How to Scale a Diesel Repair Shop: Multi-Location Growth, Fleet Maintenance & Profitability

In this episode of Know to Grow: Light to Heavy Duty, Chandler Kohn speaks with Joe Gallaher, Founder of Gallaher Fleet Solutions, about scaling a diesel truck and trailer repair business from a single shop to a growing multi-location operation. Joe shares insights on fleet maintenance, financial management, technician productivity, mobile service strategy, customer acquisition, and the systems required to build a profitable regional service business. Whether you’re a shop owner, fleet operator, or service entrepreneur, this episode offers practical lessons on sustainable growth and operational excellence.

Chandler Kohn: Welcome back to know to grow a light to heavy duty podcast, everybody. I’m your host Chandler Kohn with FOCUS Investment Banking. And today I have on Joe Gallaher with Gallaher Fleet Solutions. Joe, thank you for joining. Welcome to the show. Great to see you. Last week at Diesel Connect. Tell the audience what you do.

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, thanks Chandler. It was great to meet you in person as well. Appreciate you having me on the show. So I own Gallaher Fleet Solutions. We’re an independent diesel truck and trailer repair company, maintenance provider in the Charlotte, North Carolina area.

Chandler Kohn: Awesome. And how long you been been in business and how many employees do you have?

Joe Gallaher: We just hit seven and a half years and we’re right at 40 team members.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, so you’re in Statesville and now Bessemer City. I know where Statesville is, but I don’t know where Bessemer City is. Tell us, tell us a little bit about locations, how far apart they are and kind of what you do at each location.

Joe Gallaher: So Statesville is our headquarters. It’s a 13,000 square foot facility that we have a brick and mortar shop there as well as our headquartered our mobile team out of that location. Our Bessemer City is really right outside of Gastonia. It’s on the i85 corridor in between Charlotte and upstate South Carolina. They’re about an hour away from each other and one is on the northern side of the Charlotte metropolitan area and the other one is on the southwest side.

Chandler Kohn: Got it, got it. So I think, you know, I want to talk about this concept of expanding to a second location because if you’re able to do that, there’s nothing really stopping you from getting to a third and a fourth as long as you have that framework built out. One of the, the takeaways for you at Diesel Connect was, you know, how just many one shop operators there are and how many can’t, can’t seem to grow to, you know, multi location and you know, grow the business right to 10 million in revenue, 20 million in revenue, 30, 40 million. So let’s, let’s talk about, you know, kind of your goal to scale from the, the single shop to a kind of a more of a regional operator. What’s driving that? And then we’ll get into some of the, you know, kind of the mechanics behind it.

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, so I’ve always had a good vision, a big vision of being more than one location. I’ve, I started out with five locations and then it was part of my initial vision and then the more I thought about it as I was starting the business, I wanted to be the best in the southeast region. So that was always from the onset. I wanted to scale it. Now, once I started the location or started the business and I tried trucking because I thought that was something I wanted to do, I clicked quickly, learned that that was not what I wanted to do. So did that for two years. It distracted me to a certain extent, but it also taught me a lot about what I was doing and the customers I was serving. So it was a benefit in the long term. And once I got to running the first location effectively and consistently, I said, hey, I want to open a second location. And one of the driving forces for that was the fact that I left the dealership network in. In business, my job at the dealership, because they weren’t willing to give me the opportunity I felt like I was capable of handling. So I left there. I always wanted to start my own business, but I was willing to work inside of. Be an entrepreneur inside of a. A dealership network. But when it came time for promotion and an opportunity, they weren’t willing to give me the responsibility I felt like I was capable of handling. So I left. For a lack of opportunity. Well, one of the mantras that I have here at Gallaher Fleet Solutions is never to lose a good employee, a good teammate, for lack of opportunity. So that drives me to constantly create opportunities inside of our business. And that’s something that’s also a big motivating factor for me. That said, hey, I got to open up more locations, because these technicians, these service managers, these service coordinators, these people come in, they’re going to want to get promoted, they’re going to want to make more money. They want more responsibility just like I do. And if I don’t offer it to them, they’re going to find it somewhere else. And I don’t want to lose key employees, you know, high performers in that regard. So that’s really been a big driving force for me as well.

Chandler Kohn: In the general Charlotte market. Tell us a little bit about the types of customers that you serve, what customers you’re looking for. You know, does it vary from, like, a Florida market or like a New York market? Anything to add there?

Joe Gallaher: So Charlotte market is. Is pretty big. I think the metropolitan area is like two and a half million people. North Carolina in general has a really strong trucking industry in the state, and Charlotte is. Isn’t. I think Greensboro is the biggest in that regard. But Charlotte has a lot of trucking based out of it, but it also has a lot of construction and opportunity it just got became the. I think since I moved here in 2012, it’s been the fastest growing city in the country. I think five out of those 12 years or seven out of those 12 years. So the opportunity here for business is just astronomical compared to where I’m from in California, where it’s a stagnant market, for the most part, people are leaving instead of moving there. So in general, North Carolina, Southeast, I mean, there’s a lot of opportunity here to, to get. There’s capacity that needs to be covered because people are moving and things are happening here. As far as the customers in different markets, I couldn’t really speak to that intelligently because I only know this market. But what I would say from the Charlotte market is that they’re willing to give you an opportunity if you bring value. And if you bring value and do a good job, they’re going to stick with you. It might become an issue with price sensitivity or lack of service, turnaround time, all those different factors that they might leave you or you might just not be good at managing the relationship either way. But people generally are pretty open to giving somebody new a shot here in Charlotte. And I’ve seen that. And I think that’s a part of the melting pot that Charlotte is. And people from all over, they’re just, they’re. You’re. You’re used to it and they connect in that regard and they’re saying, hey, can you, you know, can you bring value to what I’m doing? Sure. I’ll give you an opportunity. If you do well with it, we’ll run with it. Or, you know, there. That’s been my experience across the board.

Chandler Kohn: And do you do a good amount of municipality work?

Joe Gallaher: Yes, we do. Actually, in both of our locations, we’re pretty embedded into the counties and some of the. A little bit on the city side. We are. We do have a good presence in the regional and local economies. Right. So we’re. We’re centered around the businesses like that are. That are like us. Right. They are the ones that are. That are located. The trucks, I call them, they. They. The trucks sleep near where we sleep. The people live where we live. They serve our local community. You know, they’re the businesses that our neighbors work for, you know, provide us our power, provide us our food, provide us our concrete, our lumber. You know, we do have trucking companies in the freight, in the logistics market. We do work for some of the bigger transportation companies, but our focus is around the businesses in our community.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, it’s awesome. Let’s talk about, you mentioned that, you know, you don’t want to turn down opportunity for your employees or techs and then to expand to a second location. But did you ever have any kind of capacity signals or market indicators in Charlotte that just said, hey, you know, you know, I’m willing to, to take this risk on it and develop that second location?

Joe Gallaher: Absolutely, go ahead.

Chandler Kohn: No, that’s kind of the key question there.

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the biggest things that I looked at from a Charlotte market perspective is just where can we strategically locate our, our shops to where they help each other and they help our customers. A lot of our customers are multi location within the Charlotte market. And in this business proximity matters. So geography is important. And in Charlotte, in most place they concentrate industrial businesses together through zoning and stuff like that. So you know, if you’re in an industrial park, industrial part of town or a suburb that’s highly concentrated with industrial, you know, you’re going to have a lot of customers or potential customers in that area and they want to take it to somewhere that’s within 15, 20 minutes to get service done. So we’re missing out on a lot of capacity, a lot of opportunity by being in just in Statesville. The market size for Statesville is capped for what we can do. If not going to be going out and doing breakdown repairs and trying to reach out to these national providers, which is inconsistent. So I saw that, hey, if I want to grow and serve our local community and local businesses, I need to be close to them. So just looking at the strategic landscape of what the Charlotte market looks like, where the industrial custom, where the industrial parks are, and then our current customers is saying, hey, where do you guys need help at? Like if you could put a shop, if you could choose us to go next, where would it be? And when they say, oh, go over here, this is where we have a problem or we need, need, you know, they’re taking trucks from the other side of Charlotte all the way up to Statesville, driving an hour to drop off a truck. You know, they, they we would get more of their business if we were 15, 20 minutes down the road. So keeping a pulse on it. Knowing your market in your area is super important in your customer base. And asking them what they want, what they’re looking for is really important too. They’ll tell you, yeah, I’m kind of.

Chandler Kohn: Deviating from, from our agenda here a little bit. But Duke Energy, right that’s big name, you know, Charlotte, who does all their work, do they do it in house or do they do they export that that out?

Joe Gallaher: They have their in house customers or they have their in house shops on their heavy duty side for the most part, but then they use Holman as a fleet management company for their light duty side. And we have done a little bit of stuff on their light duty side, their pickups for Duke, but the majority of Duke stuff is new under warranty, so they’re. I used to work on some of their warranty items at the dealership. Other than that, they have all their in house mechanics and they’re. I mean if it’s needing maintenance, they’re flipping that thing and getting a new one. They have unlimited money. So they buy new stuff. Yeah, I think they just, they have newer assets and they want to keep that stuff in house. They have a like unlimited budget basically. So when they need too much maintenance, they just get a new one and they’re moving towards a Holman provider from my understanding. But they’re pretty well built on the infrastructure side for their heavy duty stuff.

Chandler Kohn: Okay. All right, so let’s talk about you transitioning out of your service manager role. I mean, you know, a lot of the discussion at Diesel Connect was, you know, you got to learn how to go from turning the wrench to running the company. You know, when did you recognize your highest leverage activity was more at the management level and business level versus the kind of at the, the tech level.

Joe Gallaher: Yeah. So I was always thinking about, hey, is this the best use of my time? You know, from books I’ve read, podcasts, business stuff that I’ve learned, other entrepreneurs that I’ve been close to, I was just evaluating, hey, is this the best use of my time? And then if I was doing something that I didn’t like to do, I’m sitting, my, sitting here asking myself, do I like to do this? Why can’t somebody else do it? And they’re probably like it and they’re better at it than me. So those were some of the things that just like the day to day stuff that I saw. And then, you know, I’ve always been, I’ve been the one doing the sales and the customer outreach, the outbound, the cold outreach stuff. So anytime we needed the customers, I would be out in the field and I couldn’t be out in the field and then in the shop at the same time. So I just started delegating the shop, the shop foreman, and then pouring into them. And that’s really been the catalyst for how do I, how do I, how I started to get out of the service manager role.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. And then one, one question kind of again, deviating from the agenda. I found it was very interesting when Night Swift, me and you were in the same room together at that breakout session, how they were talking about, I think it was maybe the fleet maintenance VP there was talking about how they, you know, decide who to send service. Service work to. Right. And kind of what. What they look for. You know, I think one of it, you know, one of the things was quality. One of the things was cost. I think there was another variable in there. How do you, like, how do you kind of blend all these different variables together when it comes to getting work or, and getting repeat customers in the space, you know, not just doing, you know, one job for one operator, having them come back and, and you know, you be the, the key provider for them in the area.

Joe Gallaher: Yeah. So just knowing your ideal customers and like the people that you want to serve and having a really good understanding that and prioritizing them. Right. We can’t be everything for everybody. And I, I think a lot of shop owners, they just think all revenue is created equal and it’s not. All customers are created equal and they’re not. Some are easier, some are harder, but really just understanding like, what’s your niche? What’s your ideal customer? What’s your value proposition? And then learning to say no to things that are outside of that stuff. We, you know, we, our core promises we’re out, we offer solutions. So if we can’t fix it, we’re going to find you a solution, whether that’s we refer you to a vendor or we manage it for you. Like, the last thing we’re going to do is say, I don’t know, we can’t figure it out. That’s the wrong answer. But at the same time, we also have to know when to say, hey, this isn’t in our wheelhouse. Let’s find them a different solution. So that’s kind of what we have done and that’s more sophisticated on the back end that we’ve really developed lately. But I’ve known this stuff and been pretty intuitive and geared the business towards what we’ve been, what we’re our customer, ideal customer, and for years. And I’ve just noticed that through the trends and the market and freight recessions and covet and all that stuff. So we were already gearing it towards it. We just put a name to it now and then. Now our outbound, our cold outreach and our marketing efforts and everything, our messaging, everything is centered around Our ideal customer.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s helpful. Let’s, let’s jump into some of this kind of the financial clarity here and the margin management. What is the, the gross margin on labor and parts that a shop needs to hit, you know, before it really thinks about opening another location, in your opinion?

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re running a single shop operation, I mean you really need to be above 15 net profit after you pay yourself everything, whole nine yards like cash flow to the owner needs to be above 15. If you’re not there on a consistent basis, then you have some more refinement to do or pricing adjustments. You got to look at where you’re falling short of that. And we hit that for more than two years consecutively before we pulled the trigger on our, on our second location. And when you really look at it, you know, having clear financials and financial clarity on a monthly basis, not just a P L. So if you, if you use debt, you need to understand a balance sheet or at least understand cash flow. So whether it’s, you know, hitting a P L or not hitting a P and L, you really need to understand where your cash is going. And that’s just a lot of times, like business education, take it upon yourself and knowing that. But from my perspective, if you’re not hitting 35% GP across the board and maintaining your expenses below 20% of your revenue to create at least 15 net profit, then you’re either spending money on different things or you have a pricing problem or an inefficiency. So before I scaled to a second location, we narrowed down those financials and then every shop that you add, you know, growth sucks cash in this business, all businesses really. But this is growing as a capital intensive part of this business. So if you’re not consecutively hitting that and then as you add a second shop, being able to achieve those, those numbers, and then before you add the third shop, then you’re just growing for growth sake. And that’s not smart for. Unless you’re doing it for a strategic reason. Reason.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. Are you capturing most of your margin from parts over service or what does.

Joe Gallaher: That look like for you? Yeah, there. I mean, mar. Your, your margin on your labor should be better than your margin on your parts. Unless you have a really aggressive parts margin. And some markets determine that. It just really depends because I talked to other owners that have pretty aggressive margin on their parts and then they’ll, you know, it depends on the maturity of the business and how they want to stock their inventory and what they do and the niches that they sell and their customer profile portfolios. So what we’ve really seen across the board, and this was I was shocked when fullbay put out their state of the industry report which I thought was really in depth. But some of the average margin on parts across the southeast region was like 20%. That’s barely covering costs. I mean when we look at our margin on parts we’re, our number is minimum 35 and we’re trying to drive that higher and higher every day strategically on the right stuff. But then we allocate the cost of parts. Right. So we have to allocate, so we look at our net margin on it before overhead and you got to understand like hey, that’s a. Parts is such a hard part of this process and it costs a lot of money. You have to create a profit off that or literally sink your business. So I think when it comes down to it, like when I looked at, hey, going from a single shop technician led business, like I brought in a cfo, like a fractional CFO and they really cleaned up the financials and they organized it and they got it online. I worked with the CPA and an office manager and we were every day categorizing transactions, putting them in the right spots, clarifying what, where this was, creating custom parts matrix to drive up the margin, looking where we’re falling short. Like you have to watch these numbers every day like a hair. If they’re not, if the system isn’t built and it’s got to be a priority and if it’s not Monday through Friday 7 to 5 when you’re open, then you’re going to be working late and on the weekends because you’re not going to break past this threshold unless you figure that out. And there’s plenty of ways.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, is this, is this reporting? Is a lot of this is QuickBooks and Full Bay connected or how does that, how does this work for you guys?

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, so you can integrate QuickBooks and FullBay which we are in the process now. I think that any Full Bay users needs to do that right off the bat. That’s something that I made a mistake on and I recommend the guys do it sooner than later because it only becomes harder as you become more complex and bigger. But you know, just really looking at cash flow and understanding QuickBooks and then full Bay, making sure that you gotta create a system to where you can get clear financial data. And yes, integrating QuickBooks and FullBay is really helpful. It’s not gonna tell you everything and it’s only as good as his inputs. So just running a disciplined financial management process inside your is where it has to begin.

Chandler Kohn: One of the things I tell our, our sell side clients in the space or any industry, we have another client in, you know, another industry right now looking to get out. But they, their, their ar, their accounts receivable is running away and sometimes the owner is so focused on, you know, kind of just driving the overall company that they, they lose focus on actually collecting payments. Has that been a challenge for you guys in the space? I know some owners have relationships with their clients and you know, they trust the client will pay. But you know, sometimes these extend beyond 60 days. How do you think through that? Because that’s a very important part to kind of the financial health and livelihood of a company.

Joe Gallaher: Absolutely, man, you hit the nail on the head. And we, we have struggled with that in the past and we’ve gotten a lot better at it as we’ve matured as an organization. And I always went back to, you know, the first day in, you know, financial management 101 at college was cash is king. Cash flow management and revenue fixes everything, right. Like some of the basic principles around financial management on a business, your AR and your cash flow has to be your number one priority. It will sink a business and make you cash tight. AR is just another process. Right. And there are people who are good at it and there’s people who are bad at it. And I was bad at it when I first started and I, and, and I had to get better at it. And the more we’ve scaled, the better we’ve gotten. And it’s taken a lot of intense, focused effort, thinking outside the box, you know, just consistency. My office manager, she does a fantastic job but we involved everybody in the picture. Service managers, director of service, me, office managers, team effort. And we’re above 90 on a consist consistent basis. It hasn’t always been that, but as you scale that’s so important because there’s just cash. There’s not enough margin in here to be sloppy with your cash flow management.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, yeah, that makes, that makes sense. And talking a little bit about the business, what percentage of the business or is any of the percentage contracted with some of the bigger fleet accounts out there or is it all kind of just transactional?

Joe Gallaher: So we don’t do contracts at this point. It’s something that we want to look at getting into. We have service level agreements with pricing structures and just an overall understanding of how we’re going to operate contracts is a little Bit of a negative word in our industry for our customers. That’s more on the, the much larger companies that do fleet management on national brands and Penske Ryder, all those stuff. But our for our customers contracts is, that’s a bad word. And for us we’d say, hey, we’re not going to make you sign the contract. We’re not even going to get you to sign a contract because if we suck, fire us. And if, you know, if we’re not doing a good enough job, you tell us we’ll fix it or get rid of us. Because we want to earn your business every single day. So what we look at is fleet maintenance, where our ideal customer profile is versus we call it transactional business. So over the road stuff spot. I call it fluff. And it’s nice to have the fluff like you want to drive SEO and some of the your marketing efforts for fluff because it’s better to have it and turn it down than not have it and need it. It’s really just covers capacity. You know, if you have a slow day or you need to fill some capacity with really high margin work, which that should be, then you can take it. But you want to focus on your reoccurring revenue, your fleet contracts, driving the PMs, the dots, the basic maintenance and get the reactive repairs from there.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, what, what, what three or four metrics are you looking at? And they don’t necessarily have to be purely financial, but three or four, you know, KPIs that you’re looking at in your business to assess. It’s kind of a health on a week to week basis.

Joe Gallaher: Absolutely. Good question. You know, revenue for sure. Like money in the bank, not invoiced revenue, not accrued revenue, all that crap like how much money cash flow in the business. This week we want to look at our GP after parts and labor, making sure that that’s staying on point and then our expenses as a ratio to our revenue. Right. So trying to keep that at 20% or less and then if we, if we go above 20%, why are we growing and are we maintaining or are we buying capital assets or paying down debt is you know, really understanding that those three things are going to be leading to profitability, you know, but the leading indicators of profitability for us and is a, that’s something that you have to watch in the shop is tech utilization, technician efficiency and invoice payable hours. You have to watch that stuff because that stuff if you, it’ll be an indicator, you know, it keeps a pulse on your business, if you have enough workflow, if your guys are getting it done on time, if you’re hitting your invoice payable hours metrics. And then we’ve really, as we’ve grown and scaled and we have 25 to 20 technicians, like overtime will kill your margins in a heartbeat, like really fast. So we, we track overtime per shop and we limit that. I mean, we’ve gotten it down to like 1, maybe 2% of payroll, which is fantastic. And then our rework, you know, making sure we don’t shoot our own foot and wonder, walk around wondering why we’re limping.

Chandler Kohn: How much inventory do you guys keep on hand?

Joe Gallaher: Not a lot, man. We keep, I think right now we’re keeping anywhere like 35 to $50,000 of inventory across two locations and mobile service trucks. You know, we work on everything from a Ford and a Duramax all the way up to the largest trucks and trailers, every make and model. So it’s just impractical to keep that much inventory. My goal is saying, hey, I want to be able to do 90% of the dots or 90% of the PMs of trucks going down the road and then 50% of the common failed dot items. Now some of our, our bigger customers that we serve on the mobile side stick with the same type of equipment. So we’ll put a lot of that stuff on our mobile trucks so they can do common repairs there. But I don’t, I don’t want to carry a bunch of inventory when I can get it for, in 15 minutes to, you know, twice a day from the dealership, let them carry that cost and then I can just turn it around faster. So as we grow, mature, we’ll, we’ll add more to it. But I don’t do resale on parts. So we just do service and we just keep what we need to do. That makes sense from us, not from our perspective.

Chandler Kohn: I don’t know if you attended the last or the, the last session day two at Diesel Connect, but it was Full Bay. Not they weren’t developers, but they were just kind of almost analysts and Full Bay talking about the reports that businesses should be looking at if you know, from an inventory standpoint. One was inventory velocity, which was interesting. I hadn’t heard of that before, talking about showing you what you should stock. And they were talking about setting men’s and maxes for those parts. I’ve never really heard of that before. Again, I’m not in the system every day, but it, that was kind of an interesting one. And then the special order velocity for some of these folks carrying a decent amount of inventory. So didn’t know if you, if you, if you knew anything about that or had ever had a reason to use those reports in full bay.

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, so I’m definitely familiar with them. I don’t use them every day. I have a parts manager that manages that stuff. You know, it’s just basically velocity. You know, inventory velocity is just how fast you turn over the same part numbers. And if you do it at a certain rate, you should stock it, you know, but it, and then that’s, you know, those are good metrics to have. That’s what we use. So hey, do we keep this filter versus that filter? Do we keep this light versus that light? This clamp versus that clamp? Right. So that, that helps us. But nine times out of ten you’re gonna get one repair, it might have some commonly used parts on it and then it’s got two or three other action items with all special order stuff. Right. So are you gonna, for me, having, you know, 100, 200, $300,000 of cash tied up in inventory just doesn’t make sense at this point in the business. If I really wanted to do that, I would just open a parts warehouse like a over the counter retailer and have them carry the inventory and then serve the shop better than the other vendors. Which is something we’ve looked at to looked at, but it’s not really in the, not really on the plan right now.

Chandler Kohn: Let’s talk about mobile a little bit. This is such a hot topic. You’ve expanded to a second location. You know, the, the EBITDA margins on mobile businesses can, can be very good, a little higher than in shop. How are you thinking about mobile as part of your overall portfolio?

Joe Gallaher: So it’s a part of our strategy and it’s determined by the customer and in the market as well. Charlotte’s a hotbed for mobile. There’s a ton of them out here, big players pe, you know, all of them down to the, the technician that just bought a service truck and getting started out like I did seven years ago. And really what it comes down to is offering the customer convenience and giving them what they want and then making sure that it drives overall strategy because you can put a bunch of mobile trucks out there and drive margin. But if it, if all you’re trying to do is drive revenue and margin, then that’s, that’s good, right? Then you just go where the work is. But if you want to have like a market domination strategy you really need both. Like the shop anchors you into a place and the mobile will feed the shop. It’s a little bit harder to manage because you got to be. There’s a bunch of logistics there. But I, we take business all the time from people who only do mobile or about people who only do shop because the customers want both. Both. Right. And they can tow and all that kind of stuff. But you know, we, we just found, hey, let’s do mobile really well. Feed the shops and then make sure that if the customer wants mobile, give them mobile. If they want shop, give them shop and just have all the options there.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. So let’s talk, let’s kind of wrap this up here. This has been informative. Let’s just say you’re, you know, I know you’re not at the, the 20 million dollar mark yet, but this probably a pretty lofty goal of yours. Again, I’m just putting words in your mouth here. Right. But yeah, what, what would, what would be, you know, one or two things that, that you would really look to do or looking to do to kind of hit those, those big goals to really grow this business as far as locations. Is it, you know, is it more of a sales and marketing effort? Is it, is it a services effort? You know, how are you really trying to take this business off?

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, sales and marketing man. I mean, we’ve really, I have been focusing on that extensively myself over the last six months. I brought in a sales consultant working on our sales process, you know, really getting our. I brought in a marketing firm to help us build out. We, we created a hub, you know, HubSpot CRM. And we’re just really making the end to end, you know, from customer acquisition to how do we keep them for life playbook for what we’re doing. And if you can’t re. If you can’t predict sales and pull a lever when you want to increase sales, then the market will always determine your size. And when you can say, hey, I want to grow and I want to enter a new market or I need to scale this side, this business or this product line and you can pull a lever because you have an effective sales process, sales and marketing team, then it just matters on how big you want to get. Right. And that’s one thing that we have seen is a repeated pattern of, hey, the market has determined if we’re busy or not. I don’t like that. Right. I want to be proactive. I want to tell what the, you know, be able to see what I can do in my business. So when I need more trucks to work on, need more customers, I don’t want to be a reactionary thing, I want to be a proactive thing. So that’s something that we’ve focused tons on. And a lot of, I’ve seen a lot of technician founder led companies. They don’t know how to do it, they never had to do it, right. They just think open the shop and wait for my phone to ring. But that’s a whole, you know, that’s a whole thing that, that it’s hard, man. That’s been the hardest part of this business is scaling a sales and marketing team, right? And I’ve come to find out that’s with it, with every, every company, every industry, building a sales team is the hardest part of it. We can get the trucks, we can fix them, we can do a good job, we can make money on them. We just need to be able to get more trucks in the door when we need them. And, and with the right customer.

Chandler Kohn: And there’s kind of really two main marketing, there’s kind of push marketing and pool marketing. Is a lot of your marketing, is it, is it outbound phone calls and developing relationships, letting people know you’re, you’re there and letting them know your experience or you know, are you, are you, are you developing a sales and marketing campaign where, where the work, you know, kind of comes in, right, Based on what you are doing? Yeah.

Joe Gallaher: So we’re B2B obviously. So, you know, B2B is in my experience, what I’ve done and everything that I’ve read and learned, it’s all about cold outreach. Right. And then making sure you’re effective, whether it’s cold calls, emails, cold hard knocks, in, in person sales, you know, and just really focusing on that cold outreach section of it. You want to have brand awareness and do some digital marketing. We’ve had billboards, you know, we’ve, we’ve done it all for the most part, paid ads, all that stuff. There’s definitely a system and a process that determines the success. But the best ROI I’ve had is getting out there, knocking on doors, get in front of the people, being persistent with it, following up while emails, phone calls, the whole nine. And then once you get that chance, because it, it’s, you know, 10 to 25 touch points to get a chance for the most part. And you got one or two, you got one or two opportunities, you screw it up one or two times within the first 10 to 15 transactions, you’re probably gonna kiss you goodbye and go to somebody else. At least here it’s competitive here. So we really talk about, hey, when we find a customer and that’s. It fits into our ideal customer profile. We do everything we can to keep them and to do an amazing job with them. And then we just say, hey, if we, if we have, if we have, we don’t have enough room for all the customers, we just go down the list and say which ones are our best? Who do we serve? And we just serve them as best as possible, better than anybody else.

Chandler Kohn: And are you doing a lot of the outreach or do you have some of your staff doing it? What’s the breakdown there?

Joe Gallaher: Yeah, so we have a business development rep on staff now. Yeah. So we’re looking at growing that. I do a lot of the, the go to the deals. I don’t do a lot of the hard knocking. I still do with our BDRs. You know, I like to keep my edge, keep, keep it sharp. So I do a lot of the, the deals, setting up the tables, doing the in person sales. I don’t do a lot of the emails or the cold calls. Our BDR does that. We’re looking at adding more BDRs and account management. So the service managers do the account management, service coordinator stuff too. So we’re really developing end to end sales from business development to account management to market qualified leads and just really driving that machine.

Chandler Kohn: Good for you, man. That’s fantastic. Not a lot of folks in the space have BD resources. There is this person, sorry for asking you all these questions, but is this person motivated by commission? Is it kind of a flat rate salary? Like how do you, how do you have this person going out there and, and really hunting hard for you?

Joe Gallaher: Yeah. So we’re still trying to refine all that stuff as we go along. You know, I’ve definitely screwed it up in the past. You know, we do commission, our salary plus commission, you know, and I. The one thing that I’ve seen is in what has been successful and the consultants that I’ve worked with have told me the same thing is you got to have a hunting mentality, man. You got to go out there, kill that thing, drag it back in and have a fee. So we’re really evaluating like, hey, what’s the base salary? What’s the commission structure? How do you motivate what the company goals are? Right. And I think when you get a hunter out there, that’s killing it, man. They’re going to be worth a lot of money because they’re just bringing in the work the right customers doing a good job, they’re, they’re worth their weight in gold. It’s the hardest. Sales is the highest paid profession for a reason.

And if you’re good at sales and you know it, you’re not going to be cheap because you know what you provide and I think they’re worth it. So we’re really looking for how do we bring hunters in and then how do we have farmers built into our system to help us, you know, turn every dollar that we can get, all the market share possible.

Chandler Kohn: Awesome. Well, Joe, I appreciate you joining today. This was a great recording and I learned something different from you every time we connect. So we’ve got to speak twice in a week here. So yeah. Thank you for joining and looking forward to watching your growth story as you get to three and four locations in the Charlotte area