“He looked at me dead serious and said, ‘Don, if my trucks don’t run I don’t deliver a loaf of bread and nobody gives me any money.’ And that’s the bottom line.”Īnd while it might be difficult for a truck dealer to see his products as “a necessary evil,” Emerson has come to appreciate that many customers simply want a tool that works so that they can focus on their real business.
“I told him he could tell me within a hundredth of a penny what a loaf of bread costs, but that he couldn’t tell me within a buck a mile what it costs to run his trucks,” Emerson says. A deal to sell trucks to a local bread company helped get the business off the ground, and Emerson still recalls a conversation with the fleet manager.
He learned early on that, for his dealership to be successful, he would need to be his customers’ equipment expert. Simply, customer expectations are different. They think the trucks just come with the bodies they need.” “We deal with people who aren’t even in the trucking business, and a lot of time they don’t understand what it takes. They negotiate the price and then they go home with it,” he says. “When you look at the word ‘dealership,’ people think ‘car dealer.’ They walk in and expect their vehicle to be ready to go.
Just don’t get a negative-and wrong-impression. It might sound inappropriate to say that Don Emerson has built Portland, OR-based FMI Truck Sales & Service on the confusion of truck customers, but it wouldn’t be completely inaccurate, either.
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