Elijah Surratt

Elijah Surratt

Operator. Strategist. Builder.

00 / About

About

Portrait of Elijah Surratt

I fell into automotive by accident and stayed on purpose. I started in the service department at 15 and have worked through nearly every department of a dealership since. Sales, service, parts, BDC, marketing, ops. What began as a job turned into a genuine obsession with how dealerships actually work, why some thrive and others grind, and what it takes to connect the right car to the right person at the right time.

My work sits at the intersection of marketing, inventory strategy, and operations. Those don't usually live together, but I think they should. Marketing shapes and captures demand. Inventory has to meet it. When those functions actually talk to each other, the whole store gets better, across sales volume, service retention, and how efficiently it moves metal.

A lot of that progress has come from taking data seriously. I've built reporting infrastructure that connects marketing spend to retail outcomes, and I lean on AI to find patterns and ask better questions faster. I'm not interested in data for its own sake. I want to know what's actually true so I can make a better decision.

I think a lot about how data should inform decisions without replacing the human judgment that makes those decisions worth trusting. I build systems, ask uncomfortable questions about what's actually working, and try to leave things more organized than I found them. Most of what I've learned came from operators who answered the phone when I called, and I'm trying to contribute something back to an industry that has a genuinely exciting future ahead of it.

01 / Work

Work

A snapshot of the kinds of problems I have worked on.

Retail Growth Strategy

Performance across sales, service, and inventory

  • Built unified growth plans aligning marketing, inventory acquisition, and sales execution
  • Rebalanced business mix toward higher-margin new vehicle sales without starving used
  • Tied marketing performance to in-store process outcomes, not just lead counts

Inventory Strategy

New vehicle ordering, allocation, and lifecycle

  • Designed demand-driven ordering strategies built on historical sales, trim-level mix, and constraint analysis
  • Used competitor inventory tracking in ordering decisions to source vehicles their shoppers would defect to buy
  • Created internal frameworks for aging risk, opportunity cost, and rebalancing decisions when constraints shift

Marketing Strategy

Full-funnel digital and vendor management

  • Ran multi-channel programs across paid search, display, video, and retargeting
  • Managed website, CRM, CDP, and ad-platform vendor relationships
  • Aligned spend with operational capacity instead of chasing volume

Inventory Tools & Applications

Custom applications and data infrastructure for inventory decisions

  • Built custom applications that turn raw inventory data into trim, option, and package decision support
  • Designed normalized data structures for analyzing hundreds of vehicle configurations across available combinations
  • Connected ordering, allocation, and aging signals into tools operators actually use during weekly inventory meetings

Customer Retention

Service lane growth and reactivation

  • Improved retention through clearer customer communication and follow-up
  • Grew repair order volume and service revenue through targeted reactivation
  • Aligned marketing to service capacity so demand matched what the lane could absorb

Data & Analytics Infrastructure

Internal reporting and decision-support tools

  • Designed dashboards pulling from spreadsheets, document libraries, and core systems
  • Built normalized data models for sales, inventory, and operational signals
  • Treated reporting as a product, with usability and clarity as first-order concerns

Reporting Automation

Scalable BI for executive visibility

  • Automated recurring reports to cut manual effort and inconsistency
  • Standardized metric definitions across departments that previously disagreed
  • Built visual frameworks for inventory, marketing attribution, and sales performance

Process Design

Operational systems across departments

  • Stood up a service BDC from scratch, including scripts, cadence, and reporting
  • Rebuilt loaner and rental operations into a structured, trackable program
  • Documented workflows so the system would survive turnover

Technology & Integration

CRM, DMS, call tracking, CDP, and data integrity

  • Managed the operating tech stack and identified where data quality silently broke
  • Coordinated with vendors to fix integrations rather than working around them
  • Coached internal users on what their tools could actually do

Digital Experience

Website performance and conversion

  • Evaluated platforms and architecture against real conversion benchmarks
  • Drove improvements in SEO, site speed, and lead generation
  • Read user behavior to find friction the analytics dashboards missed

Attribution & Measurement

Tracking and performance visibility

  • Implemented call tracking, web analytics, and cross-platform tagging
  • Worked through messy multi-vendor attribution to get to a usable view
  • Treated GA4 and platform metrics as inputs, not verdicts

Cross-Functional Leadership

Alignment across sales, service, and marketing

  • Worked alongside leadership on strategic and operational decisions
  • Brought data into rooms that had been running on instinct
  • Bridged departments that were optimizing against each other

Industry Engagement

Community, peer collaboration, speaking

  • Active in communities focused on automotive marketing and technology
  • Trade notes with peers on tools, tactics, and what is actually working
  • Have been invited to speak at industry events on operations and strategy

Consulting Frameworks

A repeatable approach to performance improvement

  • Built a working framework around process, inventory, and marketing performance
  • Emphasizes the link between operational discipline and marketing ROI
  • Used in internal strategy and external conversations alike
02 / Approach

Approach

01

Most dealership data is technically true and practically useless.

Definitions don't agree across systems, totals don't add up, and people argue about whose number is right. The fix isn't a better dashboard. It's the boring work of agreeing on what we mean when we say "lead."

02

Total leads tell you nothing.

Volume is vanity. What you actually need is channel-level conversion at each step of the funnel: lead to appointment to show to close. That's the part that tells you what to do on Monday.

03

Your marketing isn't broken. Your downstream is.

If the lane can't absorb the demand or the floor can't close the appointments, no creative will save the spend. Marketing ROI gets decided by operational discipline more than by ad spend.

04

If a system doesn't work on a Tuesday morning, it doesn't matter what it does in a demo.

Tools are means to an end. The right tool for the actual problem usually beats the most popular tool for an adjacent one. If a vendor can't show me how it survives contact with my operators, I'm out.

05

AI is most useful for asking better questions, not generating better answers.

I lean on it to find patterns I'd miss, not to make decisions for me. Judgment is still the job, and judgment is the part that's worth trusting.

03 / Speaking

Speaking

Upcoming sessions and recent talks.

Upcoming

ASOTU CON 2026

  • May 12, 2026

    2:00 to 3:00 pm

    Main Stage

    AI Summit: Prompting & Vibe Coding Workshop

    A working session on the prompting frameworks that turn AI from a glorified search engine into a useful collaborator. How to write prompts that match a store's actual voice and operating context, and how to avoid the hallucination traps that waste everyone's time.

  • May 14, 2026

    1:00 to 1:30 pm

    Studio Three

    How to Deploy First-Party Data As Your Dealership's Biggest Marketing Advantage

    Your CRM is sitting on signals you're not using. The session covers auditing the database for high-intent moments, building personalized journeys customers don't find creepy, and reducing dependence on third-party leads in the process.

Recent

Freddy Live

  • April 23, 2026

    With Jon Frederick

    Building and Evaluating Dealership Technology

    A conversation with Jon Frederick on what it actually looks like to build, evaluate, and run dealership technology right now. We cover the current state of dealership tech and where it's heading, how to evaluate vendors and cut through the noise, building tech stacks on AI platforms without overcomplicating operations, Fullpath's acquisition, vibe coding, and what it takes to lead marketing at a single-point family-owned store competing against larger dealer groups.

04 / Writing

Writing

Marketing, attribution, and dealership operations. The questions I'm wrestling with this week, the patterns I'm noticing, the assumptions I think we should rethink.

Recent themes

  • Honest measurement vs. dashboard theater
  • Where AI actually helps in retail operations
  • Service retention as a compounding advantage
  • Why marketing ROI gets decided upstream of marketing
  • Inventory as the highest-leverage decision most dealers avoid making intentionally

Most of it lands on LinkedIn. I'm also part of the Auto Genius community.

Read on LinkedIn
05 / Contact

Contact

The fastest ways to reach me.