Houston, Texas-based All-Star Tire Co. Inc. is unique. The dealership doesn’t just sell forklift tires. It also sells forklifts. But it took a while to get to that point.
Robert Morin, the owner of All-Star Tire, founded the company in 2000 after working for a commercial truck tire dealership that had a retread plant. (Prior to that, he worked as a farmhand, changing ag tires on big tractors.)
He went from working in the dealership’s retread shop to handling emergency road service calls, interspersed with some sales functions.
Morin enjoyed the job, but with a young family to raise, he wanted a more predictable schedule. He began eyeing other opportunities, including going into business for himself.
After considering several options, Morin concluded that selling forklift tires would allow him to raise his children on “a more eight-to-five schedule.”
He put up his own shingle. Soon, at the suggestion of a friend who was working for Morin as a technician, the newly established All-Star Tire began fixing forklifts.
“In the early days, it was just two of us running like crazy,” says Morin. “I was fortunate that clients kept referring us to other clients and we grew.”
Hustle was the name of the game, he notes — just as it is now.
“We landed a big stevedore company, Cooper T. Smith, by just working on Thanksgiving when others didn’t answer the phone. They turned into the largest customer for us” in All-Star Tire’s early days, generating up to $300,000 in annual revenue.
“They paid every Friday. That was such a blessing.”
Morin began signing other customers as additional opportunities emerged. All-Star Tire continued to grow.
The dealership’s next turning point came when Morin, a big believer in continuous learning, enrolled in a Goldman Sachs-sponsored program for small businesses.
“Typically, the people there are some type of what you would call a ‘C-suite person’ — the CEO, the CFO or the COO of a company.”
During the program, “I sat at a roundtable with these people and someone said, ‘Robert, you already sell tires. You repair forklifts. Who don’t you sell forklifts?’
“In my mind, I was still ‘a tire guy’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ But I bounced the idea around and thought, ‘Why shouldn’t I be a forklift dealer? Other people can do it. Why can’t I do it?’ I brought the idea to my team and they said, ‘Yeah.’
“So the question became: how do I become a forklift dealer? I began talking with forklift dealers,” who recommended that Morin attend a material handling industry trade show to meet with potential suppliers.
“I went to the show and began talking with all of the forklift manufacturers.”
He discovered that most were content with their established distribution.
“Then on the last day we were there, I stumbled onto Tailift,” a forklift manufacturer that “was looking for representation in Houston,” says Morin.
“They had some requirements,” which All-Star Tire met. “We started selling forklifts.”
Today, most of All-Star Tire’s industrial tire competitors sell tires to forklift dealers, but that’s where the connection usually ends, according to Morin.
“Our client base (is comprised of) the same companies that started out buying our tires,” he says. “Forklift tires bring us customers. Our name is All-Star Tire, but when I send you a quote, it also says that we sell forklifts and we lease forklifts.”
The latter service is a more recent addition to the dealership’s business.
New forklift sales make up 10% to 15% of the company’s revenue. Morin believes that percentage will increase.
“If you sell a set of tires for a forklift, you’re talking $1,000. If you sell a forklift, you’re talking $30,000 to $40,000. It’s a bigger-ticket item.”
Morin is fond of calling All-Star Tire “the NASCAR of forklift tires” because of the dealership’s speed and accuracy.
“A business axiom I love is, ‘It isn’t the biggest that eats the small. It’s the fast that eats the slow.’ Customers want to know, ‘Can you do it now and how fast?’
“We started a mounted wheel program that allows us to install four to six tires on a forklift in 30 minutes, as opposed to three hours,” he says.
“We have a client that has 60 forklifts. Eighty-five percent of his fleet is the same make and model. They all have the same size tire on the drive position and they all have the same size tire on the steer.”
The customer uses All-Star Tire’s mounted rim program, “which cuts down on the amount of time their machines are out of production. And that bleeds down into smaller customers.
“The guy who has 10 forklifts” typically follows the same model as customers who run larger fleets, says Morin.
“So now I can speak to that customer and I can show him our data. ‘This tire will last this long in this application in these types of conditions.’”
After-sale service is important, he says.
“The tires we sell are rigorously tracked for hours of usable life. We have a large customer that’s getting over 5,000 hours” on a set of forklift tires — an increase of around 1,500 hours delivered by the original set of tires on the unit.
Morin offers another example of the impact of after-sale service. Years ago, a water bottling company in his market “was changing tires out often due to its 24-hour operation.”
Several tire vendors tried to provide a solution, but failed. “I conducted a preventive fleet survey and changed to a non-marking tire compound and their replacement rate was cut by 50%.”
With a winning formula in place, Morin is investing in the next evolution of his business: by-the-job forklift rental.
“We probably have 20 of them on rental and I’m looking to expand that. At some point, we’ll have a tire company, a forklift dealership and a separate equipment rental company.”
