Biography

After graduating from Stanford University in 1977, Johnny Garlich joined the family automobile business. Starting as the Used Car Manager and quickly moving to the General Manager, Johnny was able to become the leading Volkswagen dealer in the Mid-America territory.
His love of the nascent tech industry caused him to teach himself computer programming in the early 80s. He used his programming knowledge to write a leasing program that propelled his father’s dealership into auto leasing of all makes and models. His success with leasing other makes and models allowed the dealership to participate in the Van Conversion business as it was being born. Soon the VW dealership was retailing van conversions and leasing high group imports and still retaining its lead in the VW zone.
By 1985, Johnny Garlich decided to leave the family business and start a dealership on his own. With almost no capital, he was able to acquire a VW and Subaru dealership and transform it into one of the top-producing dealerships in the zone.
By 1991, family responsibilities caused Johnny to move onto other ventures. He exited the retail automobile business with its long hours and moved into the insurance business with his former vendor where he used his automotive connections to provide aftermarket services to automobile dealers.
By 1994, Johnny once again decided he wanted to be his own boss and bought out his former vendor and opened an agency of his own. Within a few years, he was one of the top-producing aftermarket agencies in the country.
Always thirsty for innovation, Johnny developed a series of training and sales tools to help his dealer clients achieve previously unheard of profits in their finance departments.
In 2009, as Johnny Garlich was closing in on retirement, he used his successful agency to help fund a new concept: providing loan-closing services for car dealers via a video conference call center. He helped develop a unique sales delivery system encapsulated within a video conference call. He started a new company, called Deliveries on Demand, to provide loan-closing services for auto dealers. After several years of development, he introduced the first remote loan closing in the St. Louis market. Within a couple of years he was doing loan closings in several states.
But the technology kept changing, and when it did, Johnny decided in 2014 to teach himself the new programming and rewrite the majority of the code base himself! His IT Director thought Johnny was crazy. But a year and a half later, Johnny Garlich and his IT Director changed the course of financial services by introducing a remote auto loan program for credit unions that shifted the balance of power to the member and the credit union. At 60 years old, Johnny has written off a well-deserved retirement because he is having too much fun disrupting the financial services industry.