Steve Baylis

The automotive industry is run by people who stayed in their lane. Steve Baylis refused to.

Over two decades owning ad, design, and digital agencies — seven years of formal design training under some of Canada's top creatives, and award-winning work from the start. A senior executive seat inside one of BC's largest automotive groups, where he mastered sales from inside the business. Two decades exhibiting fine art internationally. The definitive book on dealership marketing. Dealer Ignition — the most creative automotive agency in the business, with strategies that have changed how OEMs themselves go to market. And Diablo AI — a full autonomous sales platform that answers every lead, resurrects the deals the industry throws away, and connects every ad dollar to a sold car.

Most people who sell technology to dealers have never sold a car. Steve has. Most agencies are run by people who've never worked inside the business they serve. Steve has. Most founders have never made anything by hand. Steve spent twenty years doing exactly that.

The combination isn't a résumé — it's the argument. It's why his work connects what nobody else has connected. It's why Diablo exists.

It started with the eye.

Baylis spent seven years in formal design study — a serious, systematic education in visual communication, typography, and brand. His instructors were among Canada's most respected designers, advertisers, and creative directors. He left school not as a generalist but as a designer — someone trained to see what others walk past. His first agency, co-owned for fifteen years, worked across advertising, branding, and digital for a roster that spanned industries. Award-winning commercial work became the standard, not the exception.

Then the work stopped being enough.

Two disciplines, one obsession.

Art wasn't a pivot. Not a hobby either. It was parallel — the discipline that demanded everything the agency couldn't. For fifteen years Baylis ran the agency by day and painted by night, two disciplines with one obsession: layering. The practice was defined by an almost unreasonable commitment to process: oil and cold wax on Baltic birch panels, ten deliberate stages per piece, up to six months per painting, thousands of individual marks layered with intention.

His work has been exhibited internationally and represented by some of Canada's top commercial galleries. His work has been discussed by leading art publications and was the subject of a seven-page feature in International Artist Magazine. His paintings are collected internationally.

None of it came easily. At eighteen, Baylis was diagnosed with Crohn's disease — a chronic autoimmune condition with no cure. It arrived at the exact moment most people are deciding who they want to become. For Baylis, it accelerated that decision. Resilience became the baseline, not the exception. Every discipline he's practiced since has been shaped by that early lesson: the only way through is to refuse to stop.

At one point he stepped away from the agency entirely to paint full-time. But even in the studio, the obsession didn't match the canvas. He'd drive his supercar to the studio and spend the day watching car videos, thinking about cars. The honest question surfaced: was it art he loved, or was it the chase — tackling complex problems no one had solved? The answer wasn't just art. It was cars, strategy, and business — locked together.

Then came the car business.

Not as an outsider consulting in, but as an operator living inside the business. As a senior executive inside one of BC's largest automotive groups, Baylis saw the industry from the inside — what actually moved metal, how change happened inside large teams, and where the operational gaps were. During COVID, he helped grow the business over three times its previous volume. That experience settled a question that had been building for years: he was built for something larger than a single organization.

In 2023 he founded Dealer Ignition. Within two years it became the most creative automotive agency in the business — strategy-led, visually uncompromising, and grounded in how real dealerships actually operate. OEMs took notice. Several have adopted Dealer Ignition's campaigns and strategies into their own marketing playbooks. Baylis wrote Driving Dealership Growth, a 200-page playbook now used by dealerships across North America.

But the pattern he'd seen from the inside was still there. Dealers were spending $20,000 to $100,000 per month on advertising — and 90 to 95 percent of those leads were getting thrown away. Not because dealers didn't care. Because their follow-up infrastructure couldn't keep up.

So he built it.

Diablo AI is the answer.

A full autonomous sales platform that handles every customer touchpoint a dealership has — 24/7 lead response, lost-deal recovery, objection handling across five levels, private sale orchestration, and a full CRM. Because it sits connected to Dealer Ignition's advertising data, it closes a loop no other automotive AI platform has closed: from the ad dollar that generated the lead to the sold unit at the end of the process. For the first time, a dealership can prove which ad dollar sold which car.

Then came Rally — the consumer side. A social platform for car culture that connects the people who love cars with the events, drives, and communities that define the scene. The same unified-systems thinking that shaped his art, his agencies, and Diablo AI, now applied to an entire ecosystem.

Twenty years pointing at the same thing.

Find a complex system that no one has unified. Build the thing that connects it all. Whether the medium is paint, marketing, or artificial intelligence — Baylis works the same way. Layered. Intentional. Relentless.