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If you know much about our company, you know that we like trucks. Red trucks. Why red? Lann Rubin, the GM of All American Ford, sold me my first new truck about 15 years ago and it was red. After that, everything that followed had to match.
For years we stuck with red trucks. They did it all for us. I think we had four of them at one time. I spent a lot of time crowing about how great they were and all we could do with them. The snow, the ice, muddy access roads, yada yada...
Well, we are now down to one red truck. And it's the one I drive. What the heck happened?
I had to move on. We grew as a company in the last couple of years. At the same time, the kind of work we were doing changed too. We found ourselves working on a lot of different job sites in the course of the week, we were doing more commercial work in addition to our residential work, and we were still trying to get our service calls done. Bottom line, we just couldn't carry enough stuff. Not that we didn't try. We had one truck weighed and we were over 10,000 pounds. Problem was, the truck was only rated to 8800. Whoops.
It started with Joel's truck. With the miles adding up, we were looking to replace it anyway. I was thinking F350. Maybe a work body. Joel was looking around and was really trying to sell me on one of the new Sprinter style vans. One thing led to another, and we settled on an E350 van from Ford with a Reading work body on it. It was ten grand less than a new truck and it came all set up with racks and storage. I think we walked away for around 38K for the van all set up, and that was less than a base F350 truck without any racks or boxes. I hated it, but I could beat the deal.
Joel was on vacation when I swapped his truck out. I think I put his entire overloaded truck into just one half of that work body van. And there you had it. We just couldn't carry enough stuff in those trucks anymore, much as I liked the versatility.
So I moved on.
Swapped out everybody's truck for a van. I kind of tend to go overboard my wife says. But the decision has stood up. Joel was right, those darn things go just about anywhere. Too heavy to be stopped by the snow. And with all that storage space you have what you need when you get there. And your tools don't get wet in the back. And you don't have to climb into it to get what you need. Blah blah blah. Believe me, I keep hearing about it from the guys. Oh well, I'll live it down eventually.
Except for that video on why red trucks are the best. I'll probably never live that one down. I've got to re-shoot that. Sigh...
And I've got to get photos of the new fleet up on the site. Four white vans.
And one red truck