Mechanic Leslie Ballou pops out and within a few minutes has jacked up the black Lincoln Town Car in the driveway to remove its wheels.
Inside his truck, the tires are removed from the rims and replaced with new white-walled Continentals. The new tires are inflated, balanced, and put on the car in the driveway. An hour-and-a-half after Ballou arrived, the car’s owner, Maureen Moakley, emerges onto her front walk to sign the invoice: $627 for four new tires.
Moakley explains that she got a similar quote from a nearby shop – but that would have required her to spend an hour or two there, waiting for the work to be done.
Convenience and time savings are the central selling points for Rolling Rims Mobile Tire Changing Service, a Burlington-based start-up that launched last spring.
Though several small mobile tire-changing companies operate in car-obsessed California, Rolling Rims founder Steve Nugent seems to be the first to try the concept in Boston. So far, he has just one truck – bought used – and an entrepreneurial resume that includes starting six karate schools around the Boston area.
Nugent is the classic scrappy entrepreneur, with a martial arts twist. He started teaching karate while still in high school in Newton, won four world titles in competition, and opened his own karate studio in 1994, subletting space from a gym in Burlington. When students didn’t show up quickly enough, he offered to clean the gym at night to get a break on rent. That kept the business alive, and he opened his second school in 1999.
Two years ago, Nugent was in a National Tire and Battery store having the tires on his Toyota Tundra pickup truck changed. “It took me two hours to get four tires done,’’ he says. He recalls seeing an ad for Giant Glass, the mobile service that replaces broken car windshields, on TV while he was waiting for his new tires. “It hit me like a ton of bricks: If you can replace a windshield on a freezing January day out of a truck, you could probably change a tire,’’ he says.
He found such companies in other parts of the country, like The Tire Brigade in central Florida, but no one in Boston. And he was surprised that national auto-service chains like Goodyear, National Tire and Battery, and Sears, weren’t at least dabbling in the business.
In January, Nugent started testing the idea, driving around to office buildings, walking in to companies at random, and offering to do tire changes for the employees who worked there. He’d remove a customer’s wheels, throw them into his SUV, take them to a nearby gas station to have the tires replaced, and bring them back. “I tested the market demand that way for two months before I decided to buy the truck,’’ he explains.
He bought the five-year-old truck from Penske, and outfitted it with a mix of new and used equipment. The tire-changing machine and wheel balancer would have each cost about $7,500 new, he explains. By purchasing them from a Dodge dealership that was being closed, he got them for less than half that. The entire rig, truck and all, cost about $40,000, Nugent estimates. He said each truck and driver can do about five jobs a day. Right now, the truck does a job or two on a typical day. “My goal is to have 20 trucks in five years,’’ he says.
His marketing pitch is geared to busy people who’d rather not spend time at a tire store. The Rolling Rims flier asks, “Why waste your Saturday sitting in a waiting room reading old magazines and drinking stale coffee?’’ (Moakley, his customer in West Newton, picked up one of the fliers at a neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts.)
Most customers aren’t particular about the brand of tires that Rolling Rims supplies; Nugent buys tires for each job from a distributor.
“They want something round and black,’’ Nugent says, adding that the company is willing to do special orders when a customer does want to pick a specific tire. The average invoice for the tires and labor is about $600. Eventually, Nugent says, he may offer brake pad and rotor replacement, too, which would enable Rolling Rims to charge another $400 or so. (Nugent said each job is profitable, but declined to give specifics.)
Much of his marketing strategy so far has focused on distributing fliers, buying online ads on the directory Superpages.com, and talking to local companies about the service. He’s hopeful that businesses will promote Rolling Rims to their employees as a time-saver, or that companies that operate fleets of repair vans will opt to have him replace the tires in the company’s parking lot.
He isn’t afraid to do cold calls and visits: “I make about 100 calls each day, just introducing the company, and I pound the pavement,’’ he says. A local Enterprise Rent-A-Car branch has already put Rolling Rims on its vendor list for long-term corporate rental customers.
He also has been paying his early customers a $50 referral fee. What’s interesting is that he pays the fee before they actually make the referral. “When you’ve just done the job, and you hand someone a check for $50 and ask them to tell their friends about you, what do you think they’re going to do?’’ Nugent says. He estimates that he has spent close to $10,000 on marketing so far.
“Steve is the quintessential entrepreneur,’’ says Bill Covitz, a longtime student of Nugent’s who has been advising him about Rolling Rims. “He has the energy and the intelligence, and he doesn’t have an easy paycheck waiting for him at the end of the week. He has to make it happen.’’
Nugent says he can’t help but think about business the same way he used to think about karate competitions. “Those are the experiences I have to draw from,’’ he writes via e-mail. “I will never admit defeat, and I will do whatever it takes to make it successful.’’ (Tire Review/Akron)
