Breaking Down Roadside Repairs with Alex Bezzubets of myMechanic

When a truck breaks down, time isn’t just money. It’s survival. Fleets lose thousands for every day a vehicle is sidelined, while drivers are left frustrated and in the dark. That’s the reality Alex Bezzubets, Founder and CEO of myMechanic, set out to fix.

In this episode, Alex shares how myMechanic is tackling the technician shortage, cutting wasted calls, and giving fleets, drivers, and service providers the real-time coordination they’ve been missing.

Key takeaways:

• Roadside downtime can cost fleets thousands per day, making response speed critical.
• myMechanic eliminates up to 90% of the phone calls typically required during a breakdown.
• Fleets, drivers, and mechanics see the same updates, photos, and approvals in real time.
• The platform is agnostic, connecting providers and fleets without bias or ownership conflicts.
• Connectivity, not just technician supply, is the real bottleneck in roadside repairs.

LINKS:

• Alex's LinkedIn
• myMechanic's Website

WATCH THE FULL EPISODE HERE

-----------------------------------------

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS!

Are you experienced in freight sales or already an independent freight agent? Listen to our Freight Agent Trenches interviews powered by SPI Logistics to hear from the company's agents on how they took the entrepreneurial leap.

CargoRex is the logistics industry’s go-to search platform—connecting you with the right tools, services, events, and creators to explore, discover, and evolve.

Digital Dispatch manages and maximizes your #1 sales tool with a website that establishes trust and builds rock-solid relationships with your leads and customers.

Chapters

• 5:37 The Broken System of Roadside Repair
• 12:00 What the Driver Experience Really Looks Like
• 19:37 Right to Repair and Industry Challenges
• 26:37 Supporting Mom-and-Pop Fleets and Mechanics
• 36:06 Building Trust With Neutrality and Scale
• 47:58 Lessons From Building myMechanic

Transcript

Unknown: 0:42

What we're seeing in the industry, you know, especially with autonomous vehicles, with self driving vehicles, with electric vehicles, hydrogen, there's special requirements, like, you can't work on an electric truck being a regular mechanic, right? You have to be certified, or you could die, literally. And so right now, it's just a trust game. You call somebody and you don't filter them out. You don't really ask them. You just assume, hey, can you work on this? And they say yes, and you come out. And what we want to do is we want to be able to say, Hey, listen, Blythe, you had this issue with this fault code, this mechanic that's within this vicinity of 1020, 30 miles has worked on this issue, and this was his price rating and review would you like to get connected to them? And what we want to do is allow service providers to do what they're good at and enhance that. If you're good at tires, man, we're going to give you as many tire calls as possible. If you're getting all these five star reviews on electrical work, we're going to give you as much electrical work as you can. And what this does is it gives a great experience on our platform for both the provider and the fleet, and reduces downtime, and, you know, gets the provider more jobs better standings, because he's doing what he's actually good at, right?

Blythe Milligan: 1:46

Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and we've got another incredible episode for y'all today, because we have Alex Bezzubets, it's going to take me a few times in order to get that pronunciation right, but I, you know, I have for most of my life, I had a difficult first and last name for a long time, so I empathize with the struggle of trying to get people to pronounce the last names correctly. But all that to say you are the founder and CEO of my myMechanic and you are trying to create, they're not trying to but you have a platform that connects drivers, fleets and service providers for roadside repairs, towing parts and shop scheduling with real time visibility and fewer phone calls. Because I think for most folks that work in this industry, whenever you hear about a truck breaking down, you know, there's something happening in the background in order to get that truck fixed, but I guess for the overwhelming majority of you know, the last, I don't know, decade plus, that's been a real struggle for drivers, for fleets, for brokerages, when a truck actually breaks down, and trying to assemble all of the people and the parts and the logistics involved of getting that truck fixed. So I'm happy to have Alex finally on the show to be able to talk about his solution and what he's bringing to the market in order to solve all of these different issues that kind of happen in the background but affect everything from pricing to the wave freight moves and all that good stuff, or maybe bad stuff. So Alex, welcome finally to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, excited to be here. Now. I want to just preface this with that Alex is one of the best guys in the industry, because a couple years ago, we were both at a freightwaves conference, and leaving the conference, I was going to walk back a few blocks to my hotels. I don't know. It's probably like 11pm ish at night. No one's on the streets, but you, and I believe another co worker of yours were like, you're not walking by yourself, absolutely not. And then that's on that walk back was when you were telling me about your goals of bringing this vision to life. So it's cool to finally, like, see all of this come together, and the fact that, like you helped me walk back to my hotel, which was very appreciative. So thank you for that. And I joked around at the time that I was gonna now I have to have you on the podcast. And so it's cool to be able to kind of, you know, bring all of these things kind of full circle. So tell us about that vision of what made you even want to start this company?

Unknown: 4:22

Yeah so a couple years ago, two and a half years ago, was we had a roadside company that we founded in Dallas, Texas, and it was doing well. And then one day, you know, trying to figure out the company, trying to figure out how to grow the company, we had a road call from a very big fleet, and I got excited, because this is my opportunity to get in with these guys. And so they called me and they're like, Hey, we have a jack stand that's stuck at one of our trailers. Can you guys come out? I'm like, Absolutely, we'll be there 35 minutes. And you know, that was mistake number one. But then I go down my list of vendors and I'm like, hey, when can you come out? And everybody's like, four hours, five hours. And the guy on the bottom that you don't want was the one that's like, hey, I can be there in 30 minutes. And I'm like, great. I call the company back, and I'm like, Hey, he's going to be there in 35 minutes. And I forget about the road call. I go to dinner with my wife. Two and a half hours later, the guy calls me. He's like, Hey, are you guys coming? And I'm like, yeah, one sec, can I hang up? And I call myMechanic. I called him, like, nine times. He doesn't answer, and he finally calls me back. Long story short, he got high and he passed out at the gate of the of the yard, and he was in his Camry with the toolbox in the back. And I'm like, Dude, I'm never going to work with this fleet again. And he goes and he knocks out the road call, I call this company for the payment. And the guy's second question was, hey, can we. IG, to our network of vendors, of preferred vendors, and in that moment, I realized there's something wrong here, because my tech came out two and a half hours later than he said he would, and he was not prepared or qualified, and he came in a Camry, and it was high and so I did a lot of market research, trying to understand the problem. What the issue is. I still have videos of me pulling over on the road. My wife told me to get back in the car, and we got obsessed with the problem of understanding that there's a connectivity issue. And there's a lot of platforms in the industry, but those platforms are great, but they serve a business model, right? So like Bridgestone, Goodyear, Michelin, all these big brands have a platform that's designed to drive business to them, but as a service provider, I'm forced to download 1520 different platforms as a fleet. I'm forced to go to 15 to go to 15 to 20 different platforms. And so the vision, the concept that we came out with, was to create an agnostic marketplace that we will never run a road call, we will never own a truck, and we will never dictate who would prefer it over who. All we do is our pure SAS platform that connects down drivers, whether you're fleet owner, operator, motorhome, anything big and diesel, with either a call center or a service provider. So whether that be towing roadside parts, what have you, and we feel like there could be a reduction in phone calls, improved connectivity from the driver submitting a breakdown via ELD or on the phone his locations, pulled default codes, everything that's needed for that road call. And, you know, average road call can take 5678, phone calls per road call. And we are predicting, and we're seeing that we're eliminating 85, 90% of those calls, which are mostly status updates. You know, hey, can you pick up this part? Can you approve this? And technology can be introduced to remove that and provide visibility. And so, long story short, the driver has a great experience because the driver stranded on the side of the road. They don't know what's going on, right? And so they have a an opportunity to track the technician in route, communicate, chat, upload photos. The dispatcher for the fleet, same thing, he doesn't have to call anyone. They can electronically send that ticket to the service provider they're choosing. Meanwhile tracking the technician, the service provider, them, they too. They get, receive leads through the system. They can dispatch their mechanics. So it's like a closed ecosystem for everything roadside, scheduled or unplanned, that brings roadside online, essentially. But yeah, so Okay, so there's a bunch of threads that I want to pull on there, because, from the lens of I've always been told, especially working in logistics, like, if you can reduce the amount of phone calls, then you have a business and so that, you know, with you saying you reducing 85% of the phone calls, yeah. So, like I said, the initial phone call, the driver calling in and breaking down. Believe it or not, we've seen fleets that have that wait time of the driver actually coming in contact with dispatcher because he's on in on hold 15 to 20 to 30 minutes just to let the dispatch know he broke down. So that's added downtime, including frustration, bad customer driver experience or whatnot. So that phone call is eliminated. The phone call to call your service provider to see availability, you know, pricing, that's eliminated because it's digitally sending it to your provider of your choosing, and then that status updates, updating your drive or updating the service provider. Service Provider updating you parts, approval, labor approval. Everything is done through the digital aspect of a platform, essentially. So the vision and the goal will be that we will be matching you to providers in the area that match the filter of your repair, and that's where that AI component is going to kick in, but there will be no need for any phone calls at that point. Then Wow. So okay, so we have that from the lens of reducing the amount of phone calls, and then from you mentioned something earlier about they have all of the leads is, are you referring to the mechanic shops? Yeah. So we, you know, a lot of these service providers we're coming to. They're great technicians. They're great you know, business owners, in that sense. But we are introducing fleets to them when they become a verified myMechanic, vendor, service provider, and they're using our operations to our system to manage their operations. We actually have fleets that prefer those vendors over any other vendor, because they have that visibility and connectivity, and they have that digital experience with them. And so we, you know, in addition to helping a service provider manage their business and not have to use a tracking website, a scheduling and website, you know, all these different platforms, they run everything through myMechanic. In addition to that, we then start fueling them with verified leads coming in from these mega fleets that we're talking to. So what is it? I guess the play for, like, mega fleets, I imagine it just centralizes, maybe a lot of their just breakdowns. And I believe you also have a maintenance component as well. Yeah, so if you're, if you're like, let's say you're a fleet of 10,000 trucks, you're probably and you manage your own roadside, you have a team of dispatchers, 3040, 5060, dispatchers sitting in an office, and all they're doing is taking the inbound calls and they're dispatching a technician and they're following up, and then, you know, keeping the driver in the loop and invoicing and billing. So 40 or 50 people are responsible just for truck breakdowns, oh, yeah, or they're just involved in dispatching, and that's part of the. Have dedicated to responding to wow, exactly. So that's the exciting part to your point, like reducing the phone calls. And it's not necessarily that you can reduce reduce your head count that's on you, but it's making your team more efficient and more effective, giving them more information. What we've seen one dispatcher can manage maybe one or two road calls at a time, because there's such a manual process of follow ups and whatnot. But we're now seeing that same service, the same dispatcher can manage 1520, breakdowns at the same time, because our system is managing roadside and they're just overseeing the operations on the system, right, instead of them managing the road, called events themselves. So it's automation, you know, connectivity, communication, everything all at once. So okay, so we have the the fleets that are able to manage in also maybe plan out some of their maintenance it sounds like. And then you have the assistance for the drivers who are already broken down. And you know their time is obviously wasted across the entire supply chain. But that was interesting moment that you said that they have to, you know, wait sometimes 1520 minutes just to even report the problem, that they are broken down. And so what, I guess, what does that process look like for the driver? So I'm a driver, I'm broken down on the side of the road. I try to get in touch with my dispatcher or my broker, and I'm on the phone talking to them, and I tell them what the issue is. What happens after that? The dispatcher will take the information via the phone. They will pull your location of samsara, whatever ELD they have. They start calling vendors in that area that they've worked with in the past, or they use some good websites, like directories like ntts or truck down or Google. And then they call those vendors. They give them the information. They either text the vendor, they email the vendor, they They do, however, right the location of the driver. So they're again, they're using many platforms to be able to manage that one call. And then when the dispatcher says, most likely it's going to be four hours on the service side, they wait four hours. And in the meantime, there might be a couple of status update phone calls, and you're just sitting by and waiting for something to happen, and especially if it's overseas, then it's just even more frustrating, because you can imagine, as a driver, you're frustrated, you're upset, you're sitting on the side of the road, and you know, it's hot, it's cold, whatever it is, and you want that assurance that someone's doing something to get you off That road as quickly as possible. And so our customers, they have, their drivers, have a UI where they get to track everything that the dispatcher sees, they see. So there's no need for the driver to call in and ask, is anybody coming? Is anybody doing anything? They could upload the pictures of the breakdown so that the mechanic, before even heading that way, he can pick up the parts. He can see what the you know, the issues are, sometimes it's a tire, but it could be a trailer that's flipped over, right? But he forgot to tell you, actually happened where they came out for a tire repair, and it turned out that the truck was actually flipped and they had to get the towing companies out. But the guy just forgot to mention that, so again, but that causes downtime, right? And increase in downtime, and companies like these big expedited fleets that make their money off of guaranteeing on time delivery, you know, downtime for them is absolutely the worst enemy, right? And so they will sometimes, believe it or not, dispatch three four vendors at the same time just to make sure somebody comes out, and they'll pay those other three vendors to leave, but they came, and so we're telling them, we can guarantee you a mechanic that's en route, and we're going to give you real time proof that the technicians on site, so you don't have to call the other vendors and have these guys come out for no reason. So excited to see how this is going to I'm not going to say revolutionize, but enhance the industry. I think it's overdue, if not us, but somebody has had to have come up with this in an agnostic manner. Well, I mean, sending three or four vendors out to solve one problem sounds incredibly expensive. Not to mention you have no idea how long that truck is not running, because if it's not running, it's not making money, and if it's sitting, it's costing and so I That sounds like incredibly wasteful, but it may be indicative of the historic problem that has existed with trying to connect mechanics over to the vehicles that are in need. Why do you think this has been a problem that's kind of been I mean, obviously it's a great business opportunity, but why do you think this is a problem that people have just kind of dealt with? I mean, there's, I think there's a lot of reasons, right? And you can't really necessarily blame an individual issue, the service providers are very fragmented. They're broken up into the regions. They work on their own, and there's 30 different ways to connect to a provider, and they're used to that, right? And so when you're when we're coming to them and saying, Hey, this is the last platform you will need, because we will tap into everyone for you, and we will fund no not just leads through it, but we are an operating system for your business as well. And that's where they get hung up, and that's what gets them excited, because we'll come into service providers to onboard them, and they'll have Verizon connect, they'll have. Excel spreadsheet. They'll have, you know, Apple air tags, and they're like, all over the place. And then you're wondering, why are these guys offline? Well, everybody's throwing their platform on these guys. And these guys are mechanics. You know, not only do they have to learn how to use the system, but they have to onboard their technicians. The technicians, last thing they want to do is write notes, or they just want to fix the truck and they want to go to the next job, right? And so I think there was a lot of pressure, a lot of attention focused on the fleets, ELDs, TMS, TV, everything for the fleets, right? And on the service side, there's great, you know, diagnostic software platforms like jpro Diesel laptops, all these guys. And so we're like, in the middle of like, hey, let's just be that aggregator that connects this after like, Zapier or whatever, and like, we don't need to make a lot of money to make a lot of money. It's just, you know, let's keep growing. And then there's a lot of value in connectivity, I think in transportation. Since we are time sensitive business, there's a lot of money that can be made if you can help. You know, guarantee that. And again, we're seeing so much in the industry. We'll, we'll have companies that are doing 20 million, and I cannot make this cannot make this up, they are literally using pencil and paper, and they write the tickets and they give it to a mechanic, and the mechanic puts it into GPS, and he drives off, and then he takes notes and he uploads pictures, and if you don't take the specific picture, the fleet doesn't want to pay you. And it's just like this whole thing, right? And so, in all honesty, the greatest thing I did was I put together a team that that has been in the industry that knows what they're doing. And I was like, What do you think we need to do? And then we went out and we met with every customer, even if we're not they don't like they don't want to work with us. And we're like, what do you want to what do you think is needed? And spending time with these guys, like, even yesterday, we're grabbing dinner with Bill Krueger from UPS and his wealth of knowledge in the industry. I was just sitting there, just sit there, I can't make I literally lost my appetite. Even finished mistake, because he had so much she's saying, my mind spinning right? And we built the platform around the industry so that when we pitch someone, they're like, oh, we need this. This is, I can see this being used in our company. And it's very simple, it's it's very simple, and it works. So what do you do about just an adjacent and I don't know if you know the answer to this, but maybe you do. But like an adjacent industry where, like, you know, John Deere tractors, for example, like you have to have special software and tools and parts in order to replace a John Deere tractor, and then there was all that movement around the, you know, sort of the right to repair for a lot of these farmers who were trying to, you know, fix their own equipment without having to go through, you know, an authorized John Deere, you know, dealership is, does any of that exist within trucking? And do you have to kind of follow maybe some of those, like OEM or parts rules or anything like that. So on that topic, I wanted to give Alex with heave a shout out. He actually is taking on the industry on his own in that sense, and he's doing a great job of exactly what you're saying here. It's like, Hey, I bought this John Deere, and, you know, I sold it, and I bought it from somebody, and I need to know how to fix it, like you have to give me that permission of insight of what do I need to do, right? And with transportation, it's, it's slowly becoming that way with these big dealer brands, and rightly so, they want to protect their, you know, their IP, their their product, right? And so them just giving out all their sauce in the public is, isn't, you know, benefiting to them. But what we're seeing in the industry, you know, especially with autonomous vehicles, with self driving vehicles, with electric vehicles, hydrogen, there's special requirements, like, you can't work on an electric truck being a regular mechanic, right? You have to be certified, or you could die, literally. And so right now, it's just a trust gate. You call somebody and you don't filter them out. You don't really ask them. You just assume, hey, can you work on this? And they say yes, and you come out. And what we want to do is we want to be able to say, Hey, listen, Blythe, you had this issue with this fault code. This mechanic that's within this vicinity of 1020, 30 miles has worked on this issue, and this was his price rating and review. Would you like to get connected to him? And what we want to do is allow service providers to do what they're good at and enhance that. If you're good at tires, man, we're going to give you as many tire calls as possible. If you're getting all these five star reviews on electrical work. We're going to give you as much electrical work as you can. And what this does is it gives a great experience on our platform for both the provider and the fleet, and reduces downtime, and, you know, gets the provider more jobs, better standings, because he's doing what he's actually good at, right? So I think as we're growing in the industry, it's becoming more and more tightened a little bit, but I also think there's a lot of pushback coming in from the fleets on that note, because they're also like, it's, it's, it's causing them downtime. If provider comes out and he can't work on that truck and they have to tow it, and even though there is that warranty work, but still I didn't get my load delivered on time right. And so it's, it's, we're staying out of that argument. But there's some people that are, you know, fighting on that behalf. I know, alight is, you know, trying to take that on again. Alex is doing a great job of taking, you know, defending the technicians against those dealerships as well. So it's interesting to see what's going to happen in the next, you know, coming years. Yeah, because we had talked a while back a few months ago. Show about you coming on the show. And I sent a note out to the Twitter audience and asking them, you know, hey, you know, we got a founder that that's coming on the show soon that you know, has created this solution, talking about you, of course. And then there was a mechanic that replied, and it was like this, paragraph after paragraph after paragraph about how the difficulties of being a technician in the industry, and, you know, sort of alluded to, you know, a few of the issues that I had just talked about. And he basically said he's like, I wouldn't recommend, you know, anybody going to become a mechanic, but it I kind of have the opposite opinion, because there's so many. I mean, obviously your business case proves that the needs for mechanics are very high, and there's a sort of a mechanic shortage that exists. But I would also argue from the electronic side too, that there's so much a massive gap in knowledge that needs to be obtained, not just from like a traditional mechanic, but also from an electrical component and all of these different intricacies that all play a role in all of the different semi trucks that are on the road. So I guess it sounds like that your platform is being able to provide, you know, some of these, maybe specialty mechanics, or some of these, maybe up and coming mechanics, the ability to get access to leads and jobs that they might not have known about previously. Is that accurate? Absolutely. I'll challenge your your comment on there's a mechanic shortage. People hate when I say this, but I think a bigger problem than a mechanic shortage is the connectivity shortage, right? You can't tell me, when you broke down in Dallas, you've called every mechanic, and you know who every mechanic in that area, and then you call them again 20 minutes later to see if anybody's freed up. Usually you call who you see on your directory or who you know, but there's no one platform that has everybody on at the same time and actually actively monitoring them or communicating with them. And so to that point, we feel strongly that if we can bring the roadside industry online. myMechanic is built around the provider industry, because our philosophy is, if we cater to the service providers in a platform they can't live without, the fleets are going to benefit off of it, the owner operators are going to benefit, because these guys are online and live interacting through the platform, right? And so we are giving a lot of tools partner with people like, you know, these, these diagnostic tools, software that will give a service provider as much information upfront assistance as possible that they can get the job done. Because at the end of the day, again, you're right. It's the the odds are stacked against them. You're on the side of the interstate. Cars are flying by. It's raining, it's snowing, it's whatever. And everyone's like, hurry up, man. And he's trying to figure out, you know, which wire is, is mirror or whatever, you know, and then everybody's blaming him for it, and then they get the short end of the stick. And so again, it's, it's going to take some time. I don't think we're going to regulate it, but I do think we're going to bring some the communication, and just an online presence will help bring some more clarity to this industry. And it sounds like they're able to it. Now, is it individual based, as far as the technician is concerned, where they create their own profile and, you know, able to add their, you know, skill sets and, you know, ratings and reviews and collect those, or is it from the mechanic shop perspective, or maybe a little bit of both, that can, kind of, like, make their profile and set up, you know, what, they're skilled at, a little bit of both. So if you're a fleet, obviously, you don't want your driver requesting a mechanic, because you want that to go through your dispatch. If you're a service provider who has mechanics, you don't want your mechanics accepting jobs on your without your permission, right? So the there's customizable workflows on how you want it to be done. But if you're a mechanic who works for yourself, you have a mobile app, and you get leads through the system. You get to, you know, it's kind of like Uber literally on that sense. And now, if you're a service provider company, you have a profile, and leads come in through your dispatch, and then you then funnel it dispatching and scheduling jobs for your service providers and kind of managing their calls, their KPIs, reporting, all of that. Meanwhile, your customers have a great, you know, digital look. And one thing I'll say is we've had service providers that have gained so much more business from existing customers simply because of this digital interaction. Last Last month, I went ahead and I called 10 drivers that had come in contact with myMechanic. One guy forgot he used the platform. But all nine, the rest of the nine loved it. They're like, Hey, make sure my manager uses this. Because again, they're on their own, you know, they're sitting in the middle of nowhere, not knowing what's going on, but now they're looking at their phone, and they have all this information up front, and they're like, that's all I needed for so for, I think most of the folks who are working in trucking know that the majority of the country is is pretty much grown run by these Mom and Pop, you know, carriers that. And I don't mean that in like a derogatory sense, but the fact that they, you know, they have seven trucks or less, I think it's more than 90% of all fleets have seven trucks or fewer. And so for a lot of those mom and pop shops, I imagine that they're, they're wearing a ton of hats, and that when a truck breaks down, it just throws in a giant wrench into all of those things. For lack. Of a better phrase. But for those mom and pop shops, how are they? What's your I guess maybe, do you have any stories to tell from folks who have been starting to use your platform and it helps maybe free up some time in their day, because that's what it kind of sounds like, that. It would be hugely beneficial in that regard. Yeah, we've had service providers that had actually started building out their own call centers internally, because their customers give them all their business, and even if it's outside of their scope of practice, they use their platform to dispatch other mechanics so they can assist everything you know, giving them a tool that brings their business online, everything from scheduling, from reporting, from connecting to their customers. They give their customers a web link that whenever they have a breakdown, either a QR code or the driver directly submits a breakdown, and it goes straight to the service provider. Meanwhile, it's updating the fleet owner. He's getting all the updates that he needs for it. So we're we ask them to not sell our platform, but to sell their business. And when they come to a fleet and they say, Hey, we have this digital component to our company. We've, we've seen such great success stories. That's not to mention that my favorite sales pitch is getting the dispatchers on. Because when you get the dispatcher on, it's a done deal. They're like, they're freaking out in front of you. And then, you know, I don't have to call. I don't have to do this. Oh, wow. The pictures here. It's real time. I don't have to wait until the end of it. I can see it right now. I can chat with my driver, I can chat with the mechanic, and they're like, it's just all there. And like I said, we built this platform by listening to the industry in the market, by being obsessed with them. And so when we deliver it to them at the end of the day, they're all going through the same workflows, right? And so it's like, Oh, I could use this. Oh, I need this. And it's been exciting to see it, because when you're helping these guys that have been kind of, I'm not gonna say left behind, but they're competing against these mega companies that have billions of dollars to funnel into technology. You know, loves has great program, ta all these big dogs that cover this nationwide coverage, and then Tommy's towing, you know, or Tommy's roadside, two miles away from a love station. It's like, okay, can somebody call me on Google? You know what I mean? And it sucks, because, again, they're great mechanics, but and you can ask any driver or fleet owner, the mechanics that they want, are those guys that are working out of that truck that you know don't take the phone call because they know they're going to do the job right? And so we want to be able to be that liaison on their side, and digitally connect them to the industry. They can do what they're doing well. And we'll, you know, not only get them leads, but we'll help them manage their business and grow and start streamlining it for them. And as we go and as we get market share, we're going to be able to say, hey, what do you want to work on? You want to stick to Kenworth? Alright, we're going to give you all these Kenworth leads. Hey, what do you want? We want to stick to tires. Okay, great. Hey, listen, there's a snowstorm in Montana. There's about 35 requests. Can you start taking three of your trucks and start driving them up north, and we will dictate those leads for you? Or, hey, there's a hot pocket with 16 leads a week in this area, and there's no mechanics. Can we maybe put a truck there and we'll start fueling you with leads. So we want to grow with these service providers, because at the end of the day, our customers, the fleets, benefit as well. And so our barrier to entry is very minimal. We charge $2.50 on a ticket, and everybody my team hates me for it. They're like, Oh, we could be making so much more money. But like, the vision is, let's build this market together, and when we add features in the future, we want to have the customer be in a grocery store where they're putting things in a shopping cart that they need, instead of just dictating for them, Hey, pay $25 per month per technician, whether you want to use these features or not. And so again, we just want to help them customize their business however they do it currently, so that they can have a good experience. And you know, not to interrupt their their operations by training them and making them do it our way or the highway, you know. So with the numbers that I said earlier about, you know, the majority of the the fleets in this country or seven trucks or fewer, is that kind of, do you see similar numbers on the mechanic side of things where, like, you know, 90% of all the mechanic shops in the country have two mechanics or fewer. Is there anything like that that kind of exists, or any, you know, stats around that? I think it's actually flipped. You know, you have, you have big names in the industry that have done a great job, like fleet net, you know, with their acquisition of Cox. You know, there's hundreds of texts there. Epica has been so there's this crazy world going on that PE firms are now jumping into this space, and they're just acquiring service providers, and they're bundling them up into bigger companies. And so there's jokes going on around that right now in the industry is like, Hey, are you going to get bought out or not? You know, and, and it's, I think a lot of people also, they're, they're learning that they can branch out and start their own. We're seeing a lot of that as well, where you're getting shops, well, not necessarily shops. I mean, I, I personally think, you know, people are winding away from the shops less overhead to just have a mechanic in a truck. And you could, you know, the ROI is far higher there as well. And so fleets are also like, Hey, if you can just come on my yard and knock it out all these PMS, I don't have to drive every truck truck to the shop. So. Becoming more and more popular. It's kind of like mobile maintenance or mobile car washes right now. Yeah, people are just like, hey, come out and change my oil, or, Hey, come out fuel my car. That's becoming very popular as well. So it's, there's a shift going on in the industry. But again, we want to be that tool. My favorite customers that we're having are these guys that are 1015, 2030, trucks. Because, man, they're they're looking to grow, they're hungry and they're personable. You can communicate directly with the owners, and that's what we do. We pride ourselves on sitting down with these people, hearing them out, spending time with them and watching them grow and add technicians, because now they're not, you know, having five dispatchers, they have one, but they can spend more money on payroll or mechanics or buy trucks or tools or whatever. So it's interesting what's happening, but I think the fleets are going to benefit from it as well. What about, I guess, the tool aspect, you know, we had talked earlier about sort of the OEMs and, you know, exclusive parts and things like that. And I understand it from the vehicle manufacturer standpoint, where they want to control their own supply chain, but from the mechanic side of things, do the same tools work on different I am completely car, truck agnostic. You start talking about some of this stuff, my eyes glaze over. But this conversation I am happy to have because the idea of like a mechanic coming to me, but is the mechanic going to come to me with the tools that he needs? Or, how does that, I guess, process work? Does he need, like, a giant truck with all these different tools in it? Or can he just, you know, I think, Yeah, apparently, I think a great example is an ambulance, right? You're gonna have an ambulance that comes out. They have everything that they need for basic needs. And then, in addition to, they want to do, you know, control, get the truck out. So some fleets are brand aware. They would not want their truck sitting on the side of the road with their logo slapped over so they're going to tow the truck. If they flip the truck, they're putting tarps all over it. They don't want that image perception out there. Hey, my trucks are down now, as you know, as far as far as the man, I just lost my train of thought. Post, the question again, the giant trucks, like, are they? Is it like a ambulance coming with all of the different tools in it? Or, yeah, the tools. So 50, 51% of all road calls are tires, alright? So to replace the tire, you know, you get the same universal tools right now, when it gets more specific down to whether it's mechanical, whether it's a trailer, whether it's electrical, you know that you start going down these little spirals, but you ask up front when you're calling someone, Hey, can you work on X, Y and Z? And unfortunately, sometimes people just say yes, and they don't have the tools or the qualifications to do it. Sometimes it takes special software to be able to, you know, get a truck back on the road, and I know there's diesel laptops, and these guys are doing a great job of creating these virtual off road call centers, so you can actually tap in by buying their hardware, and you don't even have a tablet mechanic come out. So that's slowly becoming a little more popular as well. So people are getting creative. You know, jpro, these guys are doing all these different things. Like it's interesting to see what's happening in the industry. Happening in the industry, but to your point, again, it could be numerous things that could be wrong with the truck, but it's slow. The OEMs are doing a great job of kind of figuring those things out and doubling down on them. So you're not having the same year make and model, having the same repetitive issue and consistently, you know, having, you know, bad reputation because of it, but yeah, so what does so it sounds like you have, you know, a couple major markets or audiences that you're going after. And so it's the the fleets, it's maybe the dispatchers, and then it's the mechanics, three customers, anything big and diesel, Greyhound, school busses, dump trucks, semi trucks, RVs, motorhomes. In the middle, we have our call centers. So anybody that has a call center that inbounds from the fleet and pushes out to the provider, they don't own any mechanics themselves. Our platform is designed for that as well. We have, I think, seven call centers on right now and then we have our service providers. So we have two sides to a provider. You can be featured in our directory, so you'll just receive calls to your verified provider, or you're actually an online provider that's using our system to operate your business. So you could be a towing company, you could be a roadside you know, technician company was scheduled or emergency parts distributor. We want to see what your inventory you have, and then we want to match that filter to whatever the parts required and allow you to, you know, also sell your parts through your store as well. So, you know, we got some other stuff in the works, but those are kind of our core business models right now. Our goal is by 2026 we're putting together a fleet council of 20 mega fleets that are coming together and working into 2026 they're going to mandate, quote, unquote, that they're using myMechanic for all their roadside needs. And so yeah, when all those 20 mega fleets turn around to those service providers, the service providers are going to get instant revenue volume in addition to an operating system that helps them. It is agnostic, so they can use it with whatever customer they could we can tap into whatever ELD or telematics or, you know, software that they use. So we're not, we're not going to be like saying, you know, take use us or go away, right? So exciting to see what happens. I just did not expect it to kind of snowball in the way it's snowballing right now. But, you know, it's been, again, all credit to our team. We have such a great team that's just been knocking it out of the park early on. The funny story, our investors were like, Why do you keep hiring these older guys that are in you know? You know, they're like, You need to get a couple young guys from college that are going to run, I'm like, You guys, this is the smallest industry in the world. And Case in point, we hire on this guy and and I'm like, Mark, and I'm like, Dude, we try to get into Amazon. That guy just made my wife a cutting board. I got into this job. Let me make a phone call like, Are you freaking kidding me? Man, I've been knocking on amazon store for like, three months, and you tell me, you just you know the guy, man, I got you. So it's a relationship driven industry, and it's just been funny watching it grow from that sense, no, that that's definitely awesome, because it sounds like it's just, I mean, since we had that conversation a couple years ago, that it's just snowballed into this great thing that it was just almost like a diamond in the rough that maybe no one was really paying attention to. But you guys are kind of like building in the background and creating all of these different solutions. Different solutions that has been sorely needed. And I mean, kudos to y'all. Hats off to y'all for all of that, you know, momentum that you've been seeing. I am curious about, sort of, what the onboarding experience looks like. So if I'm a mechanic and I haven't, you know, been listed on your site yet, what does that process look like. So the really cool part about our platform, when you actually get to see a demo is all three profiles, they all look exactly the same. So whether you're a mechanic and a fleet, you could walk each other through the platform, everybody's looking at the same screen, same onboarding, kind of limiting the need for customer service calls and whatnot. But I mean, we the thing that I was not expecting that with these mega fleets that we're talking we're averaging on our second call, a pilot approval, which is kind of crazy to even imagine, yeah, literally, they're like, All right, we're gonna pilot. And usually these things take 689, 1012, months, right? Approvals, all these things. And so we can onboard a service provider or a call center or a fleet within 1015, 20 minutes, and training takes maybe five minutes. It's extremely easy to use because, again, you have many parts, pieces, people's frustrations, emotions, and so the last thing you want to do is have somebody navigate through all these different features and whatnot. Very simple in and out buttons are throbbing. You know what to do. We have mechanics learning on their own how to use the system, because you just download the app and it walks you. So again, we made it very easy. And I mean, anybody can go to our website, request a demo, or sign up and they can log in. We can get them on boarded again minutes, and whether they want to run some calls and be featured in our directory or to get road calls from our mega fleets or customers. That's on them, and we're eagerly looking for providers that are qualified as well as fleets, because these fleets are coming in with their providers. They're like, hey, we don't need new providers. We need a better way to communicate with our existing providers. And so we give them a tool to help connect them to their existing network. Because, hey, I've worked with Tommy for 20 years. I don't want to change that. That's fine. You. That's fine. Let's get you a better communication platform with Tommy, so that you and Tommy are on the same page, and you know, you're not, you know, going at each other for miscommunication, for whatever reason. And you mentioned earlier with something like, you know, it's $2 a ticket or something like that. Like, how does it is all the pricing, I guess, sort of the same for each user, yep, $2.50 across the board. You know, we like to say it's cheaper than a than a gallon of diesel, but the thing is, I feel like this industry has been burnt a lot by all these hidden costs, hidden fees, all these different providers. You know, they're getting screwed at the end of the day because there's so many hands in the cookie jar. And you know, they're they're the ones that have the truck, the insurance, the tools, the drivers on the road sitting there. And so we're like, hey, let's cut the market at the ankles, to the point where even people that might look at us as a competitor, they actually want to use us, because it just makes feasible sense for them, right? And so now, in the future, when we start automatically suggesting connections, there's going to be a higher cost to that, depending on, obviously, the expedite, the reasoning behind it. But we are going to be releasing features in cap, AI monitoring, TPMS monitoring, and you get to choose what you want to be added into your, you know, profile. So if you want 10 trucks to be because these are your expedited reefer trucks, and they're hauling perishable loads, and so you want to make sure that we're monitoring those reefers, in addition to it's just an extra dollar a month, or whatever, you know. So there's a couple things up our sleeves, but we're focused on phase one, which is just being a communication platform that connects all the parties together. And then we are going to start building in those other value propositions as we grow. Yeah, I imagine, for, you know, the drivers that are hauling like, you know, really pricey freight. Right? And maybe they're worried on the side of the road that someone is, you know, not just from an accident standpoint, but someone you know might do harm to them. Is there, I guess an escalatory, I guess Note that you can put on the platform to or maybe that's coming down the pipeline? Yeah, you can. You can pay a premium, and we alert our providers like, Hey, this is an emergency, and it's they're willing to, you know, double down or whatever, hurry up and get to the call. They can do so. But again, it's that connectivity and actually providing an opportunity to even ask that question, right? That's what we want to do. And then you could, you guys figure it out, right? We don't want to dictate who to use. You can't pay me more to make you featured on top. You're competing against yourselves, your ratings, your reviews, that way. You know we're not embedding into in your business. It's it's you against the world. You do a great job. Please see it, and they're going to get rewarded for it as well. I was going to say you mentioned earlier, I think, like ratings and reviews too. So you're able to leave almost like Uber, like the driver can rate me as a passenger and vice versa? Is that a similar Absolutely? Yeah, again, this industry is built on trust. To your point, why is this guy coming out to all these mobile regions and he doesn't even have a diesel laptop? Like, maybe we should flag him, you know, or a he's he doesn't have the proper tools or the cage. Like, there's so much different things that you could but also reward them. Hey, this guy did a great job. I'm going to tip him extra. Him extra. You know, you could do that platform as well. We have pre authorization charges, where, if you're a service provider and you get a random call from an owner operator and you're afraid of chargebacks, you can send them a pre authorization through our Stripe account, and they get make that payment. You get that money on hold. Then you could dispatch your mechanic. You feel comfortable doing it. You could, you know, add parts to that and whatnot. You do chargebacks, your offer platform. You do bad three bad ratings, reviews. You get put into review board like, Hey. Why do you keep getting these reviews? Do you know what you're doing, type of deal and starting to, kind of help filter the system the industry, without necessarily dictating people how to run their business? That's kind of the complicated part. But also, you know, the fleets are doing it on their own regardless. No, I mean, it all sounds really promising. And I especially love the fact that you have mentioned a couple times about how customer obsessed that you guys have been over the last couple of years and talking to different customers. Is there any, you know, maybe a couple success stories that you could share with us, as far as, like, mechanics or drivers or fleet owners, maybe using your services. And then, you know, having a, obviously a good experience, like, I don't think you want to talk about maybe a bad experience, which, I don't know that that's happened, but, yeah, I mean, I could go into stories. It's very hard not to mention names, because I want to be able to brag on and who's using our platform currently. And that's the hardest part about these pilots and actual customers that want to remain anonymous, in that sense. But I mean, like I said, we've we've seen in Mega fleets, one of the best things is the ROI that they're getting in reduction of phone calls and management, right? So one individual can manage multiple calls at the same time with with our tool, whereas in the old module, he had to keep manually writing notes on a piece of paper, taking pictures, emailing, you know, going all over the place, putting an invoice together using another platform. So that's on the fleet site. That's our biggest success stories. Is like, hey, all that manual is now automated, and you just manage you press buttons the call center side that one's amazing, because it's kind of like the call center is cheating in a way, because our system does the work for them, and they're just getting the reward for it from the customer. Because it's like, oh, wow, you gave me this whole digital experience. You were able to give me the location of the technician and all these things. And they're like, Yeah, we did all that for you, you know. But in reality, is the company, I mean, the platform, which is fine at the end of the day, because the customers are getting more revenue off of that, right? And then lastly, on the service provider side, I like that we were a voice for these providers, and we're putting them together. And they're fragmented. They're broken in different ways of communication and manners and platforms, and we're kind of consolidating that, and we're coming back to the fleets and saying, Hey, we got these guys on board for you, and they're verified and they're vetted. And so these big dealerships that are like that are doing a great job, and they want to grow and they want to expand. And so we're like, Hey, let us connect you directly to these fleets that you're either working with, we're trying to work with even more. And again, we've had three fleets tell us, and these are big fleets that they will use preferred vendors that are online overnight. And that just shows me how desperate they are for this connectivity and this online experience, right? And our goal is to get the market where we're a little over 3100 service providers in our directory as we speak, and growing every day. The teams on the doing multiple demos a day. Right now, I'm on the road. The team's on the road. I got two months till my daughter's due, and so I'm okay. Thank you, because then I'm going to be out, locked down for a. Couple of weeks, at least, that being said, We're, yeah, we're growing, but there's stories every day that we're getting, like, little text messages and, you know, rewards and this and that, and it's awesome, you know, it really is. Yeah, I keep anytime I get, like, a compliment, I screenshot it, and then I save it into a digital folder so I can use it later on in like a pitch deck or some kind of marketing campaign or whatever. But it is nice to especially on like down days when you don't feel like you're, you know, as as a founder, you know, you're just pulled in so many different directions. And sometimes you feel like you're, you're treading water for weeks, sometimes months, maybe even years. And so you have those little moments of like, those success stories, or, you know, testimonials that you can kind of lean on in those times. And so it sounds like you you've kind of, you know, gotten over the hump with a lot of, you know, maybe early, like startup founder type issues, and now you guys are, you know, really finding a good groove with all of the different audiences that you're serving and the success stories. So it's really cool to watch, you know, from, from an outsider perspective. And a couple last questions here, you know, from, from your lens. You know, is there anything that you think is important to mention that we haven't already talked about? I was going to say, It's important who you hire, and don't be afraid to ask around. Hey, you know, it's a small industry, and people talk talking about, you know, yeah, but you know, it's all about the team. And as a founder, like, I had this precious moment yesterday, and it sounds good, it's gonna sound cheesy, but I was driving, and I'm driving, and I'm not getting any phone calls from the team, from nothing. And I'm like, it just hit me, because I got, like, dozed off. And then I check and the ops team is doing this. The devs are doing that. They're having their meeting, the sales guys are doing a demo, they're onboarding. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, we're actually a company now, like, you know, the team is taking over these guys, like, oh, stay out of it. Like, we got it. Don't come with any I'm like, and as a founder, your control is, like, you're my babies. It's walking, you know, it's running, or whatever. And these guys are coming in and, and I've again, I did the Great, the greatest thing I did was surround myself with these guys that are reputable, they have knowledge in the industry. And so they came in and they're like, we're going to do it this way. We're going to do it that way, this way. And my job is to just, you know, stand back and be like, Okay, how can this what does this mean? What does this mean? And so lately, I've just been more focused actually starting to become a CEO, and not, like running everything. Because again, the guys that are they're getting creative. They're owning their positions and their roles. And so we were generous in giving out equity in the sense of rewarding because what I've seen a lot of these guys were with these companies for 20, 3040, years, and nothing to show for it. And so I saw a value proposition there. I'm like, Well, you could, you could show off here. Come on in like you could get creative and do what you wanted to do, and they do. And the values there, because it's years of experience that I don't have, and I'm not going to pretend like I have, right? And so it's just, it's been exciting. It's been fun. A lot of scars on my back to prove it. I used to tell people it sucks. It sucks right now, but it's going to be a nice podcast later. You know, one funny story. I'm not going to state the name of the fleet, but we we were onboarding. This is before we got funded, and we were onboarding a fleet in person. And I flew in and we took them to dinner. I had to ask my best friend to cash out me money so I could pay for that dinner. Like, that's how bad it got, you know, but I'm sitting there and saw this whole thing and, like, it's like, Hey, man, hurry up. Cash on me, whatever that amount was, you know. But it shows that we were all in as a team, and I'm really proud of our team for doing that. And now that we're, you know, we got money in the account, and we're revenue and customers and traction, our biggest focus is like, hey, how do we not have to raise capital again? Like, we're getting a little greedy with our equity, because this thing is has legs to stand on, and we've had five acquisition offers since November, you know what I mean? So it's like, it's Yeah, and it's slowly becoming something that a brand that people are talking about, which is such a proud moment, you know, we talked about just so and so told me about that. It's like, Oh, great. Thank you. He's talking about us, you know, but it's fun. I wouldn't recommend it, but it's fun. No, it is amazing to be able to have the moment where you can step back as a business owner and instead of trying to play all the instruments you can, you can finally become the conductor and to have money in the bank account at the same time and be able to trust your team like, I think that that is what every business owner, what every founder, is aspiring to do. So it that's really cool to hear. I am curious, how do you how do you ignore like, the acquisition calls? Like, because sometimes with, with, you know, a couple of my companies, if they come calling, I'm. Answered, yeah, I think it's something. It's the it's the opportunity of creating something bigger than than life. There's this Bible verse that says, A wise man leaves an inheritance for his children's children, and that's a lot of money. Okay, it's, it's not just children, it's children's children. And so I am, I feel like I'm young enough to where even if I had this perception, even if it didn't work out, I could go into whatever and try it out. And so I went all in on this thing. And I've had a couple fails in the past. It was people, it was this, it was that. And so when this thing started having its legs and kind of starting it a little market validation, I'm like, Oh, this is real. This is actually something here. And one of the things that I fought for with our startup was to not have competition. And so if we were trying to do a feature and we knew there's a competitor in that landscape, we backed up, and we're like, how do we work with them? And then it's an extension of our business. And so it's, it's honestly a pride thing, that we can say that we are the first and the only true agnostic platform that connects drivers to service providers, and we don't benefit off of that, besides the $2.50 meaning I don't have trucks that I can steer business to, or you are not. I'm not owned by a fleet, and so I don't benefit off knowing where your trucks breakdowns are. And so I think that's what the industry really needed, as well as somebody that they can trust and can't benefit off of their information. And so that's why we turn down these acquisition offers as well, because people have tried building this, but they're the market. You know, they are the market, so they can be a marketplace. And if they do acquire US, then the business model just kind of topples there. And so I have a number in mind that I think we're going to be able to reach. I have high goals that we are going to be, you know, one of the faster growing tech startups, especially in our space, and we're so far starting to show early signs of that. And again, it's not without our partners, the people, that given us the trust our early customers, being patient with us, and, you know, to this day, loving us, but all that put together, and you know the way that even God's been ordaining it, the people that are coming in. I can't sit here and brag and be like, Oh, I got this guy, or I found this. Things just align. Things happen. And it's just, it's a journey that you have to learn how to love, because if you don't, you're going to go through hell, and it's going to be hell in your family and hell in your life, and hell everywhere, right? And so we got obsessed with the product, with the product problem, and with the solution. And my favorite thing is the guys are calling me. They're like, Man, I'm having so much fun. And these guys are 50 years old, and they're, like, freaking out calling, you know, 6789, 10 o'clock. Hey, I got this idea. I got that idea, you know, I'm like, good. They're happy. They're liking it. They're getting creative with it. You know, that's awesome. And I feel like that is a perfect sort of mic drop moment for this episode to end us on. So, Alex, where can folks follow you? Get signed up for myMechanic. You know all that good stuff. Yeah. I mean LinkedIn, our website is myMechanic.app. And you know, you probably hear about us soon. We got some cool stuff that we're about to release, some great partnership announcements. We just we're about to announce, so either you could look us up, or you're gonna hear about us soon, eventually, whether you like it or not, but I imagine a lot of folks, overwhelming majority of folks, love to see a story like this. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your insights, and I'll be sure to add all of those links in the show notes, just to make it super easy for folks to find. Y'all So Alex, thank you again for coming on the show. I was gonna say, don't just use any mechanic. Use myMechanic. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain for the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything is logistics, and if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch. We help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the next episode in go Jags.