Steve Baylis.
Operator. Artist. Author.

01 · Formation It started with the eye.

Baylis spent seven years in formal design study — graduating with Dean's List honours from Capilano University's IDEA Program, one of the country's most selective design schools. His instructors were among Canada's most respected designers, advertisers, and creative directors. He left school with a trained eye — the kind that reads structure where others see surface.

For fifteen years he built his career at an award-winning branding and web design studio. He made partner. By the end, the studio was his to take over outright.

Then he walked away — to paint full time.

02 · Parallel Practice 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. Across those years, he ran the agency by day and painted by night — two disciplines with a single 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 paintings have been discussed by leading art publications and were the subject of a seven-page feature in International Artist Magazine. His work is collected across three continents.

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.

03 · Operating 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, where the operational gaps sat. 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.

04 · Studio Ignition Labs.

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

But the pattern he'd seen from the inside was still there. Dealers were spending $20,000 to $100,000 a 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 — 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, 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.

05 · Build How Diablo got built.

Most automotive AI platforms are built by venture-backed engineering teams, with capital pressure on the meter and an exit clock running. Diablo wasn't.

Baylis and his co-founder Rheis Setter built the platform end-to-end — no outside capital, no engineering team, no investor expectations — while continuing to operate Dealer Ignition. The agency stayed profitable. The platform shipped. It's now live and delivering results for dealers.

The structural consequence: Diablo doesn't carry the burn rate, dilution, or growth-at-all-costs pressure that shapes every venture-funded competitor. The pricing reflects what the platform delivers — not the cost of someone else's capital.

06 · Thesis 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.