starting a store meant roughly $1M in liquid capital and a minimum $5M line of credit, in a heavily leveraged business. The franchise model has changed since then, so for current numbers see byriderfranchise.com. That is why the projection model mattered so much. On a 42-month car loan, cash-flow payback averaged 18 to 21 months depending on deal structure, and Byrider’s static pool data was second to none for predicting portfolio performance.

Three changes owners doubted

In 2011 Byrider launched GoJDB.com. As I remember it, it was a major investment, and some late adopters doubted a car dealership needed to spend that kind of money on the internet. For me it was the start of learning how lead sources work, how to score leads, and how conversion differs between paid leads, organic leads, and referrals.

In 2015 Byrider partnered with Podium and moved the franchise base off call-center CSI calls and onto automated review requests. Owners pushed back again. It is where I first learned review management, and I later helped more than 100 locations climb above a 4.5-star average.

In 2017 Byrider rolled out ARE 2.0, an upgrade to the Automated Risk Evaluator. I lived that rollout. It was tested in the company stores first and then pushed out to franchisees, and many operators pushed back. Like GoJDB.com and Podium, it was a change management rollout. The Byrider rumor mill moved fast, so corporate had to get a few internal champions on board early to help sell the change to the rest of the company.

The tool was never the final decision maker. People had to learn how to use it and adjust the settings to score deals the way they wanted to run their locations. It did not replace human oversight. It was an updated reference point. I think of it the way people talk about AI in 2023: the tool matters less than whether people learn to use it with judgment.

Still, it was easy for franchisees who ran the legacy Byrider model, with lower vehicle prices and shorter finance terms, to see the change as built for the company stores, which ran higher prices and larger loans. That was the real debate: two philosophies of how to score and structure a deal.

What I took with me

In 2017 I moved to the franchisee side and ran four stores, including turning around a distressed location in Bradenton, Florida. Later, at NetReputation, I built a client services team around review management and reputation, the same craft I first learned from Podium at Byrider.

My takeaway is that change is constant. A large auto dealer in a fragmented market was always making improvements, using its company stores as the test kitchen and then sharing best practices with its franchisees. The family approach to business carried on for years after Big Jim passed away, and even after the family sold to Altamont Capital Partners in 2011, because of the strong corporate culture he built. That is the idea behind Leaders Read, where I review the books I learn from.

Sources for the history: J.D. Byrider About Us (byrider.com/why-byrider/about-us), Byrider Franchise About Us (byriderfranchise.com/about-us), Indiana Wesleyan University DeVoe Report, Spring 2017.