Billy Claunch

We’re running 50 websites today, and we’re posting around 2,000 fire trucks a year with the same number of personnel that we were doing when we had a hundred fire trucks a year and one website. A hundred percent due to Salesforce.

Sam Donaghey

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life.

In today’s episode, we’re joined by two incredible guests whose businesses have partnered for over 10 years together. I’m so pleased to introduce Billy Claunch from Brindley Mountain Fire Apparatus — they’re the largest buyer and seller of used fire trucks in the Western hemisphere. Billy has spent over 20 years partnering with fire departments, and he’s super passionate about serving his customers with excellence.

Billy began his career as a financial consultant with Morgan Stanley back in 1999, but then he joined his best friend and founder of Brindley, James Wessel, at the company in 2003. He now serves as VP of Sales and Marketing, and he’s got a fantastic story to share about how far Brindley has come from when he started there.

We’re also joined by John Burdett, the founder of Fast Slow Motion, a company that has helped nearly 1,000 businesses grow with scalable systems built on the Salesforce and HubSpot CRM platforms. John, Billy, it’s awesome to have you here.

John Burdett

Good morning, Sam. Thanks for having us.

Well, Billy, words really can’t describe how special you are to me. We go way back. You were one of the first businesses that trusted me and Fast Slow Motion to help you and your partners scale your business. So I can’t thank you enough for all that you’ve done for me personally and for Fast Slow Motion. You motivate me to run my business the right way by the way you model and run yours. So thank you for that first and foremost.

You’ve obviously built an amazing business at Brindley Mountain. It’s been an amazing journey along the way. Give us a little bit more background on how you even got into the business. As Sam mentioned, you started off in the financial services industry — I’d love for everybody to understand your original journey and how you got to where you are today.

Billy Claunch

Sure, glad to. Thanks, John. And the feeling is obviously mutual. Fast Slow Motion and you are absolutely critical and foundational to Brindley existing today and being a business that we can operate — that doesn’t operate us. That absolutely wouldn’t have happened without you. So thank you very much for your contribution.

So quick background — I’m living in Auburn, Alabama. I met one of my neighbors, a girl who is now my cousin-in-law, and shortly after meeting her she said, I’m going to introduce you to a guy I went to high school with. I think y’all will be good friends. That ended up being James Wessel. We met when we were 20 or 21 or so. He’s a few years older than me. We met in college, and the first thing we did was realize we both really loved business and really loved organizing projects. So we started an investment club for college-aged people. This was back in the nineties when everyone had an investment club.

After college we kind of went our separate ways. As Sam mentioned, I was a financial consultant for a few years, and James had a huge passion for firefighting — he was volunteering with a local fire department, Brindley Mountain Volunteer Fire Department. During that period, he had an opportunity to serve on the truck purchase committee for this fire department when they were looking to upgrade one of their fire apparatus. It wasn’t a very well-funded fire department, so they were certainly looking for a used truck. James was young in the department, probably 24 or 25 at the time, so he was certainly trying to do a good job and earn a good reputation with all the older folks in the department and show them that he could handle this project.

So he shopped for a used truck and ended up selecting and purchasing one — this would have been probably around 2000. When the truck arrived, it ran, which was positive, and it looked good. Well, about a week later, he was actually driving it to a house fire and the engine blew up. He pulled it over to the side of the road and watched other people drive by, sadly, to this house fire as the truck he had just purchased sat there not operating.

He called the dealer he bought it from — it came with a warranty — and the dealer said, no problem, we’ll get you paid, just let us know what the repair cost is. But as James began to walk through that, it became obvious the dealer really wasn’t going to pay for the repair. It became one excuse after another — oh, I sent the check, it didn’t show up; okay, let me send another one; oh man, it got returned, what was your address again? And just a series of increasingly obscene and odd excuses. Yeah, man, I’ll level with you, I’m getting divorced, I don’t have the money, but I’ll make it right, I’ll get it to you. This stretched on for about a year while the truck sat unrepaired.

Finally, an attorney in the coverage area got wind of the story and said, let me pick this up and take care of it. He was able to make contact with the dealer, who then immediately sent a check. So James left the experience not quite sure what to do. Then the attorney called him back a couple of weeks later and said, James, I don’t know if this is going to make you feel better or worse, but just so you know, there’s outstanding litigation against this dealer in about 15 states for basically the same behavior. And James was like, dadgum — volunteer firefighters are generally a pretty wholesome, salt-of-the-earth crew, and that’s kind of a rough crowd to be taking advantage of. He was just like, I can’t believe that’s going on.

A lot more details, but to cut to the chase — James felt led to get into the used fire truck business. He called his mom and she was supportive of the idea. He called me and I was like, man, that sounds awesome. So he bought a used fire truck. In 2001, he bought and sold four fire trucks out of his mom’s driveway, which involves some interesting stories in itself — they lived in a gated golf course community, so he was able to add a few new regulations to the golf course’s rules about not allowing fire trucks and equipment to be stored there anymore. But in 2002, he bought and sold 30 trucks. He was hustling. In 2003, I came on board and we bought and sold 90 trucks that year, and kind of kept growing from there.

John Burdett

That’s awesome. I tell people all the time — one of the many reasons I’m passionate about smaller growth businesses is the impact you guys get to make in the markets you serve. There are probably a lot of people listening to this podcast who don’t even realize there’s a market for reselling used fire trucks, but when you start thinking about it, it makes a ton of sense. And like you said, these are salt-of-the-earth people sacrificing their lives every single day to keep us safe. You guys are serving them so well. So thank you for what you do — number one. And I just marvel at your success.

2014 — that’s when you and I met each other, I believe it was around October of that year. What was the inflection point, or what was the realization on your side? You guys had looked at Salesforce — we actually got introduced to you through Salesforce. What got you to that point, and how did you realize, oh, I need something more powerful than the systems and processes I have today?

Billy Claunch

Good question, John. From 2003, when I came on board full time, until 2014 — I consider that our season of hustling. We essentially ran a used car lot, buying and selling used vehicles. As we did that, we grew some. I think in 2003 we had about 20 employees; by 2014, we probably had about 40. So we’d grown some from an employment standpoint, and more from a volume standpoint.

James and I both have a pretty high appetite for data. We like to track things. We feel comfortable when we can see data and make decisions, as opposed to making them in a vacuum — although it’s always a combination of data and gut. In that vein, I had come from the consulting world, and James had come from the fast food franchise world — his family owned a fast food franchise here in North Alabama. Both of those are fairly mature businesses where we were used to working with systems that delivered information when we needed it to make a decision. And we realized at the fire truck company, we didn’t have that. Or if we did, we were going to have to build it, which was a little daunting.

So what that looked like for the first roughly decade was Excel — like everybody else, right? Excel is the tool of our generation. It’s so useful and usable in so many instances that you can start any project in it, but it reaches a point where it breaks down in effectiveness. That point for us was around 2013, John, before we met. I was kind of hating life, honestly, trying to run the fire truck company, because we had grown to have four different software platforms. I had a website running on an old ACT! install. I was using ACT! at the time for CRM, which was software installed on servers at Brindley. We actually used an old HVAC software — I don’t even know how we came upon it, but somebody knew how to use it, so we used HVAC software to schedule all our work in the shop. And then we used QuickBooks for financials, but that gave us no management data or insight into the company. So we literally had about 300 Excel sheets that we tried to keep maintained on top of all that.

I told James, man, this is fun, but this is awful. I don’t like doing this. This is too much. We’re trying to track all this stuff and it’s not working. I spend three quarters of my time just running around tracking data, not even working on the fire trucks anymore or talking to customers. So I ran what I called a duplicative data report — pretty simple, I just started auditing all 40 employees: what did they do all day, where did they store information, where did they track information? Just trying to figure out what we were actually doing in the first place.

The results of that report were that we were duplicating information in up to 20 different places. James and I realized, okay, we’re trying to run a business, we’re hustling to buy and sell stuff, but we’re paying people to literally type the same information into 20 different locations. Right off the bat we’re like, okay, we’re already spending a bunch of money on systems, we just don’t know it. And we can’t see it. And if there’s a mistake, somebody’s going to have to change it in all 20 locations — which wasn’t really happening.

So we were introduced to the world of integrated systems, which we knew about but had always felt like we were too small a business to really participate in. Salesforce was introduced to us by some friends who owned a biotech company here in town. They had successfully built a fully integrated ERP on the Salesforce platform. So Jason, our CFO, started spending some time with this company and seeing how they ran their business. It kind of opened our eyes. We were like, man, this is just a different world. We’ve got to pursue this.

At the same time, Brindley Mountain wasn’t exactly on the forefront of fiber internet capability, but in 2013 they did actually start offering fiber out there. So that opened up the opportunities for us. We started researching the different platforms — we looked at Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Sage, who owned ACT! They all had ERP solutions at the time.

We decided 2014 was going to be the year we did something. We started looking into it and came across Dreamforce, which had like 150,000 people attending that year. The next biggest show was Microsoft’s, which had 15,000. It was pretty telling to me as far as the vibrancy of the ecosystem — Salesforce had this universe of people who were excited to be users and wanted to share information about how to grow a business. Microsoft just seemed kind of stoic and old and still server-based.

We had a local IT consultant at the time who was recommending different computers and servers, and I was so sick of talking to people about servers I couldn’t even see straight. So when I saw Salesforce’s logo and at Dreamforce saw the guy running around in the no-software costume, I was just like, yeah, that’s what I need — no software. Managing IT infrastructure is not our business. We want to specialize where we know our business, and that’s in the fire truck world, serving fire departments. That was a big thing for us — getting out of the IT infrastructure business. And secondly, taking 300 spreadsheets and reducing duplicate data as much as humanly possible.

That brought us to where Salesforce introduced us to John. It was barely even Fast Slow Motion at the time. I think I remember you telling me I was your second client. I think you still had your first client going, but we were legit number two. But dude, you just showed up. You drove up to Union Grove, Alabama, you met with us, and hearing you talk was just like honey dripping off the leaves of a promise land. I was just like, dude, you have to do this for me, please.

John Burdett

Billy, that story is amazing. I think a lot of us as business leaders and business owners can relate to almost everything you talk about. Thank you again for trusting us to help you. The only reason I was able to add a little bit of value at the time was because I’d been on that journey doing it for my own businesses.

So much around building and scaling a business — I call it the most amazing, awesome experience you’ll ever have, but also one of the most challenging, because you can get to that place where you’re miserable and kind of trapped in your business. That’s so much behind our mission at Fast Slow Motion — to help people enjoy the journey, work on their business instead of in it, and be able to handle all those different things.

One thing people probably don’t realize is the complexity of your business even back then, ten years ago. You were servicing fire trucks, buying fire trucks and reselling them, brokering fire trucks. Just think about the sales processes — you were out there trying to find fire trucks and buy them, vet them, understand what maintenance you’d need to do, get them into working condition so things don’t happen to your clients like what happened to James, and then resell them. It’s a pretty complex business. You’d done a lot up until 2014, but what you’ve done over the last ten years is even more impressive. Give people some idea of the scale of what you’re doing today, how you’re doing it, and maybe some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way — things that if you could replay the tape, you might do a little differently.

Billy Claunch

Good question, John. I would say one thing Salesforce did for me personally was give me a platform to work on the business with leveraged time. Any business owner, any founder generally really likes the content of what they’re doing. A plumber kind of likes plumbing — they have a natural inclination to it. We like the fire industry. Those are our people. We’re part of it. But it’s so hard to have a means to engage and work within that which you can grow with.

I used to tell my kids, Salesforce is my video game. John and Fast Slow Motion built a video game for me that I can play in the fire industry in Salesforce and just try to win. How that played out — initially we were able to aggregate all that information. We did successfully kill probably 95% of those spreadsheets. You never get rid of all of them, right? But we did kill all four of the software platforms and went to a single-point ERP so that everything we operate — from the website, if you get on firetruckmall.com today and send an inquiry, that’s a Visualforce page that comes into Salesforce — is 100% Salesforce process from that point through you buying or selling us a truck, working on the truck, getting the title, moving the truck with logistics anywhere in the world, all the way through the financials. Production is 100% out of Salesforce.

Not that that’s a small feat, but that was kind of just treading water. That was the minimum — that’s what Mark Benioff told me it would do at the first Dreamforce, so I was kind of expecting that.

Having the ability to see the data, play the video game so to speak, opened up new avenues in our business that led to affiliate marketing opportunities within the industry. We now run about 50 different websites where we offer kind of a broker-dealer-in-a-box platform that other brokers and dealers in the used and new fire truck industry can leverage — stand up a used fire truck storefront, have that as a profit center in their business — and we run 100% of the back end and automate reporting to them.

The power of that just can’t be overstated. It entrenched us in the industry as the go-to provider for used fire trucks. It gave us a way to scale and leverage our time in a massive way with the same number of people. We’re running 50 websites today and we’re posting around 2,000 fire trucks a year with the same number of personnel that we were doing when we had a hundred fire trucks a year and one website. A hundred percent due to Salesforce.

It’s also given us the ability to explore other options in the industry — financing, operating leases with fire trucks, actually managing fire departments themselves, managing fire department fleets over time. It’s opened up a number of avenues that were never in our plan before we had the data and the ability to use it.

And we actually — I don’t even know if you know this, John — we’ve had a little beta of Einstein running for about four months now, trying to create an automated quote for a fire truck simply using the data we’ve been saving for the past decade in the system. It’s not ready for prime time yet, but I’m shocked at how well it works honestly. It’s pretty cool.

So this has given us a platform to open up into other business lines we never even contemplated before. I’ll close by saying this — in my first presentation to James about why we should do Salesforce, it was very much a zero-sum argument. I took the duplicative data report and said, okay, we’re paying people X dollars per hour, we’re duplicating data here, here, here, here, and here — so we’re already spending like 80% of the cost of Salesforce anyway. It’s just lost in inefficient labor. That was kind of an easy sale. James was like, oh yeah, totally — let’s give it a shot.

We felt like we had huge ROI on that. But from this point forward, every year like every business, we’re looking at expenses. And although we love Salesforce and we love John Burdett and we love Fast Slow Motion, we have spent a lot of money with you for that love. So we’re cognizant of that. You’re our largest expense outside of labor. But I’m constantly beating the drum that yes, it is a large expense, but it’s not an expense — it’s an investment. It’s 100% an investment and we are getting a return on that investment. We have another choice. We could stop. We could go back to running it with spreadsheets and software, but it would cost us many times more than that line-item spend for Salesforce and related apps and the Fast Slow Motion consulting retainer. We would waste so much more money in inefficiency if we tried to do it another way. It’s an investment. And if you’re running a business, I honestly don’t see how you do it without it.

Sam Donaghey

It’s been so great to hear the story of Brindley so far. I’m excited to hear more in part two of our discussion. For our listeners, be sure to tune into our next episode for the rest of the conversation to hear how Brindley has continued to grow and scale to become the largest buyer and seller of used fire trucks in the Western hemisphere.

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