Terry, tell us about PARS and your role with the company.
PARS is a transportation company. We are a full service driveaway and auto carrier transporter throughout the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. My role is Vice President, National Sales and we have a passion for customer service and technology. Our website is very sophisticated; we update it continuously and it really does assist us in terms of our and our customers’ productivity.
What do you think sets you apart from your competition?
Part of what sets us apart from our competitors, and we have very excellent competitors within our industry, is our customer service and our passion level for our customers. In other words, part of what we do is to make sure that the customer is getting what they paid for. We don’t marshal vehicles and wait until we finally have a driver to move a vehicle. We move it, the customer is paying us to move it professionally and so we move it in a quick manner. This is a great benefit for the customer. It is a more expensive way of moving vehicles.
If you can wait and hook up a move to another move to another move it is much more cost effective. But our customers are not willing to wait a week or two weeks or however long this might take to link them together. They may be in a rental vehicle at the other end and moving it quickly may save them a hundred dollars or more in rental fees. Maybe they are in a station wagon or a sedan rental vehicle and they are waiting for a work truck. Well, they are not very productive as it relates to being in a car as opposed to their work truck. So we try to make sure that we are expeditious, that we do pay attention.
We have the ability to customize our parameters for all of our customers. So, we can specifically mandate for a customer or a customer can mandate for us…this is how I want you to act…when you pick up our vehicle this is what I want you to do. I want you to get the oil changed. I want you to get another key fob for the vehicle that’s only got one. I want you to get a duplicate registration if there is no registration in the vehicle.
Our business has turned into much more a concierge service now than in years past. It used to be that driveaway companies would just pick up the vehicle at point A and take it to point B. If it’s got food wrappers in the back, if it’s filthy, if it’s got a chip in the windshield, if it’s got a ding in the door, deliver it as it is and our driver will take care of it at the end of the line. Now the companies are much more sophisticated, the drivers are much more sophisticated. If it’s a new employee, they expect a new vehicle. So when you bring them a 40,000 mile vehicle, it better be as clean as possible. Detailing the vehicle, shampooing the carpets, buff and shine the exterior; make it as nice as possible.
How have your services expanded over the years?
Part of what we do for our customers is, I think, solution selling. Very few of our customers simply want us to move a car. That is why many of our current services have been developed based on our customers’ needs. We will continue to expand our services to provide solutions for specific problems. There has been a lot of uneasiness in the economy over the past few years. There have been a lot of redeployments, a lot of people losing jobs. Some of the industries have been hit very, very hard. We have partnered with our customers to help with the planning upfront; understanding what vehicles make sense to replace and move or store or redeploy – high mileage here, low mileage there. So, we do a lot of solution planning with our customers and listening to what their needs are and the earlier that we can be involved in that kind of redeployment or a downsizing the better off we are in actually understanding what their needs are.
When we get to the vehicle, we are the eyes and ears for our customers. Typically, the customer has no idea what this particular vehicle looks like. So, their driver may have taken pristine care of it or may have just trashed it. They expect us to make the decisions, based on their parameters. Does it need a detail; does it just need a vacuum? Was it smoked in? To smoke in a vehicle is pretty incredible now. Since it is smoke free everywhere, it is something that is very difficult to get out of an interior. We do ionization, we do different things.
We have had a nonsmoking policy at PARS forever. We have had, for the last four or five years, smoke free drivers. Before that, our policy was that you do not smoke in the vehicle – that’s clear, you never smoked in the vehicle. However, even if you do not smoke in the vehicle, if one of our drivers is a smoker, they are driving 500 miles; they pull off to the rest stop, they have a couple of cigarettes, a sandwich and jump back in the car – then they roll the windows up and all of a sudden now that smoke is on their clothes, it’s in the vehicle. And so we are very sensitive to those kinds of things.
Are your drivers employees of PARS?
Our drivers are actually independent contractors. There is a lot of debate about whether employees or independent contractors are a better fit. We feel independent contractors allows us more latitude as it relates to expanding and decreasing our driver pool. We can redeploy drivers very easily. We have a phenomenal pool of drivers where some of them want to drive once a week, some of them want to drive once a month, some of them only want to drive long distances. Some only want to be out of town for a week. Other ones don’t want to be out of town at all, only driving locally during the day.
Our managers in the field manage a very diverse group of drivers and know when this kind of move comes up; this is the perfect driver for us. We have long haul drivers, short haul drivers, CDLs, you name it. They are all a part of our service organization. They all understand what we are trying to accomplish with our service level and all represent PARS very professionally.
Our drivers not only represent PARS, they also represent our customer so we need to make sure our drivers fit the level of what we would consider a professional driver. We take a lot of care in terms of how we specifically recruit and retain our drivers. Safety is a huge issue for us. We have now gone to a no cell phone policy, hands free or otherwise. So, we are very safety conscious; we don’t want to have an accident. We take every care in the world to make sure our drivers are trained properly, for safety. We want our drivers to be driving for us for a long time. Many of our drivers have been referred by a friend that drives for us. We do MVR checks to be certain that they are safe drivers.
What are some of the trends that you are seeing in the industry?
The trends that I have seen over the last four or five years are the additional services that are available from the transportation companies. Almost every vehicle needs to have something done with it. There are work trucks that we deliver as is but most of the others do require some additional service. Customized parameters are very important to us. We need to understand what our customers need; what are their pain points? What are the things that really do cause them issues around transportation? Because frankly, for most companies transportation is a very small line item on their things to do; it is only a big item when something goes wrong.
When our customers place a move on our website, they immediately get an email indicating that we’ve got their order. When we schedule that vehicle to be moved, we send them an email that tells them that their vehicle has been scheduled to be picked up on Monday and delivered on Tuesday. When the vehicle is delivered on Tuesday, we send an email to them saying your vehicle was delivered on Tuesday. So our customers don’t have to chase us as it relates to the status of their move. We understand that time is money.
The services that we provide, for example, full DMV services, where we handle the entire title and licensing of a new vehicle, providing a turnkey delivery. We stand in line at the DMV so our customer’s driver doesn’t have to. We also do partial DMV; obtaining a smog certificate, VIN inspection, weight slip, etc. for our customers. For example, we are bringing your vehicle into California and it needs a smog certificate and VIN inspection. The fleet management company is probably doing the state transfer but they need the smog certificate and VIN inspection in order to complete their activities. We can either deliver the vehicle to the driver and the driver can now take it down to do the smog check or we can do it on our way. Drivers are very valued parts of an organization. Most companies don’t want to have their driver, that is potentially a $500 dollar an hour employee, to be waiting at the DMV for two hours trying to get whatever might be required to do the state transfer.
What do you see ahead for the industry?
I think the fleet industry has changed a lot in the past year. Obviously the turmoil at the OEMs and the tsunami in Japan has led to a lack of vehicle production. This has caused fleet managers and the industry itself to really think about how many vehicles they have and how many vehicles do they need. Where can we redeploy? We are the eyes and ears for our customers and help determine which vehicles that potentially do need to be sold and those that can be redeployed. We try to make sure we are offering solutions to our customers to make sure that we are a value add to what they do.
I think the transportation services for many years was nothing more than drive away companies; you just pick it up here and drive it to there. There weren’t many options. Today it has almost become a concierge service as it relates to vehicle deliveries. As the dealer body shrinks a little bit it, becomes harder and harder for the fleet management companies to find a courtesy delivery dealer in close proximity to a driver. A lot of times, we can provide a solution to pick up the vehicle at a dealership and take it to the driver so they are not impacted by a hundred or two hundred mile round trip to get to the dealer. That is part, I think, of what is coming down the road for us.
Redeployments are a big issue as customers down size or right size or a pharmaceutical company that gets a new drug and suddenly require a large number of new vehicles in a hurry. We can help them do that. On the manufacturer transportation side, there has been a lot of disruption in the days to deliver, especially in the case of ship throughs on up fitted vehicles. Where we can help out is to pick the vehicle up at the up fitter as opposed to the vehicle going back into traffic. It might get them the vehicle three weeks earlier than normal OEM traffic. The downside is they are going to have to pay both the freight from the OEM and the cost to drive the vehicle but they may gain that much productivity, especially if the drivers are working out of rentals.
Our primary business is with the private sector, the commercial fleets and the fleet management companies. The public sector is one that is interesting and we have participated in that particular part of the industry. That business may grow as the federal government gets to the point where they can’t afford to have a driver or one of their employees drive a vehicle a thousand miles and drop it off just because they are on the payroll. Hopefully, our government has more important things to do than move vehicles around.
We are looking at many things; potentially being game changers within our industry. The resale market is very hot right now. Fleets are short cycling, getting out of vehicles early. They are moving vehicles, getting rid of the high mileage and replacing them with lower mileage vehicles. I think we become the solution that helps them get their vehicles in the right place at the right time.
BIO
Terry Langness is Vice President, National Sales for PARS (Professional Automotive Relocation Service). Terry is responsible for all sales activities for the US, Canada & Puerto Rico. Terry has over 35 years of fleet industry experience. Prior to joining PARS in 2002, Terry held various management roles with Gelco Corporation and GE Capital Fleet Services. You can email Terry at [email protected].
