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All customers big and small 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.
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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
MTD February 2018
