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On this episode of All About The Car, join Rob and Bryan as they chat with longtime Associates, Doug Eichten and Dennis Adamski, about what it was like to launch the Commercial/Farm division of Schierl Tire & Service. Dennis (pictured left) has been along for the ride since 1966! Doug recently celebrated 28 years with us.

John "Butch" Schierl purchased his first Commercial/Farm service truck around the time Dennis started with the company. Dennis trained alongside the first Commercial/Farm Service Technician while he continued to work at the tire & service center. Back then, there were no booms on the trucks and most of the work was done with hand tools and an air compressor. The second truck was added in 1980 and tools continued to improve. Today, Commercial/Farm Advisor Doug shares that our fleet has grown to 17 trucks with state-of-the-art equipment that gets the job done and keeps our Service Technicians safe. Listen here for stories about the old days and read the transcript below.

 

 

Rob:

Welcome to our podcast, All About the Car brought to you by Schierl Tire and Service. I'm your host, Rob Hoffman an auto service specialist with over 44 years of industry experience. We're back in the studio again today with Doug Eton, Dennis Adamski, Brian Call. And we're talking about the 65th anniversary of Team. Schierl Companies focusing, especially on Schierl Tire and Service. And this is the second part of a three part series on our 65th anniversary. And oh, so the stories will continue to be told. So hop in, buckle up, hang on. And let's hit the road. So Denny you're the, the old timer here in the group. So I'm gonna just like narrow in on you just for the time being you started back in September of 1966.

Dennis:

Yeah.

Rob:

And you've probably seen just about everything, including commercial and farm tire service,

Dennis:

Right from the beginning, Butch had just gotten the first service truck and Dave Dansik was running it at that time. They trained me along with him along with working in a tire center. And I've been at it ever since.

Rob:

So just kinda explain what the commercial and farm tire service end of our business is. Mobile tire service is really what it is. It's a truck set up to go out to farms and trucking fleets or roadside breakdowns and repair replace tires, am I accurate when I say that?

Dennis:

Yes you are back then versus now is a whole different world. At that time, it was a electric calcium chloride pump with 55 gallon drums mix your calcium chloride with a broom stick.

Brian:

You had bags of powder didn't you? You mix it with the water and you...

Dennis:

Hundred pounders that nobody wanted to handle that we would get in by a semi load. You had to load it everything by hand store 'em in old truck body, then rehandle 'em again, as you needed it, going out, compressor was a gasoline powered Wisconsin engine on it. No tailgate, no lift, no boom. Everything just basically air driven, compressor and electricity and no bead breaker, no power bead breaker hammer and chisel.

Rob:

Oh gosh.

Brian:

So it's like a great big pickup truck and a strong back

Speaker 2:

Rob:

Go ahead, Denny. You can say it. Those are the good old days.

Dennis:

And they were, I'll tell you what, I still enjoy coming to work as much now as I'd did then basically, because of the clientele I've gotten to know through the years. I've grown up. I'm dealing with a lot of my third generation already.

Brian:

Yeah. I believe that.

Dennis:

And they call me and I'm kind of proud of that.

Brian:

You should be it's a hell of an achievement

Dennis:

And I've proud to say I've never been thrown off a yard yet. Come close once.

Doug:

You were telling me a story once where they were all thrown in a dollar and betting on who could get closest to what age you were.

Dennis:

Seneca's crew. At that time, I was in my early sixties and,

Rob:

Oh a young guy then

Dennis:

Two or three years ago, I went out basically the same crew and they did it again. and it was really something

Brian:

That's pretty fun.

Dennis:

They said you can't be 70 years old and still doing this.

Brian:

Oh, it shows you how the, the equipment that's changed over the years.

Dennis:

Equipment know how and how you go about it. It came natural for me. I grew up started changing tires on a farm when I was eight, 10 years old. And it's something I just liked and working with the people I've been invited in houses to eat supper and dinner already, and I've done it already. Cuz you have to these people, aren't happy you guys have both dealt. I don't know if you you've been on service calls haven't you?

Rob:

Oh yeah.

Brian:

Oh yeah.

Dennis:

If you don't talk their talk and walk their walk, they shy away from you.

Brian:

Well you gotta take care of 'em.

Dennis:

You gotta take care of em. It's the only way your business and your reputation is gonna grow.

Rob:

Well, Schierl Tire and Service has been growing and evolving. I would imagine the service truck fleet has grown as well. The next truck came around in the company in 1980?

Doug:

1980. The... I wasn't there at the time. I'm younger than Denny.

Rob:

As we all are.

Doug:

But the story I was told when I took over the Marshfield location is that when we bought that business from the current owner that the commercial farm service technician and truck came with the building.

Rob:

Bonus.

Doug:

Yeah. Didn't have to hire or train nobody.

Rob:

So that was our second truck.

Doug:

That was our second truck.

Rob:

Okay.

Dennis:

Along with the repairs.

Doug:

Yeah.

Dennis:

Constantly

Rob:

The more trucks in the fleet, the more repairs are needed, right Denny?

Dennis:

Never ending.

Rob:

Never ending.

Brian:

To keep the trucks up and going.

Dennis:

It's it's a never ending battle.

Doug:

One thing I wanted to bring up is that Denny, both you and I are not large men. And that's one of the misconceptions of people that to do this job, you gotta be a big burley guy, but yet you gotta be a guy that understands leverage and angles and how to use your equipment. And you know, if you look at the equipment, that's on a truck today, we have lift gates that lift a tire up into the back. So it doesn't hurt yourself. We have a mobile crane that helps you move the big loader tires around. We have pneumatic tools to break the bead loose. We have cordless impact wrenches to take nuts off and put 'em back on.

Rob:

State of the art.

Doug:

All kinds of warning lights, by the way, anyone listening to this. When you see a service truck on the side of the road, move over and slow down, come on now,

Rob:

Little safety plug by Doug Eton there.

Doug:

You better believe it. I got a team to protect

Dennis:

Talking about people changing tires and that, especially your big fireman commercial stuff, it's not the body size tire changing it... Basically geometry.

Doug:

It is.

Dennis:

All starts out from zero. You start learning the leverage points and stuff like that. And do your lubing and stuff like that. Use your Jack in that to help you out your boom whenever necessary. It's not that hard of a job gets tough. Ask for help.

Doug:

Yep.

Brian:

You have the tire work for you.

Dennis:

Yep.

Brian:

Use the tire, the weight of the tire...

Dennis:

The tire has to work for you yep. The tire, the car, the Jack, all your equipment is there so that that's there to help you. You don't use it. You keep it in that compartment. You're gonna come back tired hurt. And you're not gonna like your job.

Rob:

You know what comes to mind? Working smart. Not hard. I would imagine that if you get a call from, let's say a farmer during a rainy season and their tractor is out in the middle of a field in the mud, in the rain and can't move. Who are they gonna call? It's gonna be you right Denny? And how are you gonna fix that tire?

Dennis:

Well, you got two options. Either get a bigger tractor and pull it outta there or else, get that same tractor, pull you in there. Hope to get yourself situated and just start jacking. I've got blocks left in a few different places in the ground to this day. Six, eight feet down.

Rob:

Get plowed up a couple years, years from now.

Doug:

Just keep putting...

Dennis:

You get a linko or a combine and you're in for trouble there's no bottom underneath you.

New Speaker:

Yeah, just keep putting another block on top until ever it stops.

Brian:

Start double jacking Jack to Jack.

Doug:

It's like a bridge piling.

Brian:

Yep.

Rob:

I can't imagine all the tools that you have to have on that truck. There's gotta be hand tools bars. Doug, you had started to talk a little bit about how those trucks are equipped, but how do you keep these trucks equipped and with what?

Doug:

Well, we have a list of all the tools that are supposed to be on every truck. And then we do an inspection several times a year just to make sure that they're all there, but there's a handful of tools that you use on every single job. And so you take pretty good care of those. And then we have a lot of specialty tools that we do kind of a different thing. Where when somebody learns about a tool, that's gonna make our life easier or more efficient then we'll buy one of them, test it and see if it works. And if it works, then we expand it through the whole fleet and every truck gets one or at least every location gets one. So...

Brian:

Going back to when Denny started, we had one truck.

Dennis:

Yeah.

Brian:

So when did that fleet start expanding?

Dennis:

Well, in 80, when we bought Marshfield, we got another truck and then the next step was in Wisconsin Rapids. We built a new store and put a truck in place there.

Brian:

That was 1985 if I remember right.

Dennis:

85 yep.

Brian:

So 20 years in the business and we're up to three trucks.

Dennis:

Yep.

Brian:

Wow.

Doug:

And then when we built Plover, then since Plover was near Steven's point, we put a truck in there and then

Dennis:

We covered for Plover for a number years.

Doug:

Lot of years.

Dennis:

Yeah.

Doug:

Yep lot of years

Dennis:

Before they had a truck. I covered it all Portage county and Waupaca into Rapids, all of that with one truck. I mean, we were all over the place. We probably would eat with that one truck. We covered more miles than each tire center does right now. It was just a bigger circle at that time.

Brian:

Sure.

Doug:

Sure.

Rob:

So the first 20 years,

Doug:

That's 32 internationals on the road all the time.

Dennis:

yeah,

Rob:

No, it was 52.

Dennis:

52.

Doug:

Wow. That's right. It was 52.

Rob:

So the first 20 years we ended up with three trucks, obviously that's accelerated a little bit.

Doug:

It is actually we added another location in Medford in around 2000. We bought out an existing dealership and that had a service truck as well. And then we partnered with a company down in Lavalle Wisconsin. It's a small town down by Wisconsin Dells called Hartje Tire. And that location had two trucks at the time. I believe we added a third truck, ironically, that is our largest commercial and farm location out of our chain. And then we built a new center in Weston, right by St Clair's hospital.

Rob:

There comes another truck or two

Doug:

That was 2003 or 2005, somewhere around there.

Rob:

2003 yeah.

Doug:

Yeah. Another truck there. And then our businesses continued to expand. So we've added multiple trucks. We just added two more trucks we're up to 17 in the central Wisconsin area. And it's pretty remarkable. Cuz if you add up all the service trucks from all our competitors, I don't think they have 17 trucks when you add 'em up.

Rob:

So what type of marketing or how do you get the word out to the public and all these businesses that we're here to serve and come out and serve their tire and farm tire needs. How do you get that word out there? What are some of the creative things that we've done?

Doug:

Yeah, it's really remarkable because people always say, well, you should advertise more, but if you're advertising to a farm segment, the immediate question is where do you put that at? Because everybody listens to something different. It's very regional. The country music station in Marshfield is not the country music station they listen to in Steven's point. So our entire scheme, so to speak is all of the people that run our service trucks are our ambassadors. So when we go out and take care of a guest, we make it a point to talk to 'em generate some kind of relationship with 'em, understand them better. And then when we don't have things to, to do will actually go out and stop into people's places and introduce ourself and ask for their business and it's done really well for us. And it's, it's almost like the people on the service truck are running their own independent business, but we're financing the whole thing

Rob:

Does lunch on the farm spark, any memories?

Doug:

Yeah. Oh yeah. We've done all kinds of things we used to do called farm user meetings where we'd invite a whole bunch of people in for pancake breakfast. And then we changed that to, we would go to a specific farm and we'd invite all the neighboring farmers to come in and we'd bring in our vendors. Goodyear would come in or we brought a bank in once and we'd talk about the products and the services that we have. And then we did a really interesting thing. One in Hartje one year was lunch in the pit and our salesman at the time in that area used to work for a asphalt excavating company down there. So we knew the whole procedure at the asphalt pit. So when the trucks came in, they have to actually spray the box with some kind of oil, So that the asphalt doesn't stick. So what we did is Mike Kelly was his name is when the truck pulled up, he would spray down the box so that the driver could get out. And we were grilling bratwursts and hamburgers and we served him lunch. And so then when they got done eating their lunch, their truck was ready to go. And then when Mike was done spraying the box, he would look at all the tires on the truck and then contact the company and let 'em know what all the tires looked like on each individual truck. So it was a lot of fun.

Dennis:

Yeah lunch on a farm was the same way.

Doug:

Yeah.

Dennis:

I mean, you get to these people one on one, never ask him what they have for problems. They'll usually come to you once gain that confidence.

Brian:

It's quite the change over your career, going from one truck up to 17 trucks now.

Doug:

Yep.

Dennis:

Yep.

Brian:

It's been,

Dennis:

I haven't even seen 'em all yet.

Brian:

you haven't?

Dennis:

No.

Rob:

Well, it's been quite the ride again today and I thank you very much to Dennis, Adamski, Brian Call and Doug Eton for joining the ride and filling us in on all these great stories about the commercial farm division of Schierl tire and Service. We hope to have you ride along next time on All About the Car. To listen to previous episodes, find additional resources or to simply send us a message head to all about the car podcast dot com. We'll see you next time.