Revolutionizing Tire Sales With George Silagadze, Vice President of TireConnect

George Silagadze is the Vice President of TireConnect, a company that has revolutionized how tires are sold. He founded the company in 2013, and it was acquired by Bridgestone in 2015. George has worked with Bridgestone to transform the tire sales landscape, revolutionizing the practice through direct referrals and online platforms.

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In this episode…

The true definition of entrepreneurship is the ability to recognize a gap in the marketplace, fill it with your own ideas, and abilities to satisfy the desires of the consumer. There’s no better example of this than the story of George Silagadze, who combined his background in digital marketing with his frustration getting quotes on tires for his wife’s car. This led him to launch TireConnect, which started as a website called Get New Tires and quickly evolved into a valuable entity that was acquired by Bridgestone.

On this episode of Gain Traction, George Silagadze, Vice President of TireConnect, joins Neal Maier and Matthew Peters to talk about his amazing entrepreneurial journey born out of frustration with a common problem in the tire industry. George tells the origin story of TireConnect, discusses its evolution and how it eventually came to be acquired by Bridgestone.

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

• George Silagadze explains how TireConnect helps tire retailers
• Why George created the brand
• How TireConnect came to be acquired by Bridgestone about two years after being launched
• Where George looks for inspiration to improve TireConnect’s process for customers
• How George navigates through the complexity of the tire business
• Why TireConnect has been slow to embrace specialty tires
• George shares some helpful advice for others in the tire industry

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• George Silagadze in LinkedIn
• TireConnect
• Bridgestone Tire
• Neal Maier on LinkedIn 
• Matthew Peters on LinkedIn
• Tread Partners

Transcript

Mike:

Hey folks, Mike here. I want to invite you before we get started today, to join us in Durham, North Carolina, September 28th through the 30th at the ASTE Show. That’s the Automotive Service and Technology Expo. You can find out more about it at asteshow.com. That’s A-S-T-E-S-H-O-W.com. Look for me there, Mike with the Gain Traction podcast. Hope to see you there.

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.

Neal:

Hi, this is Neil Meyer and I’m joined by Matt Peters. We’re the host of Gain Traction where we talk with top automotive business leaders about their journeys. Before we jump in with today’s guest, this episode’s brought to you by Tread Partners. At Tread Partners, we provide digital marketing for multi-location tire dealers and auto repair shops. Using our strategy, branding and marketing services, we help shops sell more tires. So what are you waiting for? Visit us at treadpartners.com. Today, we’re joined by George Silagadze of Tire Connect. George, welcome to Gain Traction.

George:

Thank you.

Neal:

Well George, let’s start by talking a little bit about Tire Connect. I imagine a fair number of our listeners are familiar, but tell us a little bit about Tire Connect.

George:

Sure, so I always talk a little bit of defining Tire Connect in a concise way, but basically I would say the best way to describe it is it’s a commerce platform purpose build to help tire retailers to sell and buy tires, and when I say tire retailers, it’s a broad term. It can apply to actual tire dealers, mechanics, car dealers, fleets, and so on. So it could be anyone really who again sells or buys tires. So we have a suite of solutions that helped make these processes more effective, efficient, and just take the hard work out of it.

Neal:

I was trying to think back about when we first met. It’s been years and years ago, but Tire Connect’s gone through quite an evolution through the years. Let’s start off by why did you create Tire Connect?

George:

Yeah, I mean well, for me it’s an interesting story I guess hopefully for your listeners as well, but it started actually, so my background in my past life, pre Tire Connect is also in a digital marketing space and I had my own little company for about a decade since early 2000s basically building websites, applications, doing some helping companies with marketing and in about, I want to say 2012, and I’m in Canada so winter tires is a big sort of thing here, big deal and every year practically you have to deal with that awesome experience. So as part of that, I was actually looking for tires for my wife’s car and especially at that time, you basically had to jump on the phone and start calling essentially, right? If you want to get some quotes and it’s very frustrating process at that point, definitely was at that point.

And after a few hours doing that, you usually, kind of the way it works, you call a few shops and then you get maybe a couple of quotes right there. A couple of them say they’ll call you back and then never do, and then at some point you just get tired and you’re like, “Okay, this is the best option.” And you can go, you kind of settle and go with whatever you found. So that just, again, it was really frustrating and I thought, “Okay, there must be sort of a better way of handling this.” So I came up with a concept essentially, which we called at that time get me tires and there was a retail website where we worked with independent local dealers and try to get them to list their tires on the website and customers would go on and look for options. So just trying to solve this problem.

So we ran that for about a year and a half and then we signed up a couple of good-sized tire dealers to participate in our platform and then it sort of clicked where we realized that as opposed to trying to build a destination website, which is not easy. At that point it wasn’t easy. Now it’s even more difficult, but we realized that there is an opportunity for a B2B platform, B2B solution where we provided software to retailers to help them sell tires and make those tires available on their website. So this was kind of transition from a B2C solution to more of a B2B solution where we started working with tire retailers and help them to sell tires, display tires on their websites. The main issue or I guess the challenge was the fact that we naively, and I think naivety is sometimes it’s a good thing with the startup because you don’t know the issues and the problems and the obstacles you’re going to run into, but then as you encounter them one by one, you can overcome and it works.

But when you look back and think, “Holy moly, if I knew what I was getting into, I probably wouldn’t do it.” So we again, I really thought that dealers or clients would be able to load their inventory onto our platform manually or semi-manually and work out fine, but then we quickly realized that that’s not going to work, because most of these, especially small shops don’t stock any tires, so you needed live connections to their wholesalers and to their suppliers. So that was really the connect in Tire Connect. So we started building infrastructure that allowed us to connect to first, Canadian wholesalers because again, that’s where we started from and I think we did a good job in providing coverage when it comes to this connectivity to wholesalers first couple of years, and then we decided to move out of Canada and expand into US. At that point, we had maybe three, 400 clients who used our tools on their website and at that point it was limited to basically you can show tires on your website, you can price them, and you’re able to provide quotes to customers.

So that was the extent of the functionality at that point and then we again start calling on US clients and one of the clients was Bridgestone. Obviously, they have a very large presence in the retail space with Firestone Complete Auto Care centers. So we called them up as a potential client, but then the conversation progressed very quickly and we realized that they’re interested in potentially acquiring us and technology to offer that up to their dealers for various strategic reasons. So within I want to say six months, essentially we agreed to be acquired. We felt it’s a good enough fit for us and we felt that being part of Bridgestone, it would allow us to scale much quicker and provide resources obviously, Bridgestone as an industry leader.

And that happened, that was basically in 2015. So we’re talking about three years. So since then we’ve been part of Bridgestone and all our plans and hopes materialized in our platform’s growth. We now have over, I can’t remember the exact number, but about over 6,000 retailers or client locations that we work with in US and Canada. It’s going to split about 70% US, 30% Canada, and we extended our platform quite significantly. So from that base inventory connection and basic functionality for your website, we expand it into a lot of different sort of areas and directions. Obviously we offer full transactional capabilities now when it comes to selling tires, ability to sell tires to your customers, there’s a lot of features that I’m not going to list here that we added, but it’s a full start to finish, end to end commerce platforms if you want to connect to your vendors, display that inventory those products on your website and then have the ability to create customers to get quotes and schedule appointments and purchase tires.

And then we also expanded into procurement. So procurement is a big area of focus for us and this we’re talking about now the other side of this coin. So initially again, we kind of focused on selling tires and when we talking about procurement, we’re talking about buying tires and that part of it was kind of neglected I would say. A lot of solutions, a lot of even things like your point of sale system, most of these point of sale systems, they do a good job in terms of facilitating what you need to do when you’re working with a customer in front at the counter, but they’re not sales tool. So this was a start of our in-store and procurement journey because we realize again, the point of sale systems that most shops use nowadays, again, they’re not designed to be a sales tools.

So we built a tire focused sales tool or solution that makes it much easier for staff members, for counter staff members to work with a customer, can engage them in that buying process, make them feel like they’re not, it was sales sort of situation where somebody’s trying to sell me something, I don’t know why and are they being honest with me? Are they being transparent? What am I buying? You know what I mean? All these kind of questions that a customer typically has when they come to a tire shop.

We’re trying to basically alleviate these concerns I guess from a customer perspective. So we started with that. So we offered an in-store sales solution and then we extended it into where you working with a customer, you working with them and you found the tire that they agreed to buy, and now if you need to source that tire, you can very easily see where it’s available within your supplier network so to speak, and you can very easily purchase it basically, order it right there and then it’ll show up in your shop. So that area is a big sort of expansion target for us, and we started working with the entire focus businesses or tire centric businesses when it comes to that and then we realize honestly the same problem exists when you’re talking about general repair shops or fleets. So we work with few car rental companies for example that leverage our procurement platform very effectively.

So that’s the journey. I think the latest addition to our platform, a bigger notable thing would be wheels. So we added custom wheel kind of side to our solution, I want to say late last year. So it’s been quite popular. We already have a few hundred clients using it as well. So because again, we notice that there’s no solution out there that unified tires and wheels in a good cohesive, holistic way. So we felt, “Okay, there’s an opportunity there to assist our clients.” Because obviously a lot of businesses that sell and install tires, they also offer wheels. So it just makes sense, right? So long-winded sort of answer, but that’s the story and progression of evolution of Tire Connect up until today I would say.

Neal:

It’s an incredible journey. I want to take you back a moment back to 2015. Had you considered an acquisition prior to meeting with Bridgestone?

George:

No. To be honest, no. It was very surprising because we were really early in our journey. So it was Lily, myself, Chance, my partner in crime sort of and we had one more person working for us full-time, helping our clients with technical questions and set up and whatnot. So it was literally two and a half people and I would say we were a baby of the company. We didn’t really have any meaningful revenues to speak of or anything like that. We just had I think good core technology, good core group of clients and validated product market fit. When we started talking to Bridgestone as I mentioned, it was just another client that we wanted to potentially work with. So yeah, no plans. It wasn’t planned let’s put it this way.

Neal:

I wish I would’ve been a fly on the wall in that meeting because you put one heck of an impression on them for them to come back and say, “We should try to just buy the company.” That’s fantastic.

George:

Yeah, it was literally a second meeting. It was really a roller coaster of a conversation from where it started to where it ended, very rapid change and progression. So we had to make a decision quickly basically.

Neal:

Right. Well, clearly it was the right one. I mean I look at the growth through the years and my gosh, it’s taken off. As you and Tire Connect work to develop different functionality. I mean at this point, as you said, it’s end to end for the retailer, everything from buying the tire all the way through checkout. As you think about that, where do you look for inspiration? Who do you look to or groups, where does that come from?

George:

Yeah, interesting question. Well, the first one and I’m sure a lot of companies cannot say that, but we genuinely take our client feedback very seriously. So I think if not majority, but a big chunk of improvements and changes and sort of features do come from client feedback. So it’s not an official sort of advisory board or anything like that, but we do have key clients that we do constant communication with. If we have an idea for example, we always validate it with them and see what they think, and oftentimes they come to us, we try to make them feel like they can and should come to us if it’s not working the way they expect it to work or if it doesn’t fit their processes or if there’s a way to make it work better for them ultimately.

They come to us and we basically take that, I mean sometimes we need to run it through a lot of sort of filters so to speak. Obviously if it works for one client, it doesn’t mean this automatically, it’s going to work for everyone. We need to always keep in mind that as we work with more and more clients, it makes it challenging to ensure I guess, or validate ideas and features that you want to implement to make sure that it’s going to work for a good number of clients. You’re not making some custom changes for this one client that might benefit from it. So with intake, all of that feedback, we put it in a queue, we review it internally, and then some of it makes it our roadmap and we work through this. So that’s one input channel. The other one is industry. Obviously industry is quite dynamic, even though a lot of my friends outside of the automotive industry or if I meet somebody and they ask me what I do, as soon as you mentioned tires, the eyes glaze over.

It’s just not a very sexy industry, but with that being said, there’s a lot going on, right? There’s a lot of changes, movement across the board. So somebody, Bridgestone colleague I guess, he used to say the industry is this big and this small. It’s really interesting dynamics, but as things move, you see these changes and you try to be agile. We don’t really have a solid or monolithic roadmap onto our platform. It’s very agile and you got to watch it and make sure you’re not jumping from one shiny thing to another, but you do have to be nimble. So as market changes, you got to adapt very quickly. So industry, again, that’s sort of the second input and I think the third one that comes to mind is partners. So we work with a lot of partners like you guys for example and all in all we have probably about I want to say 30, 40 different integration partners.

So these range from point of sale systems to wholesalers to radio CRP or procurement platforms. So all of these partners again, they kind of introduce so to speak, or you do get certain level of I guess, input from them and again, you’ve got to adjust and adapt and make our platform, make it more flexible, more integratable if that’s a word. You know what I mean? So those are the key ones I would say that drive our development and evolution, and then obviously, actually the other one is, it’s similar to the industry, but just opportunities. If we see for example, okay, wheels or commercial tires, different segments that we’re not in yet. So you can grow vertically or you can expand within the industry because tires, there’s a lot to tires and there’s different, again, aspects of industries or verticals or segments that we might not play in today, and those create opportunities for us as to expand.

Neal:

I think that’s a really smart approach and I think that for anyone outside the tire industry, they’d be shocked at just how complicated all of this is. So you touched on wheels, Matt and I have talked about it a dozen times that the complexities of connecting a search for wheels and a search for tires, I mean it’s significant as you’ve gone through this, anything that’s surprised you? I mean I feel like at this point you’ve seen all kinds of integrations.

George:

Yeah, I mean to your point exactly, there’s a lot of layers to tire/wheel industry. I mean I’m sure there’s a lot of layers to aftermarket, automotive aftermarket in general, but obviously I’m more familiar with tires and wheels kind of segment. So if you look at and the layers are similar but not identical when it comes to tires and wheels, and again, when we got into wheels, we were a little bit naive again, which was again, probably a positive.

Neal:

It’s a good thing.

George:

Yeah, so we thought it will be very similar and in some ways it is because these again, layers and you have your kind of fitment or data layer that identifies, okay, which wheels, which vehicle and on. So you have to find the right data for wheels that can accommodate that and then you got to make sure that the data, you can connect it to your tire data.

So that data layer, ultimately that’s an important one to solve. Then you have your wholesalers or sellers I should say. With wheels again, it’s a little bit different because with tires, tire wholesalers don’t really manufacture their own tires typically. Some do, but typically they don’t. With wheels, that line is very blurred. A lot of manufacturers are wholesalers and wholesalers are manufacturers or importers. All of that is just a big sort of mess. So that produces a lot of additional complexity when it comes to catalog management and where the product data comes from and who’s responsible for what, and then something we need to solve, this is something that we have it on our roadmap and we’ll progressively get to it sort of with tires. The installation packages are much simpler in a sense that you might have your valve stamps or TPMS sensors, with wheels, there’s much more to it.

So you need to have a lot of accommodating installation kit, so to speak with which wheel, and that’s a complex problem to solve. So we’re in the process of working through that, and then once you built out this wheel solution vertically so to speak, now you need to make sure that it is made nicely with tires and it introduces its own complexities because if you go to a typical tire dealer website, even some of the larger ones, you don’t really see a lot of options where you have a universal user experience. You’re either looking or the customers expected to just find wheels or just tires or ahead of time say, “Well, I need a packet.” And in that case, it kind of works together. We think and this something we create a goal for ourselves is basically to create a completely universal experience.

So it doesn’t matter where you start, you can basically find what you’re looking for because oftentimes, especially in winter tire mode so to speak, oftentimes you want to get a smaller wheel and different size tires just to accommodate because it’s cheaper. So for that purpose, a lot of times your average consumer doesn’t know what they need. They just need to be able to try things. Obviously, everything is within the spec of the vehicle, but we think they should be able to find the best option for them either getting just a tire or just a wheel or a package. All of that should be accessible within one interface, one solution. So that’s our current sort of challenge I guess, that we’re trying to overcome.

Neal:

I did not consider the complexity around wheels and winter tires. Of course, being in North Carolina, fortunately or unfortunately, don’t have to experience that.

George:

Like you guys.

Neal:

But nonetheless, I mean I think that’s just part of this industry is every way you turn, there’s a complexity that just so hard to anticipate.

George:

Yeah, no definitely keep surprising you every time you’re trying to do something or move into a different area, you always encounter these things that work differently or processes or a business environments. For example, commercial tires. It’s a very different market, different customers, different sellers, everything is different, and then there’s a lot of gray area where you have fleets that both need commercial tires and passenger tires. So you need to try to find these kind of ways to offer both, and anyway, honestly, we’ve been at it for many years now and there’s no end in sight as far as the challenges and that we need to overcome and opportunities that we hopefully it can take advantage of. It’s really interesting industry. Let’s put this way.

Matt:

Hey George, what about specialty tires? Is that an area that you guys have considered looking at as well?

George:

Yeah, no, we definitely, again, one thing at a time sort of, but we’re definitely looking into that. Specialty tires, it’s less and to be honest, we didn’t dig into that space as of yet, but it is something we’re looking into, and first, again as I mentioned, it’s all layered, right? So the first layer is to solve for would be product data, and then working with dominant wholesalers or sellers in that market and that’s what we’re going through. So right now, I wouldn’t say we’re actively working on it, but it is definitely on our roadmap as far as different segments of the tire industry.

Neal:

ATVs and UTVs need wheels too.

George:

Yeah, no, they do, but then as opposed to and we ran into it with commercial segment with passenger and light truck tires, most consumers you assume I punch in my vehicle and get my tire size and everything’s nice and easy. With commercial and specialty, none of that applies anymore. So you can only search by size and you got to know what you’re looking for and then it introduces a lot more potential issues with it. Anyway and you have these smaller manufacturers that it’s not easy to get their product information into your system.

So a lot of moving parts and because now we have pretty decent understanding of these potential pitfalls before we dive into something, we try to analyze what’s the situation in that sliver of the market. For example, we actually looked into motorcycle tires a while back and again, you think tires are tires. No, everything is different. The whole wholesaler versus retailer line is very blurred, and the profile of the sellers and the potential clients is very different. So it’s like a whole new almost industry that you’re diving into. So that’s why considering these things very carefully because obviously every segment, there’s a lot of things attached and you drag a lot of things when it comes to sales and support, and everything else comes along with expansion into a different segment of the industry.

Neal:

Yeah, I imagine plus once you enter that area, you’re there.

George:

You’re there.

Neal:

It’s a lifetime commitment.

George:

Yeah, exactly. So it took us a while to decide to move into wheels because we do integrate with some of the other wheel solution providers in the space and for a while we thought, “Okay, we’re just going to work with them and that’s going to be the end of it.” But then we realized that it would just give us more flexibility if we actually had these solutions, this functionality within our platform. It doesn’t mean that we don’t work with other players in the industry, we do, but if somebody is looking for that really integrated solution or a platform, then we wouldn’t be able to provide that.

Neal:

Got it. Well George, I think as you look back across the past I guess 11, 12 years, I’m sure you’ve received some really good advice in that path. Anything stick out to you?

George:

I can’t think of any sort of specific advice, but I would think, but I would say just from an advice perspective, this is more of a I guess would be my advice to anyone is just staying current and making sure that you’re not getting stuck in what you have been doing, let’s put it this way. So because what we see a lot of times and it applies to businesses of all types and all sizes, but you get stuck in, okay, this what we’ve been doing for years and it works and this is how we do things and it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to be afraid to make a change.

And I would say we try to take that approach with our platform so there’s no kind of wholly things or kind of save things when it comes to our platform. So we try to always change things and rebuild things and improve things, remove things like for example, features that don’t get used. We try to sunset them and remove them from the platform, but in general, I think it’s applicable to any business in any industry, right? Just staying current, not being scared of being comfortable I think is the more of a danger as opposed to actually trying to change things within your business.

Neal:

That’s really good advice and I look at our industry and think COVID pushed a lot of things to the side and in reality opened some opportunities, but also forced some dealers hands and for instance, selling tires online. Those objections seem to have gone by the wayside at this point, or they’re few and far between.

George:

No, we saw just a note on kind of COVID because I think it was quite disruptive, not just for tire industry obviously, but in general, but what we saw on our platform is that transactional volume because not all of our clients have turned on the option to accept payments online for various reasons, but we did see that based on the volume that was transacted I guess, it grew I guess 200% over that COVID period and it didn’t go down, let’s put it this way. So as things opened up and things went back to normal, we didn’t see a reduction in that. The growth rate definitely slowed down, but it stayed at that high level, at that peak COVID level, and it’s stabilized and it’s just slowly growing. Maybe single digit percent per year, like last year or last two years.

Neal:

But no going back to the way it was before.

George:

No. We’re really open to that change.

Neal:

No, I think that that’s the constant in this business. There’s always change, but George, I can’t thank you enough. This has been fantastic. I love hearing stories like this and seeing all the well-deserved success. Where can people learn more about Tire Connect?

George:

Sure. No, thank you and thank you for having me here. I love sharing the story. Hopefully it will be interesting to your listeners. As far as learning more, tireconnect.ca. Just make sure you use .ca. Unfortunately, it so happened we don’t have .com domain, so it’s .ca. Obviously, again, services and solutions that are available in US and Canada, but it’s Canadian’s domain you have to go to, and we recently redesigned our website so it has a lot of information about all the different solutions that we offer because it’s quite a range of different tools and whatnot. So yeah, so that’s the best place to start, and then they can contact us. There’s obviously various ways of contact us as a potential client or a partner. We’d love to hear from everyone.

Neal:

Fantastic. Well George, thank you. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us on Gain Traction.

Matt:

Thank you George.

George:

Thank you guys, thank you.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

• Bridgestone
• Gain Traction Podcast
• George Silagadze
• Matt Peters
• Neal Maier
• TireConnect
• Tread Partners

Transcript