Mixing truck equipment with trailers
Aug 1, 2009 12:00 PM, BY BRUCE SAUER
Utility trailer dealer adds truck equipment under one new roof
Conventional wisdom says that truck equipment and truck trailer sales just don't mesh. But then, there's not a lot that's conventional about the new Utility Trailer Sales of Boise facility in Boise, Idaho. But there is wisdom in getting extra business from a territory that the company already serves.
Not many trailer dealers have a fully equipped Reading service body mounted on a Ford Super Duty as the featured product in their showrooms. But then again, not many truck equipment distributors have a parts counter designed to look like a Utility 3000R refrigerated trailer.
It all combines in an unconventional way that allows this veteran company to generate revenue that it would otherwise not produce if it operated strictly as a truck equipment distributor or a trailer dealer.
But before we write of conventional wisdom as wrong, let's talk to Steve Bowman, the company's truck equipment sales manager as well as trailer sales.
“You can't combine the two,” he says flatly.
Okay, so what's going on?
Bowman is one of the few people at the Utility Boise operation whose responsibilities span trailers and truck equipment hats. Virtually everyone else in the company operates either on the truck equipment side or is involved in some facet of trailer sales, parts, or service. The twain does not meet, except maybe at the water cooler.
“We are really separate businesses operating under one roof,” Bowman says. “I have been in the truck equipment business for 43 years. I don't think you can make this work any other way.”
Both operations — Utility Trailer Sales of Boise and Utility Truck Equipment Sales — in effect are two companies operating under one roof. Utility Trailer Sales of Boise does exactly what the name implies, operating as a Utility Trailer dealer. Utility Truck Equipment Sales is a distributor serving the same general area as the trailer operation. Both are subsidiaries of Utility Trailer Sales of Idaho, the parent company that also owns a separate operation in Idaho Falls, 280 miles east of Boise.
The company sells Reading service bodies; Omaha Standard farm bodies, platforms; and service bodies; Crysteel dump bodies; and Morgan vans. Truck equipment lines include Auto Crane cranes and bodies, Monroe Truck Equipment spreaders and large snowplows, Versa Lift aerial devices, Waltco and Maxon liftgates, and Western snowplows.
Utility of Boise got into the truck equipment business because the company was able to hire the people that enabled the company to do so. Bowman had been the branch manager for a truck equipment distributor in Boise. When he could not buy the operation, he went to work for the Utility trailer dealership.
“We started selling truck equipment here in 1989,” Bowman says. “We have been able to grow it to a $6-7 million a year business. That's in addition to the money we bring in through our trailer business.”
Bowman supervises a trailer sales staff and another for truck equipment. The two outside sales reps for Utility Trailer Sales of Boise are responsible for the entire Utility Trailer line, along with Carrier Transicold refrigeration units.
Making the sale
Three people sell truck equipment, but they also represent the CPS line of dump trailers.
“That's our main overlap between trailers and truck equipment,” Bowman says. “We sell our dump trailers through our truck equipment operation because the same customers who buy dump bodies also buy trailers.”
The sales guys split the territory geographically. In the case of truck equipment, one rep handles the west Boise market and travels north to the Canadian border, one handles the east Boise market and travels east to the Wyoming border, and the other sells into eastern Oregon and northern Nevada.
Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus
