When Syam Menon was offered the role of CEO of incadea in February 2025, he accepted it just as the company was about to pass a major milestone. It would be only a few weeks later that the provider of digital solutions for automotive dealerships would celebrate its 25th year in business, and he was ready to rise to the challenge of leading the company to its next stage of growth.
Building on his experience at Volaris
Syam has had the advantage of working at Volaris Group for three and a half years. During his time at Volaris, he has gained a deep appreciation of its long-term growth perspective. Before assuming his current role, he was the Director of Integrations for the automotive portfolio within Volaris Group, where he helped companies adapt after being acquired and encouraged new leaders to access Volaris resources and implement best practices.
All the businesses that I worked for before, I think it was very short-term goals, right? Yes. We had to run hard, achieve the goal, relax a little, run hard, achieve the goal. Whereas in Volaris, when you talk about running a business to perpetuity, that’s a different game. And that was something I had never experienced. And when that was explained to me, it was very, very exciting for me to understand how that was done.
Working in integrations has helped him gain deep knowledge of the businesses acquired by Volaris, including their ways of doing business and their people. Learning about newly acquired businesses was especially interesting to him since many acquired businesses have deep institutional knowledge and close relationships with customers.
As he takes on his new role, he hopes to apply some of his previous learnings: “One of the surprising experiences that I had working in integration is that the businesses we buy don’t always value their solutions and services as much as we do.”
Continuing a career in automotive technology at Volaris
Syam is no newcomer to the world of automotive software. Before joining Volaris, his career took him around the world, including working for two global leaders in automotive technology, Keyloop and CDK Global for close to a decade.
As part of the Volaris automotive portfolio, Syam is supported by other experienced leaders who form a community around him. He reports to a previous incadea CEO, Werner Leinauer, and within Volaris, incadea has several peer companies who also provide automotive software, including ASC Automotive, MoVec, fmade, Runya, and Automate.
The industry has several incumbents, and then you have a lot of new solution providers coming along the ecosystem, and they all need each other.
Benefits of belonging to the Volaris automotive portfolio
Syam is already familiar with the advantages of being part of the Volaris automotive portfolio. The businesses within the group operate in more than 70 countries, and many business leaders have more than 20 years of experience behind them, lending them vast market knowledge across geographies and cultures.
Belonging to a community focused on automotive technology within Volaris helps strengthen the resilience of each of the businesses. Where it would be challenging for a single business to stay on top of all market developments and trends, belonging to a larger group with peers who also understand the industry makes every business in the group stronger.
“Within the automotive retail software industry, we see common themes for how a manufacturer expects you to behave, how a dealership expects you to behave, how an end customer expects you to behave,” he explains. “These themes are quite consistent, and that is the knowledge we bring within the Volaris automotive portfolio.”
