Gerald “Jerry” Lacour was best known in the F&I world as the longtime leader of Austin, Texas-based product provider and administrator Innovative Aftermarket Systems, which he co-founded in 1984 with his son, Garret. 

Jerry and Garret had relocated to Austin from their native Louisiana. Jerry was in transition, having worked as an independent general agent after a successful career in automotive retail. Garret had just completed his second year at Loyola University in New Orleans. He decided to join his father in Austin for the summer of ’83, initially planning to sell credit insurance. 

The timing at first appeared inopportune. Jerry and longtime collaborator Henry Primeaux III, then a multistore dealer in Tulsa, Okla., had developed for a major service contract provider a follow-up system and training course for sales and F&I professionals, only to be cut loose at launch. It was only the latest in a series of letdowns for Jerry, who had spent years navigating the Wild West early days of F&I product development, administration and claims adjudication. 

“It was a guessing game,” Garret says. “They were creating an industry with no historical loss data. Some of the companies Jerry partnered with failed. He would have to go to dealers and say, ‘Sorry that company wasn’t solid. This new one will be.’”

With another partner on the brink of collapse, father and son decided to start their own company on the pledge to “deliver what we promise,” Garret says, and over the next 24 years, Jerry would earn a distinct reputation: “If you had an idea to put a product in the market, talk to Jerry Lacour.” 

The Problem Solver

Jerry, who died on April 19 at 89, had retired in 2008 when a private equity firm bought IAS. The company was acquired by iA Financial in 2020 and is now part of iA American Warranty Group. By that time, Primeaux had known Jerry for 40 years, having met him when Jerry was the sales manager at Durham Volkswagen in New Orleans. 

After parting ways with American Warranty, Primeaux went into retail. He started with Oklahoma dealer Bob Moore and would eventually own multiple dealerships, including Tulsa’s three-franchise Crown Auto World. Jerry was his first ancillary provider partner. 

“He was more like a brother than a friend. Jerry would do anything in the world for you. He was that kind of guy,” Primeaux says. “Nobody didn’t like him. And he gave everybody credit. Everybody that was associated with him got the credit they were due.”

That includes Garret, who Primeaux believes was “instrumental” in Jerry’s late-career success. “The thing he inherited from Jerry was not only his thoughtfulness but his ability to solve problems.” 

Jeff Breckenridge worked with the Lacours starting in 1987, first providing freelance creative services to IAS and later heading his own agency. He has been vice president of marketing for RoadVantage, the company Garret started in 2011, since 2017. 

“He was just so incredibly creative,” Breckenridge says of Jerry. “He had so many interesting ideas. Some of them worked, and some of them didn’t. We would throw money at it, and it would drive Garret nuts. But it’s how we got where we are today.” 

“He would say, ‘If we just made a dollar on every contract, we’d do well. Everyone else should make the rest,’” Garret says. “I would say, can we make $2? We’ve got a big overhead.”

A Man of Action

K&R Insurance Services founder Ken Argent was a vice president at American Warranty in the mid-1970s when he first met Jerry. The two remained close and would partner at every opportunity in the ensuing decades. 

“Obviously, integrity and commitment mean a lot in business, and I never felt I had to worry about anything in our relationship that would negatively affect my business, my dealers or their customers,” Argent says.

Asked for the secret to Jerry’s success, Argent cites his ability to balance his own convictions with his partners’ needs and expectations. 

“He always had something to say — whether you agreed with it or not — and that honesty was part of what made him so effective and respected. He was successful because he listened. He valued the perspectives of others, but at the same time, he had a clear sense of what was right for his business and his customers.” 

He also was a man of action, according to the multiple sources who mention Jerry’s habit of flying from Austin with little notice to meet with prospective partners. That’s how Jim Tansey, founder and president of Responsive Automotive, met Jerry in 1994. Tansey was an officer in the New York Police Department and an aspiring businessman. He had repped a steering wheel lock, which led to the opportunity to sell a vehicle replacement program. 

“I didn’t like the gentleman running the administrative side. I spoke to someone in Chicago, and they said, ‘You need to call Jerry Lacour,’” Tansey recalls.

The call was placed on a Monday. Two days later, Lacour was at Tansey’s side to successfully pitch a New Jersey agent with a 500-dealer roster. As he drove Lacour back to Newark International, Tansey asked if they needed a contract to cement their new partnership. “He said, ‘Jim, you look like an honest man. And I’m an honest man. Shake my hand.’ I shook his hand and that was my contract with Jerry Lacour.” 

“He got things done. At the drop of a hat, he would pack a suitcase, run to the airport and be in your office within 10 hours. He was just that kind of guy,” says Don Brady, founder of Las Vegas-based Insured Services and Production Plus and a longtime friend and partner. Brady first met Jerry in the mid-’70s. “I was looking to take a product to market. I got a line on Jerry from another vendor who said, ‘Call this guy, he might be able to help you put that thing together.’”

Innovation Meets Creativity 

Reflecting on the “summer job” that led to the launch of IAS and their first years in business, Garret says he and Jerry were determined from the outset to set a new standard for product development and support. The journey from kitchen table to full-suite ancillary products provider began with Theft Avert. 

“We decided window etch could be our first core product,” Garret says. “We were getting in on the ground floor of ancillaries when dealerships were used to selling just service contracts and credit insurance.”

“Jerry used to say, ‘Jeff, it doesn’t all have to work. I just have to get some of them to work,’” meaning work in the market with at least reasonable loss ratios, says Breckenridge, who recalls the first time he saw a Theft Avert kit. “He showed me a Ziploc bag with a little printed label and stuff for glass etching. I had no idea what he was doing. Who would buy this? Later I understood. The bag of stuff isn’t the point. The protection is the point.”

Theft Avert was a hit and would be joined by the Safety Key anti-theft device, tire-and-wheel coverage, key replacement, interior and exterior protection, windshield repair and replacement, door ding and more. Garret says he and Jerry stumbled upon the concept of ultraviolet label-based theft deterrence on a visit to a 3M manufacturing center. 

They had traveled to Minnesota to look at samples of reflective tape to frame rear license plates as a safety measure; as with a third brake light product, IAS would pay a benefit to those who had the tape in place but suffered a rear-end collision. They returned to Austin with two products. 

“While we were up at the 3M factory, out of the corner of his eye, my father saw stick-on labels that created a traceable UV marking on metal body parts. It was easier to apply and more economical than physical window etching.”

Phantom Footprints would become one of the products most closely associated with IAS, emblematic of Jerry’s creativity and vision, notes K&R’s Argent. 

“I appreciated his depth of knowledge and the energy he brought to the business,” he says. “It was both impressive and contagious.” 

A Kind Heart

His colleagues agree Jerry Lacour created countless opportunities for others, Jim Tansey among them. In addition to running Responsive Automotive, Tansey serves as first assistant prosecutor for Union County, N.J. He was able to start law school at 40, fulfilling a lifelong dream, thanks in large part to Lacour’s partnership and mentorship. 

“There was never anybody like him, ever. You could trust his word. You could take it to the bank,” Tansey says. “I told my kids I have a beach house because I was successful in that business, and I was successful because I was mentored by Jerry Lacour.” 

Denny Henderson is pastor of Northlake Church in Lago Vista, near Lake Travis, where Jerry lived on a sprawling estate with his wife, Stephanie, their kids and, over the years, an untold number of guests. The two were close friends for 25 years, including two when Henderson and his family lived in one of Jerry’s guest houses while their new home was being built. 

“In life, Jerry was so generous to my family and other people. He really did outgive himself,” Henderson says. 

“The car business is a tough business. You’re always watching your back. But Jerry found time to help people out,” Brady of Insured says. “When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and all those people were displaced, Jerry took a lot of them in, and they stayed for months.” 

“And dogs, the Katrina dogs,” Henderson adds. “They still have one today.”

“He had a genuinely kind heart,” Garret Lacour says. “People have faults, but he never talked bad about anybody. Even the people who caused him heartburn and financial stress, he just moved on.” 

Henderson believes Jerry’s work ethic comes from his parents, the children of French immigrants who devoted much of their limited resources to his education. 

“So he was raised to work hard, and he was super-creative — everything from marketing to graphics, he knew it when he saw it.”

Jerry would donate millions of dollars and devote countless hours to churches and various causes over the course of his life. He and Henderson met when the pastor was struggling to keep open a church he had started at the University of Texas. 

Attendance was excellent, Henderson says, but donations were scarce. “I didn’t fully think it through, but it’s hard to plant a church for the most unemployed group in the world whose parents are already paying for school.” Henderson cast a wide net in the search for help that led him to the man who would become the church’s first and biggest benefactor, as well his new best friend. 

“We had to fund our growing on-campus church through outside donors. Someone said, ‘You need to meet a guy named Jerry Lacour.’”

About the Author: Tariq Kamal is an auto industry executive and consultant.