Our History

The AccSite platform started as an idea, that become a pet project, that became a partnership with a vision.

Mark Dawson realized that there were no cost-effective alternatives for dealers who wanted to advertise on sites such as autoTRADER or Kijiji and retain control over improving a dealer’s Google presence and relevancy. Mark hired Eric Schnell to develop an automotive dealer website who was disgruntled with their current vendor. They had worked together on various web projects previously but this was the one that caused the biggest headaches since there really wasn’t anything on the market that truly fit what a dealer needed or wanted – at a reasonable price point.

After that endeavor, in his spare time, Eric Schnell started to build an enterprise level dealership website platform. Little by little he worked on a platform, that would become known as AccSite, as time allowed. The working relationship between Mark and Eric continued throughout on various other web related projects and periodically Eric would pick Mark’s brain on the ins and outs of dealership expectations given his almost 10 years’ experience at autoTRADER and 5 more previous to that in the powersports world.

By the spring/summer of 2019, Mark had what he thought was his final conversation with Eric about his progressing platform. He didn’t think the premise of, ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy was the way to go and his interests were swayed to look at the purchase of one of the primary competitors in the Canadian market. That opportunity was not all that he was being sold on and his follow up reseller experience was not a good one either. Once his non-compete clause was over, he immediately contacted Eric to renew their partnership with the idea of bringing all of Eric’s hard work to date, to market.

"Everyone complains about how they would do X if they were in charge. Well after so many years in a corporate setting and dealing with all the BS that goes along with representing 2nd rate products with 1st rate stories, I decided to leverage my years of dealer experience and bring my vision of the very best dealer-specific website platform to market."