Find a co-founder who loves what you hate

Dan and Sean see their auto parts company very differently. “Growing up as a Russian immigrant in California, I was surrounded by people who worked on cars,” says Dan, who loves the complexity of it—all the fitments and models and matching customers with the right part. Whereas Sean is a strategist. He’s all about the opportunity that auto parts represent. “There’s a romanticism to cars in America. Cars are cool. And why pursue them as a business? Just look around you on every city street!”

The car parts aftermarket is gigantic—hundreds of billions of dollars, as big as the car industry itself—and a complex puzzle. There are over 100 car manufacturers globally that make 7,400 models. Each model is made up of 30,000 parts. That’s a huge catalog. It’s also a highly commoditized business, and to succeed, you need a serious edge. 

Part of Go-Parts’ advantage is that they have a very technically advanced inventory system. But what really makes it all work is that Dan and Sean are business partners with completely different skillsets.

“We’re more like a tech company that sells auto parts”

“Honestly, you have to be a bit crazy to be in this business,” says Sean. “It’s a very tough market. Every point counts. Nobody is here making money hand over fist. It’s all about scale, cost discipline, market dynamics, and the catalog is just massive.” 

Dan is a programmer with a love of data and systems, and what attracted him was the complexity of the problem to solve. There’s a huge number of SKUs, and fitments, variations, and makes and models. “Just setting up the analytics to be able to wrangle all that information, I’m convinced it’s gotta be one of the hardest product lines to sell as a retailer,” says Dan. “The deeper I got into it, the more I learned to love it. Now I’m very interested in understanding all the different parts, suppliers, and brands.” 

There are two ways to approach such a market: by testing and by strategy. Dan and Sean each provide an essential perspective.

“If there’s one word I’d use for Dan, it’s ‘analytical,’” says Sean. “Maybe it sounds like I’m just boosting my partner, but it’s true. I have never encountered anyone professionally who is so willing to continue the analytic process until they have found the right answer. It's just so common that someone stops short. They get a little bit of data, and they're like, ‘Yeah, this is good enough.’ Dan doesn't stop. His ability to remain focused and continue to drill down and ask more questions is unparalleled.”

As Sean sees it, Dan scaffolds his questions and doesn’t move on until he’s found proof. Then he builds upon that discovery with better questions. When he brings his findings to a meeting, they are ironclad. “It never ceases to amaze me the level of depth he's gone to form that opinion, and it has served us very very well over the years,” says Sean.

“Sean is interesting because while I focused on nothing but computers and auto parts, he has a super diverse background of experiences,” says Dan. “He brings all these different valuable social aspects into the business. When we started working together. He was like, ‘Hey, we gotta start going to these conferences. We’ve gotta meet the kingmakers in this industry.’ Whereas I’m so happy being the computer guy in the basement. I can work there day and night, so it's great to have him making the connections, networking, because he's such a strong strategist and communicator."

They feel their skills complement each other exactly. Sean’s full of soaring ideas and ‘good enough to proceed’ answers, and Dan owns the technology and the incremental innovation. Together, they ask questions about stock and supplies and transactions that used to overwhelm their first bookkeeper. The bookkeeper eventually told them it was time to look for someone who could keep up. So Dan led the search for a replacement and found Pilot.

At first, Sean was against the purchase; why did they need more software? “Don’t get mesmerized with tech,” Sean warned. “Bookkeeping is bookkeeping.” But Dan had gone deep into understanding Pilot’s platform and the AI-automated reconciliations, the self-serve reporting, and the ability to slice and dice the transactions. Sean relented, and they onboarded with Pilot.

The timing could not have been better.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit, and right as their Pilot bookkeeper had gotten all their books straightened out, lockdowns hit. Companies and consumers tightened up their spend and inflation soared—so revenue dropped. Sean and Dan went into overdrive trying to get parts into the country and navigate the supply chain; the port of Los Angeles shut down and they had to reroute trucks. And they found that having a combination finance platform plus a complete outsourced team—a bookkeeper, controller, and CFO—helped them make decisions fast enough to be effective. 

Now, Sean spends far more time in Pilot than Dan.

“It's not just our skillsets, it's our personalities that I think are really good complements,” says Sean. “We are very different people, but it fits together very beautifully. His strong suits are my weak areas, and vice versa, and they create this unified front that our team can rely on.”

That stability has allowed Dan and Sean to build a stable Go-Parts team that keeps thriving. Over the years, they’ve opened up new verticals or sectors, and assigned them to someone. Years later, they get the satisfaction of seeing that person promoted to run the whole thing. Almost all their senior directors and managers started in customer service or warehouse positions. “We’ve built up a really healthy company DNA of internal promotion,” says Sean. 

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“I don't want to make it sound easy because it hasn't been,” says Sean. “Every success I can list has been paired with a face plant. Every victory started as an absolute crash and burn. We’re just constantly picking ourselves up and asking, ‘What did I miss, or why didn't I break our way?’” But there’s a consistency that runs through the organization they’ve built together. Whatever Sean runs into, Dan is there to unblock him. And whatever Dan isn’t sure about, Sean swoops in to handle.

The journey hasn’t been simple. For years, they wrestled with the question, “Are we technologically overbuilt?” They worried they’d gone too far in coding their own enterprise resource management (ERP) inventory system. Or that their website search function was too heavy. Then came AI. Dan and Sean meet frequently over several months, asking what AI would mean to the business. They realized that it was the perfect accelerant to what they had already created. They had a perfect foundation. LLMs now offered even better ways to connect customers to hard-to-find parts online—to act like a “counter person” to guide and recommend. They were among the first auto parts companies to launch their own AI sales assistant. 

“We realized oh, we were always destined for this,” says Dan. “It’s what we were preparing for and didn’t even realize. I’m having way more fun running this business today than a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. It just keeps getting better. It’s a really strong partnership.”