Heath Mayor and the business before the keys

A car can look ready long before it is ready to leave. Someone has to move it, prepare it, check the work and get it to the right place. The customer sees the finish. Heath Mayor has built a business around the arrangements behind it. There is a considerable distance between a promising vehicle and a completed handover, even when the two are parked only a few feet apart.

Mayor is the founder and president of OnSite Dealer Solutions, the Kansas City region company that puts employees and managers inside automotive dealerships. Its work includes detailing, make-ready operations, reconditioning and workforce support. These are practical services with a public consequence: the vehicle a buyer receives is also a verdict on the dealership that sold it. A polished sales pitch has limited authority over an unfinished car.

For Mayor, this has become a career in the less photographed part of automotive retail. The showroom gets the lighting. The operation behind it needs a schedule, trained people and someone willing to take responsibility when work stalls. His business brings those pieces together. The interesting part of his story is how often the same ingredient returns, whether he is buying a business or talking about an employee: a relationship that has had time to become useful.

A friendship with a long lead time

Consider Mike Spal. He and Mayor worked together at National Dealership Detailing Incorporated in the early 2000s. Both were involved in dealer-focused reconditioning services. Spal eventually went out on his own, founding Automotive Detailing Solutions in 2008. The two kept in contact, exchanging industry observations and business leads. Their working lives separated without the relationship disappearing.

Years later, Spal wanted to train as a helicopter pilot. Mayor had previously expressed interest in buying ADS if Spal ever decided to sell. In April 2025, ODS announced the acquisition. ADS brought a 26-person team and a business concentrated heavily on luxury dealerships. Spal described an orderly transaction and an owner who respected what he had built.

Mayor's explanation put the employees near the center of the purchase. He saw experienced people who could develop within ODS, including potential future leaders. The deal also brought ODS's SERV software into the acquired operation. A conversation maintained across years had become a way for one founder to leave and another to keep a team working. There are acquisition stories with more theatrical entrances. This one had the advantage of the parties already knowing each other.

2008: learning what a dealership needs

Mayor's own ventures began in 2008, spanning automotive labor, marketing and commercial real estate. The combination put him close to the operating questions that would shape ODS. He was learning how dealerships worked while running businesses of his own, with the demands of clients providing a rather direct form of instruction.

A relationship with a family-owned automotive group in Peoria, Illinois, became particularly influential. Working with that group helped develop the ideas behind the eventual ODS model. The starting point was a customer relationship and the work it required. OnSite Dealer Solutions formally took shape in 2011, initially serving dealerships and groups in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri.

That geography still helps explain the company Mayor leads. Its headquarters are in Mission, Kansas, in the Kansas City region. Its early emphasis was on dependable staffing, processes and responsibility for make-ready operations. Expansion followed those operational roots. The company's stated approach remains selective: a new dealership partnership has to be supported by the right employees, management and service capacity. A new pin on a map is easy to admire. Someone still has to arrive at the dealership and do the work.

The ladder starts beside a car

When Mayor talks about advancement, he includes himself among people who began on an early rung. In a 2023 account of employee Gabriel's progression, he described a shared starting point with other ODS leaders. His short assessment of Gabriel was direct: “Gabriel represents our ideals at ODS.” The compliment was attached to a career path, rather than an abstract declaration about culture.

Gabriel joined in 2019 in an hourly service-wash position. After three months he became a porter, working alongside sales and service teams. He later moved into detailing and then site management in Kansas City. Each role added another view of the dealership: moving vehicles, preparing them, and eventually organizing the people responsible for getting that work done.

For a founder whose company supplies on-site operations, that progression has a practical appeal. A manager who has done the job understands more than the finished checklist. The work itself has supplied part of the education. Gabriel's experience gives a concrete example of the kind of internal advancement Mayor praises. It also locates his idea of leadership close to a working team, where a title is accompanied by responsibility for what happens during the day.

“Gabriel represents our ideals at ODS.”

Heath Mayor · 2023

A company that works inside another company

ODS now supports more than 165 dealerships across 10 states. The structure is unusually intimate for an outside service business: its employees work within customers' dealerships, and its managers coordinate with dealership leadership. Mayor's company must therefore be recognizable as an employer while fitting into another business's daily routines. That is a more demanding arrangement than delivering a service and leaving a receipt.

The employees are W-2 ODS staff, supported through recruiting, onboarding, training and local management. The organization includes area leadership and trainers as well as people working at individual sites. Those layers matter because the service is performed across many locations. A founder can describe a standard in Mission; the result has to survive the journey to each dealership.

The range of services has widened beyond a traditional detail department. ODS offers labor support, customized reconditioning services and software alongside make-ready work. For Mayor, the business has grown around adjacent problems within the same customer relationship. A dealership already needs the vehicle prepared. It may also need a clearer way to organize the surrounding work. The company he founded has followed those connections across the operation.

The paperwork gets a job, too

SERV Automotive Software is the technology side of that approach. Developed by ODS through its dealership work, it connects inventory, digital work orders, vendors, approvals, billing and reporting. The purpose is operational visibility: allowing people to see where a vehicle is in the process and what still needs to happen.

There is an everyday logic to this expansion. A vehicle can wait because a physical task remains unfinished, but it can also wait because information has failed to reach the next person. Software gives the surrounding coordination a place to live. It turns progress into something a manager can inspect without relying entirely on a conversation that may have happened at the other end of the lot.

In the ADS acquisition, this distinction was tangible. The incoming business had used spreadsheets and manual tracking. SERV added reporting and invoicing tools to an operation whose detailing skills were already established. The team brought experience; the system supplied another way to coordinate it. Mayor's company was buying the people and customer relationships while adding infrastructure around their work. The sequence is revealing: the operating business came first, and the technology grew out of it.

A different kind of drive

Mayor's dealership connections also reach the golf course. On October 15, 2025, he participated with ODS in the Berkshire Hathaway Automotive charity tournament at Bear Creek Golf Club in Dallas. ODS was a Premier Partner Sponsor. The wider event brought together more than 200 teams and raised over $401,000 for The Gatehouse of Grapevine. That total belonged to the tournament's collective effort.

The Gatehouse supports women working toward self-sufficiency through education and career preparation, financial skills and housing. Mayor appeared alongside colleagues and other automotive participants in an event organized around an existing industry partnership. The dealership relationship had produced an occasion to do something beyond dealership work.

Golf makes an agreeable setting for a business gathering, though the ball remains unimpressed by a person's job title. Here the purpose extended beyond the scorecard. ODS's charitable activity operates under the OnSite Cares name, connecting company resources and employee involvement with community organizations. The same network that meets over vehicles can also assemble around a local cause. Mayor's participation places him within that network, rather than merely lending his company name to it.

A family connection in Kansas City

In October 2026, ODS returned as a sponsor of Chipping for the Garden at Oakwood Country Club in Kansas City, Missouri. The event supported Pete's Garden, which recovers surplus prepared food and turns it into meals for local families. This time the connection was also personal: Mayor's son Henry helped organize the tournament with fellow Rockhurst High School senior Hank Homsey.

The event continued a student-led effort from the previous year. Its practical fundraising needs included more freezer capacity for recovered food. ODS and Mayor were thanked for their continued support. It is a particularly concrete version of community involvement: a golf event helps fund equipment that allows an organization to handle more of the food arriving at its door.

Mayor's year-end message for 2025 had emphasized employee development, leadership and clearer career paths alongside community participation. Those priorities sit comfortably beside the story of Gabriel's promotions and the preservation of Spal's team. Across these episodes, the recurring ambition is to give people and organizations enough support to keep doing useful work. For a founder in the vehicle-preparation business, readiness turns out to have several meanings. The customer eventually gets the keys. Much of Mayor's career has happened before that moment.