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Tired of the corporate environment after working in IT management, back in 2016, Lindsay Coyle had a friend who was a dealer for a mobile tool distributor flag describing to him what the business was like. Coyle had always taken a liking to the idea of running a business, and the opportunity to get in on something with the assistance and the backing of a larger company but still operating on his own appealed to him. After seeing the limitations of the franchise model, Coyle branched out on his own and started his own business -- Coyle Tools -- in the Austin, TX area.
As for his route, Coyle covers a 40 mile radius in the Austin area. He is not restricted to a particular territory and says he specializes in fleet diesel and custom shops.
“Those shops tend to have a higher concentration of technicians,” Coyle remarked. “Those technicians tend to get paid better than a lot of the other industries, and they tend to stick around longer, so there’s better long-term business there.”
The business owner notes the best part of the job is being on the road.
“This job is all about building relationships with customers,” he says. “ I enjoy people, and when I can be a significant part of their professional lives and hopefully brighten their day a little bit, that’s what I enjoy the most.”
Equipment and products
Coyle stated his customers today love lights and knives. He mentioned some of his most popular selling tools are the modular light from PowerProbe and almost all of the M12 Milwaukee Tools.
When it comes time to add new products to his truck, Coyle takes a slower approach that is heavily dependent on customer feedback.
“It takes me a little while to adopt new tools because I don’t know how popular they’re going to be,” he says. “You don’t know how good the quality of the tool is going to be. I expand depending on what the customers say. I don’t turn wrenches for a living… my customers do, so they know more about a lot of the tools than me.”
As for how he goes about finding the products, Coyle also relies heavily on his customers.
“If they’re asking me about a product, then I’ll start to give it some serious consideration because clearly there’s a desire there,” Coyle stated. “If I see a product that is compelling, and it’s from a manufacturer I trust, and it’s something I think my customers might need, I’ll start asking around about it. I have even handed tools I’m not sure of to customers and ask them to try it for me for a week and give me their thoughts.”
Finding the right employees
When asked about the biggest challenge of running your own business, Coyle immediately pointed to the fast pace of the industry.
“The biggest challenge is finding time to keep up with the demand because I want to keep expanding the business and doing that while maintaining a high business standard is hard,” the truck owner said. “It’s difficult to find good people to build our team with. Finding people that do things well that I don’t do well (such as accounting) has been hard.”
Coyle adds on that since it’s been so hard to find good team members, he took it upon himself to start doing the businesses’ bookkeeping and printing budget systems. Because of the obstacle, the growth of the business is not as far as Coyle would want it at this point.
“We’ve had to pace our growth,” he says. “When the pandemic first started, we had fewer problems hiring people. The problem is the people we hired weren’t as energetic or interested in the job. When the pandemic first started, there were so many people questioning their future, they just went to any job that was available to start fresh. The problem is, for this job in particular, you have to have high ambition to make it work well for you and not everybody has that.”
Standing out
Coyle points to four iteams Coyle Tools does to stand out from the competition:
- The company has high standards for themselves.
- He services a lot of second and third shift shops, eliminating competition.
- Coyle Tools helps customers with any other companies warranty process
- Their YouTube channel has been growing, so they're getting non-brand specific information for how the tool industry works, and they're helping to guide people as to what they’re buying.
Tips for young distributors
When asked about advice he would give young distributors just starting out in the business, Coyle did not hesitate to give a swift response.
“The first thing I would tell anyone is your desire to run a business has to be stronger than your desire to sell tools. Every business, no matter what industry, has to do the basic necessities. Every business has to establish itself as a legal entity, you've got to make sure you know how to keep your books, you have to pay your taxes, you have to find insurance companies, and you have to find your suppliers. That's the boring stuff. That’s the stuff that pulls people away from maybe the original reason they got into a business.
“For example, if someone likes to cook and they're really good at it, they might wanna start a restaurant, or they might wanna become a chef. Well, be careful because when you start a business, the thing you're gonna do least is cook.”
Future plans
As for the future, Coyle has some immediate goals.
“The immediate future is to open a brick and mortar store that caters to professional technicians, so have a tool truck kind of environment, bring the knowledge in the quality of products that we have on the trucks to a brick and mortar,” he says. "Also, I want to start doing more online sales, so we can maintain contact with not only our customer base but also expand the customer base, so we can offer the same types of tools of the same quality, so if we don't serve a particular customer in the truck who's outside of our area, then we can help them out in much the same way as we would if we were on the truck.”
Coyle said one thing he realizes now at 52-years-old is he has more energy than he thought he had.
“My time is almost 100 percent spent on this job,” he notes. “If I didn’t have the energy, my business wouldn’t be a success. If you work hard, you can be successful, and I want to grow this business until I physically can’t anymore.”
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