00:00 00:00

Podcast

Why Truckers Should Start Planning for Winter in July

Learn why being proactive about working on your business and your commercial vehicles saves time, money, and frustration, and the importance of planning months ahead for winter.

Episode 329:  Being reactive costs the trucking industry millions yearly. Once something breaks down, it costs you so much more money than if you planned for it in advance. Most people understand this for fleets and owner-operators, but we see this all the time as we consult with heavy-duty parts manufacturers, distributors, and service companies as well. Ignoring parts of your business that are not working well or are looking like they will soon break down, is not a good solution for a lasting and successful business.

Our featured guest is Bill Fortney, Western Regional Sales Manager for Webasto. He explains that Webasto has a full line of fuel operated heaters which save fuel and reduce wear and tear on the engine by keeping the engine and cab warm without requiring idling. Planning ahead in the summer and fall and proactively making sure that commercial vehicles are ready for the winter can help us avoid spending more time and money when the winter does come.

Links

Sponsors of this Episode

Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation: Find out how many “fault codes” your heavy-duty parts business has. Meet with us today. Visit HeavyDutyConsulting.com

Hengst Filtration: There’s a new premium filter option for fleets. If you’re responsible for a fleet, you won’t believe how much using Hengst filters will save you. But you’ve got to go to HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/Hengst to find out how much.

Diesel Laptops: Diesel Laptops is so much more than just a provider of diagnostic tools. They’re your shop efficiency solution company. Learn more about everything Diesel Laptops can do for you today by visiting DieselLaptops.com today.

HDA Truck Pride: They’re the heart of the independent parts and service channel. They have 750 parts stores and 450 service centers conveniently located across the US and Canada. Visit HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/HDATruckPride today to find a location near you.

Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy Duty Parts Report may receive a commission. 

Transcript of Episode:

Jamie Irvine:

You are listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy-duty people.

Welcome to another edition of The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. In this episode, we are going to talk about why being reactive in the trucking industry costs millions of dollars every year.

We’re also going to discuss why it’s not too early to start planning for winter, and finally, we’re going to teach you how to make your own cup holders if you have an older truck that doesn’t have cup holders.

We’ll also talk about why it’s important to look to the market for testimonials on products and not just believe everything you hear, but you got to watch to figure out what we’re talking about with those cup holders. Alright, let’s get started. Being reactive costs the trucking industry millions of dollars every year. Once something breaks down, that’s when the costs really start to skyrocket.

We all know that downtime is far more expensive, especially unplanned downtime and roadside emergency is far more expensive than doing proactive maintenance and planned maintenance in the shop in a controlled environment.

Now, most people understand this when you’re talking about commercial fleets or you’re talking about even owner operators.

If you operate a commercial truck or trailer, you’ve been through the experience before and you know how true this is, although let’s face it, we all could use a little bit more education and reminders on that on an ongoing basis, but did you know that we see this kind of situation unfold in heavy duty parts, manufacturers, distributors, and parts and service companies all the time at the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation when we’re working with our clients? What do I mean by that?

Well, for example, just like if you were to ignore needed maintenance or upgrades on your commercial truck or trailer, that would lead eventually to a catastrophic failure and be very costly.

But on the parts side of the business, when you’re manufacturing or you’re running a distribution company or you’re doing parts and service, if you ignore the maintenance or upgrades or retrofits needed to keep your business moving forward and to stay kind of up to and exceed even the expectations of your customers and the changing landscape of the market.

If you don’t do that, your company will start to fall behind and just like a commercial truck or trailer, ignore it long enough, it’ll lead to a catastrophic failure.

Now, some examples of this are we’ve seen clients with ERPs, so that’s the computer software they use for accounting and for keeping track of inventory, things like that, that are 30 years old.

They’re not cloud-based, completely antiquated and the amount of time, effort, and money spent on workarounds to try to make that system work and now in 2024 far exceeds the cost it would’ve cost 10 or 15 years ago to just invest and update the system and to continue to update the system and keep up to date with whatever the new technology is.

Another example is you see this with marketing companies with websites that haven’t been updated since 2012.

They are so far out of date that they are doing nothing for the business. They’re not generating any leads and really actually they’re hurting the business because people who find the website go, what is this?

I haven’t seen a website like this in over a decade and actually does more damage than if they didn’t even have a website at all. Another example is with people.

Now, a lot of times we see companies where they know they’ve needed to invest in people, they can do the math and their most senior people are approaching retirement age and they just haven’t invested in updating their recruiting tactics, updating their training investment, and really making sure that their business has a strong succession plan.

We see these situations all the time at the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation and it’s very much like it is with the commercial truck side of the business. If you’re not planning for the seasons that are about to come, you’re going to be reactive and when you’re reactive, it always costs more. At the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation, HDC for short.

At HDC, we work with our clients all the time to help them to move from that reactive position to get into that proactive position. We help them to make the investments to plan, budget and execute on updating their company to get them to a place where they are going to be competitive and they are not going to slowly be approaching a catastrophic failure.

If this is something that interests you, make sure you reach out to us. You can go to heavydutypartsreport.com, click the consulting button in the top menu.

You can now text us if you’re listening on a podcast player of your choice by just going to the show notes in the pod player and hitting that text button, and you can always find me on LinkedIn. In my profile, there’s a book, an appointment link. There’s many ways to get ahold of us, whatever one’s convenient for you, those are the top three.

Use them, get ahold of us. We’d love to work with you and talk about your situation.

Now, if you are on the part side of the business where you’re selling parts, if you’re on the repair side of the business where you’re installing those parts and you’re responsible for maintaining commercial equipment, the interview that we have set up for this episode should be of interest to you.

But interestingly enough, we’re going to talk about a product that is typically used in the wintertime despite the fact that it is July and it’s probably 90 degrees outside.

Why are we doing that today? Well, because we are trying to set the lead of not being reactive, so we’re trying to help our audience be proactive, put a plan in place now so that when winter comes, they’re not hit with unexpected downtime.

They’re not caught by surprise with a breakdown, but they’ve done the things necessary to get their fleet ready for the coming winter season.

We’re going to take a quick break, stick around, and after the break we’re going to have our interview. Are you deferring maintenance because of filter cost or availability or worse yet, are you trading down to no name filters to try to save a few bucks? Either way, you are rolling the dice.

The good news, there’s a new premium filter option for fleets Hengst Filtration. If you’re responsible for a fleet, you won’t believe how much using Hengst Filters will save you, but you’ve got to go to heavydutypartsreport.com/hengst to find out more. That’s Heavydutypartsreport.com/hengst. Head there now.

At Diesel Laptops, they go way beyond diagnostic tools. They are your complete shop efficiency partner from diesel technician training to complete repair information, parts lookup tools and robust technical support. They are there to support you every step of the way. Learn more and download your free starter pack today by visiting diesel aptops.com. That’s diesel laptops.com.

We’re back for our break, and now it is time for our interview with Webasto where we are going to find out why you should start planning for winter in July. My guest today is Bill Fortney. He is the Western Regional Sales Manager at Webasto.

Bill Fortney is someone who has been in the industry for a lot of years. He lives in the Montana area and he’s worked as a diesel mechanic and he has extensive experience in the trucking industry. So we’re very happy to have him join us today. Bill, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. Very happy to have you here, sir.

Bill Fortney:

Yeah, thank you. Super excited to speak with you today.

Jamie Irvine:

So today I wanted to start our conversation by discussing some of the trends you’re seeing, and I think your perspective is going to be interesting related to the product categories that you sell now because of your background as a diesel mechanic. So what are you seeing in the industry? What trends are you seeing related to the products that you sell?

Bill Fortney:

It seems to be ever evolving, right? We see regulation. The trucking industry is faced with regulations yearly. We also are seeing the rise and fall of fuel costs, the rise and fall of freight rates.

So I would say trend-wise rates are down right now, which affects spending fuel is somewhat stable, but people right now are a little nervous about the economy, so they tend to be holding a little bit tighter to their money right now. That’s kind of what we’re seeing.

Jamie Irvine:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So when you’re now in the field talking to people, first of all, maybe just give us a little bit of an overview of some of the products that you’re selling that Webasto provides the trucking industry.

Bill Fortney:

So I think we’re best known for our heating solutions. We have a full line of fuel operated heaters, both diesel and petrol and a few different variations. So we have cabin heaters, which a lot of the class eight trucks will have a cabin heater nowadays.

We also have coolant heaters, which I think is a less talked about product honestly. So we have coolant heaters that they operate off of the fuel of the vehicle and they basically circulate coolant through the engine and they keep the engine warm instead of idling during downtime. As we talk about kind of evolving products and things like that.

We’ve also dipped our toes into the EV market as well, so we have a line of high voltage heaters now that are available for EVs. We have a full line of batteries as well for EVs, so it’s kind of ever evolving. We’re trying to stay ahead of the curve and the trends and such and just stay relevant really.

Jamie Irvine:

There’s so many ways for someone who operates commercial trucks and trailers to look at their overall costs and to your point with the current economic climate in the trucking industry, rates are still not great. There’s a lot of volatility. I talked to a lot of people at every level of the supply chain.

We were just at one of our clients who’s a repair shop and they’re saying that they’re having one month where they’re busy, they can hardly keep up in the next month where it’s kind of flat, and so that just kind of tells you what’s going on with their customers who are fleets.

So when you sit down with a customer and you want to talk to them about how to help the end users, the owner operators, the fleets, even the repair shops who provide service and install parts on your behalf, walk me through that business development conversation you have on lowering their total cost of operation.

Bill Fortney:

It’s been tough, right? I’ve been selling product for years and years, and when you go into a customer, especially a cold call and you’re discussing your products, the first thing is always price. Well, how much is it going to cost? Okay, well, we can go down that road. We are very competitively priced, but I’d like to divert the conversation once I do talk about price point to the savings aspect. Well, yes, our product is X amount of dollars upfront.

However, the payoff period is also very short. If you look at idling, if you idle a truck, I mean, I think the standard number everyone uses is a gallon to 1.3 gallons per hour to idle a truck. To operate one of our cabin heaters, you can operate our heater for a 24 hour period and not even match an hour of what you would do idle in the truck. So it’s multiple things. It’s wear and tear on the engine. We’re reducing wear and tear on the engine.

That is a big thing that people don’t think about. We’re reducing wear and tear on DPF filters, which just as well as I do, how expensive it is to not just replace, but also to service a DPF filter system and then the fuel, right? So it’s kind of a multi-level conversation and savings, but you put all those pennies together and they match dollars for sure.

Jamie Irvine:

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely true. I think also it’s really important for people to look at the whole picture, and I really feel for people who are operating commercial equipment, they have so many different suppliers where they have to consider which products are we going to spec.

They also have all these dashboards with telematics information and data that they’ve never had before, and it’s getting more and more complex. The actual equipment is becoming so complex. The challenges of running a commercial fleet today are just higher and more complicated than they’ve ever been.

So when you walk in and you talk to these customers, how do you simplify things for them? How do you explain to them what they should do? And what I was curious to know about is are a lot of your products already installed on the vehicles OEM and then they’re just buying replacement, or do you also talk to fleets about retrofitting to try to get a hold of some of those savings?

Bill Fortney:

Sure, yeah. It’s certainly a good mix of both. We do have OEM applications. We work with all the OEMs, so it’s basically kind of a point and click for the dealer that’s specking the truck. They can spec a heater or not. They can spec a bunk heater, a coolant heater, all those things. For me, supporting those OEMs is huge.

We have to be constant. We have to be in contact with them, we have to be providing support with them. But on the backside for us, it is finding those fleets that are not using our solution and kind of targeting them and saying like, Hey, this is where we can save you. This is what we can do to your business growth.

We don’t just want to sell a widget. That’s not our goal. We want to partner with our customers. We want to find solutions that are going to help and be lasting solutions, not just a one-time, kind of a one and done thing.

Jamie Irvine:

So in that situation where you’re looking to help a fleet make a good decision where they’re going to maybe do some retrofitting, they’re going to add some of your products beyond just the savings that you talked about already, what are some of the other things that maybe a person wouldn’t think of that contribute to the overall benefit to the fleet? I’m thinking in the way of how the driver is impacted, not just the equipment.

Bill Fortney:

Sure, yeah. Driver retention is huge, right? I think it costs a trucking outfit up to $5,000 between the recruiting process, the expense of bringing them to their facility to train and then to have them training for a week. So just a little creature comforts that you can offer. Certainly do help with driver retention. Driver happiness is big, and a past life was a dispatcher and have worked with drivers and it’s a rough life.

They have to deal with traffic, they have to deal with getting into a fuel stop. They have to deal with finding parking, all these things that are thrown at them that the general public doesn’t really think about. Just providing one little creature comfort could make a huge difference for their drivers, and certainly that’s what we are think.

Where I live here in Montana during the wintertime, we’re zero. We don’t technically drop below zero, thankfully very often, but to be able to park the truck, to have a heater to keep them warm instead of having to idle the truck, it’s a big package for them for sure.

Jamie Irvine:

Yeah, well, I live in the great way north. We do get below zero, so it’s pretty cold here. Okay. So beyond the heater, I was interested to learn more about the way that you were talking about the coolant and the heater there.

Can you walk me through that again and go into some detail? I’d really like to understand that better. Where are they installed? Where in the system are they put? Is it before the rad, after the rad? How does that work?

Bill Fortney:

So it typically is going to tie in with your heater core system on your truck. So it’s going to be after. Yeah, so basically it’s just that it’s a pump. It’s a secondary pump that’s going to circulate coolant through the heating system, and much like our air heaters, it just has a chamber that atomizes the fuel. It heats up and we extract the heat like a heat exchanger off of that, and we’re just circulating, continually circulating through the engine.

We also heat hydraulic systems as well, hydraulic tanks, fluid tanks like that. We have a paint striping company that we work with in Billings that uses our product to keep their paint warm while they’re spraying the epoxy, things like that.

Jamie Irvine:

Right. So in the truck, when you’re keeping that engine warmer, is that helping with hard starts and cold starts like that?

Bill Fortney:

Absolutely. So go back to the DPF conversation. I was around before, during, and now after the DPF craze.

So we learned early on, we had a lot of failures early on that oh ’07, ’08 year range where we were all clueless. We knew how it worked and we knew what the components were and what the insides of it looked like and what it shouldn’t look like when you pull one apart.

But for the opacity level, when you start a cold diesel, the opacity level is huge. Diesels nowadays with the EGR systems, they’re made to run hot. That is their most efficient target fuel burn.

That’s when they’re the cleanest. It’s kind of funny, it’s like they clean it up on the backend with the DPF filter, but that’s the way, that’s just regulation. So what we do is yes, by keeping the engine warm when it’s shut off, we’re reducing the opacity of the original startup.

So basically when you’re starting your engine after running our heater, you’re not going to get that big soot load on your DOC or your DPF filter, which causes face plugging, which in turn leads to more and more problems down the road, very costly problems down the road.

Jamie Irvine:

Yeah, absolutely. So when you’re out working with distributors and you’re looking at supporting end users, what’s an ideal customer for your company? Just walk me through the profile.

Bill Fortney:

That’s kind of the neat thing about here is I’ve been focused on the trucking industry for the last 20 years. Before trucking, I was a diesel mechanic in the Coast Guard for seven years, so I’ve done marine, so we have a huge marine division class.

Eight trucks is large. That’s the biggest target for us, but also we have construction. I’m responsible for Alaska and I’ve got people in Alaska using heaters on everything from excavators to bulldozers, you name it, our equipment is out there.

But also another market for us is the RV market, these small camper vans, the sprinter vans that people are building now and using those, and that’s a large market for us as well that we’ve been successful with providing heating solutions for.

Jamie Irvine:

Yeah, yeah, that’s great. So when you are out there and you find these different fleets, walk me through again the problems that they might be having that alert you to say, aha, I have a solution. How does those problems manifest? Again, I just want to better understand that.

Bill Fortney:

Well, I mean there’s a lot of discovery that goes into it. The way we target, we will go work certain areas. I live in Montana, which is somewhat remote.

So if I say if I’m going to Portland, Oregon, I’m going to do my research, I’m going to make some calls ahead of time and set up appointments and try to get just mine information out of these people, are you currently using our product? If you are, great, how is that helping you? If I do find out that they are using our product, it’s like, how can we support you better?

Then I try to take those little tidbits that I get from those customers that are already using us or our solution I should say. Then I can use those to go to other fleets and say, Jim’s Trucking down the roads using our are the results they’re seeing, fuel savings, DPF, maintenance drop, just overall driver happiness, things like that.

It’s really just a conversation. Every single conversation is different. I think it just kind of depends on how you approach the customer really. Like I said, I don’t want to just sell you a thing and run away. I want to sell you a thing and support you through the installation and partner up with you and help you grow your business.

Jamie Irvine:

Yeah, solve the problem permanently and get the benefit. Can you just tell us a story of one of your success stories where you’ve been able to really help someone? What was their situation, how did you help them, and then how did it turn out?

Bill Fortney:

Sure. So we have an owner operator based out of Helena that I’d worked with for years, and he’d go out on the road for three weeks at a time and then he’d come home, park his truck for a week and he’d plug it in, but was never really happy. The performance of the block heaters, the factory block heaters and such, they do okay, but when it gets really cold, they can’t keep up.

So talking with Kyle, we just discovered pain points like what can I do to help you during these situations? And the result was a coolant heater. We added a coolant heater to his tractor and we’re able to somewhat give him a peace of mind that when he goes home for that week that he doesn’t have to go and check on his truck every day.

He can have a little bit of relaxation, not think about work, and know that six days later when he comes back to his truck, it’s already going to be prewarm that he’s going to turn the key, it’s going to start. He doesn’t have to pay somebody to come out and jumpstart his truck for 400, 500 bucks, whatever that costs nowadays.

So just those little things that he was excited about, and he also uses it when he is out on the road as well. He’ll turn our heater on and he’ll circulate, turn his fan on and kind of use the circulation of the coolant heat through the sleeper as well, and kind of take advantage of the heat from the HVAC system of the tractor.

Jamie Irvine:

So for those of you listening, who’s thinking to themselves, we’re in the middle of summer right now. I got air conditioning issues, not heater problems. Why are we talking about this now? There’s two reasons. One, if you are selling parts, you are always working about a quarter ahead of what your customers actually need.

So that means that sadly summer’s going to come to an end and we want you to get ahead of this and we want you to start thinking about these products and make sure that orders are put in inventory is going to come in at the right time and you’re going to be able to support your customers.

If you’re selling parts, not just at the parts counter but out on the road, you want to think about this stuff ahead of time and make a plan for this fall to go talk to your customers, and if you’re running commercial equipment, you need to be planning this out. If you’re going to do some retrofits, if you’re going to be making some changes to the specs on what you use, now is the time to have the conversation so we can help you get so that when that cold weather hits, you’re ready to rock and roll.

That way you are prepared and I think that’s really, really important. I love the five P’s Bill. Proper planning prevents poor performance.

Bill Fortney:

Yes, absolutely. And you’re right, we do in this business tend to look ahead. It is tough to sell heaters during the middle of the summer without a doubt, and that’s kind of the talking point for our sales team.

We have a great sales team in North America, so we’ve got basically seven regions in the states and then we have four or five regions up in Canada, so we’ve got some great coverage up there.

Me being in the north, knowing about the cold, it’s a little easier for me to go out and sell heaters and talk about the benefits of the heaters for our territory guys down in Texas and the southeast, maybe a little bit tougher, but regardless of what climate you live in, a cold start’s a cold start, right?

Yeah. Does it make sense if you live down in San Diego or LA or Phoenix, it’s tough to justify a coolant heater, but your rigs running across the country, right?

You’re not just based in Phoenix. So just to plan ahead, like I said, the initial cost of it is always a stumbling block, but as we can prove out on paper that we actually will save money and that the payoff is very quick and it’s really tough to forecast maintenance, but just as well as I do that costs are going up.

Over the road maintenance for me in a previous life was tough because you have a piece of equipment that’s broke down out on the road and you’re almost held hostage sometimes, and that’s tough because you feel like you just don’t have a leg to stand on. So if we can help just one little tidbit of reducing maintenance costs, that’s certainly one of our goals.

Jamie Irvine:

Well, I was going to ask you what’s the one thing people should remember, but that is the one thing. So Bill, thank you so much for being on the show. You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine.

We’ve been speaking with Bill Fortney, Western Regional Sales Manager at Webasto. To learn more about Webasto, visit Webasto.com. Bill, thank you so much for being on The Heavy Duty Parts Report.

Bill Fortney:

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Jamie Irvine:

Well, I hope you enjoyed this interview, and I really think that it is important that we all, regardless of the role we play, what part of the industry we work in, what kind of responsibilities we have related to the trucking industry, all the way from the manufacturer right down to the person who’s driving the truck and everybody in between.

We need to be proactive and start thinking about what’s coming, because guess what? Winter is not that far away and now it’s time for That’s Not Heavy Duty.

In this edition of That’s Not Heavy Duty, I want to share a couple clips from a great video because here’s the thing, not taking the time to listen to what the market says, That’s Not Heavy Duty.

What do I mean by that? Well, when you are listening to The Heavy duty Parts Report and I have a guest come on and they talk about their products, you need to think about, okay, what do customers who are already using that product actually say about the product?

Or when you’re evaluating different service providers in your business, whether that’s the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation or anybody else, you want to listen to what the market has to say, and if you’re responsible for driving business.

If you’re responsible for that business development part of your business, whether you’re at the fleet level, whether you’re at the parts distribution level or the manufacturing level, if you are in business development, you need to listen to what the market is saying about your products, about your service, and about where you need to go as a company to fulfill and meet their needs. Listening to the market is really important, and it’s not that hard really.

You just have to take some time to talk to people who are in the position that either you are already in or you want to be in talking to them about their experience. So we’ve had Webasto on the podcast. Now, you’ve just completed listening to that interview. I want to share with you a video clip that I found, took me a couple seconds to find this video from Sam’s Trucks where he talks about his opinion of Webasto.

Sams Trucks Video:

The main thing I wanted to get to in this video is this. You need to put a Webasto on your diesel. Any diesel, get one great product. You literally, it’s plug and play. You don’t even have to read the instructions. It’s that simple. The main thing is finding a place to mount it underneath the hood or wherever you’re going to mount it, preferably underneath the hood.

Now, I paid 930 bucks for the whole kit, brand new, and that was dirt cheap. Now, if you’re in the Alberta area, I know International in Airdrie, Alberta carries them for 930 bucks, the whole kit, regular, like 1300-1400 bucks, anywhere else kind of thing. All you have to do is find a place to mount it. I made these little mounts here so it sits flat.

You tie it into your heater hose, and what it does is is it uses the diesel from your fuel tank to ignite a burner, and then it heats up your coolant, and there’s a little pump right back here that circulates all the coolant through your engine.

I ran a test the other day and it was minus 25 ish outside Celsius, and so I had the truck outside all night. It wasn’t plugged in, nothing.

I went out, started the heater, ran it for one hour, and then went outside and it was already at 170 degrees operating Fahrenheit, operating, so pretty much operating temperature, blowing hot air into the cab, very impressed, and it uses less than a cup of fuel in an entire hour. Now, the other cool thing, they have an exhaust right here and that gets real hot.

So if you just put two and two together, you run this, point it at your oil pan and you’re heating up your oil too, so you can run a thicker oil, which is generally cheaper. I’m running zero 40 just because I love zero 40 and I think it looks awesome, but hey, you can do whatever the heck you want.

Didn’t even have to read the instructions. I just plugged everything in where it said to go because it’s all labeled, and then you’re done. You have the little controller in the cab, which I just mounted right here, and you can set everything from, you can set it to come on at 5:00 AM Monday to Friday, and then at 7:00 AM or whenever the heck you want.

There’s a bunch of different options, so it automatically comes on, or you can set it to manual mode so it comes on its own, amazing product. I love it because the cab is instantly warm.

You turn your truck on and it’s blowing nice hot air right away, and it makes everything easy on your engine. This is not a sponsored video, even though Webasto, if you want to sponsor me, I will do whatever you want because I think you have an amazing product.

Jamie Irvine:

Now, this video was a couple of years old, so he mentioned just having a child. That child now is a toddler. Sam, I hope that everything is going well with your family.

You’re a local Albertan like me. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your personal opinion about Webasto and the products that they sell. I hope that helps you all who are listening today to get a feel for what someone in the market who’s used the product thinks about it.

Now, in addition to that, I promise that the outset of the interview that we would show you a unique way to add cup holders to your truck if your truck is older and doesn’t have cup holders. Sam had a really ingenious way of doing this, so if you’re watching the video version, I’m just going to let you watch it.

If you’re just listening, I’m going to describe it to you. So what Sam’s done is he’s taken a piece of wood, he’s drilled a couple holes in it about the size of what two cups would be, and then he has attached it with a bracket. Now you’ve got to kind of see it to really understand, so if you’re listening, next chance you get, just go to the show notes of this episode on the website and we will have the link to the full video where you can watch the video from start to finish.

I just think it was an ingenious idea and I wanted to share it with you because that also is heavy-duty, finding a way no matter how you have to do it.

Thank you again for listening to this week’s episode. By way of announcements, I wanted to just let you know that I will be traveling to Southern California next week.

We’re going to do some work with a client. I’ll be in the Los Angeles and Ontario area for a few days, so if you want me to stop into your parts and service company, or if you’ve got a fleet and you’d like to talk to me, I’d love to come see you, and if you’re in that area, why don’t you reach out to me and let me know where you’re at.

I’ll do my best to come see you. Also, if you haven’t already, head over to heavydutypartsreport.com. Click the follow button and sign up to our weekly email. You get one email a week so you never miss out on our content. If you like listening on the podcast player of your choice, hit that follow button for free.

If it gives you the option, we would really appreciate it if you gave us a five star rating and a review. We heard that that helps us to expand our reach, and if you watch the video version, hit the subscribe button on our YouTube channel. Thanks again for all the support, and as always, I want to encourage you to Be Heavy Duty.

Share this:
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Email
Related:

FOLLOW THE PODCAST

Receive a weekly email with links to the latest episodes.

You Won’t Believe How Much You Will Save.

Your Complete Shop Efficiency Partner.

The Heart of the Independent Parts and Service Channel.

Search