Today on the Book More Show, we're talking with Bill DeBoer, owner of DeBoer's Auto in New Jersey and author of _Profitable Fleet Management_, a book that helps small and medium size companies manage their fleet of vehicles to ensure they continue to serve the business needs and proactively stay in service. He recently finished his book and recorded a book launch with recent guest Rich Bontrager, and we caught up to see how he's been using his book.
Bill has the value-driven approach we often talk about. Passionate about helping other business owners, he understood that his book could help his ideal client today and be a resource to organizations whose fleets are just starting. They may be too small to be clients now, but by providing value, he's building relationships with people who will become clients tomorrow as their fleets inevitably grow.
He's also using their proprietary technology to grow their company into other states, and his book allows him to build a bigger footprint outside of New Jersey and find customers and partners ahead of any investment.
It's a great conversation, and I really appreciate how Bill is looking to drive value in each element of his book funnel.
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Bookmore show. It's Stuart Bell here and today great interview with one of our authors who just recently finished the book. So I really wanted to get his insights into what it's been doing for his business and also because it's a little bit of an unusual business as well. I mean, as we think about examples of people writing books, Bill's business isn't the one that springs to mind. So, Bill DeBore, welcome to the show.
Bill: Thank you, stuart, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Stuart: No problem at all. So I start off by saying that your business isn't one that necessarily springs to mind when we're talking about examples of books. So do you want to give the audience a bit of a background on who you are? Let me get up an image of the book as well. So the book is Sure. Let me on the screen here. The book is Profitable Fleet Management. So what's your company and what do you guys do for people?
Bill: Yeah, so we have a business DeBore Zotto in Hamburg, new Jersey. We've been in business for just over 40 years now and we take care of people's cars, trucks, vans and all that. So pretty much the book was spawned out of. A couple of years ago we were looking for ways to increase our business and we started knocking on doors of the small and medium-sized businesses out there that have fleets of that size and started seeing some real pain points inside of those businesses with regards to how hard it is for them to manage it, how much of a pain it is.
It's like the unwanted stepchild inside of these businesses. So, after kicking that around and we're growing and we're adding capacity to our building, we're in the middle of a buildout. We're adding six more bays. The shop is going to be set up specifically for these types of fleet vehicles, the taller vans and stuff like that. Our existing shop is an older facility and the roof line is a little bit lower, so we're going to be set up way better to handle that and we thought it would be a great idea to write this book, launch it and then use it as a lead tool to help fill up the shop when we get it open.
Stuart: This idea that we talked to a lot of people about in terms of picking a single target market, and not that it's exclusive of everyone else. It's not that you have to turn away other business, but the idea of reaching out in a campaign sense and picking that target market. You were talking about other vehicles and other types of non-van fleet people that you can help. What made you pick that area as opposed to something else? Was it an area that you wanted to break into, or is it the most profitable area or the area you can help the most?
Bill: Well, it's a couple things. So in our business I mean, those fleets are a good, steady supply of vehicles for us to work on. In our business everything comes down to car count how many cars we have to work on. And the thing about fleets that is attractive to us as a business is that we can deal with one or two people and collect 30 to 40 vehicles with only a couple contact points, where for us to do 40 vehicles, that's 40 different phone calls, 40 different people. We got to deal with a lot more work that goes into that. So the fleet business works well for that.
The other thing that comes in handy too is typically the ebbs and flows with repairs seems to correlate with these other businesses. So when they are slow is when they have time to put their vehicles into the shop to get their maintenance done and their repairs done, and it's typically at the same time that we are getting slow seasonally. So they time together really well so that we can average out our workflow and keep a nice steady flow of work coming into the business with it.
Stuart: So such a perfect marriage. A lot of organizations that we talk about the coach inside the business is this idea of excess capacity. So if you're doing something but there is excess capacity, you've really got that. The engineers, the tech, so they're anyway, the equipment's there anyway. It really gives you a lot of leeway to do some quite innovative things in terms of reaching out to people and creating a win-win situation because you've got the capacity set there. I mean, it really does expire at the end of the day when the mechanic goes home. If he's been sat around doing nothing, then you can't get that time back Exactly.
Bill: To be able to marry it.
Stuart: It's that being in business for 40 years gives you a lot of insights into that ebb and flow and the seasonality of what you're doing and the lifecycle of the maintenance of different fleets. Is that a competitive advantage that you've got? Being able to proactively reach out to people and sow the seed of what might be about to happen, almost before it actually happens?
Bill: Absolutely. That's what the book does. It's a real simple read. I made it so that it can help people at whatever level they are at in their business with these fleets.
Typically, what happens is it's your plumber, it's your electrician that turns business owner now. Then they get the one van, which is fine, they can manage it on their own. Then they start layering on more people, more vehicles. It grows to a point where they've got an office manager and now this gets dumped in the office manager's lap. They don't have any idea what they're doing, other than, hey, send them to the truck for an oil change and they think that they're taking care of it. It's really not nothing of the sort. They send it to a quick loop that has lower level technicians. Their skill levels are entry level, unlike ours, where they're master certified. They can spot things before they happen and we can get in front of things to keep them on the road.
Again, as the business ebb and flows, when they're busy and they need those vehicles to go, they're ready. There's no critical breakdown during those time periods With the book. What we did was we took the approach where we can go in, drop the book off and, depending on whether they're fit for us or not. We can coach them into becoming a fit for us as well. If they're in there and maybe they can't quite afford the service level that we provide, it gives them a lot of tools to go and implement in their business that they can get their handle on the fleet expenses and start dialing them in and then growing to the size fleet that is a really good fit for us.
Stuart: It's such a great approach because not only most people I think about finding the customers who are ready to go. Now, so much of that advertising, burn and churn is to try and find those people who do something today. A lot of time you've probably heard me say before on podcasts or when we've spoken, my brother's a yacht broker. Well, they're the distributor for a specific brand, but in a previous life he was a yacht broker, walked in as a relatively junior broker to an office where I think the guy had passed away. I really should fact check this story. I can't remember whether he retired or passed away it changes the dynamic of the story a bit, but anyway he was no longer there. There was literally a draw label dead leads. One of the first things it filled in was went through that draw and reached out to the people and sales came from literally a draw that was labeled dead leads.
Being back to your approach of the book, so many people are trying to find the people who are looking for fleet managers. Now, today They've got a problem they're trying to fix by starting that conversation and building that relationship earlier by adding value. It just makes such logical sense that as they grow to that level of needing it. They already have the relationship with you. You're their guy. Why would they even look anywhere else To be able to provide them that value in the book, to educate them make the most of where they are today? Was that in terms of when you think about what to write? Was that an obvious first choice for you, or did you go back and forth on which bits to include or which bits to where? Maybe too complicated?
Bill: Not really. It just all flowed together really nice once. I decided to go ahead and pursue the project, made the outline with the chapters and all flowed from that. My background is in.
I happen to be in the automotive business. It's a family business that I grew up in. Originally we were retailing cars. When I came into it I established the service department, but I went to college for business. I also went and got my automotive technology degree as well. While I was at college I learned all that.
But business is a strong suit of mine. I built with the book. I wrote the business aspects into it. I'm speaking to the other business owner as a business owner and what I have used in my business that's worked for me that they can implement into their business. After one or two weeks we start off right with profit first accounting, which is a nice method to control cash flows inside of a small business. It helps them plan for the expenses with the repairs, the acquisition of new vehicles and that sort of stuff so that they're not scrambling for cash when they have situations arise. That's a lot of what the book is there for to try to help these guys, if they're not in that position, to grow into that position by teaching them this stuff as well.
Stuart: One of the book blueprint mindsets is this idea of value-driven content and it really sets the scene In the early days although we don't see it so much now, but in the early days of the book business there were people who were talking about oh, they wanted to give away all of their best stuff in the book and it's such an alien concept. It wasn't really coming from a marketing background. That was never really anything that we were, it was just a thought that hadn't popped into mind. I think the likelihood of being able to give away enough that you're actually giving value, but obviously saying to people oh, there's always more, there's more. That's out of the scope of this book. It's not that I'm holding things back, it's just that it's out of scope.
And then delivering as much value as possible within the pages creates that relationship and literally adds value and then builds towards a next step, rather than saying to someone well, there's five things I could tell you, but it's too complicated for you, so either come and pay me all, you're on your own. Do you get that feedback from people as they read it? I mean, I've read the book as well, and even not, as I have one card, not a fleet, but even there there's value that I get from it. Just thinking outside of this specific example, I imagine for people who are office managers, who have had a fleet dropped on them or the fleet's developed over time, they must really get a lot from it.
Bill: The thing, too, is I wrote the book. We live in our little corner of the world. It's not like I can service the entire country, but there's something in there for everybody and the problem that I see locally here is just across the entire nation. So leading up to this book, I've been producing content on a regular basis about fleet management, trying to get control on this stuff, and through our blogging and our YouTube stuff out there, I've already generated calls from around the country, people that have this unwanted stepchild dumped in their lap, calling me for advice. They want to pay me to be a consultant, which I don't really have the time or bandwidth for, but the pain is real out there and I wrote the book so they can be helped and try to get a handle on what they need to.
Stuart: Yeah, as you say, the local being 50 mile, famous for being able to legitimately help people where you've got the bandwidth and infrastructure to help is one thing, but there is a good feeling about knowing that this is universally applicable and you're actually able to help people. And it almost sets the idea of kind of like digging the well before you need the water expansion later into another area. Potentially this kind of lays the groundwork for customer base in that area or bridging into other things. So no bandwidth at the moment for consulting or doing the one on one work. But you're not the first person that we've talked to, probably on a podcast, Actually. I'm thinking of a couple of people where years down the track, their businesses have pivoted into something that they weren't necessarily expecting. That's not going to be the case for everyone and even if the opportunity is there, it's often people don't want to take it up.
Bill: That's the one action. The one thing that we're looking to see and get feedback from the book as it rolls out nationwide and if we get leads or people calling us up that aren't in our direct area that we can service, to obviously connect them with the book but also test that market out there to see we can go in and become a. We're exploring the idea of being a fractional fleet manager. So what that would look like is we have a tech stack that we can go into, say, a company that's in California or wherever around the country. We can deploy this tech stack that we use it currently locally with our existing fleets, go in there and we can manage from afar. While we may not be touching the cars and fixing them, we can do the actual fleet management piece of it make sure that they're staying on top of all the maintenance schedule on the vehicles for service and taking that burden off of whoever's managing it inside of the office.
Because what happens like when we talk about the fleet business, you get small, medium-sized businesses and then there's the enterprise level, and when you get to the enterprise level, we service a lot of those fleets as well. But there's some major companies out there that manage these fleets for people. But small, medium-sized businesses don't have the bandwidth or the cash flow to afford those types of services. So with us being a fractional fleet manager, we would be able to come in. They can pay us for the little bit of time that they need for somebody to manage the fleet affordably, get it off of their plate until they either stay with us or they can grow up to the next level with their business.
Stuart: That's an interesting point as well, because that expansion and knowing where you sit in the overall eco structure really means that you can maximize the benefit for those people, knowing that some people will grow into it but also that some people will grow out of it. A lot of listeners are probably strategic coach members because we've got a big footprint with Coach. So their idea of, like the free zone, frontier and this who, not how mentality of creating something that's bigger than the sum of the parts, so you've been able to help an organization in the other side of the country that has great capability but maybe not the infrastructure or the technology to be able to come in and provide that for them. I mean it's such a win-win, not only for you to expand the footprint, for the customers to get a better service, but also for those shops to be able to make a more robust model, the people who, so the office managers or the fleet managers that are interacting.
We talk about this idea of the book being the start, the conversation, towards that doing business. If it's a point that some people get tripped up on, they kind of know or see other people using a book as a lead generation tool. They kind of conceptualize it as a good idea. But sometimes people struggle with okay, well, how do I transition that into someone raising their hand to do business? I really like what you've got on the back cover of the book. Talk a little bit, if you can, about how you make that transition. So someone raises their hand and gets a copy of the book somehow. How does that conversation then go?
Bill: Yeah, so we got a couple different downloadable tools that I talk about inside of the book the cost per mile worksheet. We have a pre-drive checklist for drivers so that they're doing regular inspections, which is key to keeping these cars on the road. For these fleets, I mean. Typically the major breakdowns and the catastrophic breakdowns occur because they go extended time between intervals and they end up with low fluids, and the way to catch that stuff is to have a regular inspection process. So we have the inspection checklist that they can download and then, ultimately too, they can book a discovery call with me where I can kind of help them out with their fleet, talk to their pain points and send them in the right direction of alleviating that pain. Give them some Tylenol for it, right?
Stuart: That took out building your success on the success of others, the fact that you've got the vehicle checklist that the local managers can give to the drivers. That is almost preventative to the I mean there's a case to say that's taken, read out of your table or whatever the analogy is but it's really adding value and building that relationship in a way that makes it easy for them to get on board with Such a fantastic idea of basing your success on their success. And again, I imagine that just builds the rapport even faster.
Bill: Yeah, and these are simple tools. They're simple spreadsheets and stuff that they can download and start implementing and they're a business, like I said again, if they can't afford our services with our fractional fleet service, when we go in with the tech stack, that's already built into everything that we do. So we talk about this paper checklist that they can go through with the drivers. Our digital version of that is linked up with our tech stack and they can have. Every driver have their own, whether they use an iPad or a phone for the business they can go in and do the inspections right on that. Everything gets reported up. Any issues go up to us as the fleet manager and we can start looking at them and addressing them. Also takes care of a lot of safety issues, make sure that we stay in front of that stuff for the fleet and just the whole host of other things. But again, starting out and helping people where they're at, meeting them where they're at, helping them grow their businesses I mean that's really what I'm passionate about.
I really love small and medium businesses and talk about growing businesses.
Stuart: And that I think that's authenticity, if that's not an overused word these days, but that comes through in the book as well. I think you can read some things that clearly look like marketing pieces that are just given enough to get you to the next stage, and then other pieces like the book, where it's clearly you know the business, you know their pain points and you're really trying to deliver as much as possible. Talking to getting in front of the right people then. So none of the books created. The next stage obviously is getting in front of the people who can best be served by it. So what are you doing at the moment? I know it's somewhat early days, but what are you doing at the moment to get the visibility out there and to get it in front of the right groups of people?
Bill: Well, we just started. We just we did a live book launch this week with Rich the Trigger, bond Trigger and his company Rock the Stage Media, I think it is. So he helped us out. We did a spotlight interview on me we're highlighted me a couple of weeks ago, a little 15 minute clip that got put together. Then we did the live book launch Tuesday evening of this past week and he brought on some special guests, actually some of our existing customers, and you know they all read the book. They gave their testimonials how it's helped them, how we helped them in their business. And you know we also took it.
I went to high school with a voice actor or actress and she laid down the audible version of this, which just got approved and uploaded the other night too. So yeah, so you know we've got freefleetbookcom where people can go on to lead generation. They can download the digital copy for free If they'd like to get a physical copy right now we have a limited supply of them that we're giving out if they wanna pay postage and then obviously they can buy it on Audible for the audio version or on Amazon for the regular hard copy as well. But I'm just trying to pump it out there. The other thing that we're looking at getting in front of is other podcasts for those industries that we serve and also getting with those trade publications to help them out by either giving them written content that they can supply in their trade publications to help out the fleet piece of their businesses so they can try to make them get in front of it.
Stuart: Have you seen the Success Magazine ad that Dean did a while ago for Email Mastery?
Bill: Yeah, yeah, I did see a copy of that.
Stuart: Yeah, did we talk about it? We did a strategy call a couple of weeks ago. Did I send that to you as part?
Bill: of that. Yeah, you shared that to me. Yeah, perfect.
Stuart: I'm going to take that now.
Bill: I just saw it before.
Stuart: I'll link it in the show notes for anyone who wants to check it out and hasn't seen it already. But this idea of providing content in a kind of advertorial type way, so providing because all the individual steps that you've got in the book and all of the other things that kind of are related to it, but not necessarily just in the book, that's definitely article length information that's super valuable and give people the bite-size pieces and then offer the free copy of the book as the next step. Hey, if you like this, grab a copy of this for more. It's such a perfectly dialed in way of amplifying the message. Are you guys present on LinkedIn in a meaningful way?
Bill: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we're on LinkedIn. Actually, when we did with Rich, we did it non-traditional way or I guess maybe a newer way. I felt like instead of registering for Zoom, a Zoom call, where he registered people and we invited guests and people and tried to fill the room, I decided to go another route where we just went live on all the multiple streams and got it out there. Not everybody can come and watch it at the time that it occurs, so I figured if we just went live and then all those rebroadcasts or once it was on their live, people could watch a rebroadcast as they will. So we went live on YouTube, linkedin, facebook and pumped it all out there.
Stuart: We'll link the if we can grab a link to the. I always find it difficult navigating LinkedIn sometimes, which is why I'm not as active as I should be on there, because my frustration level gets too high. But we'll find the replay link for the LinkedIn version and stick that in the show notes as well here, Because I think not only is it interesting to see what you did in the kind of look behind the scenes way, but it's also interesting for people to see that kind of live element of the customers coming on and talking about it. And so you're presenting the various elements of the book, because the point of the podcast here is too full. Not only is it to kind of highlight what you've done with the book and what you do in the business, but also really, if people copy and cheat and take the shortcuts from everything that we've learned over the time, then it can only serve to do them better. I think I'm pretty safe to say that we haven't done another fleet management book. Sometimes with the financial advisors it's maybe a little bit more challenging because we've definitely done more than one retirement planning book. But yeah, if people can be inspired by different industries, that definitely helps everyone. It helps everyone out.
Bill: I think to go back to your point too how a lot of people hold back so much information in a book. I didn't feel that in this at all, because I feel like the more that you're out the information, like you can go out and coach people and talk to people, the amount of information that they implement is so small compared to what you actually put out there. If you give them everything all in the book to it, they're still going to come to you for some more information. I think it's the best if you're fully transparent, get all the information out there and then see what happens from there.
Stuart: You're right, because it's particularly. We were talking about chat GTP the other day and as that develops and gets even more robust Google's been around for 20-something years Chat GTP kind of takes it to the next level a little bit and just makes it more interactive, going one or two levels deep. It's not like the actual information isn't out there, but people's ability through either an understanding or even just a capacity to actually do it. I think that's really the biggest problem that 90% of people have got. It's not knowing what to do, it's just having the full picture or the capacity to do it. I agree, share is I mean, it's what we did in the Scorecard book went slightly overboard on the videos and things in that book, but sharing as much information as possible. It just really gets people to the point that they know and understand that you are the right person to help them and they've started to build that rapport anyway. So I'm more likely to select you as they realise that, hey, I'm not going to get to do this myself, I really need someone else just to do it.
Bill: Yeah, so we talk about especially in our business. There's a huge side to just automotive repair. It's called do-it-yourself the auto parts store service customers that work on their cars at home. Then there's a do it for me market, which is what we're in. People bring the vehicles to us and I feel like the same thing is true with the business. In my years 25 plus years of being in this career path I found at times I didn't have the budget so I had to do it and follow the book and maybe spend a little bit of extra time. And then there's other times in my life that I've found where I can just hurry up and bypass and save a whole lot of time and jump to the front of the line by calling somebody. So again, I don't think holding back information ever really helps anybody.
Stuart: No, because people can tell as well. You definitely get that feel for when someone's just wanting to move to the next conversation and get someone to sign on the line that started. Come up on time. Super appreciate the time you spent today. I think people are going to get a lot from this. I want to make sure that they can check out more of what you're doing. So there was freefleetbookcom.
Bill: Yep. Freefleetbookcom is where you can get the book. Anybody feel free to connect with me professionally. I jumped in Bill DeBoer I think I have the only handle with that on there, so it's pretty easy to find or DeBoer's Auto is the business, so check us out.
Stuart: See what we've got going on. And we'll make sure to put links to all of those in the show notes as well. So, as you're listening, just hop over to the show notes, which I think also appear in the show notes of the podcast player, so should all be clickable, just to get straight through Anything that we haven't touched on. That you wanted to like. If someone was asking you if they should write a book for their business, is there anything that kind of springs to mind that might, that they might not realize?
Bill: No, I mean, I think that you know, depending on what you're in, I mean I think everybody's got a book in them and 90 Minutes obviously does a really nice job of packaging this all together. You know it just got on the call this afternoon with a marketing colleague that we haven't talked in a while and just catching up talking about the book, and you know, on the discussion, like he's probably got like 10 different book ideas that he could just, you know, just sitting out there and it never really dawned on him to you know, put it in this. And then you know a lot of how he generates his business, is going by to you know these industry trade shows and giving away these, you know the stupid trinkets and probably the other stuff that nobody ever wants right Worship drawers and magnets and pens, yeah. Right, and you know I told them. You know I mean how great would it be just to have a book and hand out a book to everybody, in what a Greek of a way versus all the pens and whatnot that they have.
Stuart: So yeah, fantastic. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thanks again for your time. Thank you, I would say. I'll make sure that we've got showing the notes and links to everything that you're doing, so I highly recommend people check that out and we'll do another strategy call a little bit further down the track and we'll check back in and then we should do another podcast as well and keep people in the loop of the world domination that's starting not far from me here in Jersey.
Bill: Yeah, Sounds good man.
Stuart: Alrighty Thanks, Bill Thanks.
Bill: Thanks for watching.
Stuart: We will catch you in the next one.