CurtailGuard

Idea

Floor plan trust compliance software for independent RV and powersports dealers. CurtailGuard reconciles a dealer's DMS sold-unit list against their floor plan lender's outstanding-unit ledger, flags units sold but not yet paid off (sold out of trust) and units approaching a curtailment due date, and keeps an audit-ready resolution log so the dealer catches the problem before the lender's periodic physical audit does.

Market gap

Dealers who stock inventory with floor plan financing (NextGear Capital, Northpoint Commercial Finance, and similar lenders) owe the lender a payoff the moment a financed unit sells. If a unit sells and the payoff isn't sent, it is "out of trust" (OOT), and several states treat that as a form of conversion or embezzlement with criminal exposure on top of loan default and personal-guarantee liability. Lenders police this with periodic physical floor checks, done in-house or through third-party inspection firms, but those checks are inherently reactive: they happen monthly to quarterly, so an OOT unit can sit undetected for weeks. Dealer management systems (DX1, Lightspeed DMS, BiT DMS, ZiiDMS) run sales, service, and parts, but none of them continuously reconcile the DMS sold list against the lender's own outstanding-unit ledger in between audits. That reconciliation is left to a dealer's office manager cross-checking a monthly lender statement by hand. The timing is right now because floor plan lenders have spent the last two years building more self-service audit tooling (NextGear's Account Portal audit features) precisely because dealer self-reporting is unreliable, which signals both the size of the problem and those lenders' openness to a dealer-side tool that produces the same clean reconciliation from the dealer's side.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up:

• RV dealer businesses in the US: 6,717 (IBISWorld, "Recreational Vehicle Dealers in the US," 2025)
• Powersports dealer and retail locations eligible for Motorcycle Industry Council membership: roughly 5,000 existing dealers plus 6,000 independent outlets, about 11,000 total (Bikernet/MIC, "Motorcycle Industry Council Expands Membership to Powersports Dealers")
• Combined target locations: roughly 17,700. Excluding large public dealer groups that build their own tooling (Camping World, Lazydays, RV Retailer, RumbleOn, roughly 400-500 locations combined), independent target locations are approximately 17,200.
• Floor plan penetration: new-inventory dealers overwhelmingly finance stock through floor plan lines rather than cash, estimated at 70% of independent locations actively carrying a floor plan balance at any time (a conservative estimate given floor plan financing is the standard way dealers stock new units): approximately 12,000 addressable dealer locations.
• Assumed annual contract value: $3,600/year ($300/month per rooftop, the entry tier below).
• TAM = 12,000 x $3,600 = approximately $43.2M/year.

SAM: RV dealers only as the initial beachhead (cleaner, more standardized DMS export formats than powersports) = 6,717 x 70% = 4,702 dealers x $3,600 = approximately $16.9M/year.

SOM: 5% penetration of the RV SAM within 24 months = 235 dealers x $3,600 = approximately $846K ARR.

Monetization strategy

Monthly SaaS subscription per rooftop (physical dealer location), billed to the dealership. The dealer pays because a single missed out-of-trust unit risks loan default, personal-guarantee exposure, and floor plan line termination, all of which can stop a small dealer from stocking any new inventory. Retention comes from the audit-export log becoming the dealer's evidence trail for their lender relationship. Priced per rooftop rather than per user since the buyer is the dealer principal or their office manager, and value scales with inventory volume, not headcount.

Pricing strategy

• Starter ($300/month per rooftop): up to 150 outstanding floor plan units, weekly reconciliation uploads, email alerts, audit-export log.
• Growth ($550/month per rooftop, anchor tier): up to 500 outstanding units, daily reconciliation uploads, SMS alerts in addition to email, priority curtailment countdown dashboard.
• Multi-rooftop dealer groups: custom pricing, contact sales (out of MVP scope to build the consolidated console, but priced now to signal the roadmap). Entry point is Starter at $300/month, a fraction of what a single OOT default or lender line termination costs a small dealership.

Lead magnet

A free "Out-of-Trust Risk Calculator": the dealer uploads (or manually enters) their current floor plan balance, average days-to-sell, and curtailment schedule, and gets a one-page PDF estimate of how many units are statistically likely to be sitting unreconciled right now, benchmarked against the industry's periodic-audit cadence. It proves the gap in under two minutes without requiring a DMS export.

Social proof that the problem exists

1. Ford and Stellantis both sued Iowa dealer group Sky Auto Mall in 2024-2025 over alleged floor plan fraud, with Stellantis alleging the dealer defaulted on a floor plan agreement from November 2023 while continuing to secure financing for inventory that may already have been pledged elsewhere: https://www.aol.com/lifestyle/ford-stellantis-sue-same-dealer-164500083.html
2. Dealer-facing CRM vendor AutoRaptor publishes standing content warning dealers about the most common floor plan mistakes that trigger auditor findings, evidence this is a recurring, well-known operational failure point across the industry, not an edge case: https://www.autoraptor.com/blog/5-big-dealer-floor-plan-mistakes-that-will-irritate-your-auditor/
3. Collateral Specialists Inc runs standing job postings for "Floor Plan Field Inspector - Automotive Dealer Floorplan Inventory Auditor" roles across multiple US metro areas, an entire third-party physical-inspection business built specifically because lenders cannot rely on dealer self-reporting: https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=17dfb568235482a2
4. NextGear Capital, one of the largest floor plan lenders, built and markets dedicated self-audit tooling inside its dealer Account Portal, direct evidence that a major lender sees dealer-side reconciliation and audit-readiness as a real, unmet need worth investing in: https://www.nextgearcapital.com/solutions/floorplanning/audits/

Competitors

• DX1 (Recreational Dealer Solutions / Dominion Powersports Solutions): all-in-one powersports DMS covering sales, F&I, service, and parts, with OEM-facing compliance reporting but no continuous lender-side floor plan reconciliation. https://www.dx1app.com/
• Lightspeed DMS: dealer management system across powersports, marine, and RV with inventory and accounting modules, not built around floor plan lender ledger matching. https://www.lightspeeddms.com/solutions/dms/
• BiT DMS: DMS for marine, golf cart, and RV dealers, general inventory and operations tooling. https://www.bitdms.com/
• NextGear Capital: the floor plan lender itself, offering dealers a self-service Account Portal with audit features, but it is lender-built, lender-hosted, and only reflects the lender's own ledger, not a reconciliation against the dealer's actual DMS sold list. https://www.nextgearcapital.com/solutions/floorplanning/
• Northpoint Commercial Finance: another major floor plan lender serving powersports and RV, same lender-side-only visibility limitation. https://northpointcf.com/industries/power-sports/

What competitors offer now

DMS platforms manage the sales and inventory side of the business well: deal desking, F&I, service scheduling, parts, and general OEM compliance reporting. Floor plan lenders' own portals show the dealer their outstanding balance and upcoming curtailments from the lender's side. Neither actually cross-checks the two: no product on the market today ingests both the DMS's "this unit sold" record and the lender's "this unit is still financed" record and proactively flags the mismatch before the next physical audit. That gap is filled today by manual spreadsheet cross-referencing by an office manager, or not filled at all until a third-party inspector like Collateral Specialists Inc physically counts units on the lot.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Lead with the free Out-of-Trust Risk Calculator distributed through RV and powersports dealer associations, 20-group forums, and floor plan lender relationship managers themselves (lenders have an incentive to recommend a tool that reduces their own default risk). Position CurtailGuard explicitly as "your own audit before their audit," a framing no DMS or lender portal uses, since DMS vendors sell operations software and lenders have no incentive to build a tool that also flags their own audit process as something dealers need to get ahead of. Distribution through lender relationship managers as a referral channel is a wedge general DMS vendors don't have, since lenders don't endorse general-purpose DMS platforms but have a direct financial interest in dealers staying compliant.