Tireless. Kim Lorenz
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the thought of a company car was an extraordinary perk for a person my age, now living in an apartment, going to school, and working nights to support myself. I wound up doing an interview with them despite my initial negative language. I was hired on by Bill. However, I had to start at the bottom and work my way up. There was no company car just yet. There was the potential to get one within the next couple of years, but I would have to earn the position.
After just a few days, I was impressed by the opportunity at hand that I did not previously know existed. Who knew the depth of the commercial tire industry? More importantly, who knew that there was an industry that was virtually inflation-proof? Trucks are running every day, in every economy. The trucking industry has a saying, “If you got it, a truck brought it.” Now that is an industry that could last a long time. The company also operated truck tire retread manufacturing plants.2
It is not this industry the book is written about, but rather the visualization of opportunity and how we realized huge success. There are several other lessons within these pages, examples of how others turned an opportunity they saw into gold. It happens every day. Knowledge is power, and the more you study and understand how to look for the opportunities in front of you, the odds of seeing them improves.
After about 18 months at that job, I got a company car. I was still going to school in the evenings. As it turned out, I was excelling in the business, and I was promoted to management. Ironically, after I started our business five years later, Bill, who had hired me, ended up managing one of the locations we operated. I guess that’s just proof that you often “meet the same people on the way up that you meet on the way down!” The business specialized in commercial applications, not retail—a vast market requiring greater knowledge of the customers and their businesses.
I was scared to death when I got that first company car and was given a territory in the industrial areas of Seattle. As I would drive through Pioneer Square and see the homeless people on benches, I was so afraid I would end up like that. I had to call on big companies like Boeing and UPS, as well as garbage companies. Garbage trucks are a tire salesperson’s dream. They grind off tires! I also called on dump truck operators, construction companies, and huge shipping companies around the waterfront. I was just this 22-year-old kid, engaged to be married, still doing night school, and here I was in this big world of industry.
It is what I learned along the way that made more sense after we succeeded in our own business. Time has a way of teaching us if we pay attention. At that time in my life, it was not so clear. What was I seeing, and what was I doing that was so different than others? What did the others fail to see?
I resigned after five years, and that is when my partner and I started our first company. There were some obvious obstacles we encountered while looking to start that first business, one of which was our partnership. We both quickly realized the truth that while most new businesses failed, the rate of partnerships failing was even higher. We had only worked collaboratively between our two previous employers, but we really did not know each other well at all. Our respective families and spouses had never even met the other! All we knew for sure is that we shared a common vision, saw an opportunity, and trusted each other in a working relationship. We both felt comfortable with the way the other conducted business and had similar ethical standards, always following through on what we said we would do. We agreed to each own 50% of the stock issued. I was very fortunate to have a great partner as a shareholder. We are still partners today in several ventures, even after 40 years.
Together, we had completed several large, successful collaborations for both our respective companies in the years leading up to us starting our own company. John had run the manufacturing operations as company president. He had many skills I did not have. He had also started from the bottom and worked his way to the top in a relatively short time. My background was in marketing, operations, and sales. I was promoted several times up through management positions, becoming a young Vice President by the time we both left our jobs. While I appreciated the promotions, one thing nagged at me. It was simply not clear to me why I had been promoted ahead of so many others who had held similar positions for 20, 35, or even 40 years at the company. Why me? It became very clear as time went on.
As we grew, it was apparent the opportunity we saw proved to be the correct path. Perhaps our greatest partnership asset as we started the new business is that we had such diverse corporate experiences in the same industry. One might also say that our young ages would indicate we did not know yet that failure was a real possibility. I was 26 when we started the new venture, and John was 29. Ignorance was bliss.
Another reason we started our own venture was fear the company we both worked for might fail. The owner had turned the company over to a son after 65 years. The father held the large capital assets, while the son only had the operating company. As can often be the case when family takes over a business, the son did not share the same passion, business acumen, or decision-making abilities as his father, who had worked hard to build the large group of companies. A few years after the son took control, we saw signs of financial concerns that could affect the future of all the family companies, including the ones John and I ran. I was getting more and more concerned, pouring my time and effort—my life, really—into this business, realizing a little at a time that the son might be running it into the ground with poor decisions and management. The companies we both left to start our business did fail just a few years after we resigned. Hundreds were out of work, and a 65-year-old company was history.
Prior to that company failure, John called me out of the blue saying we needed to get together to talk. John told me he had given notice and resigned. We discussed starting our own enterprise, and that short meeting led to an all-night session developing pro-forma income statements and balance sheets. By 4:30 AM, we shook hands and agreed that, “Unless we ran into an insurmountable brick wall,” we would start this new company. There was simply no other company in our market I felt could do what our vision was telling us we could do.
At the time, I thought I was already near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid. I was at the top level of management. I had a company car, recent salary increases, a new home we had just built, and kids in a private school. My life was about to take a huge change!
John felt assured that he could run an efficient retread plant operation, building it from scratch. He had planned to buy used equipment as cheaply as he could, possibly at an auction, and have it shipped to Seattle. I, on the other hand, felt strongly that there was still a market for a commercial tire company working with the customers and educating them on how to reduce their operating costs and significantly reduce expenses.
It’s important to note that this had nothing to do with selling tires cheaper than the competition. That was already being done. There were several areas we had learned that would save customers a lot more money than simply buying cheaper, but the customers did not understand that yet. Again, this was thinking outside the box, doing something others did not understand. This involved really learning the customer’s business, not just our business. The examples later in the book are there so you can think through what we did. There are also examples of what many others did and are doing that might apply to your own business, or any business. We showed Fortune 500 firms how to operate their own businesses better with our knowledge, as well as helping them see what industry trends could benefit them. That is the story worth reading. Who cares that two people started a little company that grew very big? What matters is looking at what your company does and asking yourself how it could be done better.
Our vision was not complicated. It seemed like everyone else in the marketplace was simply selling tires and services. There was no one educating the customers on their options and what could happen if they changed the way they did their business. It was a vision that could change the paradigm of the companies we targeted and lead our business to success.
One such area was outsourcing—showing the customer that with changes, they could reduce labor costs and the associated expenses and liability. In the past, the customers were hiring their own staff for the tire programs. We could show them why they did not need to do that. We could be an outsource entity that could significantly reduce their operating costs, and we could prove it. Companies could experience huge savings by looking at operations in a different way. Our new venture would be a company that specialized in outsourcing