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Managing the risks of road service

TravelCenters wants to expand across America

By Bob Ulrich

On Nov. 2, 2016, TravelCenters of America LLC changed the landscape of the domestic truck tire industry. That evening, Barry Richards, then executive vice president, announced the formation of the TA Truck Service Commercial Tire Network. With 243 truck service facilities, TravelCenters instantly became the largest truck tire dealer in the U.S., selling Goodyear, Bridgestone, Michelin, Marathon, Kelly, BFGoodrich, Cooper, Yokohama and Continental tires. It planned to add Pirelli commercial tires into the mix when the brand became available domestically.

Fifteen months later, Modern Tire Dealer met with Richards, now president and COO; Skip McGary, senior vice president, truck service; and Greg Ford, director of commercial tire sales, to see if the company had followed through on its goals to not only meet tire demand at its truck stops, but also exceed its reach. The quick answer is yes, thanks in part to an aggressive customer expansion strategy.

MTD: Is your new commercial network set up to sell tires to smaller fleets as well as the large fleets?

Richards: It is. Tire sales have always been a part of our company. But they were primarily directed at national tire accounts and emergency tire services. People used to look at us as their emergency tire repair center or provider. Now they can look at us as a full-service dealer, and across the country, not just locally or even regionally. That includes selling to smaller fleets. We often work with tire distributors and dealers as a secondary source of tires.

MTD: Does that mean you are competing against your suppliers, and vice versa?

Richards: To be as sensitive as I can about it, a lot of our suppliers are competing with us directly. At one time we were restricted as to the customers we could sell tires to outside national account business.

McGary: If we had an emergency roadside repair, we could take anybody’s product and put it on roadside. But if someone wanted us to come to the yard and put on tires, we couldn’t. All the major brands with national accounts did not want us competing against them. We just came to a point where Barry made the decision that we had to be something different.

Richards: There were trucks driving all over the highways pushing Goodyear, Bridgestone and Michelin, and it was really getting restrictive. They were encroaching on our business. We looked at I don’t know how many years of downward tire sales figures. We had to do something to level the playing field. We just realized we had to have more freedom to sell products.

Goodyear was the first to embrace us as a dealer, and has become our premier partner. Unless we are performing emergency road service, we still need permission from Bridgestone and Michelin to sell their tires off-site.

Skip McGary (left), Greg Ford (center) and Barry Richards are in charge of tire sales at TravelCenters of America.

Everybody had to come to an agreement that we were still going to be able to help each other. That’s still true today. We’re a big force out there. They need our outlets. They need their product moving through our sites. And we needed the ability to completely service our customers, which includes selling them tires. I understand their dilemma. They’ve got dealers out there and here we go passing by with our trucks loaded with tires. That’s got to cause some friction. I don’t know if it will ever get worked out 100%, but it’s been pretty friendly to date since we all came to agreements on how we would work together.

McGary: It has been. We try to all keep in mind that we’re trying to service customers. What the customer asks for, what the customer needs is what we want to provide. If the customer asks our tire network to go out and put tires on their truck at a service yard, then it’s in the best interest of the tire manufacturer and us to be able to do that. Although their dealer may say, “That would have normally been my business,” it just as easily may not have been.

Richards: We had some large fleet customers call the manufacturers and ask, “What is going on? You’ve got to allow them to service our trucks in our yard.”

Our new customers are a different story, but that’s where Greg’s team comes in. Everything Greg’s team is doing is incremental and business we wouldn’t have had in the past. If we sell them tires, they may have needs for fuel, preventive maintenance and oil changes, and hadn’t really thought of us. And if they need vehicle services, I can leverage those things to get their tire business. It’s working out pretty well.

MTD: Did you ever have any restrictions on performing service work in your bays?

McGary: No. Anything that’s in our scope of service we can

do anywhere, any way we want to. We are expanding that out into our OnSITE Program, where we’re going out working yards, and doing things like inspecting trailers and trucks. We do a lot of that for Amazon. We inspect their trailers before they hit the road to make sure they don’t have a breakdown and a late delivery.

MTD: I would assume the larger fleets demand you get certified or pass certain criteria to be able to touch their vehicles. How far down does that go? Is a fleet that has 20 or 30 vehicles large enough to dictate that, or is that too small?

McGary: I don’t know that any customer really dictates our training or certification level except for Freightliner. To be a warranty certified organization for them and carry their flag, we have to train to their standard, and we do. As a matter of fact, we train well past their standard.

All our employees, including our 3,000 technicians, go through extensive training, both online and in the classroom. We have three training centers in the U.S. One is in Lodi, Ohio, one is in Nashville, Tenn., and one is in Eloy, Ariz., right outside of Phoenix. Every technician who works for us, once they achieve a certain amount of online training through Freightliner, then they’re eligible to go to one of our training centers and take advanced training.

Advertised truck tire prices In “Road King” magazine, produced exclusively for TravelCenters of America LLC, trailer tires are advertised by brand.

• Goodyear and Continental tires cost $479 each. • Marathon, BFGoodrich, Yokohama and Firestone tires cost $379 each. • Kelly tires cost $309 each. • Roadmaster and Dayton tires cost $289 each.

“Need steer or drive tires? Add $40 per tire,” adds TravelCenters.

MTD: You handle the training, Skip?

McGary: Yes. We have a training department that runs the training centers. But my team and I set the curriculum. We tell them what we want to learn. Freightliner has about 100 certified trainers in the United States. Ten of those people work for TravelCenters. These people have to have an ASE certification for a number of systems, including electrical and brakes, before we let them work on them alone. That pretty well satisfies the criteria for the smaller chains.

Ford: We have purchase policies from all of our customers, big or small. When we pull their name up, it pulls up all their equipment and needs, and what they require done on their vehicles, and we follow those policies.

MTD: Do you have enough technicians?

McGary: We do, but we hire every day. Techs are hard to come by in the industry. If anybody says they aren’t looking for techs, they know something I don’t know. We look for more of a skilled technician than probably most on-highway shops and maybe most tire shops or tire dealers normally would because we do so many other things.

MTD: On your website, you promote Goodyear retreads. Is Goodyear your only retreaded tire supplier?

Ford: We now carry the Bridgestone retreads as well.

MTD: Do you source and bill through Goodyear and Bridgestone?

Ford: For the retreads we work with the local dealers. We’re not today doing our own retreading. We’re trying to work in the industry and support the industry and the retreads, using local suppliers and local vendors. I couldn’t say we wouldn’t think about doing our own retreading in the future if it made sense for us. How could you not think about it? But today our stance is we think it’s good for the industry and good for us to work with local suppliers, and support them and they support us. We create a lot of casings. It’s a good relationship.

MTD: Do you have growth plans for the number of TravelCenters? You’ve been at 243 for a while.

Richards: I’ve got an interesting thought on that. We’re always looking for places. To build them is a big deal for us. We’ve got big parcels around the country where I guess we could build on them, but we’ve had more success acquiring independents and investing money and converting them to a TA or a Petro. Those places have done very well for us historically.

You can’t set a target on the number of truck stops or you’ll start working against yourself on price. We buy when it’s optimal to do so. We were on a spree for quite a while. We had a number of folks calling us and bringing us projects. But it’s thinned out quite a bit.

I think by focusing on providing tires and service to some of the smaller companies that are all over the United States, we can maybe make the pie bigger for us. We’re having a lot of success taking service to people. There’s a limit to that unless we add more brick and mortar. A comfortable reach for us is 50 or 60 miles for road service. As such, we’re not going to kill the market for the little guy because we can’t reach all those customers that the locals have and are servicing today.

MTD: How much inventory are you carrying at each location?

Ford: We have probably 600 to 900 tires per location, depending on the location.

Richards: We have a lot of tires. They don’t all fit indoors.

MTD: Are you thinking about adding Tier 3 or Tier 4 tire brands to your portfolio?

McGary: We are. We haven’t added any low-cost radials yet, but we do have some customers asking for those products.

Charles Darwin, who originated the theory of evolution by natural selection, said, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change.” TravelCenters has proven adept at initiating and managing change in the truck tire industry. It may also turn out to be the strongest and one of the most intelligent. ■