“I’m not what most people consider a teenager,”  said senior Duncan McCrae.

McCrae looks just like your ordinary high school student. Standing at around six feet tall with close-cropped, curly hair and a t-shirt and jeans, he blends right in with the Redwood crowd.

Yet at the age of 17, McCrae has already owned and operated three businesses, the most recent of which is his biggest yet.

Last year, McCrae launched CarSavvy, an online car sale business that is designed to make buying a new or used car a smoother experience.

CarSavvy intends to make the car-buying process easier by allowing the company to do the work to find out what type of car best fits the needs of the buyer. McCrae then negotiates a price with the dealership.

“I make the process easier because I’m not tied to one brand, so I can advise you in the car buying process, but I won’t push you to do it,” McCrae said. “I’m not selling you a car, I’m helping you buy one. So it’s a stress-free experience where you won’t get screwed and you’ll get the best price possible; the dealers like it because from their perspective, they’re getting a sale without the grunt work.”

The slogan on the front page of the CarSavvy website now reads: “Get your new car in a relaxed and totally transparent way.”

McCrae was 14 when he first looked to eBay to pursue his interest in business. He started small, selling Spotify gift cards on eBay to international customers, but then flipped his eBay profits into a larger-scale business that bought and sold magnetic toys known as Buckyballs on Amazon.

“I loved the interaction with Amazon and the idea of managing inventory and having a wholesale supplier. It just took off from there,” McCrae said.

However, McCrae soon realized the limitations of his online hobby. He wanted to manage and control his own business, so Amazon and eBay became less important in his eyes. McCrae dumped eBay, and, using the money from his endeavors with Amazon, founded CarSavvy.

“The thing about Amazon is that you’re at the mercy of another company, so working with them is really just building Amazon,” McCrae explained. “They were using me as a tool, so with CarSavvy, I wanted to have my own brand and identity people could know, so I looked for something in the community that I thought needed to be fixed, and that’s what I came up with,” McCrae said.

According to McCrae, he saw the car-buying process as something he could change, stemming from his own experience buying his own car a year ago.

“It’s the market right now,” McCrae said. “In Marin there is this expectation of excellence and service, and you can find that in just about every business but cars. Businesses are trying to solve this problem but there still isn’t any transparency, they work in an antiquated way. So I saw an opportunity to bring transparency, honesty, and technology in a modern brand to car buying. Cars have advanced so much but the buying process hasn’t,” he said.

McCrae said he has sold multiple cars since CarSavvy’s inception almost a year ago, but declined to comment on his exact sales or profits.

McCrae recognized that he was taking a risk by starting a business.

“What makes a business difficult is that odds are you’ll fail,” McCrae said. “Even when you’re an adult, odds are that when you start, you’re going to fail. So when you’re a teen, the odds of you failing are exponentially higher.”

McCrae likes to maintain a business-like personality in all facets of his everyday life, even if it means arranging his schedule so that he can be reached by clients on a traditional business schedule.

“With all my businesses [Amazon and CarSavvy], I maintain the illusion of a nine-to-five schedule,” McCrae said. “I’ve had calls with [people from] venture capitalist firms who legitimately think I’m 34 and I arrange my schedule in such a way where I find windows of time in my day to call people. I’ve called people at break, I’ve called people at lunch and during 7th, and I always respond to emails during the day because you can’t respond to emails at 11:30 at night – that’s unprofessional.”

Even though he often works with people twice his age, McCrae rarely lets anyone in on the secret of his age when talking about his business.

“I never say I’m an adult; I think it’s just as assumption people make given my skill set,” McCrae said. “The issue is there is a lot of prejudice towards age. Whenever someone looks at you, they have an assumption of what you’re capable of and what your abilities are, and I think myself, along with other teenagers, are more capable, competent, and experienced than people realize.”

McCrae noted that even his classmates are skeptical of his business venture.

“The first reaction is basically ‘that’s cute,’ but when I show them a video on our site, they always pause it halfway through and ask: ‘Did you make this?’ They come in with this notion that this is like a lemonade stand for cars, but then they realize this is a legitimate thing,” McCrae said.