Sean Raynor didn’t plan on a career in dealership software, he more or less stumbled into it. Shortly after college, his roommate started selling boats at a dealership that had recently purchased a new ERP system. Their team wasn’t entirely sure how to use it, so Sean spent three months helping them figure it out. […]
Read More… from Sean Raynor: Three Decades of Leadership in Dealer Software
At a recent Perseus AI Roundtable, Sadia Aslam shared how her QA team has transformed their approach to software testing with Cursor. Over the past year, they’ve produced a framework that helps QA engineers build, maintain, execute, and troubleshoot automated tests more efficiently. In this article, Sadia shares how the team approached adoption, the lessons […]
Read More… from How QA Teams are Using AI to Rethink Testing
A Conversation with Raginee Mamgain, Director of Marketing, Constellation Dealer Group. Artificial intelligence has become a fixture in marketing conversations, but for most teams, its use remains limited to drafting emails or brainstorming ideas. Raginee Mamgain has taken a different approach. When her content manager resigned several months ago, she saw an opportunity to rethink […]
Read More… from How One Marketing Leader Reimagined Her Team With AI
For decades, the dealer software market has been built by entrepreneurs. Many of the systems that dealerships rely on today, whether for dealer management, inventory, F&I, fixed operations, CRM, digital retailing, payments, or analytics, began as businesses founded by people who deeply understood the industry and built software to solve very specific problems. That entrepreneurial […]
The first half of 2026 has kept us busy across the group. We welcomed two new businesses to our portfolio, hit to road to meet founders around the world, and leaned into AI. Here’s a look back at the first six months of the year! Acquisitions Completed We completed two acquisitions in the first half of the year, expanding our footprint in dealership software. […]
When Divya Lucas joined Aspen three years ago, she wasn’t stepping into a carefully planned technology career. In fact, her path into software began almost by accident. After spending a decade in the automotive industry working with dealer management systems and CRM software, Divya was approached about an opportunity that would eventually lead her to Aspen. What started as a customer success role quickly […]
Read More… from Women in Technology: Finding Your Voice and Creating Your Own Opportunities
For many entrepreneurs, building a business begins with a passion for the work itself. However, as the business grows, the work you once loved gets buried under the work that simply has to get done. A CIBC survey of more than 1,000 small business owners found that two-thirds work longer hours than they did as employees, and […]
Read More… from The Case for Selling: How an Exit Can Give a Founder Back Their Focus
In the first article in this series, Adam Zimmer shared lessons from the founder’s perspective, emphasizing that the smoothest sale processes are rarely built in the months leading up to a transaction. To complement that perspective, we spoke with Aaran Newman, Managing Director of Auto-IT, who, in conjunction with his partners, recently guided the business through its own sale […]
Read More… from Inside the Process: A Firsthand Account of Selling a Business
Customer-owned software businesses have very different priorities than traditional founder-owned companies when they begin thinking about a sale. The customers who own the software are usually operators first. They built or acquired the platform to solve a critical operational problem inside their industry, not because they aspired to run a software company indefinitely. At a certain point, many customer-owned businesses […]
Read More… from Running the Business You Depend On: The Customer-Owner Dilemma
A practical guide to knowing whether your business is ready for a sale, with reflections from someone who has lived both sides of the deal. Adam Zimmer founded Arius Software in 1999, ran it for more than a decade, and sold it to Perseus Group in 2012. Today, he is a Portfolio Manager where he is responsible for acquiring and overseeing a group of businesses […]
Read More… from Lessons from a Seller: How to Run a Smoother M&A Process
Employee-owned companies are built to protect their people and preserve the culture they’ve created, while ensuring the value they generate is shared with those who built it. When it comes time to consider a sale, employee-owned businesses face a unique set of considerations. While valuation is important, they place additional importance on the future of […]
Read More… from A Natural Next Chapter for Employee-Owned Businesses
We’ve recently started running a series of AI roundtables to share what teams across Perseus are building, and what’s working. In our latest roundtable, Pranav Sood, General Manager of Aspen walked through how his team uses AI tools. As an avid sneaker collector, Pranav first started using AI to catalogue his inventory. It was a simple experiment, but it quickly highlighted how powerful these tools can be when applied to repetitive, […]
Read More… from Inside One GM’s AI Experiment: From a Legacy Portal to a Team of Digital Agents