Board Member Spotlight: Amy Weisenburger

Amy Weisenburger’s first job in the remarketing industry was with Walden Fleet Services, and after her colleague Brent Sergot started Marketwise Solutions, Weisenburger followed him to the remarketing company as its very first employee in the late 1990s.

“That move completely changed my life and the course of my career, and I have never taken another job since,” Weisenburger said. She is now executive director of national accounts for AutoVIN, one of several companies for which she has worked through four different mergers and acquisitions. She was there through all the transactions, helping to integrate different companies with different cultures, systems, products, and services. So even though she has never accepted another job offer during that time, “I’ve had the opportunity to serve in many different roles every few years.”

As her career progressed, she began taking on a role of an early adopter, or “disrupter,” as she likes to describe it, working on programs and projects that might not have been popular at the time but that became more popular later on when the industry was ready.

Her work as a disrupter accelerated after wholesale used car auction company Autodaq acquired Marketwise around 2000. Getting involved in the first wholesale online auto auction at a time when few people knew much about it was interesting to her.

“We were trying to be something different, innovative, highly disruptive, and not popular,” she said. “It was a clear venture from the traditional wholesale auctions.”

She experienced some positive disruption of her career a short time later, when JM Family acquired Autodaq in 2005. She called it “a game changer” because JM Family “is absolutely one of the best companies to work for in this business.”

She worked with JM Family’s CenterOne Financial Services and then for its financing and risk management products business, DataScan. Her time at DataScan brought out more of the disrupter in her as she worked on the consumer initiatives of Inspect My Ride and PRNDL.

“We got to do something very visionary, very innovative, and a little disruptive,” she said. Inspect My Ride offered direct-to-consumer inspections for buyers of vehicles through sites such as eBay, Cars.com, or AutoTrader.  DataScan also created an end-to-end and fully virtual F&I experience called PRNDL, named after the parts of an automotive gear selector. Weisenburger described the program as “the total online experience” that offered services such as inspections, financing, warranties, and transportation for online vehicle buyers. But the program was too ahead of the game at the time, she said. “It’s interesting to me to see all these different companies now attempting to do the same thing that we were doing so many years ago but nobody was ready for.”

When remarketing services company AutoVIN acquired DataScan in 2015, Weisenburger went back to her roots of offering more traditional, field-based remarketing services. She now manages a team responsible for business development, legal and compliance, and client relationships in the United States and Canada.

But she notes that another disrupter is coming to the forefront: self-inspections. Weisenburger is working with the AutoVIN Self-Inspect product, which is live in the marketplace today. Version 2.0, which is in development in partnership with AutoVIN’s sister company TradeRev, will incorporate artificial intelligence and client-specific excess wear and use pricing of damages.

Being able to reduce inspection time to just a few minutes, which will have “huge ramifications for our field network, our company, [and] our industry, but most importantly, for our clients.” Hundreds of AutoVIN employees conduct inspections on-site now.

“There is a lot of time and resource and expense in that, so what this technology means to us as an organization from an efficiency and technology standpoint is really exciting.”

That passion for the industry drew her to IARA, and she joined the association’s board of directors in late 2016. She has participated on the group’s education committee. But a desire to give back to the industry, as well as the IARA’s focus on consignors, was most important to her.

“It’s an opportunity to network and stay close to the issues and industry topics that are important to my clients, ” she said. “The consignors are the industry from my perspective, and that’s what the IARA tried to do that was a little different than the average conference or event. We try to make sure the consignors are the focus. I think that’s important to who we are, and it was important to me when I decided to get involved.”

For the future, she plans to continue efforts to be an early adopter and pursue additional disruptive technology. “I’m a patient disrupter,” she said. “It’s all about timing. Sometimes the market is not ready for it, so you just have to be patient.”