For years, Mark Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, Ram in Lake Charles, La., sold about 1,200-1,300 new cars a year in its small-town market.
But last year, the shop sold 4,013 new vehicles, owner Mark Boniol told CDG News, with just 45% of those sales going to Louisiana buyers. Boniol said the store also has sold in all 50 states in each of the last three calendar years, a streak he still can’t quite believe.
“Alaska, Hawaii, we’re selling in them all,” he said. “Sometimes I pinch myself about that.”
What to know: For most of his career, Boniol said he followed the same script as anyone else. Buy eight or 10 stores, build ‘em, sell ‘em, rinse and repeat.
By 2016, Boniol said, he’d hit a point of diminishing returns and wondered whether the car business had passed him by.
Instead of giving up, he changed directions.
He gathered his team and told them the store had to change, even though he didn’t know what to change or how.
They started with analytics and digital marketing, two things he said he knew nothing about.
Business didn’t start turning until the fall of 2018.
Finding inspiration: Boniol said he’s equally inspired most by Dave Smith, Elon Musk, and Henry Ford.
Dave Smith Motors in Kellogg, Idaho, sold cars nationally out of a town of about 10,000 people in the 1990s, and others who tried to imitate it failed, he said.
While trying to come up with solutions to jump-start his business, he remembered a time he had the opportunity to speak with Ken Smith, son of founder Dave Smith, when Detroit hosted Super Bowl XL.
He asked how they did it.
It all began for the Smiths with an ad in the Wall Street Journal that advertised Cadillacs at $500 under invoice, Smith told him.
The phone began to ring, the internet became public, and the rest was history for the group, Boniol said.
At the time, he didn’t think he could replicate their success.
“It was a long, detailed answer but I got it,” Boniol told CDG News via email. “The short answer here is that technology has made it possible for anyone to do.”
Years later, the thought just kind of hit him.
“Wait a minute, we’re all Dave Smith Motors,” Boniol said. “We just don’t know it. Technology has caught up.”
Still, he said there’s a key difference. Dave Smith Motors is a hybrid model that kept traditional salespeople.
Mark Dodge uses product specialists, who are half concierge and half persuasive salesperson, don’t negotiate, and act as an advocate for the customer, which he called a key principle of his sales model.
They also aren’t incentivized to get customers to pay more, he said.
He also took a page from Musk.
“The truth is, part of my change was when I stopped criticizing Elon Musk and started studying him,” he said, referring to the Tesla CEO’s customer-first approach.
From the Ford founder, he took the idea of lowering prices through efficiency while paying workers more, the way Ford cut the Model T’s price by more than half.
Thus began the adventure of building a single store that operates like 10, combining a brick-and-mortar dealership with a virtual one.
Building the machine: Boniol credits four in-house departments, remote F&I, a titling center, logistics, and sold orders, for making the machine work.
Remote F&I: Today, customers can sign remotely through a shared-screen setup with his DMS provider, Reynolds and Reynolds, allowing them to buy and finance a car in less than an hour, Boniol said.
The store started remotely signing customers on Jan. 2, 2020, weeks before COVID made it a necessity.
They can sign customers on offshore oil rigs, in Europe, or from the back of a boat, he said.
Boniol said his F&I profit per vehicle was initially cut in half, and the process barely worked.
“I mean, it was a Wright brothers airplane; it could stay off the ground about 150 feet, but it was so clunky,” he said.
He also cut contracts in transit by 90% by switching to eContracting.
The titling center: A dedicated team handles registrations for buyers across the country.
“I have these amazing ladies that work in our titling centers who have relationships all over the United States, and we literally register in every county in the United States,” Boniol said. “It is a daunting task, but we’ve taken it on.”
Buyers choose where to register, but it has to be legal, Boniol said, so the team gets an address and asks questions before filing.
The titling center has operated at that level for almost seven years, he said.
Logistics: A manager and two employees make up the squad that helps customers find and arrange shipping, using third-party carriers. Shipping is free within 300 miles.
And no matter where each new car’s forever home is, it ships to Lake Charles first, then on to its destination.
That’s the automaker’s call, he said, and he doesn’t see it changing.
His lot holds a little more than 600 new vehicles, plus a storage lot, and the locals notice.
At a reception for the governor, Boniol said several people told him, “My God, you got a lot of cars.”
“There’s transports rolling in with cars, and there’s transports rolling out with cars,” he explained.
Sold orders: This is where Mark Dodge is best known, Boniol said, especially with enthusiasts.
A sold order is a vehicle a customer commits to buy before it arrives at the dealership.
Mark Dodge has a dedicated team of remote, non-commissioned specialists who handle them, Boniol said.
His store sold a little more than 1,400 Ram RHOs, while the next-closest dealer sold about 250, he said.
At one point, Mark Dodge had about 17% of all RHO orders among Stellantis’ roughly 2,600 dealers, he said.
He said his TRX wait list is about 1,600 names long, but the TRX is allocated, so he can only sell what he gets.
Sold orders spend far less time on the lot, and the model costs “only 42% of the expense of the traditional model,” Boniol said.
The people: Mark Dodge employs about 83 people, including remote workers in states such as South Carolina, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
All are licensed in Louisiana and never meet customers face to face, Boniol said. They work with customers only electronically.
For example, say someone learns a remote employee works for a dealership and asks them about a Wrangler at a Starbucks or something.
That employee is not allowed to discuss anything and can only refer them to the dealership itself.
All customers who buy from Mark Dodge sign electronic consent forms acknowledging they’re buying from a Louisiana dealer.
When the Louisiana Motor Vehicle Commission found out what the store was doing, it “conducted an intense investigation,” Boniol said, and found it legal.
Beyond that, product specialists are paid a flat rate per sale rather than a traditional commission, and they don’t negotiate.
Still a hometown store: Boniol said Mark Dodge still runs a full showroom and service department for Lake Charles.
“We’re your hometown neighbor, also, you know,” he said, adding that customers can buy however they want.
As he sees it, customers are his only boss, especially in the era of online reviews.
“If three or four or five of my customers find each other online and say Mark Dodge is a fraud, then we are,” Boniol said. “We actually have to be what we say we are, or this doesn’t work.”
Taking care of shoppers: Even out-of-towners still get the Mark Dodge touch after a purchase, Boniol said.
A program called Customers in Distress, modeled on Gulfstream’s response to grounded jets, texts every manager, including Boniol, when an out-of-state buyer has a problem with the vehicle for the first 1,000 miles or 30 days, whichever is longer.
The team then finds a nearby dealership, ships parts if needed, and follows it “to ground,” he said.
Boniol said, in one case, a three-time customer emailed after a botched delivery.
“We dropped the ball, but we’re gonna do something about it,” he said.
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Things to consider: A far-and-wide digital presence comes with unique customer interactions.
Boniol told CDG News that once, hours after Hurricane Laura tore through Lake Charles in 2020, he answered a ringing phone in the sales tower.
He said a shopper in North Carolina was interested in a Grand Cherokee Mark Dodge had listed.
Boniol told her the remnants of a hurricane had blown through about four hours earlier.
“She goes, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, but do you still have the Grand Cherokee?’” Boniol remembered.
He handed the phone to a sales manager and told him, “They didn’t have a hurricane in North Carolina. Let’s go. See if we got it. Let’s take care of her.”
Mark Dodge was also the only dealership open in the area for two months after Laura, Boniol said.
Similarly, when a rare snowstorm closed every dealership from Houston to New Orleans, Boniol said Mark Dodge still signed 10 new-car deals.
Combining the tactics: In four years, Mark Dodge climbed from No. 1,800 to No. 27 among roughly 18,250 U.S. dealerships, and it did more than 3,000 sold orders in 2022, Boniol said.
Of the 4,013 new vehicles Mark Dodge sold in 2025, he said 1,789 (45%) went to Louisiana buyers and 1,098 to Texas. Florida, California, and Mississippi rounded out the top five.
Along with the scrutiny to make sure operations stay within legal boundaries, Boniol said he faces criticism, too, for the model itself and for its low prices.
“Not everybody likes that,” Boniol said. “Not every manufacturer, not every dealer likes anyone gaining any sort of an advantage that way, but we have found efficiencies that scale, and efficiency is how we do it.”
What’s next: The Louisiana dealer said he plans to use AI to spread the word and grow as a digital retailer with a brick-and-mortar home in Lake Charles.
Boniol said good customer feedback is what makes it worthwhile. On a bad day, he reads his reviews.
“I’ve never had more fun,” Boniol said. “I’ve never made more money, and I’ve never been more proud of what I do.”
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