Overcoming Entrepreneurial Challenges With Jared Kugel of Tire Agent

Jared Kugel is the CEO and Founder of Tire Agent, an innovative e-commerce platform revolutionizing how consumers purchase and install tires across the US. Tire Agent has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies, ranking #936 on the Inc. 5000 list, with Jared himself being a 2024 finalist in the New York area’s Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. An expert in automotive, e-commerce, and fintech, Jared is dedicated to providing exceptional customer service and fostering strong partnerships within the tire and automotive industry.

In this episode…

The automotive industry is known for its tight-knit community and loyal professionals who often spend their entire careers in the field. How did one entrepreneur leverage this industry culture to build a successful e-commerce tire business from scratch?

According to Jared Kugel, Tire Agent started with a simple LinkedIn message and evolved through multiple iterations before finding its footing as an online tire retailer. Jared faced numerous challenges, including financial hardships and countless rejections from investors, but persevered through sheer determination and the support of industry connections. His journey highlights the importance of adaptability, resilience, and building solid relationships within the automotive sector.

On this episode of Gain Traction, Mike Edge welcomes Jared to discuss his entrepreneurial journey in the tire industry. They discuss Jared’s background, the inception of Tire Agent, early challenges in fundraising and business development, and the company’s growth into a successful e-commerce platform. Jared also shares personal anecdotes that illustrate the dedication required to launch a startup in the competitive automotive market.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• [01:54] Jared Kugel’s first job and early challenges
• [02:56] Managing 15 kids versus managing 100 adults: Jared’s perspective
• [03:35] The journey from family tire business to founding Tire Agent
• [07:39] Jared’s LinkedIn message that led to a $750,000 investment
• [11:17] How Tire Agent pivoted multiple times before finding success
• [17:32] Crazy customer service stories
• [21:25] The comprehensive structure of Tire Agent’s customer service
• [23:24] How Tire Agent partners with dealers for mutual growth

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jared Kugel on LinkedIn 
• Tire Agent 
• Eric Gill on LinkedIn
• Gills Point S Tire & Auto Service 
• Mike Edge on LinkedIn
• Tread Partners

Quotable Moments:

• “I was answering the calls on holidays, weekends, and the middle of the night. I did not celebrate a holiday or birthday; I was all in.”
• “If it no longer is fun or you don’t enjoy it anymore, you shouldn’t be doing it — because this is something you’ll do half your day.”
• “You can never be happy if you never experience sadness — you appreciate the highs much more.”
• “We want to create a foundation of friendship and family when you’re building a business because that’s what helps grow.”
• “Without customers, there is no business; if you take care of your customers, they will take care of you.”

Action Steps:

1. Personalize customer interactions: This builds a deeper connection with customers and ensures they feel valued.
2. Invest in comprehensive staff training. This will ensure that staff is knowledgeable and prepared to offer the best customer service, reduce errors, and enhance customer satisfaction.
3. Implement a dedicated post-sale support team: Creating specialized teams for post-sale support, such as warranty handling and package tracking, ensures that customers have a seamless experience even after the purchase. 
4. Leverage multi-channel customer acquisition: By partnering with platforms like Tire Agent, dealers can gain additional customers without extra marketing expenditure, thus diversifying their customer acquisition channels.
5. Regularly review and update customer service protocols:  Adapting to changing market conditions ensures the business stays responsive to customer needs.

• Gain Traction Podcast
• Jared Kugel
• Mike Edge
• Tire Agent
• Tread Partners

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Mike:

Hello folks. Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast. I am Mike Edge, your host. Today’s guest is Jared Kugel, founder and CEO of Tire Agent. Tire Agent is one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies in the United States.

Before we get started, this podcast is brought to you by Tread Partners, the leading digital marketing agency in the tire and auto repair space for multi-location operations that have five to hundreds of locations. Tread Partners works exclusively with tire and auto repair dealers and shops. Don’t waste time and money with marketing agencies that don’t specialize in this space. Get with Tread Partners today and make your marketing predictable and profitable. If you have 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 shops, contact Tread Partners today. To learn more, visit TreadPartners.com.

As you guys know, I like to mention past guests. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to listen to a podcast I did with Eric Gill of Gill’s Point S Tire. This guy is on fire with solid growth and an incredible company. I’ll tell you, it was kind of funny when we met, we found out we were the same age, graduated high school the same year. But he grew up in Oregon and I grew up in Kentucky, and we ended up, we found out at the same lake in Wisconsin as kids, which is just bizarre. But I mean, you never know how God works or how he brings you into these situations or whatever. But Eric’s a great guy and I think you’ll enjoy the podcast. Check it out, please.

So without further ado, let’s gain some traction with Jared. Jared, welcome to the Gain Traction podcast.

Jared:

Thank you so much for having me. Super excited.

Mike:

Glad to have you. I’m excited to talk more about Tire Agent. I’m excited to let the audience know more about what you guys do. But let’s back up a little bit and tell the audience a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, and something like what was your first job?

Jared:

All right, so my first job was a camp counselor.

Mike:

Oh, nice.

Jared:

And as you can imagine, it was not the most amazing job to have, but it was cool. It was my first experience.

Mike:

How old were the kids?

Jared:

Oh man, they were probably maybe eight or nine, and I was, I think, just finishing high school at the time.

Mike:

Nice.

Jared:

I can tell you I don’t have the energy for that anymore.

Mike:

How many kids at the camp?

Jared:

I think I was in charge of maybe 15.

Mike:

So was this like a day camp or was this overnight thing? Or what was this?

Jared:

No, no, no. It was a day camp. And I can say that it’s harder to manage 15 kids than it is to manage 100 adults. I think I’ll stick to what I’m doing now.

Mike:

I wouldn’t doubt it. That’s funny though. That gives you a lot of perspective though, right? I mean, another thing that’s a challenge is they’re all the same age, so they’re egging each other on or challenging each other and dares or whatever it is.

Jared:

Yeah. I mean, my first job after that, I was working with my family in the tire industry also. We had a bunch of retail stores and wholesale centers, and that’s where I got my foot in the industry. And you know what they say, once you’re in the tire industry, you never leave.

Mike:

Yeah. I left for a little bit. I’ve always just been strictly on the marketing side, but I left for a little bit and then got an opportunity to come back and I dove right back in. And I know I’m not going anywhere now. It’s kind of like what they say. What is it? It’s either the smell or the rubber gets in your blood or something like that. Yeah. I love everything about it. But I’m on the side that I just love the people of the industry. And I think everybody knows that that meets me. I really truly like the people of this industry as a whole.

Jared:

Oh, yeah. I often tell people one day when I get married, it’s going to be like the SEMA show. I mean, my best friends are in the tire industry, people I’ve known for 10, 20 years; people I talk to on an everyday basis, not even just about work, but just about sports or whatever the topic may be. I’m usually talking to somebody in the industry because it’s people I grew up with. Even the people that are new that fall in love with it, you could see they never want to leave. The people in the tire industry, and in the automotive industry in a more broader sense, are some of the best people I’ve ever met.

Mike:

I know.

Jared:

You get loyalty because people stick with the same companies for years, or they stick with the same customers for years. And even if they move to other positions, they’re still keeping in touch. I mean, they’re the warmest people, they’re the most loyal people, and more importantly, the most down to earth people I think of any industry out there.

Mike:

I think this is funny, because he and I are the same age as well, we found out, but Mike Graber, president of Toyo Tire, he said one of the things he liked about this industry is, “I just like it because it’s not corporatey. Everybody’s down to earth.” This is the guy that’s president of a corporation, and he likes the fact that it doesn’t feel corporate. I think it says a lot and it says a lot about the company. But ultimately, I think that’s what we all like about it.

It doesn’t mean things don’t change and we’re not moving forward or whatever, because I think what you brought to the market space is a new… I mean, it’s not new in the sense that there’s other people doing it, I realize. But you guys, let’s shout out a couple of the accolades you guys have. You’re one of the, I think it’s Forbes’s Fastest 5,000 Companies?

Jared:

No, no, no. So I was a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the New York area. We won two times. Now we’ve been listed on the Inc. 5000.

Mike:

Inc., that’s right.

Jared:

Yeah. Of the 5,000 fastest growing companies. And I know there are some other awards there. But to be honest with you, I don’t think of them as individual awards. I think of them as awards that we won as a group.

Mike:

Oh, absolutely. I know that with your personality, man. I could sense the whole team aspect there.

Jared:

Oh, the people I work with, I mean, some of these are my best friends. Our second hire that we ever had, his kids call me uncle. I mean, I’ve known him. Me and him are so close. My head of marketing, him and I hang out. My controller and I go clay shooting. Almost everyone here, we hang out together. We do personal things together, not just come to the office and leave. You want to create a foundation of friendship and family when you’re building a business, because that’s what helps grow. If people just treat it like they’re just collecting a paycheck, they just don’t take it as seriously. So all the awards I win, I think of it like we win it together. In fact, when I win the awards and I get a trophy or a plaque, whatever, I don’t have it at home. I have it in the office. This way people could feel like it’s part of all of us.

Mike:

I love that. Let’s back up. Talk a little bit about Tire Agent, how you conceived the idea and why you wanted to do it. I love hearing about some of your early challenges and how you overcame a lot of really negativity when you’re trying to raise money and whatnot.

Jared:

Crazy is the best way to describe it. I was working at my family’s company at the time, and I knew there had to been something else. My philosophy has always been whenever you’re doing a job, if it no longer is fun or you don’t enjoy it anymore, you shouldn’t be doing it. Because this is something you’re going to be doing for literally half of your day every day of your life. So I got to a point where I just said, “I’m not happy with what I’m doing.”

So I went on LinkedIn. And if you believe that the power of the universe is always around you, well, one day I go on LinkedIn, I don’t know why, but I click on a person that I don’t know. I said, “You don’t know me, but I have an idea for a tire company I think you need to know about.” I messaged him. He goes, “Can you send me a deck?” And I’m thinking, “What the heck is a deck?” I thought it was something that goes on the back of a house. I didn’t know it was a presentation.

So I go online and I just type into the site, “Can someone make me a deck for $100?” I give the guy a Word document of my idea. He spits out a deck presentation. I give it to this guy on LinkedIn. All of a sudden he goes, “Can you hop on a call in 20 minutes?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I can do it.” So I’m taking the call from my car because I don’t want people to listen to what I’m doing. We have a call. I’m thinking it went terrible. We have another call with another one of his partners. Again, I didn’t even know what the guy did for a living. I just saw the name investor under his name. I didn’t know anything. All of a sudden he goes, “Can you meet me in my office a couple days later?” Okay. Day number seven. Day number seven. So day number one was when I messaged him, day number seven comes. I get a call. They make me an offer to be an investor in Tire Agent.

I got to tell you, the idea was terrible. The original idea was just awful. So I don’t know what they were thinking. And I found out years later that had I have not messaged them that particular time, then it would’ve been too late or too early. The timing just worked out perfectly. So they wrote me a check. They made me sign some paperwork. I quit my family’s company. I went to my brother. I said, “I quit. I’m giving you two weeks.” Gave him two weeks. And my brother goes, “You’ll be back.” And I’m like, “Nope. I’m making this work.” And that was it.

And then what happened was I go through this tech accelerator. Again, my idea was not good. We experimented with four different businesses. So we kept pivoting every few months with a different business idea until something hit. Eventually demo day comes where you have to present your idea on stage in front of almost 1,000 people. Keep in mind I’m a very shy person when it comes to public speaking. I don’t like it. I do it sometimes, but I don’t like it. I pitched my idea. And the day before I go on stage, I get a deal done with one of the largest backed by insurance companies. So it’s a road hazard protection idea that was backed by one of the larger insurance companies. So we signed the contract before we go on stage. And my idea was okay, but at that time it was mobile tire installation. But that was way too early. Right? This was seven years ago.

Mike:

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Jared:

So I get 60 meetings. All 60 meetings don’t pan out. And this is where I was telling you the story earlier. One of the guys who rejected me ended up later becoming a customer.

Mike:

I love that. Yeah.

Jared:

So anyway, demo day ends. I now become broke. I literally have nothing. I get a letter from the bank that my apartment’s about to get foreclosed on. I’m literally eating crackers and jelly to survive because I can’t afford food. So whatever change I found around the house or whatever possessions I sold, that’s what I did. I sold some stuff. I sold my own possessions online just to get money for whatever I can afford. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a group that had seen me pitch on stage got together, rallied together, and wrote me a check for $750,000. And that then took me to the next stage of my business. And then from there, we started the concept of Tire Agent in 2017. I think it was June maybe.

Mike:

Just to be redundant here, for the sake of the listener, we’re talking about selling tires online.

Jared:

Yeah. That’s right. Because by that time I was evolving into online. So June 2017 is when we got the offer to start the company, so forth. September 2019 is roughly, give or take, when we actually started to sell tires online for real. And three months later, I basically was experimenting with different business ideas while I got the money back in 2018. I was trying to experiment different ideas. We’re almost out of money. So of course now I’m almost homeless again. No, not to that extent. Just kidding on that extent. But then my investors were like, “You need more money.” I start pitching the idea to every venture capital I could find. I got rejected by a whole bunch. The number is so big, I wouldn’t even know what the number is at this point. The group came together and said, “You need money. You have something here.” They took a chance on me and we raised almost $1 million. And from there I was like, “Okay, now we have legs. Now let’s really take the idea of selling tires online to the next level.” And then we went full force.

Thankfully we became cash flow positive very quickly. We started hiring the right people, started growing it out. Even though people twisted my arm, I no longer did customer service after a while. Because I wanted to answer all the calls. I wanted to make sure I was in touch with the customer.

Mike:

Well, I mean, I think you told me before we jumped on this call, one of the things, you had to be customer service, because you couldn’t afford anybody else.

Jared:

Oh yeah. I was everything.

Mike:

You answered the chats. I mean, everything.

Jared:

Do you want me to say the story now?

Mike:

Oh, absolutely. We’re here. Tell us.

Jared:

So obviously I was own customer service. So I’m answering the phone, I’m doing the chats. And I literally did not sleep. I’m working crazy hours. So it’s middle of the night. I’m working at the office really late. Well, not really office. We’re using that term really loosely. At that time, I’m working out of almost like a WeWork type of scenario, like a co-working area. So I’m leaving now super late. I get chats. And like any entrepreneur, I’m answering the chats on my phone.

Mike:

God, I love this story. This is [inaudible 00:14:27].

Jared:

I didn’t have enough money. I didn’t have enough money to pay for those unlimited data plans. So as I’m walking, my internet just cuts out on my phone. And I’m like, “Oh my God.” I’m in the middle of a chat with a customer and I’m trying to sell them some tires. I literally am running from building to building that’s open. So any little store I could find, I’m like, “Does someone have Wi-Fi? Anyone?” So finally I got Wi-Fi after a few buildings, and thankfully the customer didn’t leave the chat. He was just waiting. So I answer, and I ended up selling him a set of tires from the chat on my phone.

Mike:

Cha-ching, man. That feels good right there.

Jared:

But back then you’re grinding, you’re hustling, you’re trying to do whatever you can. But what we were saying before is you don’t worry about the pure economics early on. You worry about just giving people the best customer service you can do and put together so that people can really remember who they’re buying from. Because tires are very commoditized and it’s very easy to forget that when you’re in the day-to-day, that people can get tires anywhere they want. They can go to a chain store. They can go to a mom and pop. They can go to a big box. They can go online. And so the only way you could really separate yourself is by giving people a customer experience that they can no longer forget. And so I was answering the calls on holidays. I was answering the calls on weekends, middle of the night. I mean, I did not celebrate a holiday, a birthday, friends having kids, nothing. I was all in on this business 100% all day every day, sacrificed anything you can imagine.

It’s been the best journey I’ve ever been on in my life because you remember every low you have and you appreciate the highs that much more. Someone once told me that you can never be happy if you never experience sadness.

Mike:

I agree. That makes a lot of sense.

Jared:

Yeah. And I really do believe it because when you start your business, it’s very easy for people to be negative. Like, “Oh, it won’t work.” Or, “Oh, okay, give it a shot,” but they don’t really take you seriously. When you’re an entrepreneur, you remember of those things, because you want to say one day that you were able to do something that nobody believed you were capable of.

Today, we’re one of the largest online retailers of tires, which I’m very proud about. But more importantly, I’m proud about our online reputation. If you look at our online reviews, they are stellar across almost every review platform. And it’s because we take training very seriously. I want customers to walk away saying, “This is the best purchase experience I’ve ever had.”

Mike:

Well, listen. All right, so that leads to another story you told me. And I think it’s important because everybody knows I like a good story and I like a little humor. Tell the audience the story about the girl and her mom that you gave a good customer experience to. They wanted a longer relationship with you.

Jared:

Oh my God. I have two stories that I’ll share. One was I answered every call nonstop. Never missed a call, as long as I could help it. I must have been on the phone with this customer taking my time, because I always believe you never rush a customer off the phone. I don’t care whether it’s two minutes or an hour or more, you never rush a customer. So I was taking my time. I’m walking this customer through every tire possibility for the vehicle. I’m being professional. This person must have had a screw loose or something. I don’t know what happened. But this person got her mom on the phone and was like, “Will you marry me?” And I was like, “What is going on? I’m just trying to sell a set of tires.”

Mike:

Whoa, where are we going here?

Jared:

And I thought she was kidding.

Mike:

Yeah, right. Of course.

Jared:

But she wasn’t. She was dead serious. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah.” I was like, “So do you want that set?” I was like, “How do you keep a straight face?”

Mike:

The sad thing is, I mean, maybe nobody had ever treated her nice, and then she gets this first experience and you’ve just set the world on fire for her.

Jared:

I had one customer that asked me for a refund because his brother ran off with his wife and stole their car with the tires that they bought.

Mike:

And he wanted you to give the refund.

Jared:

Yeah. And I was like, “I don’t know what to say about this one. I feel like this is bigger problems than a set of tires.”

Mike:

Yeah, exactly. Wow.

Jared:

This was when I was doing customer service seven years ago.

Mike:

I understand.

Jared:

So today, thankfully, I think people are a little bit more normal.

Mike:

Well, let’s talk about with your staff now. I mean you’ve grown from you doing everything in customer service, to how big is your staff now? The entire staff, your whole company?

Jared:

I’ll answer it a different way because it’s a lot easier if I do it this way than just giving a number. We’re very, very organized. We have a customer service team. We have a post-sale support team. So we have people that handle warranties. We have people that actually just track the packages to make sure they’re being shipped out on time and make sure that nothing is going wrong with it if possible. We want to make sure people have the best experience. So we have people that do the chat and do the customer service. We have another team that tracks the package and the flow. We have another team that does warranty. We have another team that does supplier follow-up and manufacturer follow-up to make sure everything is going smooth post-sale. Then we have a full-on marketing team. Then we have a procurement team, the ones that are buying the tires. We have a social media team. When people give a number, they’re not giving the full context. I even have a quality assurance staff where they listen to all the calls to make sure customers are getting the quality.

Mike:

I love the way you just described this because what it’s taken my mind is I can picture Jared walking around Manhattan being customer service on a chat to now you’ve got different teams for every aspect of the customer experience. It’s not just a team for customer service, it’s broken down for process.

Jared:

Oh, yeah. Because what we don’t want is we don’t want customers to get in the shuffle. We don’t want them to feel like a number. We want to make sure that people leave with an excellent experience as often as possible. And so even when someone becomes a customer service person, they have to go through three weeks of training, one week of shadowing, and then one week of mentoring. And then we do quarterly training on the products so that they know how to explain the product to people.

Mike:

That’s awesome.

Jared:

Professionalism is the highest priority here. And every person that does business with us from the supplier level to the retail installer level knows that we really value our partnerships, we value our customers, and we want to make sure that no customer has an inconsistent experience if we can help it. We want to always make sure we give them the best experience possible. And so what we were saying before is, I know I’m saying it way ahead of time, but without customers, there is no business. And so if you take care of them, it’s good for the business.

Mike:

I’d ask you for words of wisdom, what would you tell the audience? And that was it. You live it, and this is proof. The customer’s the only thing that matters to you.

Jared:

And the thing is, we don’t stay complacent. Every year, every six months I am re-looking at our protocols and I am looking what to fix to make sure we are being flexible with the customers to make sure that we are adapting to the environment that we’re in.

Mike:

Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Jared:

I was going to say, no matter how big you get, you got to always remember that customers are people, and you have to be flexible certain times because things happen to people that are not always in a set protocol. And so we try to teach our people to not just think with SOPs, but think also with your heart if the situation warrants it.

Mike:

Yeah. No, I like that. Let’s talk about how you can help dealers. A lot of my listeners are dealers, tire dealers, multi shop operations, and a lot of single shop operations as well. But where does Tire Agent work within the industry, and how do they work with dealers?

Jared:

The best way I like to explain it to dealers is that most dealers that I have met spend money on marketing, and you can never replace that. But what we do is we give dealers free lead gen basically. They get listed. We vet them. Assuming they pass the vetting, we want to work with them. We want to make sure they have a good online reputation. We want to make sure they have a clean store. We want to make sure they give good customer service. They check those boxes and they have good equipment, we want to work with them as one of our installers, and we want to give them our customers to do the install. So we have a very easy process to get onboarded. And once you’re onboarded, we want to then work with you and say, “Hey, the customers that are buying tires from our website, let’s show them who good installers are to go to.”

So now imagine a dealer is working with a marketing agency to bring in leads, but then also blending that with free leads. Because you never want to rely on just one channel. You want to have a multi-channel approach. So we just are another channel to get them customers, and all they have to do is do the installation. And while they’re there, customers may be like, “I want an oil change. I want mechanical work done. I want a wheel alignment.” Because we’re never going to get into that. That’s not what we do. We sell tires. We want the dealer to do what they do, and we want to do what we do. But we think of the dealer as a partner. We are not thinking of it as two separate transactions.

If they want to get started, by all means they can go on TireAgent.com. We have a section to sign up as an installer. We have a whole onboarding team. I forgot to mention that. So we have a team that only works exclusively with installers to make sure that if there are ever any issues that happen, we could troubleshoot it right then. They communicate with them. They have a dedicated team that they can talk to. And so we really try to bridge that gap.

When I started in the industry, there was a lot of tension between brick and mortar and online, as if they were two competitors battling. It does not have to be that way. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. Online should complement brick and mortar. Online should never compete against brick and mortar. What we should do is work together to grow and service more customers.

Mike:

Absolutely. Well, and the other thing is too, here’s a question I could see coming to mind if I’m a dealer. Let’s say that you sell a customer a set of tires. They get shipped to my operation, my shop, and I install them. I may get some other mechanical work out of them, et cetera, brakes, whatever. Then a couple years pass, or not even a year or whatever, but that customer could technically come back to me and buy tires without you even being involved, couldn’t they?

Jared:

Yeah. Well, here’s what we do.

Mike:

What I’m saying is, the value you’re bringing in a sense is you’re saying, “I’m going to keep the customer because I give them a great customer experience,” if I’m understanding this correctly.

Jared:

Correct.

Mike:

You’re going to keep the customer more on the service side, but we can mutually work together. Is that [inaudible 00:26:30]?

Jared:

Yeah, that’s basically what it is. I mean, the way I look at it is if we do our job correctly, that customer is going to want to keep buying tires from us. But we don’t want to handle the service. We want our partners to handle the service. And so technically, yes, you can theoretically lose a tire sale. But if you’re good at what you do, we don’t worry about that. We want to do what’s right and we want to give the customer the best experience. And we want you, the dealer, to really help us and build the industry together for customers. And we want you to get [inaudible 00:27:01].

Mike:

And that’s what I wanted to convey, in the sense that for the dealer’s aspect, look, you’re putting all your chips on the table in saying, “Hey, I am going to keep the customer because I’m going to give them a great experience. And I’m going to vet you to be a dealer, but we’re going to work together. And I believe that I’ll keep the customer because I’m going to give them a good, on the tire side, a great customer experience. You’re going to keep them because you’re going to give them a great service experience.”

Jared:

Exactly. And I’ll tell you this, we have an incredibly high repeat purchase rate, like incredibly high, and it’s because we do everything we can. But also, our installers, we continue to sign up new ones. We don’t do the whole listing everybody that approaches us. We will never do that.

Mike:

Let me make a pitch for you, because I deal with and talk to a lot of folks that are not in the tire industry and they might be multi-location operations that do service and repair and they sell tires as an add-on, but it’s never on the front side. That’s a perfect relationship to start with with some of these guys. I mean, you might as well get this opportunity of working with Tire Agent, get these tire customers into your shops, and then continue to take care of them on the service side.

Jared:

Exactly. Exactly. And aside from that, we have some people that come to us and they don’t want to sell a tire, they just want to install it. We actually have people that have said to us, “We don’t sell tires, we just install.” Because they don’t want to deal with the headache of things that can happen if it goes wrong, like warranty or whatever. I don’t mind handling the warranty. If you’re going to sell a tire, I don’t care if you’re online or in person, it’s your job to handle the warranty. If you’re doing the service side of the business, then it’s your job to be the best at what you do with the service side. And we should look at each other as partners, not competitors, because ultimately I don’t care if a website wants to be the cheapest person online, if they don’t have good customer service, if they don’t have partners and dealers to work with, they’re not keeping that customer. You don’t want a customer who’s not going to value things beyond price. You want people that are going to understand that.

Mike:

As we wrap up, how can a dealer get in contact with you if they want to ask you questions? Because let’s say someone wants to do a little research. How do they reach you?

Jared:

Super approachable. They can either reach out to me on LinkedIn. Or if they want, on TireAgent.com, we have an installer page that they can sign up, and then someone on our installer team will reach out to them and walk them through the process. And the best part is they don’t have to think about it because we have a very streamlined process that makes it completely easy. We even have a portal that they can track all their customers and when the tires are coming. It’s just very user-friendly.

Mike:

I love it. So it’s TireAgent.com. T-I-R-E-A-G-E-N-T.com.

Jared:

That’s it.

Mike:

Anything else you’d like to say?

Jared:

No, other than the fact that I love this conversation. I feel like we could have talked for hours about the industry.

Mike:

There’s no doubt about that. And look man, we’ll have to have you back and get an update of where you’re at a year from now or something. But I love what you’re doing at Tire Agent. I wish you the best of luck. I can’t say enough. I really appreciate you being on the podcast.

Jared:

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Mike:

Awesome. To all our listeners out there, thank you for being part of the podcast. We are grateful for you. If you would like to recommend a guest to me, please email me at [email protected]. Until next time, be safe. Have a great day.

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