Scaling a Pure-Play Mobile Fleet Service Platform: The Whitestone Fleet Service Growth Story

In this episode, Chandler Kohn of FOCUS Investment Banking sits down with Lenn Isaac, CEO of Whitestone Fleet Service, to discuss the rapid rise of a 100% mobile heavy-duty repair platform built from the ground up in under three years. Lenn shares how customer demand sparked the company’s launch, the operational playbook behind expanding into 13 states, and the leadership decisions that enabled Whitestone to scale quickly without brick-and-mortar locations. The conversation explores mobile-first service models, hiring and team building, capital investment, and why specialization may be the key advantage in today’s evolving fleet maintenance landscape.

Chandler Kohn: Welcome back to the show, everybody. My name is Chandler Kohn with FOCUS Investment Banking. We’re an M&A and capital raising platform for the automotive and heavy-duty aftermarket space. Today I have on Lenn Isaac with White Stone Fleet Service. Tell us a little bit about yourself and let’s kick it off.

Lenn Isaac: Yeah, I’m Lenn Isaac. I’m the CEO of Whitestone Fleet Service. Started this company a little under three years ago and we are currently expanding across the East coast and just dominating the industry the best we can. Love to hear it.

Chandler Kohn: How many employees you have and the number of trucks.

Lenn Isaac: Currently we are in 13 states and growing. We are currently sitting around just under 40 trucks, and we are constantly getting more trucks in every day. We just had two delivered yesterday and we got two more coming in next week.

Chandler Kohn: Awesome. And how many employees?

Lenn Isaac:  We got a total of 36 employees currently. We are 100% mobile. No brick and mortar.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, so let’s step back to the origin and the growth story here. You opened this in June 2023, not even three years ago. Ryder launched Torque by Ryder the same summer. You know, the mobile repair market, according to Mordor Intelligence and some of these other industry publications say that it’s grown at 9% a year, almost triple the rate of a shop-based repair business. You both saw something at the same time and I’m sure kind of others did too. But obviously you’ve grown very successfully. Take us back to that moment in June 2023. What were you doing before this and what made you say, I’m gonna start a mobile truck repair company?

Lenn Isaac:  Well, this is kind of a multi phased answer. When I first started, I’ve always wanted to do my own thing, but, you know, fronting the capital to get started was always like an eyesore. So, I actually started Whitestone out as Whitestone Pressure Washing, which is where the term Whitestone came from.

Chandler Kohn: Got it.

Lenn Isaac:  And as I was doing that, I was doing it in the morning. You know, I was making pretty decent money while also working my mobile job between Dickinson or Prestige, whichever one I was at at the time. And as I was working there, there was something that happened at Dickinson that had made my customer base very upset. And they basically asked if I would be willing to move companies because they could no longer work with that company. But they didn’t want to lose me as a tech. They actually were trying to get me to start my own company at that time, but I had a lot of reservations on it. Like, you know, I don’t have the insurance, I don’t have a truck, I can’t afford to front the parts. All that stuff came into play. So, I ended up going to Prestige. Well, that lasted maybe six months, and then Prestige had really made my biggest client today, currently with Whitestone, very upset. And basically one of their higher ups in the company had called me and wanted to put a serious inquiry together with me about trying to help me start a company because they wanted to use me as a tech and they felt like they were getting shafted on the backside because they talked to me multiple times to see how I’m doing my billing. But what I was billing wasn’t matching up with what was being billed to them in the background. And they were willing to go out of their way, bend some rules a little bit to get me started. They put me on like a net 7 pay to begin with. And they told me basically just try not to spend any money in parts, do labor only jobs for us, whether it be greasing trailers, doing DOT inspections, whatever it was to get started. And it. I agreed. I said, okay, yeah, let’s try it. Well, at the same time, I’d worked with other customers such as LKQ, Chem, Inc. Stuff like that, who I’d always heard had problems with techs. When they leave, they didn’t return their keys. Well, that one simple gesture of me returning that key like nobody else has before, when I went to give it back to them, they basically said, where are you going? They liked me as a tech. And I said, well, I said, I’m gonna go try to start my own thing. And they’re like, well, why don’t you come work for us and on your company? I’m like, I can’t. I was like, what do you mean you can’t? I’m not a vendor with Wheels. I’m not a vendor with Element. I was like, I can’t do that. Well, they actually sponsored me in immediately on day one into the Auto Integrate system to. In order to work on their trucks through Donlin at the time, which is now Wheels Today. And yeah, it kind of snowballed out of control after that. Customer to customer, I went to. I ended up having a total of five customers leave with me on day one, which was not my intention at all. It was supposed to be just taking Carter Lumber with me and working with Carter Lumber. And I was basically a Carter Lumber service provider. And it just worked out really well. They bent the rules really well for me. And I was on the grind for six, seven months. I was producing about $160,000 a month out of a truck with just myself. Granted, I was working myself into the grave doing it, but I was working like crazy on that. And it just got to the point where I couldn’t do it alone anymore. I just started hiring people. That’s helpful.

Chandler Kohn: You know, I really appreciate the background there. You know, a lot of what we see in Mobile is you have three to five trucks, three to eight trucks. The owner’s dispatching, quoting, invoicing, even, you know, turning wrenches. Right. When did you stop turning the wrench yourself? And what broke when you did? I mean, that’s obviously hard to, to pass the reins on. How did that work out for you?

Lenn Isaac:  So when I got to, I believe it was four or five trucks is when I realized the back office was starting to stack up. I couldn’t keep up with what I was doing in the field and the office at the same time. Because in the beginning I only hired like top tier people. I didn’t hire anybody that was like a B tech or a C tech. I only exclusively hired A techs.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah.

Lenn Isaac:  So, they knew what they were doing, they were getting their invoices and quickly started backing up. So that’s when I stepped out of the truck part time, full time step out of the truck probably came closer to seven to eight techs. That’s when I stepped out full time. And I ended up hiring a manager in to help me manage the techs at that point too, which was actually Lou Wall, my COO. And we grew with him up to 10 techs. And then we hit that next jump to where you start struggling to get to the next level. But the big thing, I guess that separated for me was I guess not being on the ground level and hearing the customer complaints on a day-to-day basis. And I noticed a lot of the things that I know should be looked at were being overlooked by the techs on site. And that aggravated me a lot. And a millionaire gave me some of the best advice I think I’ve ever received, which is part of the reason my company scaled so well. He told me, you. Because I was firing a lot of people in the beginning. He said, you cannot hold anybody who works for you to the same standard you have. And I, I kind of argued at first, like, what do you mean? And he told me that he’s like nobody is going to care about this company as much as Lenn Isaac. He said you need to hold your employees to basically an 80% standard of whatever your standard is. And he said that’s a real-world standard that is scalable, that can be used to stretch across all markets of the country. And I’ve kind of held true to that. And that was really a turning point to where we started to take off is when I started actually embracing that advice.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, I think that is really good advice. I mean, you know, you’re the only person that, you know, theoretically owns the company when you start it. Right. And you’re the one with the skin in the game. So so totally understand that. And I think 80% is probably a good number when you enter a new state. What’s the playbook there? How do you land your first customer? This is chicken and the egg. So do you have the truck and then sell the truck kind of, hey, it’s in the city, or do you try to go get the customer and they get the truck down there real quick? What does that look like?

Lenn Isaac:  So the playbook today for that’s way different than it was in the beginning. In the beginning, we just kind of fed off our own customer base. Like, hey, where you need help at? We’ll help you. We would drop ship, attack in, ship them across the from Ohio to say, Philadelphia to begin with. And we ship them out there and we basically build around that tech and use the account such as Carter Lumber, for example, or one of the Superior Propane companies. And we use that as a anchor to build around. We know I’ve been one to throw a tech into an area making no money, mainly because, well, I don’t come for money. So I have to do things kind of smart.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, I totally get that now and then.

Lenn Isaac:  Today we do it a little differently. Now we’re national Holman providers. We are one of what, three companies on the entire country that are national Holman provider. So today we actually just landed our first deal with them because we got this during. We got this deal right around TMC time in 26. Um, and what we can do now is basically Holman approaches us with accounts and says, hey, this is where we need help. And then we decide like, hey, can we help them there? And then we use those as our anchor accounts and we, we build off of that. Where it’s what. That’s what our goal model moving forward is, is to build off of the Holman model. Since we’ve kind of embraced the Holman.

Chandler Kohn: Well, TMC 26 was about three weeks ago, right?

Lenn Isaac:  We just signed it not long ago. Been a long time in the making. We went from being, you know, just regular Holman providers to being affiliated partners, and now we’re national partners. From my understanding, we have one of the highest customer service feedback ratings ever. We came back at a 9.56 rating. And TMC, by the way, that was an excellent show. I was there too, and I really got a lot out of it. I was at the Heavy Duty Repair Collision forum, too, that they put on the Heavy-Duty Repair forum. And yeah, I thought. I thought that was a very productive show this year. So obviously you did, too.

Chandler Kohn: The next category in this podcast is. Is about building the team and letting go. This is something that obviously, you know, a lot of owners struggle with. It’s hard to. To let go. You know, you have a COO, a VP of Ops, and a VP of Sales and Marketing. That’s, you know, fairly heavy leadership team, especially for a company that’s not even three years old. Remind us again how you found those guys.

Lenn Isaac:  So Lou is actually my boss when I was at Dickinson, and he was one of my favorite bosses I’ve ever actually had. Ever. Well, when Cox bought into Dickinson, you know, they let go of a lot of people, and he was one of the ones that got let go. And he actually was retired. I actually pulled him out of retirement and brought him back into the game. He was actually retired, working on fire trucks up in Akron part time, just enjoying his life. But I yanked him back into the game because he believed in what I told him. And, yeah, now he’s over here. Harry. Harry just kind of fell in my lap. That’s my VP of Ops. Yes, he kind of fell into my lap. I got told one day about him, and I just decided, you know what? I’ll call him. And that was just kind of the stars aligning. He says he never answers the phone for anybody randomly, especially when he’s working on his race cars. Well, for some reason that day he picked up the phone for me, he was also retired. He was out of the game. He was done. He got done. He got done real dirty. And I guess Pat, his two of his past employers before that, he was just done with the game.

I said two things to him that drug him back in. One is I admitted that I don’t know everything. And two was I needed help from the people that experience in the industry. And he said, coming from somebody as young as me and of my position. He says he’s never heard anybody admit that. So that drew him in and made him want to work for me. And then my VP of sales, Kevin Kane, I was searching for sales guys for a while and Kevin Kane’s name kept popping up. And I worked a deal to get him over here. And that was just a, you know, just a standard recruiting process of talking to some of the popular names in the industry. And me and him ended up working out to having a deal and he ended, agreed to come over here an early stage.

Chandler Kohn: You may have not. I mean, maybe you have the cash flow to pay for that, but that’s kind of a heavy lift, four-person leadership team early on.

Lenn Isaac:  Correct.

Chandler Kohn: I can kind of, kind of do the math there on my end. Did, did you ever have any hesitations from, from the kind of the cash compensation side of things?

Lenn Isaac:  Well, when I hired Kevin, I had. Which I had my investment by Roebling. By that point they had put some money behind us and that was used to help build my infrastructure basically. Because up until that point we really didn’t have much of an infrastructure. We were just kind of bootstrapped the whole thing up to that point. But yeah, no, there, there’s always capital concerns when you’re growing as fast as we are. I mean, there’s not many companies out there that are growing 23 to 33% month over month over month for seven months in a row. We tripled our size in seven months. So yeah, there’s definitely, there’s definitely been times where I said, oh crap, I got too far from my feet, for lack of better words, and we had to step back. That. That has happened. Yeah, absolutely. As far as them being expensive, I mean, yeah, they are, but you’re investing into what you want. Could I step back and grow slower? Sure. But if you got a partner behind you that’s willing to help you front it and get over the humps and get there five times faster and you might have to give up a little bit to get there faster. Mean, if you can save three, four years along the way, why wouldn’t you. If you got to give up a little bit of equity, so be it.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah.  I mean, you know the CEO is responsible for going and building out that team with, you know, the help of, you know, the investor who’s generally kind of operational focused. So that’s. That that playbook is, is done over and over again. And it generally works. Let’s talk about the operations of this pure mobile model. Over 80% of heavy-duty shops now offer mobile as an add on service line. This is according to, according to Mordor Intelligence Mobile Vehicle Repair Service Market 2025 report. You’re 100% mobile, no shop at all. The last guess I had on, I don’t know if you know Josh Goodman with Goody’s Fleet Solution down in Florida. He has a 30,000 square foot shop plus mobile units. If everybody’s adding mobile, what’s the advantage of being only mobile? Is a pure play mobile business a better business than kind of adding that service line on.

Lenn Isaac:  Biggest thing is mobile and shop are two totally different business models. I have yet to see a company that can do both of them perfectly and do them both well. People are usually, if the CEO is usually either good at mobile or the CEO is good at shop, I think Dickinson Prestige, them are all great examples of it. And if you were ever a tech like I was down in the field, you heard it from your customers every single day. If you ever sent a shop, a truck to the shop, it was always messed up because they were really good at mobile and vice versa. You get companies like Rush truck centers, you go to customers lots and you hear how bad they are at mobile, but they’re really good at shop. So my thing with not wanting brick and mortar, at least not immediately, is we’re good at mobile. That’s what we do. That’s what we’re really good at. We have really high satisfaction ratings. We have really good just overall repairs in that area. Their quality or the breakdown rates are extremely low. And when it comes to shops, I mean when you, here’s my thing with a shop and I tell everybody this, especially when you’re mobile, generally speaking, the smarter technicians you hire are going to work mobile because they’re alone, they’re by themselves, they have no support, they’re just out there by themselves at midnight with a wrench and a truck. If they can’t figure it out, they’re dead in the water. So if they were your smarter technicians and they can’t figure something out, generally speaking, the new guys of the industry, they start in shops, they go to shops, that’s where they’re doing their learning. Um, a lot of shops are run more for a lack of better words like a union. I don’t want to say lazier people, but less ambitious people typically work in shops. Now granted that’s not always the case, but for me working in Shops until I went mobile. That is 100% the reality of the situation. So if the guy in the field can’t figure it out, he’s your smart guy. You’re sending a problem, he can’t figure it out. Diagnosed to somebody who doesn’t know as much as him, for lack of better words.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah.

Lenn Isaac:  To me it’s a self creating problem and I noticed it at everywhere I’ve worked prior to here like crazy and it always caused problems. So what I do specifically is I just work the mobile. I know a few people that are really good in the shop based side of things and I say, hey, these guys are really good at shop. So just work with these guys and they will take great care of you. We’ll take great care of you on the mobile side. But when it comes to needing an engine, needing a transmission, needing a, a computer flash or whatever it may be, these are your guys over here. This is what they excel at. And there’s a company in Dayton specifically that I use, that I’ve been using since the beginning whenever I run into jobs like that. And they’ve done an outstanding job. Now once again, they, to your point, they are trying to offer mobile and they have come to me multiple times asking how I’m doing, what I’m doing. It’s just the mindset of somebody who runs a shop and the mindset of somebody who runs mobile is two totally different mindsets. Like the repairs are different, the way you pull in the revenue is different. Like yes, we’re all mechanics at the end of the day, but I tell everybody there’s three types of mechanics and these are all very three different business models. You have your, your shop mechanics, which I say are like the, the more mellow mechanics, the union type guys who just want to go in, do their eight and go home, like they just want to work. And then you have what I call your bubble gum mechanics, which are very essential too. Those are the guys that work on the side of the road, get somebody out of the pinch as fast as humanly possible to get them out of the way of danger. And then you have what I call the prima donnas. The prima donnas is what we hire in the mobile world. They’re the guys who want the best of everything. They want the best truck, the best tools, the best technology, and they also want the best pay. But for that you get the best tech. In return, you get the guy that’s independent, can run his own customers, can run his own truck for the most part. And they just do an excellent job. 95, 98% of the time. And to me that is the biggest difference between shop and mobile and why I stay mobile compared to having a shop and mobile. In my opinion they just don’t mix and anytime I’ve seen anybody try to mix them and it’s always ended bad.

Chandler Kohn: What is the, you don’t have to say the actual labor rate but the percentage difference right now between you know, kind of what you’re paying your, your techs in the mobile field versus maybe a shop or competitor down the road in shop service capability.

Lenn Isaac:  Well, our pay scale works way different than everybody else’s too. Like we’re flat rate. If you know anything about what you’re doing, you should always be able to beat SRT times. But yeah, we pay, I would say we pay in the upper percentages of what a mobile tech should make in my opinion. But I’ve also told, I’m a little over sympathetic towards what I paid techs because I was a tech. But I would say we definitely don’t have any techs that are making under a hundred grand if they’re going in and doing their job every day.

Chandler Kohn: For sure. Yeah. And what about your, your, your benefits packages? What does that look like?

Lenn Isaac:  We go as far as offering pet insurance, cancer insurance, you can opt into additional life insurance. Basically, your standard insurance package that everybody else has with a few add ons.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, yeah. And then, and then when a guy like right. Like you have a couple locations where it’s, I think it’s just probably that one tech, that one truck and, and they take a week off. Right. They need a vacation. How do you kind of manage that down in that area? Do you, do you go ahead and tell your clients that hey, I’m going offline for a week down in South Carolina or what does that look like for you?

Lenn Isaac:  We really don’t have any markets where we don’t have an overlap. That is one of my big rules is I don’t want to do any market without an overlap for that specific reason. Somebody has a family emergency, has to go away, wants to go on vacation, gets sick, sick, you don’t want to leave your customers dead in the water. The worst thing you can do is leave a customer dead in the water with no answer. So that is one thing we, we. Yeah, I definitely don’t do. I did that once in the beginning and it was a fire drill to say the least. So that was a. A learning lesson for me as I was growing a business. But yeah, I. I definitely don’t ever want one tech in a market only I have. I have a 2:2 tech minimum rule, and I prefer three.

Chandler Kohn: Interesting. So let’s talk about contracts here. Your site’s explicit about no contracts. Meanwhile, Ryder is bundling mobile into subscription contracts. And the market is moving toward this kind of this truck as a service model, right, where that cost per month stays flat and it’s not chopping up and down. It’s just better budgeting right, for the fleet. Are you swimming against the current here by offering no contracts?

Lenn Isaac:  I don’t think so. One thing I’ve noticed with customers under contracts is they’re almost always unhappy. You might have your locations that are happy, but for the most part, they’re always unhappy because when you’re in a Penske, you’re in a contract, you can’t leave it. So, like, for instance, we have a few customers here in Sharonville that want to get away from Penske, for example, but they’re not allowed. There are people on site have explicitly told us and. And these are giant customers, by the way. They said, hey, we don’t want to work with them. They don’t show up, they don’t do with their job, but we don’t have a choice. We have to wait for them. And we have since with some of these rent leasing companies came on as vendors for them leasing companies that when we can work for these customers and they don’t like customers generally don’t like contracts. And that got ruined back in the day by like the old Dickinson’s of the world just because they were never able, like, if you were mad at them, you couldn’t leave. So my motto is, if you’re happy with what we’re doing, use us. If you’re not, then okay, then we can have that conversation and see what we can do to fix it. But there’s nothing locking you in. And to me, that gives a customer a massive peace of mind to know that, you know what, if this guy is screwing up, I can just say, hey, I’m gonna go over here instead. Now, there is downsides to it. You can have a manager switch and the manager wants to use his buddy over here. But that’s only happened like maybe three times since I’ve been in business across 420 customers. So that pool of customers is so small. It’s like that to me is like, whatever. But yeah, I don’t. I think not offering or I shouldn’t say not offering, not forcing contracts makes it easier for a customer to make a decision. It speeds up the process to us getting on site. And it makes it to where, you know, if the customer is happy with the quality of work, then they’re happy. I mean, I don’t think you should be forced to use anybody you’re not happy with.

Chandler Kohn: I’m surprised there’s no breakup fee in these contracts where, yes, they may have to pay a fee to terminate, but ultimately they get to, to make the decision who does the work. Have you ever heard of a breakup fee in these contracts?

Lenn Isaac:  I’ve never heard it brought up. I’m sure it probably exists, but I know I’ve never heard anybody bring that up. But I mean, pretty much if we ever run into it, it’s never a contract with, you know, any of like my immediate competitors. Like you don’t hear of contract with Cox anymore. You don’t hear of contracts with Prestige or EPICA or FMM or anybody. Anytime you run into contracts, it’s always the same three people. Ryder, Penske, Packleys. Remember the three we always run into? Outside of that, we really don’t run into it.

Chandler Kohn: Okay, let’s, let’s jump into customer acquisition a bit. You know, a lot of this business happens on referrals, word of mouth and relationships. At the end of the day, what is Kevin, you know, your, your VP of sales and marketing. What is he doing day to day to generate this business?

Lenn Isaac:  Well, right now he’s just working. I got him specifically focusing on driving this national Holman account and getting us in with there and getting us deep roots in. To me, getting into a program like that is what creates the future of where we’re going to go. You know, Amerit had their breaks back in the day that they drove down into like the rent a Tech programs that fed their business to get to where it is today. And to me, in my eyes, this Holman opportunity for us, I believe is going to be our thing that takes us to the next level. So that’s what I have him really focusing on. Before that, he was just, you know, kind of focusing on any of our anchor accounts in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Jersey, wherever. And he was just looking for customers around that to build us from. At the time we were doing like, I think 6.7 hours per tech to getting over. You’re getting pretty close to that 10 hour per tech mark. And that’s what his job is. Ben built the density and now we’re having him focus on the more nationals.

Chandler Kohn: Yep. What would you say is the average kind of lead size that you’re, you’re looking to target?

Lenn Isaac:  Well, we, the way we categorize it over here is minnows, bass and whales. And we have a lot of minnows. We have a lot of bass now. And now we’re starting to go after whales. I would say the most of our customers fall in the bass category, which is like a mid size fleet. The problem, the thing with that is you got to be careful with that because you don’t want to go whale hunting and not have enough bass to feed the whale. For lack of better words, that’s the analogy we use over here in house. So you don’t want the whale to starve while you’re hunting it. So we got to be able to. It’s a, it’s a balancing act game where you got to get enough bass before you start trying to go to whales. Because you don’t want to spend too much time on a whale. Because a whale can take up to six months to suck sign. And if you’re chasing whales for six months and you’re ignoring everything else, the company will suffer.

Chandler Kohn: Yep. So I think you guys are all over social media. You got this rags to wrenches YouTube Channel, is that right?

Lenn Isaac:  Yeah, my marketing lady set that up.

Chandler Kohn: You know, sometimes it’s hard to quantify, you know, what comes in through social versus what is just kind of general baseline branding in the background. Can you tie any revenue to any of the social marketing efforts that you guys are doing?

Lenn Isaac:  Absolutely. We got some of our biggest customers through, believe it or not, just my LinkedIn posts and the podcasts. We’re calling them podcasts now. Originally I was just making them as like a documenting my journey type thing, but now I guess it’s turning more of a podcast type deal. And we’ve also pulled in some of our best technicians watching them. Specifically one of them here in Ohio, up in the Piqua area, he saw my videos and he liked how I talked about techs and how I was a tech and how I treat techs and how I’m a firm believer that you should always put your techs first. And that brought him in. And you know, them guys that I’ve pulled in through there, they’re, they’re 80 plus hour a week billers. So they’re hustlers. They, they want, they want to be here and they want to do a good job. And yeah, they were. That’s three things just off of the last six months of putting them in there, that’s turned into easily hundreds of thousands of dollars. Easily.

Chandler Kohn: That’s awesome. That’s great. And if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the age of these techs that have been kind of watching these videos?

Lenn Isaac:  Between the ages of 30 and 40.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, that’s kind of what I would expect. This is a good segue into this talent and tech shortage going on. It’s, it’s, it’s built in, it’s systemic, it’s not cyclical. You know, I saw a stat, I think Full Bay publishes that stat in their report that they just produced that says 57 of heavy duty shops are understaffed and technician wages have jumped 10% last year. You know, when, when you’re hiring for a mobile business only that doesn’t have a shop they can go into and, you know, be part of this team, is how does that impact their, you know, your willing, their willingness to sign up with you? It’s basically like working remote, right where, you know, you’re up in, in the Northeast, you know, Mid Atlantic, and they’re, you know, hundreds of miles away.

Lenn Isaac:  Well, we’ve really never had that many issues with getting techs. We’ve always said, I don’t know, I really don’t know where that comes from, because I know everybody always says they have problems finding techs and being understaffed. I mean, we have the opposite of that problem. I have a lot of people that want to work for me. The only reason I can think of is because I am a tech owner and most people aren’t tech owners. As far as managing people from a distance, I mean, it’s pretty easy to tell when you have techs that are doing what they’re supposed to on the ground and not doing it on the ground just based off of what they’re pushing through on a daily basis. I mean, there’s not a single person outside my VP of sales, there’s not a single person in my entire organization that was not a tech on the ground. And that’s the one thing I tell everybody when I hire them, is like, look, man, we’re all tech, so you cannot BS us. Like, if you’re gonna try to BS us, we’re gonna see through it immediately. So whenever somebody is being dishonest from a distance hundreds of miles away, we can see it instantaneously. And then we just immediately go for corrective action or, you know, we just find somebody else.

Chandler Kohn: Got it from the kind of the money in the financial architecture side of things, what is the single biggest bottleneck to growing faster right now?

Lenn Isaac:  Cash. Just shortage of cash, that’s it. I could be growing at 50 month over month right now if I wanted to. If we had the cash to do it. And we know we can do it. We’re saying no to customers every single day. If it’s a net 30, net 45, net anything. Net 45 and net 60. For me, right now has been off the table mainly because we, we, we’re growing so fast. We are spending the cash faster than it’s coming back in. Naturally it’s going to happen when you’re growing at the rate we are, like that’s a given. Which is where we try to focus on the FMCs, you know, that turn cash back in faster. 72 To 48 hour pay helps out a ton of. But yeah, that’s, that’s really the biggest bottleneck I would say almost everybody in this industry is facing who’s trying to grow is just cash. I mean getting trucks, sure. But you can solve the truck issue pretty immediately just by calling a company like PTR Enterprise, whatever. Get around a truck until you can get your truck set up. Getting techs, like I said, I know that’s a problem for a lot of people. I have a buddy up in Wisconsin, his biggest problem is finding techs. I don’t have that problem whatsoever at all. The, our biggest problem is just cash. Like just getting the cash back fast enough. Like we’re constantly sitting, you know, in the. I don’t want to say the number, but we’re sitting really high with our numbers in AR all the time, just waiting for the cash to recoup. I mean it is what it is. It’s part of the game.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. And what, what kind of terms are you offering for somebody to pay in 48 or 72 hours?

Lenn Isaac:  That’s usually FMCs. So places like Holman Wheels, Donlin, the Net Element, stuff like that, they all pay within 72 hours. Anything that goes through auto integrate for the most part pays within 72 hours. And then we also, you know, we offer the typical net 10 with like a 2% that.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, yeah. I actually have a client right now in the space that their accounts receivable is extending 60, 90 days and it puts them in a really tough position with their vendors and having to extend those payables out. So I can, I can see why you’re doing that. And I can see why cash is. Is the. The biggest bottleneck to growth right now, competition in the industry. So Ryder went from 0 to 200 technicians across 20 states in under two years. By acquiring companies, I think they did pit stop fleet service for 24 million. They’re buying comfort companies. You know, like you guys. Who are your biggest competitors out there? Is it the.

Lenn Isaac:  The Ryders of the world?

Chandler Kohn: Talk a little bit about that.

Lenn Isaac:  The biggest competitor, I would say, for me, that is there’s a few of them that are trying to roadblock me. Like, we know Cox has done blitzes against us. We know Impico has done blitzes against us. As of recently, there’s one company out east. I don’t want to say his name because I don’t want to turn into that guy. But he’s deliberately trying to do everything he can to stop me by calling all my technicians, offering them $60 an hour. Just trying to make me bleed and cause me problems, have to put out fires. Yeah, but I’m not even that much worried about them. They’re so much smaller than us at this point. Like, I’m. They’re just a thorn in my side. But, I mean, as far as competitors, I mean, I really don’t think we have many competitors because there’s nobody that’s performing at the level that we are. I believe. I firmly believe if I had an unlimited balance sheet backing me, we could absolutely explode this into oblivion. I mean, just with certain contracts and partnerships we have, we have, like, I think it was like $12.9 million sitting on the line. If I had the money to front it, I could take it tomorrow, but I don’t have the money to front that. 18 Trucks is a lot of trucks. That’s a lot of money, and that’s a lot of people to get really quickly, which I think we could arrange the people. But just fronting 18 trucks worth of money is an insane ask for somebody our size. Now, if you had the right backing behind you that didn’t, you know, blow your legs out from underneath you and force you to give away the whole company to do it. And that’s one thing, but that’s far few and in between nowadays. But, yeah, I mean, our biggest competitor, I think right now is just ourselves. Like, we. We got to be able to stay tamed and not get ahead of ourselves and grow ourselves out of business, for lack of better words.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, makes sense. Let’s kind of hop into this vision and closing piece. You’re in 13 states. Obviously, you’re doing well now, where does Whitestone need to be in the next three years for you to feel like, you know, you’ve kind of truly won the first six years of your growth cycle?

Lenn Isaac:  Well, in my mind, I’ve already won. My five year goal was to get to a quarter of a million dollars when I first started all this. So that was a far, far undershot goal and I just didn’t realize it. That was my goal when I first started in revenue. I didn’t realize because when you work in a lot of these big places, they always try to undervalue the tech and tell you you don’t make nowhere near as much money as you think you did. Like my last year at Cox, they told me when I asked for a raise I was making less than $150,000 a year. And I’m like, oh crap. Really? I didn’t realize that. Well, that’s what I based my whole goal around was the customers I was working. I was like, well, they said I made less than 150. Okay, here we go. And then you start actually doing it yourself and you’re like, dude, these guys were lying like crazy to me. Yeah. Come to realize I was making 150 grand a month. Well, yeah, I mean, that just is what it is. But no, the three year goal right now is really six year. Realistically, we’re trying to get into the point where we can get PE acquisitioned right now. And it’s not because like I want to financially. It’s more of, you know, we’re all human beings and anything can happen at any point in time. I could have a brain aneurysms, make it run a red light, knock me out, turn me into a vegetable. So the whole point of that for me on this first round of PE, which is I want to do like at a 49, 51 type deal, is to make it to where no matter what happens to me, that my family is secured. And that’s my whole goal around the first transaction. The second transaction would be kind of close to what you’re talking about. That seven year goal, mark, is what I have it down as. And that’s to, you know, ride this out for seven years with somebody, hopefully turn around and make a big deal at the end of it and make a ton of money. That’s, that’s the whole goal.

Chandler Kohn: Got it. And you know, let’s just say somebody gave you like, you know, just any amount of money, $10 million to go and build a national platform and compete with some of these other folks that maybe have more capital than you to get in the space right there. They exist out there. I know them, I talk to them. What would be the first thing you do to kind of really build out this national platform aggressively? Is it trucks? Is it, you know, recruiting? What is that?

Lenn Isaac:  The first thing I would do if I had that much money would be immediately get on the phone with some of our partners that we have that are helping us with work, like they supply us work, would be on the phone with them and say, basically, where is your biggest pain point? We want to solve it for you. And then work on a map out from that. Like I said, we have one customer right now that wants 18 trucks within the next 30 days, and we just don’t have the capital to do it. If I had $10 million behind me, I could do that instantly, knowing it’s a 5, $5.9 million return with a 5 year track record of it paying that year over year over year over year. So. And that goes through their portal, so we can see it. So that would be where I would go first personally, because you. Not just that you’re left with a bunch of money left over and you can start. That gives you so many anchors everywhere that throughout the country that’s guaranteed at 50 to 100 hours a week.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, I got it. And then for. Let’s just say somebody has, you know, been running a mobile shop. Pick a place in the country. It could be anywhere. I mean, excuse me, an in shop service business. And they want to get into Mobile. Maybe two to three trucks the last 10 years of their work before they kind of get out and sell the company. What’s the single most important thing to get right.

Lenn Isaac:  In the beginning? If you’re trying to start a mobile company, the very first thing you should get right is communication. That is by far the number one problem in every single mobile company. It’s real easy to communicate when somebody’s coming to a shop and they’re standing in front of you at a desk, but it’s one in the morning, it’s pouring down rain, you’re soaking wet, you just got done with a truck, you just want to go home and get out of those clothes and relax. A lot of people forget to communicate. Even today, even at Whitestone, every mobile company is the exact same problem. Everybody has problems getting their techs to communicate. 100% Of the time. Now, that being said, I think Whitestone has bridged a lot of that gap by us drilling it into our people’s heads every single day. But that is by far the number one problem, I would say, across every mobile industry. When we go and we’re talking to somebody where another person say they’re using, you know, the Rushes of the world, the prestigious of the world, the fms, whoever it may be, the Deaton Fleet fleets. The number one complaint we always hear is the communication is poor every single time. It’s not always about the tech on site. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s not. It’s usually just about, man, the communication sucks. And then the SEC that that comes second to, well, they’re just overpricing. They’re overpricing everything. When they look at our price compared to their price, like, well, why are you so much cheaper than them? Well, we don’t do this and that’s why.

Chandler Kohn: Awesome. I appreciate it. Lenn Isaac, White Stone Fleet Service. Thank you for joining.