Tyler Robertson, Founder/CEO of Diesel Laptops, quit his six figure job in the truck service business and scaled his part time gig into a $100 million business. This is a great story about slow and steady growth, taking smart risks, and obsessing over solving your customers’ problems.
Show Links
- Diesel Laptops https://www.diesellaptops.com/
- Tyler Robertson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-robertson-diesel/
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Show Transcript
This is an automated transcript, so there are definitely mistakes and occasional weirdness that the robots got wrong. But it’s close.
Paris Vega (00:02.212)
Hey everybody, welcome to the first customers podcast. Today we’re gonna talk about how Tyler Robertson built diesel laptops to $100 million in revenue within eight years. Tyler, welcome to the show.
Tyler Robertson (00:14.250)
Well, hey, thanks for having me on and any chance I get to talk about business growth, entrepreneurship, I’m all about. So I hope you have some great conversation here.
Paris Vega (00:22.417)
Awesome.
Well, that’s what the show is all about, helping entrepreneurs and other business owners hear what other people are doing to build successful companies and going back to those early moments of when they got started, to kind of help people bridge that gap and connect those dots from going from zero to something, from no customers to how do you convince a human to give you money for something that you’ve started? So that’s the whole context of the show
they’re entrepreneurs to share so that other people can learn from them. So take us back to those initial moments of building diesel laptops. How’d you get those very first customers?
Tyler Robertson (01:04.370)
Yeah, and I think there’s like three types of customers here. There’s actually who my first customer was and then how I kind of branched from there and then how we kind of got into more of the enterprise, the bigger customers. So ironically, I worked in commercial truck dealerships my whole life. So when you’re in a commercial truck dealership, they’re just like car dealerships. They have all kinds of problems. Customers do it. They bring their truck to get fixed. And I was fortunate enough to work in the service department
a lot of years. So I understood the tools and the technology needed to hook up the computers and do all the things to diagnose a truck. And this is, this isn’t like cars where there’s like a bunch of handheld little scanners available. These are a little more complex, the commercial truck world. So then I got, I got transferred to the parts department and people all day long were asking, Hey, I want to buy a diagnostic tool. So I don’t have to come to your guys’s shop. So I just want to do it myself. And up until then, nobody in the parts department
Paris Vega (01:42.654)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (02:04.350)
Right where you’re the whole state covered multiple locations. Nobody actually knew how to do any of that on the part side of the world Like well, I work in the service side. I know exactly what you need So I started through the parts department as parts manager started selling the software to customers needed to do this and I’m still working for someone else I’m not doing anything myself yet and the problem was is if you sell a piece of advanced software to a 55 6 year old shop owner. He’s got no idea how to even install it so
Then I’m doing like tech support and selling all these different computers. I’m like, this is a pain in the ass So I I called up my manager my boss. I’m like, hey, I got an idea How about I buy the hardware from you? I’ll buy a laptop from Best buy wherever and I’ll make kits that are ready to go that way. I don’t have to deal with installations I don’t have to deal with like troubleshooting like they can just buy a whole kit ready to go So I’m like, he’s like, so you’re gonna buy product for me bundle with something else and sell it back to me I’m like
Exactly. He’s like, all right, we’ll try it. So, you know, I bought some stuff from him. I bought a laptop. I put the whole kit together, sold it to my own employer, and they put it on display on their counter and, well, behold, customers started buying it. So my first customer was actually a distributor, I guess, in that sense, and it was now an employer at the time. So that was the first one. But what happened right after that is I had the bright idea of,
Paris Vega (03:27.632)
Wow.
That’s cool.
Tyler Robertson (03:34.530)
Heck, if people in Columbia, South Carolina need this tool, probably everybody else does. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have a website, I didn’t have a brand name. I’m like, I’ll just go throw them on eBay. I threw one on eBay and the dang thing sold in a day. I was like, oh, let me go build another one and let me go raise the price a couple hundred bucks and boom, sold right away again. I think I learned early on customers were looking for solutions to
They didn’t really care what the product or brand was they just had a problem They were trying to fix and I happen to have the rights and a knowledge and kind of at the right place at the right time to Start putting these kits together. So I had none of my own products at the time I was just bundling other people stuff together and making it easy for people to buy and get going
Paris Vega (04:05.282)
Yeah.
Right.
Can you go back to, so what exactly was that first product? You had, you know, parts from your employer and then the laptop, but how does that turn into something valuable that somebody wants to buy? I don’t know.
Tyler Robertson (04:23.850)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no problem.
Yeah, so this is 15 years ago. To do diagnostics on a commercial truck, you need three things. You need a computer. You need a piece of software on the computer. There’s a bunch of different software out there. Some made by the OEMs, some are like aftermarket. And then you need a vehicle interface device. So it’s this box that one in plugs the truck, one into the laptop. And yeah.
Paris Vega (04:53.517)
Yeah.
And that’s kind of like the handheld things you can have. Like I’ve got one for my car, I just plug it into the thing and it gives me some error codes.
Tyler Robertson (05:00.170)
This didn’t exist for commercial trucks at the time, and people wanted to do all the things the dealers can do. So like that handheld you have, you can just kind of read stuff and do some minor things maybe. Customers, like commercial trucks are tools. These cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases, and they’re a tool to make money. So these, a minute of down time is a big deal for them. It’s not like a car, you just go rent one and you’re back going. So people wanted a complete solution out of the box, and nobody made all three pieces. That was the irony. Is someone made software?
Paris Vega (05:08.532)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Tyler Robertson (05:29.850)
Talk to that hardware guy and then go find a laptop somewhere that meets these specs. So it was hard for an independent guy that runs a small shop to be like, they didn’t even know what they needed to buy. They just knew they had a problem. I want to connect to a vehicle. I want to read all the codes. I want to do some tests and commands. What do I need to buy? And in the B2B worlds, you can correlate money with time really quick and price has never been an objection in our space at all. That’s never the problem.
Paris Vega (05:35.132)
Thank you. Thank you.
Wow.
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (05:59.970)
it’s there’s other problems that we have together other objections but yeah so yeah
Paris Vega (06:05.252)
Especially, yeah, in trucking where, yeah, every minute of downtime means the load’s not getting there, they’re losing dollars, yeah, directly affects revenue. And so you’re helping diagnose the problem quicker if you’ve got an easier way to figure out what’s wrong.
Tyler Robertson (06:17.910)
So that was my company, right? It started with just selling a diagnostic tool, but we really, what you’re talking about is being efficient at something, right? So I think anyone listening to this, if I was like, hey, go fix your lawnmower, right? There’s some things they’re gonna need. They’re gonna need some tools, which we sell diagnostic tools. They’re gonna need some repair information on how do I disassemble it, how do I test it, how do I do whatever. They maybe need a little bit of training on how to properly do something, and then they need the old phone or friend.
I don’t know what I’m doing, I need some help. So what we’ve done on diesel laptops is just take that to the B2B world and say, look, when you buy a product from us, you’re not just buying a product and you’re going away. We’re a solution, we’re an extension of your shop. I got a call center staff with 50 techs. We’re gonna help you remotely fix things. I built all my own repair information. I put it in mobile apps. I put it on any computer you want. You can go fix all these things, that way you have all that. And we have training. We do online training and we’ve got physical training centers throughout the country. So we come to customers
Everyone else still does it in my field. They come to people as products. We come to them as I’m a solution. And we go command 30, 40% more than all our competitors do. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it. And we have no problem doing it.
Paris Vega (07:31.232)
So just with much better customer service, and maybe it sounds like designing that product and service to more fully solve your customer’s problems. So just with much better customer service, and maybe it sounds like designing that product and service to more fully solve your customer’s problems. So just with much better customer service, and maybe it sounds like designing that product and service to more fully solve your customer’s problems.
Tyler Robertson (07:38.710)
Yeah, people, I mean, you can say this through your blue in the face. People don’t buy products, they buy solutions, right? So I didn’t, I didn’t buy, I didn’t buy the movie ticket. I bought, I bought entertainment for two and a half hours is what I, is what I bought. Right. I didn’t. So the people think of it the wrong way, but that’s what they really, I got to come back to at all times is, especially in the B2B world, how, how does this solve my problem? Right. You, you have to solve someone’s problem and you can’t, you can’t go take things to just jam them in and, and say, Hey, I got this thing.
Paris Vega (07:51.676)
right.
Tyler Robertson (08:08.790)
it’s going to solve this problem. You got to figure out what the problem is and then make the solution for it. So we’ve had that focus for a long time now. We’re not a diagnostic tool company. We’re an efficiency solutions provider for these repair shops. In our industry, it’s a big thing. There’s over $80 billion a year spent on labor and parts fixing commercial trucks. And then you look at the off-highway world, which has more diesel engines. That’s even bigger. So just in North America,
200 billion a year spent on parts and repair on various equipment on highway and off highway. So it’s a big rule people don’t even realize exist. It kind of happens in the background, but COVID exposed supply chain here a little bit. And people understand it a little bit more now than they did a couple of years ago.
Paris Vega (08:49.796)
Right.
Paris Vega (08:56.972)
Right. So you had the, your kind of prototype you sold to your employer. Now, how’d you get the connection between all three of those things at first? You said you needed software and you had the laptop and then the device was being sold separately. So did you have some software experience or did you get custom software made or
Tyler Robertson (09:14.090)
So yeah, I’ll tell you the first thing I did. So at first I was just buying software from the OEM that I worked for. So I could only really sell people, hey, this kit only works on international trucks. Like, and there’s Mack trucks, Peterbilt, Kenworth, Freightliners, all these other brands, but mine only worked on international because that’s who I worked for. And I was like, all right, well, these guys want to work on other stuff as well. So then I started to figure out how to go buy the Detroit Diesel software from Detroit Diesel and the Allison transmission software from Allison. And I could kind of start making these custom bundles
Paris Vega (09:21.637)
Okay.
Tyler Robertson (09:43.850)
for people as the inquiries started coming in. So that was one piece of it. And then I stumbled across a gentleman that probably changed my trajectory completely. His name is Don. And Don had built by himself in his basement a piece of software that would hook up to every commercial truck and read everything. And I’m like, oh wow. And then his website looked like it was out of the 1990s, right? Like I was like, okay, he’s not a marketing guy. He’s just puttin’ around,
Paris Vega (10:10.374)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (10:14.530)
So yeah, software engineer, right? You learn to code by himself. Like he used to be a diesel tech. So I found him, I’m like, hey man, why don’t I, why don’t you let me resell your thing, I’ll bundle up and make another kit, but make it an all makes all model kit, and let’s see if we can move some of these. And Don’s like, yeah, yeah, there was more wider coverage. It didn’t go as deep in coverage, but it was wider. And everyone’s like, yeah, I wanna work on everything. I don’t wanna ever tell my customer I can’t connect to it. So, yeah.
Paris Vega (10:22.076)
Yeah.
And that would be like a premium since it was universal. Yeah, okay.
Tyler Robertson (10:44.230)
I struck a deal with Don and I can say, you know, if you look over the last, you know, 10 years we’ve known each other. Well, I ended up buying the rights to his program completely, so I own it now. We have our own engineers and we’ve developed new stuff. But I mean, literally over a million dollars I spent with him buying software licensing from him. You know, he had a part-time gig. So Don’s still a great friend. Him and his wife just spent two weeks in their RV in my front yard camping out here. So he still works with us
Paris Vega (10:55.816)
Okay.
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (11:13.850)
and does things, but yeah, if it wasn’t for me and Don, I probably never would have had enough to like quit my job for somebody else and do this thing full time. Like he really gave me a lot of guarantees. It’s been a great partner to work with. So it’s always interesting how you find these people along your journey that really kind of give you that rocket fuel to really take off and Don’s definitely one. I think it’s a great way to get to know people and get to know them and get to know them and get to know them and get to know them and get to know them.
Paris Vega (11:16.732)
That’s cool.
really.
So was he selling it just as software and you just stumbled across his website or something?
Tyler Robertson (11:40.951)
Yeah, he just had the software. He was selling on eBay, selling on his website. It was for the layman, for the shop owner, there was no way to look at it and be like, oh, I know what this does. I’m like, okay, I got to go to this mumble jumbo and just be like, here’s a tool that hooks up to everything you run across, would you be interested? And people are like, yes, that’s exactly what I need. So it was just getting it out of the engineering speak and putting it into marketing speak and getting people, again, frame it as the solution,
Paris Vega (11:51.703)
Yeah.
Right.
Yep.
Tyler Robertson (12:08.790)
the product. And that’s really, you know, what we’ve been able to do with that product. So yeah, so that was the first one. And then the second piece that came right after all this was selling all these tools, they’re telling people all the fault codes and all the problems. Well, they don’t, they don’t actually tell you to fix it. That’s repair information. So I had the bright idea one day, I was like, man, I’m going to go, I’m going to, I need to make a software program that tells people how to fix every single fault code that’s ever existed for every commercial truck. And I told that to a couple
like you’re insane. Do you have any codes there are? And I’m like, I don’t know, I’m gonna find out. So, I hired an outside software developer to build me a little admin tool and a little front end tool for the customer to put on their desktop. And I would just sit there to the wee hours in the morning, documenting fault codes with solutions and building up a database. So yeah. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off. I’m gonna turn it off.
Paris Vega (12:38.953)
There you go.
Yeah.
So that’s awesome for like SEO and showing up for search results and stuff. If you’re the, you know, there’s probably some of where you might be one of the few resources on the internet for some of these random codes.
Tyler Robertson (13:09.330)
It’s really weird. Like yeah, you mentioned that like some of our top performing blog posts are really specific like Cummins fault code 3582 and hold us all like and that’s like, you know dreams brings you like 4,000 clicks a month You’re like, okay, like people it’s amazing how much when you when you niche down like that How many people really have that problem and once you position yourself as the the authority in a specific field you start building the brand and a following and all the things and Like that’s definitely happened over the years it went from need to run a lot of paid search to
Paris Vega (13:19.228)
Yeah.
Yep.
Right.
Tyler Robertson (13:39.193)
organic search is our number one job.
Paris Vega (13:44.692)
Wow. Yeah, that’s awesome. So you had the distributor as your original customer and then, you know, random sales on eBay and different, maybe online methods. And your target audience overall, you said is repair shops. So you’re not necessarily selling directly to companies unless they have their own like self-service shop or something. So how’d you go from that one distributor to finding other customers? I know that, you know,
Tyler Robertson (14:03.976)
Yep.
Yeah.
Paris Vega (14:14.772)
for this stuff, but did you set up a website or what was kind of that early marketing process of figuring that out?
Tyler Robertson (14:19.790)
So I was probably content and happy with just doing what I was doing. I had a one year old, a three year old. I got a six figure job at work. I’m now making 10, 15 grand profit a month of my side business. Granted, I’m working like crazy hours and not seeing my family at all, but I’m like, okay, I can keep doing it. Money’s good, right? So, everything paid off. I was like, okay, this is starting to get ahead in life. And then the company I was working for
Paris Vega (14:35.654)
Yeah.
Right.
Tyler Robertson (14:49.810)
and they’re like, Hey, you need to need to, we’re going to stop buying from you. You need to quit your side business. I’m like, Oh, really? Like what, why? Like, well, now you’ve empowered a bunch of people to work on their own stuff and they don’t need to bring their equipment here. I’m like, well, I’ve always agreed not to sell my product in South Carolina. I haven’t been, you have, but I’m selling them on eBay in other states. And they’re like, yeah, you need to stop doing that. I’m like, well, that doesn’t impact you. We’ll see how it impacts our other dealers that we work with and blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, well, here’s the thing.
Paris Vega (14:57.253)
thing.
Okay.
Tyler Robertson (15:19.790)
reason people are coming to you is because you’re the only ones with a tool or the only ones with knowledge. Like that’s a bad business plan and you’re not going to make it long. So I was and they’re like, if you don’t quit, you’re going to get fired. I’m like, okay, great. Then you’re 10 years, like making six big years, one year old, three year old life, you know, life doesn’t work. See at home on like this sucks. So I, I did what I think everyone does. They call their dad and I’m like, Hey, dad, here’s a situation. What do I do? And he’s like, man, you need to, you need to quit that side business. Like, look,
Paris Vega (15:24.716)
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (15:50.110)
You either get that, get that solid paycheck, or you’re making good money, but just sell it, do whatever with it. All right, so then I called Don, and I’m like, Don, here’s a scenario, like what do you think? And he’s like, man, I think you should quit your regular employer, I’ll give you exclusive rights to the software for North America, and I think you can go make it a big thing. I’m like, okay, yeah, I appreciate it, I don’t know, like we’ll see. And then I,
Paris Vega (16:15.032)
Yeah. And how far into the business is this? Like how long had you been doing it?
Tyler Robertson (16:17.490)
Two years maybe, year and a half. Yeah, so like things are still like, you know, they’re still going up and to the right. So you’re like, okay, maybe I don’t know. It doesn’t completely supplement my full-time job and health insurance and 401K and college funds for the kid, you know, like, you’re like, okay, but I’ll give my, well, not my ex-wife, but I’ll give her credit. She said, hey, screw that, just quit your job and let’s just see if we can make it work. We got no debt. She’s like, what’s the worst that happens if it doesn’t work out? I’m like, well, I guess
Paris Vega (16:30.532)
Yeah. Right.
Tyler Robertson (16:47.450)
just go work for somebody else. She’s like, exactly. So I’m like, okay, like we got some money saved up, we got no debt, let’s give it a shot. So I immediately said, okay, I need a website. So I went and bought, you know, like the crappiest shopping cart they had on GoDaddy at the time and built like the worst template site you ever saw. And just said, I’m gonna hit eBay a little bit harder and, you know, quit my job. And it kind of got forced on me. So I probably would still be kind of puttin’ away doing my thing.
Paris Vega (16:51.617)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (17:07.574)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (17:17.510)
and employer didn’t give me an ultimatum, which ended up being one of the best things that ever happened to me in hindsight. So that’s, that’s where I got serious about it. And I got focused on SEO. I got focused on, okay, what if eBay, you start de-risking yourself, right? So I was doing so much on eBay. I was in eBay, they’re always screwing around with their top-rated sellers, their fees, their cat-like, it was like, man, like, I can’t, I got to diversify away from eBay, like, what if they screw me or I, I just screwed some sell, some buyers and they kicked me off?
Paris Vega (17:40.032)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (17:47.470)
have nothing. So that’s when I was like, got to go build my own website, I gotta go figure out SEO, I got to get my own traffic and start building my brand. And that was that was about eight years ago now.
Paris Vega (17:49.520)
Right.
Paris Vega (18:02.332)
And so you started off with the GoDaddy cart. Talk a little bit about how your e-commerce evolved.
Tyler Robertson (18:08.150)
Yeah, I was shocked when someone bought something off the website. I actually remember the first sale came through. I actually call them. I’m like, how did you find me? Why did you buy for me? Cause this, this site looks like utter crap. Like how did like, well, no, I Googled you showed right up and that’s exact thing I need. And I ordered it. I’m like, cool. Well, I got him here. You’ll, you’ll happen in two days. So, um, it was.
Paris Vega (18:19.695)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (18:27.095)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (18:33.890)
I mean, you don’t know anything at that point. You don’t understand, like I knew nothing about Page Search. I knew nothing about SEO. I just knew, like, okay, if I wanna win here, I know I need to rank on page one of Google. Like everyone says, where do you hide dead bodies? Page two of Google, right? Cause nobody goes there. So I’m like, all right, I gotta focus on this. And it was, I still remember, like every single week, I was like, okay, I’m gonna do one thing this week to improve my SEO. And it could be on page, but I really focus on off page. I was like, I need to get linked back
Paris Vega (18:52.930)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (19:04.070)
my site from other like-minded other companies. So I focused pretty intently on things that, you know, at the time, you know, I’d be like, is this worth my time spent in four hours writing a blog post? But in hindsight, you know, some of those blog posts drive tens of thousands of users every single year, it’s totally worth it. I probably should put more effort into it, but it’s hard to see that when you’re at that level and at that point. So it was doing that. And the other thing I knew was like,
Paris Vega (19:05.132)
Okay.
Paris Vega (19:24.732)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (19:33.850)
customers, I know they’re going to keep buying things from me and they’re going to start referring me to people. So I was probably crazy obsessive making sure every customer I had was 100% happy. And you know, you can tell you this, your wife doesn’t like it at 10 o’clock at night on a Friday when someone’s calling you and you’re blowing up your phone asking for help because the truck’s broke down the side of the road somewhere, right? But I’m like, I’m a one man show. I have to take the call. I have to help this guy out. So that’s just the entrepreneurial life in the beginning.
Paris Vega (19:56.953)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (20:03.850)
you’re throwing your heart and soul into it and trying to figure out accounting and taxes and SEO and new products and customer support and running the UPS store every day shipping stuff. It’s a lot and I always tell people, I’m really glad I worked for somebody else for 10 years. I’m really glad my family, bunch of entrepreneurs, own some businesses because this would be really freaking hard to figure out if you didn’t have some of that life experiences. So kudos to all
Paris Vega (20:07.132)
Bye.
Paris Vega (20:16.732)
Bye.
Paris Vega (20:20.532)
Thank you. Thank you.
Tyler Robertson (20:33.850)
entrepreneurs out there that are figuring it out. It’s not a small hill to climb by any stretch.
Paris Vega (20:34.032)
100%
Paris Vega (20:40.152)
Yep, it’s really easy to focus on the big numbers or even the title of this episode and think, oh man, all these people getting lucky out here, building businesses and you never see the, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. You never see the years of pain and fear and doubt and uncertainty that came before. And so, I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point. I think that’s a good point.
Tyler Robertson (20:48.474)
Oh, yeah.
Tyler Robertson (20:52.671)
I mean.
Tyler Robertson (20:56.850)
Yeah, I mean, people, people need to understand too, like I didn’t, I mean, I didn’t take a salary like the first six months because I was so worried. And I’m like dead adverse. So our company still has no debt and we, we bootstrap this whole thing. I don’t have outside investors. So as, as I was growing, I couldn’t take money out because I needed it for inventory and receivables. So as fast as I was making money and paying the tax guy and doing growing receivables and inventory, like there’s just, there was, I mean, I went,
Paris Vega (21:10.153)
That’s awesome.
Paris Vega (21:12.432)
Well.
Tyler Robertson (21:26.750)
months or so not taking the salary out. Then I finally paid myself like 40 grand a year and then 50, you know, like it just, there was up until recently, like it was impossible for me to go take out big chunks of cash out of the company because there was no cash to take out. Like it was just, it was being stuck.
Paris Vega (21:32.674)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (21:41.572)
Were you just living off savings from before at first for a while?
Tyler Robertson (21:42.950)
It was before we cut everything back. Like when I quit my job, do it full time. Like we sat down at the dining room table and we had a budget and we were like, yep, that can go cancel, direct TV, cancel this, cancel that. Like how much cash do we have here? So I was really fortunate. I listened to a lot of Dave Ramsey kind of before that time. So I was really focused on not having debt and having cash stacked in the bank. And I know a lot of times in the economy is good. People kind of laugh at that. Like what are you doing? Ha ha. But man, I can tell you what.
Paris Vega (21:56.887)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (22:12.553)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (22:12.850)
Like it saved me then, COVID came around and everything stopped. I didn’t, yeah, I was worried, but when you got, you know, millions in the bank and empty credit lines are kind of like, we’ll, we’ll tough this out. Um, and even now recently in our company, we had a bad situation. We switched our ERP system. We weren’t sending invoices to customers to collect money. We weren’t getting bills in the sitlight. It was just chaos and all of a sudden you wake up like, oh man, I owe vendors, you know, $12 million. Like, but I’m like, okay, glad, you know, I had no idea.
Paris Vega (22:25.917)
Yep.
Paris Vega (22:36.732)
Thank you. Bye.
Tyler Robertson (22:42.890)
because the county was all screwed up, right? But you know, to be like, oh, well, we got cash in the bank and we have no debt, we’re gonna be okay here. So those are big safety nets for me and it’s probably throttled our growth a little bit, but I also know I’m still having great growth and I’m able to sleep at night and I have like almost zero risk with what I do. And I’m not sure if I’m gonna be able to sleep at night or if I’m gonna be able to sleep at night or if I’m gonna be able to sleep at night
Paris Vega (22:46.132)
Right.
Paris Vega (23:06.432)
And so did that mean during COVID and the wildness of the economy in the past couple years even, you’re able to kind of keep your staff and not have to lay off or anything like that?
Tyler Robertson (23:16.170)
Yeah, so yeah, we’ve never had layoffs. So we’ve COVID, so okay, every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare, right? Like is like, hey, my business is growing, something will happen, it’ll go off a cliff. But logically, we all sit there and say, okay, well that’s not gonna happen because business went up slow or consistent, it’ll go down slow and consistent. So usually not like a cliff event where you lose 100% of your revenue, right? It’s over time, yeah. Well, then COVID happened and the phone stopped ringing and the internet traffic stopped
Paris Vega (23:20.800)
Awesome.
Paris Vega (23:27.996)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (23:40.334)
Yeah, it was like a true Black Swan event that happened.
Paris Vega (23:45.996)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (23:46.230)
world stopped and I mean our sales plummeted but we didn’t we we actually shifted what we sold we kind of moved some things around put an employee expense reduction committee together we did all kinds of things and we actually maintained profitability all the way through COVID and we actually stacked a lot of money in the bank like we were afraid banks were gonna fail like 2008 to when we get access to credit lines to get cuts we like drew everything down so we’re sitting in this big pile of cash
Paris Vega (23:49.853)
Wow.
Paris Vega (24:07.074)
Well.
Tyler Robertson (24:16.210)
And we actually, it was the irony was people were starting to lay people off. So I was like, well, now’s when we go build up end strength. So let’s go hire the good ones out there and let’s bring them in the company and build this up. So in hindsight, COVID ended up being one of the best things that happened to us in terms of employees that we were able to grab and the goodwill we built with employees. And we were very, very clear to employees on, hey, here’s our daily number we need to hit to maintain profitability. And they all knew what we needed
Paris Vega (24:27.993)
There you go.
Paris Vega (24:32.232)
smart.
Tyler Robertson (24:46.150)
They all rallied around everything we had going on. So it ended up, COVID wasn’t fun for anybody, but I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over thinking my business was gonna go to nothing. I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this, but I’m not sure if you can see this,
Paris Vega (24:54.374)
Right.
Paris Vega (24:58.592)
So was there an actual month, a full month or any period all were actual trucking stopped? Cause I feel like they were still taking stuff to stores for the most part, but there may have been a little blip there where there was literally a full stop. I can’t remember exactly. Okay. Okay. So I’m gonna go back to the beginning of the video. I’m gonna go back to the beginning of the video. I’m gonna go back to the beginning of the video. I’m gonna go back to the beginning of the video. I’m gonna go back to the beginning of the video.
Tyler Robertson (25:07.392)
So.
Tyler Robertson (25:11.970)
So it was segmented, right? So grocery stores in Walmart, they couldn’t haul stuff there fast enough. Other things like big construction jobs kind of kept going because they were under contract and deadlines, but there were some segments that just completely stopped like fuel hauling because nobody was driving around anywhere, right? Like everyone was sitting at home, they didn’t have as much fuel, they’d be gassed it. Yeah, so there was that. Actually right now is probably one of the worst trucking economic times in a long time. For a lot of reasons. It’s the bulletproof effect
Paris Vega (25:18.595)
Right.
Paris Vega (25:30.015)
Really.
Paris Vega (25:32.753)
Oh, like the red, yeah.
Tyler Robertson (25:43.030)
rates went super sky high, then they dropped, and they got back to normal. Now there’s an oversupply of trucks. All those ships that were off the ports all got all their stuff unloaded, the product finally made to stores, and all the retailers now have too much product. So they stopped ordering products. So there’s this balancing act two years later that’s still playing out in the macro economy. Yeah, rates are horrible right now. I mean, here’s the thing. I always say like, look, I’m not gonna be worried about what goes on in the world. I can’t control anything.
Paris Vega (25:44.376)
video.
Paris Vega (25:52.473)
Right.
Paris Vega (26:01.093)
Gotcha.
Tyler Robertson (26:12.050)
that I can only control my attitude towards that. I just know I can control the things that go into my business and we can just plan for things the best we can. And by planning you solve a lot of problems and you you tend to have a lot less stress going on in your life when you when you know you got things ready to go.
Paris Vega (26:13.053)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (26:29.672)
Yeah. And that’s a really good argument for going the bootstrapped, debt-free, kind of Dave Ramsey style business, because you’re right, you’re not going to take advantage of maybe the peak of any given time because you’re not leveraging all the potential, you know, equity you have and getting the maximum growth. But it’s like you’re, you’re guaranteeing that you’re on a sure path no matter what’s happening.
Tyler Robertson (26:45.714)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (26:53.350)
Yeah, and you don’t have stockholders to appease. So I can have a bad quarter, bad year. Like that affects nobody but me, right? You get shareholders involved and investors, and all of a sudden people start asking questions. There’s like another pressure that gets put on you there, typically when you go raise capital and go do those things. And I, you know, I guess that’s part of it. The other part is I was just too stupid to even think to do it. Like I was like, I never even crossed my mind to go do that. I didn’t even know what my company was worth. Like I’m about three years into it.
Paris Vega (26:57.274)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (27:23.790)
an executive from another company, he retired, sold his business, came in, he was one of my neighbors, I’m like, yeah, I could use some help, figure out accounting, HR, structure. Then one day he’s like, do you ever do what your company’s worth? I’m like, I don’t know, never even thought about it. I have no idea. I don’t know. He’s like, he goes, you are worth like 30 million at least. I’m like, no, really? Me? No. He’s like, Tyler. I’m like, yeah, yeah, you absolutely.
Paris Vega (27:41.817)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (27:50.695)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (27:53.710)
It’s crazy now in hindsight. Like I never built a company for valuation or to do those things, but I’ve been offered as much as 100 million for the company and I’m still like, I don’t need it. That’s not what I want to do. Let’s go keep executing and doing the things we’re doing over here because we’re having a lot of fun. I always tell people, how many times do companies have an opportunity to go change the way an industry works? And it’s not often. And we have that chance to go really help a lot of people. So it’s a different. It’s a different.
Paris Vega (28:13.203)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (28:19.253)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (28:23.250)
ใงใ
Paris Vega (28:23.453)
Yeah, you’re decentralized.
Paris Vega (28:26.832)
Yeah, you’re decentralizing knowledge and that that seems to be like what’s going to happen, like they say information wants to be free. And it’s like, eventually all the gatekeepers are going to kind of melt away. And it’s going to get to the people anyway.
Tyler Robertson (28:37.750)
Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, it’s right to repair. There’s a big movement going on with that. People want the right to choose where to fix your phone, where to get your car worked on. And I can tell everyone listen to this, the people that own commercial trucks, they want the right to bring their truck anywhere to get fixed. And the OEMs do a tremendously great job of putting things behind paywalls or locking the users out of their own stuff. John Deere’s one of the biggest names that comes up in this right to repair in this world. And it’s companies like ours,
Paris Vega (28:44.673)
Yes.
Paris Vega (28:48.474)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (29:08.030)
We work with that are saying no, but we’re not we’re not gonna stand for that We’re gonna fight it on a legal front and and we’re gonna go reverse engineer We’re gonna develop tools that do the same thing as yours So customers can have the right to choose and we’re gonna do it in a legal way And there’s nothing you guys can do to stop us So what’s interesting is we do a lot of that too like on the commercial truck part side So we wanted to build a platform to allow people like cross-reference parts So by brand a it’s all the stock I can find brand B or C really easy And when we first started that I remember going to the trade fair
Paris Vega (29:13.676)
Hmm.
Tyler Robertson (29:37.610)
shows going booth to booth, explain to what we’re doing, how we want to get their data and how to be good for everybody. And they all told me to pound sand, get away, like you can’t have it. I’m like, okay. And literally, you know, we did it a hard way without their help. And now we go to the same trade shows three years later and we’re like, oh look, we built this thing, all your data is in here, we got a tremendous amount of traffic. Would you guys, would you guys like some of that traffic? We can drive you guys some revenue. And they’re all like, this is amazing. How’d you do this without us? We’re like, you know, we tried. But mind shifts do change over time.
Paris Vega (29:47.132)
Thank you. Bye.
Tyler Robertson (30:07.690)
with people once you start to see the value of what you’re building. It just, it can, it feels like moving a mountain sometimes, but it can be done.
Paris Vega (30:09.532)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (30:16.732)
And so with right to repair, so a lot of these companies are trying to prevent the individual or the buyer from being able to repair their own things and making it illegal to do that in some cases, right? And so with right to repair, so a lot of these companies are trying to prevent the individual or the buyer from being able to repair their own things and making it illegal to do that in some cases, right? And so with right to repair, so a lot of these companies are trying to prevent the individual or the buyer from being able to repair their own things and making it illegal to do that in some cases, right?
Tyler Robertson (30:24.092)
Yep.
Tyler Robertson (30:28.210)
Yeah, I mean, they put encryption on the software, on the ECMs, they make it really difficult to do things. They’re trying, this is a great example, they all do intellectual property claims on everything. So like Volvo claims the shape of their headlight. So that way, nobody, and they got approved, which means nobody in the world can make an aftermarket headlight assembly besides Volvo, which sucks because now they can charge whatever the hell they want for that headlight, right? Like it does that.
Paris Vega (30:56.874)
right.
Tyler Robertson (30:58.330)
is Cummins during COVID. There’s a critical part of the emission system that was intellectually protected so nobody could make an aftermarket. And it wasn’t a big deal to Cummins because they could make a bunch of them and sell them and make their money. But then all of a sudden they couldn’t make them because of supply chain. And all of a sudden now it’s an emission component so when it fails the trucks derated and can’t be used. So at one point they had tens of thousands of trucks down across the country because they couldn’t supply this one part and nobody else
it and Cummins actually had to work with the EPA to get a emission delete approved by the EPA so they could bypass the component. So now you got tens of thousands of trucks running around, not up to EPA standards because we had some piece that was intellectually protected. So there’s good reasons to do it and then there’s reasons that really impact users. And again, this goes into everything people do, their phones, their TVs, their microwaves, their cars. It’s a
deal out there. And it finally looks like it’s making progress. And there’s some bills in Congress right now, one’s called the Repair Act. So yeah, RepairRack.org, go there, fill out the form, it really helps. And people are really, really trying to fight. It’s been in battle for 15 years. The tide has definitely shifted directions and the OEMs are finally starting to be like, okay, we hear you, we got to do something because our own dealers, what they’re finding is their own
Paris Vega (31:58.617)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (32:11.215)
Amen.
Paris Vega (32:24.617)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (32:28.230)
not enough capacity in the market. So it’s shifted a bit.
Paris Vega (32:31.832)
Right. That’s interesting because it’s like the two different competing kind of American principles. If you got capitalism on one side and then like freedom and individualism on the other side, kind of overlapping and like having some friction there. So,
Tyler Robertson (32:39.834)
Thank you. Bye.
Tyler Robertson (32:45.510)
Yeah, I mean, the irony for me is, is like, not my business is succeeds because we don’t have right to repair because we engineer and build tools to work around what the OEMs will provide. So everyone’s like, Tyler, you shouldn’t be for right to repair because now you’re gonna have a whole bunch of competitors that can enter the space easier. Like, you know, that’s alright, though, because that’s, that’s, it’s not what’s best for me. It’s what’s best for the greater good here. And it is better for everybody if they have access to tools and repair information and knowledge. And I still believe
Paris Vega (33:00.032)
Thank you.
Paris Vega (33:03.152)
Bye.
Tyler Robertson (33:15.550)
make my company, I know it’ll make my company a lot stronger at the end of the day. And competition is a good thing. That’s not a bad thing. Because it usually forces your company to go take risks and do things they normally wouldn’t do. That’s how people and companies get better.
Paris Vega (33:20.953)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (33:30.596)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (33:33.532)
And your company’s positioned to be really competitive, especially like, because if you had to compete, you’ve got a lot more flexibility being, you know, no debt, don’t worry about investors. So you can still pivot like a smaller company and do what you need to do. And that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna do a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little
Tyler Robertson (33:43.530)
Yeah, yeah. So, and I was late to the diesel game, like diesel’s been around for a long time. Electronic engines started to happen in the mid 90s. And I just started eight years ago, at least when I started my business full time and the two years before that or three doing a part time. So there’s existing competitors and came into the space like big names, the audience would probably recognize like Bosch, Snap-On, some just big behemoths out there, billion-dollar companies with tens of thousands of employees. And here I am with some crappy GoDaddy website.
Paris Vega (34:11.016)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (34:13.450)
So I always tell people, like, look, you know, this is the great reset now. Now you got EVs, which is a whole new technology front. You got robots driving trucks and cars. That’s a whole new front. Now we get a good, it’s the great reset. Let’s all go see what happens here, you know, from around zero.
Paris Vega (34:22.832)
Bye.
Paris Vega (34:26.296)
Mm.
Paris Vega (34:33.413)
And that seems like a whole other issue of right to repair Like if you look at the leading EV stuff like with Tesla for example, I know that they have their hole like you have to use their whole network of shops and stuff right and chargers
Tyler Robertson (34:37.216)
you
Tyler Robertson (34:43.050)
Chargers. Yeah, yeah, you gotta use like, yeah, they’re chargers. I mean, it sounds like they’re gonna convert their chargers to work with others. But yeah, I mean, that’s anytime a new industry pops up, everyone’s got their own idea for a standard. And it’s just a battle to see who wins. And it’s going on right now with an R space with smart trailers. So trailers used to just be like these dumb boxes on wheels. But now they got sensors on the doors, the landing gear, the tires, the fifth wheel, the temperature inside, like it just, it’s crazy.
Paris Vega (34:56.516)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (35:06.257)
Bye.
Tyler Robertson (35:13.110)
there are like there’s literally like a dozen companies all arguing about whose connector should be like the industry standard right now the reason they want to be the standard so that they make the most money right so it’s it’s it’s like man I’ve seen this story play out like eight times so it’s just like have your popcorn and watch at some of these some of these industry meetings where everyone’s trying to talk through their points
Paris Vega (35:20.474)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (35:22.836)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (35:28.874)
Right.
Paris Vega (35:35.252)
So is there gonna be like an EV laptops or some kind of pivot sub brands or whatever? So,
Tyler Robertson (35:38.090)
You know, I’ll tell you where I think, yeah, so like, I mean, people always like, hey, Tyler, diesel laptops, that’s going to be obsolete, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, you know, you’re not wrong, right? Because we got EVs come in and now we’re doing stuff with like, you know, mobile phones and tablets, not laptops, right? So I’m like, you’re not wrong. But I think there’s actually a huge opportunity for us. So what, yeah, there’s some things that need to happen on the truck. And I’ve seen commercial trucks, I thought there’d be nothing
Paris Vega (35:46.032)
Thank you. Bye.
Paris Vega (35:49.717)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (35:54.617)
Right.
Tyler Robertson (36:07.970)
stuff but just not an engine. There’s cooling systems and more sensor. They’re more complex than people understand. But where the real impact for me is, is like, well, all these charging stations, they’re all controlled by computers. And they’re all, they all break and they all need diagnostic tools. So I’m like, oh, I’ll be a room here for someone to make and all makes all model charging station diagnostic tool. And the other problem is all these guys have is there’s so many charging stations, then you bring your truck in, you
Paris Vega (36:15.753)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (36:26.693)
Yeah
Tyler Robertson (36:38.370)
Is it the truck? Is it the charging station? Is it like what why is it not working? So people are already asking for all make diagnostic tools to help with the charging stations And I’m like man This could be actually a really big thing if if and when this whole thing takes off for commercial trucks
Paris Vega (36:45.977)
Okay.
Paris Vega (36:54.932)
So is that still the main type of product that you sell? I know that you’ve kind of, your website has a lot of different stuff on there now, but is it mostly like just centered around diagnostic tools? I think it’s a good idea to go to the website and see what you can do. I think it’s a good idea to go to the website and see what you can do. I think it’s a good idea to go to the website and see what you can do. I think it’s a good idea to go to the website and see what you can do. I think it’s a good idea to go to the website and see what you can do. I think it’s a good idea to go to the website and see what you can do.
Tyler Robertson (37:04.950)
So I can tell people that are listening, like the number of kits we sold last year didn’t change in the year before, but my revenue was up 30%. And it’s up for all the other things. So while we used to just say, hey, you buy a kit from us, you get all these, you get repair, you get training, you get all these things, it just comes with it, we realized a little bit ago that, oh wait, maybe any customer anywhere wants to buy training classes, not just our current customers that buy our kits. Or maybe any customer anywhere
Paris Vega (37:33.898)
Okay.
Tyler Robertson (37:35.130)
center and have a phone a friend to talk to someone about how to fix their truck or access to our repair information databases. So we’ve started to open up, yeah, I started to open up those proprietary things that were just for our customers and expand them to everybody else. So that’s a big part of it. And then we sell everything from, we sell everything that you could possibly use for diagnostics. It could be a $10 cable to a $10,000 professional tool or anything in the middle. And then we’ve launched our own brand of
Paris Vega (37:43.203)
Thanks.
Tyler Robertson (38:04.950)
tools kind of at every tier from entry level to professional. So we kind of got a way deeper portfolio and wider portfolio than we’ve ever had over here. And I used to think I was in the diagnostic tool business. Like now I’ve realized like I’m in the data business and data collection business and all the things you can do with data that you collect is just unbelievable. So it’s really made us refocus our company and really shift like, hey, where do we wanna put our resources the next five years? What are we?
Paris Vega (38:22.832)
Thank you. Thank you.
Paris Vega (38:25.879)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (38:34.950)
to be five years from now. So strategic planning and long term growth are definitely the main talking points around here lately.
Paris Vega (38:42.972)
That’s really cool how like you just trying to go above and beyond with customer service kind of evolved into these sub services like the training and the data and that kind of thing. And now they’re like separate pillars, like standalone parts of the business.
Tyler Robertson (38:57.090)
Yeah, like, first of all, we have no, everyone’s like, who’s your competitor? We have nobody that does like all the same things we do for those initial things. But for like some of the pieces, we do have some smaller competitors out there. But yeah, it’s been eye-opening to us. Like the training thing, like, and everything’s always a pivot, it’s always a change. So like, when we launched our training classes, used to be, oh, pay per online course or pay per hands-on course. And it kind of sucks to go sell 10 seats to 10 different people
class, we’re like, okay, there’s got to be a better way. So one of the pivots we’ve done here this year is like, okay, forget all that. Let’s just go to customers and just say for X dollars per month, you can get unlimited classroom training and unlimited online courses. Let’s just make it a peer subscription model. And by the way, if you buy a kit or you buy a support package, we’ll just include that with it. So it’s been trying to get smarter about how we sell things and making it easier for customers to engage and do business with us. So I, I’m in one of these weird spots where like, we don’t do up on phone calls. We don’t,
Paris Vega (39:42.336)
There you go.
Tyler Robertson (39:58.631)
We have a hard time managing the pure amount of volume and traffic coming at us efficiently. So it’s all inbound. Yeah, we don’t have all this people calling people trying to cold call or do any of that. Like we just do online marketing. I mean, in a given month, we have about 800 new customers. But the problem is we have so many coming at us, we’re not filtering them out. Like a guy that calls about a $10 cable, we’re kind of treating the same way as a $10,000 tool.
Paris Vega (40:07.032)
So you’re just about pure inbound sales.
Paris Vega (40:14.132)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Tyler Robertson (40:27.050)
throw more and more bodies in our sales department to keep using our old processes. So like I’m sitting here saying, man, we did 70 million in revenue last year. We’re blowing up our entire sales organization and having to redo it because we’re like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t work at our volume and our scale anymore. And I’ll never get to 100 or 150 or 200 if we keep doing it this way. Like we just can’t, you realize you can’t just keep throwing bodies at problems. You just, you lose that, you know, sense of efficiency through that process.
Paris Vega (40:47.937)
Right.
Paris Vega (40:58.152)
Okay, just a couple more questions here, because we’re coming up to the close here soon. So talk about your current sales structure. So you think of like your website, it’s a e-commerce website, right? You just think, well, a customer can just go buy something. So what’s the role there? Or what’s that, how does that work with actual sales people helping people buy online? Or how does that work?
Tyler Robertson (41:18.092)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (41:22.470)
So, yeah, so less than 20% of our revenue happens online. So the other, yeah, yeah, so the other 80% happens over the phone because, well, it’s B2B, first of all, and people that are buying our products, they don’t, I mean, there’s a website with 1,000 SKUs on there and 1,000 products. They don’t know which one they need. And some of these are pretty big investments. So a lot of it comes down to customers being like, well, here’s my situation, here’s what I work on,
Paris Vega (41:28.235)
Really.
Paris Vega (41:33.453)
Wow.
Paris Vega (41:36.274)
turn.
Tyler Robertson (41:52.590)
options and we have to be able to be like, okay, these are the options we’d recommend for you. This is the way it works. This is how you can pay all the things. So for us, the website is more of like we focus on traffic and we focus on conversions and conversions for us are definitely sales on the website, but it’s mainly how many website chats, how many people fill out a form, how many pages they visit on our website before they fill out a form. So our marketing department focuses on converting traffic is their goal. Get traffic, convert traffic, let sales go
close deals. So the problem we ran into is when you have hundreds of sales inquiries coming at you a day and you’re not filtering it all out, you end up have overburdening your salespeople. They have to become a subject matter on everything and you can’t do it. These are not people that come out of our industry. They’re entry-level salespeople. So we really stumble like the stat I can give the audience is like our paid search when people fill out a form. So I’ll tell you the good news is we have a 650% ROI.
Paris Vega (42:44.717)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (42:53.110)
The bad news is 96% of customers don’t buy a product from me within 120 days. And we spend about 2000 hours a month chasing down that 96%. So you start looking at 2000 man hours chasing down that 96% that never buy. You’re like, okay, what are we doing here? Why are we doing this? Like how can we be better at these things? And they sound like obvious problems when I say them, but that’s like months of us like having to figure out how do we measure this? How do we analyze it? Like, how do we do the data?
Paris Vega (42:54.832)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Paris Vega (43:04.232)
That was my Howard.
Paris Vega (43:09.732)
Bye.
Paris Vega (43:21.072)
right to even get that data and get that now I was about to ask like how do you know like how did you calculate out of that like or what tools are you using to figure all that out
Tyler Robertson (43:22.450)
Thank you. Thank you.
Tyler Robertson (43:27.030)
Yeah. Yep. So we use Salesforce for all of our CRM and everything we have in there. We have an insider company. We have a Power BI guy that grabs data from all these places and builds us beautiful dashboards. But all that aside, the way our processes worked, we couldn’t even, when we first said, what’s our ROI on paid search? We couldn’t even, because our processes were so broken and fragmented, we couldn’t even answer the question. So we had to go redo our processes,
Paris Vega (43:32.758)
Okay.
Tyler Robertson (43:57.010)
involved changed all the sales people and all the sales leaders. And then I was finally able to start getting some data in there to understand what’s happening inside your own company. But when you’re growing really fast, you don’t think about those things. You just think about giving me more traffic, giving me more phone calls, well, some more stuff. And we did that for seven years. And now we’re finally like, okay, we got to get, we got to get, we got to get better at handling what we got coming at us because getting new customers is the most expensive way to go grow a business. Let’s go figure out a way to sell more to our current customers.
Paris Vega (44:07.696)
Yeah.
Tyler Robertson (44:27.351)
instead. And we never go back to current customers and tell them about our new products besides a mass email campaign that goes out. We’re just not set up to do it today.
Paris Vega (44:37.032)
And so that’s one of the goals is to get better at selling into your own customer base.
Tyler Robertson (44:41.010)
Yeah, it has to, right? I keep telling them like, guys, I can’t, you can’t keep depending on marketing to give you 800 new customers or thousands of leads a month. Like eventually, eventually that well goes dry. There’s only so many customers. Like you gotta, we gotta start figuring out how to go get more out of what we got and get more efficient at what we got. Um, so it’s, yeah, I’ve thrown a lot of bodies, a lot of problems over the last several years and now it’s kind of like, okay, I don’t need more traffic. I just need to handle the traffic. I got better. Um,
Paris Vega (44:43.953)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (44:50.746)
Bye.
Paris Vega (45:09.232)
Thank you. Thank you.
Tyler Robertson (45:10.950)
And a lot of that comes from building the brand. So I wouldn’t change anything. I mean, it’s hard to beat, it’s hard for competitors to beat me when they’re searching for my name on the internet. That’s the fortune position we’re in now. I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it. I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it. I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it. I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it. I’m not sure if you can see it,
Paris Vega (45:11.532)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (45:17.253)
Yeah.
Paris Vega (45:20.932)
All right.
Paris Vega (45:25.572)
This has been awesome, Tyler. I really appreciate your time. I think there’s a ton of valuable lessons in here for the listeners and any other entrepreneurs out there trying to build a business. It’s really cool hearing your story from all the different phases. So let’s say we’ve got a thousand repair shops listening. What’s that pitch kind of to close out the show of why they should do business with you? I think it’s a good question.
Tyler Robertson (45:49.290)
Yeah, I mean, the pitch at the end of the day is basically, we’re here to save them time and money. If I can’t do both those things, you shouldn’t do business with me, right? But I do know our company, we sold tens and tens of thousands of these things. We have so many customers. I know I save them time and money. So we’re here if they need us to facilitate that. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Paris Vega (46:10.252)
Awesome. All right, shop owners, go get you some products from Diesel Laptops, save yourself some time and money. And, Tyler, thanks for being here.
Tyler Robertson (46:18.150)
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me come on the show. It’s a pleasure.
Paris Vega (46:22.932)
See you everybody next time.
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