Founder and CEO Vin Micciche entered the Automotive industry in 1994, as he began selling cars after leaving college, eventually starting the first Automotive BDC 1996 for Boston’s Ira Motor Group. Holding various management positions in retail automotive, including F&I manager, General Manager, Vin graduated from the NADA academy in 2006. In 2007, Vin was put in charge of all E-commerce for the entire East region for Group 1 Automotive. Eventually, Vin built one of the largest centralized BDC’s in the country, handling dealers from New Hampshire to Florida, as far west as New Orleans, and working with over 60 different dealerships and 17 different OEMs.
When Group 1 relocated to Houston in 2013, Vin and his family decided to stay in the Boston area. Starting Strolid with a number of his top managers, including two who have now been with the Strolid team for over twenty years, such as Shawna Behan, who oversees company operations.
From then on, Strolid improved on the process that they developed for Group 1, to help dealers improve their customer experience when communicating virtually with dealerships. Central to that improvement is the CXM, a software platform that connects Strolid agents to the external systems they depend on: CRMs such as Vinsolutions and Eleads, dialers like Volie, inventory systems like Dealervault and nearly every lead provider in the North American market.
As Covid hit, Strolid’s in-house team quickly pivoted to remote working, successfully building the technology and internal processes for operations to onboard, accommodate and manage remote employees. Key to this was a restructuring of the training process; solidly based on 24 years of training experience. Led by trainer Lulu Santa, Strolid now executes on a scalable recruiting process, offering employment to US candidates nationwide, and to international candidates for overnight work. After the initial training, Strolid’s day-to-day process includes training managers working continuously with agents throughout their career at Strolid.
In 2021, Thomas Howe joined Strolid as their CTO, the our first in-house development team, building the next generation of communications technology. Backed by a dozen engineers, and joined by noted communications designer Dan Petrie Strolid’s team has filed for their first patent and are proposing their first standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force in July in Philadelphia. Internally, Strolid now runs on an Slack based process, enabling our team to coordinate between themselves, and with dealer clients, efficiently and in real time.