The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – SearchTires.com The World’s First Tire Price Comparison Search Engine

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The irony Lady sings it. That means it's official. Welcome to the big show.

Starting point is 00:00:46 We certainly appreciate you guys coming on the show with us today. As always, for the show to your family, friends, and relatives, go to goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, linkedin.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, youtube.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, and Chris Voss 1 on the tickety-tockety over there. As always, we have the most smartest minds that come to you,

Starting point is 00:01:03 the CEOs, the entrepreneurs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the astronauts, you name it, rock stars, all the authors that come on the show. We have the most amazing minds, and they will expand your mind, make you smarter, make you grow, and if you don't or else. I don't know what that means. I said they'll make you, so it sounded like it was a force thing. But no, you can just volunteer to enjoy the show as well. We have an amazing young man on the show today. Timothy Schaefer is the CEO and co-founder of SearchTires.com. It's the world's first tire price comparison search engine. And he is changing the way we buy tires for the better.

Starting point is 00:01:39 If you ever bought tires, they can get expensive these days. They're not like the old days where, you know, they were all kind of the same. And then you got snow tires and there's all sorts of tires. I'm sure that he's tired of hearing about it, but he'll tell us all about tires here. Tim is a dynamic sales and operations expert with over three decades of industry proficiency. He is a visionary at heart and he spearheaded SearchTires.com with the core mission empower consumers with transparent out-of-the-door tire pricing while championizing local tire retailers under his guidance search tires.com has become a beacon for those looking to the best value for the money while also

Starting point is 00:02:17 supporting the community-driven ethos of local business he's had an illustrious career including titles such as president and CEO, and his vast knowledge to share when it comes to operation. Welcome to the show, Timothy. How are you? Great. Great, Tim. You ever get tired of tires? Sorry. I didn't do that joke. You're probably sick of hearing people doing that joke on you. Hey, tires ain't pretty. It sounds like a tiring business. Anyway, jokes jokes aside give us the dot com i guess we kind of plugged in a million times there we give it for any other places on top of that maybe you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better search

Starting point is 00:02:53 stars.com and search stars.com forward slash blog where we give you all the safety and information updates on your car that you may want to have there you go go. So in your words, give us a 30,000 overview of what do you do there? The only thing we do, we're like a dating, an online dating service for tires. So we don't sell anything. We just match the tire that you're looking for for your vehicle to the retailer. So we, we, you put your, your make and model in or the size and you go to the next step. It shows you all the tires you can from lowest to highest. You click it, then it goes to the retailers and you can pick whatever retail you want to go to and click to make an appointment or click directions or click to call them.

Starting point is 00:03:33 And that's it. We want, cause we realized I've been in the business for a long time and I realized that most people only want to know how much, how long and where are you at? There you go. That's sweet. Sounds like most of my dates off Tinder. I don't know what that means. But anyway, so how did this company get started and become what it was? Tell us some of the journey that went into it. The journey is, it's pretty funny, actually. I was on vacation in Colorado skiing, and I was

Starting point is 00:04:00 after skiing for a long day or getting abused by the slopes. I was in a hot tub and I was listening to someone. This is 2009. I was listening to someone talk about how they were booking their flights to kayak because kayak was pretty new then. And I was thinking about that and I'm thinking, I'm in the tire business. Why don't we have something like this? So actually the iterations started from there and I started to put it together. It took a year. I put something together and we come up with the first iteration and the first iteration failed. The market wasn't

Starting point is 00:04:29 ready and we didn't know how to place it properly in the market either. And I hate to use the word failed, but it's, it is a failure how most people look at it. But as an entrepreneur, we just learned a way of not to do it. There you go. I mean, that's, I've been in those lessons where, okay, we just learned a way, another way not to do this. So we're one step closer to the way to figuring out the way to do it, which is also my Tinder dating history. So I'm 56 and still single. And then we're still just trying to figure out the right way to do it, whatever that means. When did you start with the company?

Starting point is 00:05:01 You started this company, how many, how many years ago was it? This was, this iteration was started in early 2022. Yeah. And how did you know when you finally got the right dial in of the formula? What happened is sometimes, you know, we had that iteration, first iteration that we did that didn't work out. It really peaked in like 2014. And like by 2016, we had shut it down. And we had other marketing businesses that we do. And we learned so much from the other marketing businesses that we said, hey, you know, we never said we weren't going to

Starting point is 00:05:37 do it. But we just took some time off and gained awareness of how to do it better. And then we got with that. And, and, you know, me as a personal consumer, you know, I looked at a lot of ways thinking, what do people really want? And you know what people, I think, in my opinion, what people really want is that they don't want to have to enter in all their information and give you all this stuff. They just want to know, hey, man, how much is it and where are you at? I want to go get my stuff. I don't want to spend five hours yeah because you know most people before in the business in the tire business because i've been in it forever is that they have to search on five or six sites they don't know if they're getting

Starting point is 00:06:13 you know they don't know if it's the same tire to the same tire i mean it's just and like you said it's expensive now it's like 700 at least for a regular set of tires now and we save the average person an average of 111 but we see some of them on the upside of 300 to 400 for a set of the same tire from one place to another so that's that's what we're here for that's you know that's why that's why we exist so is that what are some of the problems you solve for the consumer i imagine one of them is just what you said you you combine everything into one source that you can go to and look at everybody's pricing yes so we put it all it's all formatted out there they can you know they can see what the that same tire compared to all the other retailers what the price is but not only do we do that

Starting point is 00:06:59 we do the out the door price because sometimes the tire could be cheaper at one place the mounted balance disposal taxes all that, it may differ a big deal. And, you know, in this day and age, $20 to $50 to $100 is a lot of money. I mean, we need to save every penny we can get. So that's what we do. And then the way our platform works, and, you know, this is completely free. We let you write from our platform. You can click the call.

Starting point is 00:07:24 We'll collect it, carry it to them, click for directions, or click to go to their website and make an appointment. It's just we really, the only skin in the game we have is just trying to get people to put us in between so they don't have to go search five or six sites and waste three or four hours and be confused. Go to one site, look at all your stuff, go get it. There you go. And it says here on your website average savings there's 111 dollars for four tires 100 bucks is 100 bucks for most people 100 bucks is 100 bucks you know it's a

Starting point is 00:07:52 nice dinner for one person but you know i mean why i don't know i don't have a joke for that anyway so they go into your website they can shop and. I imagine you work with all sort of major retailers. There was something in your bias about supporting local businesses and smaller businesses. Do you help kind of, if they're price competitive, steer business to smaller competitors? You know, there's always those giant brands that you're asking why. So we're always adding daily, we're adding. We have over 15,343 locations on our site right now and we'll yeah within six months we'll have north of 20,000 these are retailer locations

Starting point is 00:08:32 and why we say we like to help the local communities is because i don't know if you know but a lot of people know that there's a lot of these i call them e-tailers they come on their online and are selling tires and then they ship them to the store the local brick and mortars are selling, that have the tires pay for the inventory and pay for the employees and pay for their rent and pay taxes and all that stuff. Guess what? They just got cut out of the big slice of the pie. They don't get to sell the steak. They just get to sell the potato. So they get there and you spend $100 to $200 with them and they lose the $500 or $600 for the tires.

Starting point is 00:09:04 And, you know i was i'm brick and mortar i was in brick and mortar so i want to let them get everything so i'm driving prices back to your local community stores that help communities help little league baseball teams you know they're in your communities employing your people i mean i'm passionate about it hey there's a place for everyone but as far as i know i'm going to help that local brick and mortar get the whole pie instead of just getting a piece of it. There you go. That's important because, yeah, you're right.

Starting point is 00:09:30 They really got pushed out of the market. It's hard to compete sometimes with them. I'm sure these big chains, you know, that do all the tire stuff. And so everything's cooking now. It's working well and people are signing up for it and pricing out the stuff you know what what do you find what do you find as as a ceo gives you the most rewarding feedback from your company the rewarding feedback i get is just from helping local brick and mortar but truly helping the consumer make it easier for them so if it's a single mother single father whatever it is or a married couple

Starting point is 00:10:05 that don't have time, you're always on the go kids and everything. I don't want them to have to spend five or six hours looking for tires. I just want to make it simple and painless for them. And so whenever I get our good feedback, like our net promoter scores, 97%, you know, it's that's, that's what it is. And you know, the, the funny thing about this whole thing is that what people don't know is I always say tires ain't pretty, but it's a $58.8 billion market. And no one's ever thought about how can I help people find the best deal on the tires in their area. And that just blows me away. People say to me all the time, why hasn't someone thought of that before?

Starting point is 00:10:39 And I go, I think exactly the same thing. I don't know why no one's thought of it, but here we are. You bring up a good point for those people in the audience who might be entrepreneurs. They're looking for that sort of inroads. And, you know, it seems like any time, you know, there's some sort of popular thing in business, like AI is popular right now or some other, you know, whatever the latest shiny object is. Like everybody goes and starts businesses in those things and where you guys have technically cut out something that no one's really paying attention to and and a niche if you will and also it seems pretty protected because no one doesn't see

Starting point is 00:11:16 coming after you so that's pretty smart and the other thing is it's low tech. You know, I mean, other than designing the website, you're selling tires. You know, it's not like you're building the next AI system that's going to, you know, you're going to have to spend 50 million years or the next social media site or you're selling tires. And we don't even sell them. We're just showing them. Letting the brick and mortar sell them. Yeah. You're just sl. And we don't even sell them. We're just showing them, letting the brick and mortar sell them. Yeah. You're just slinging, slinging rubber.

Starting point is 00:11:49 Wait, I think that's Trojan's slogan. Lighting fires and kicking tires. Yeah, there you go. I think it's Trojan or one of those condoms, the places that slinging tires, slinging rubber, I think that's their, I don't know what it means, but it sounds funny in my head. So there you go. And so when you deal with building something like this, you went through a lot of failures. How did you keep believing yourself again and again and keep coming back

Starting point is 00:12:14 to this thinking, maybe we can find a way to make it work? That's a great question. And I can tell you, this is in the beginning, you know, as an entrepreneur, you always think that you have the answers, right? But the answers sometimes to entrepreneurs, as an entrepreneur, you always think that you have the answers, right? But the answers sometimes to an entrepreneur is it's 10 of them instead of just one. And so what we were trying to do in the beginning, we were trying to please the retailer. We were trying to please the customer. We were trying to do all these things at the one time. And what, what our, what our true North ended up being is, Hey, let's just give the customer the stuff for free and let them go get the tires and once we did that and we had that mindset it's it just took off from there

Starting point is 00:12:50 and you know there's a lot of in building the site it's it's a lot of technology and and aggregating all that stuff together but you know the great thing about the the consumers that use this stuff like this i don't know if you've heard of Alex Ramosi, but Alex Ramosi, you know, big entrepreneur. He's in a space where he's wrote a couple of big books, a hundred million dollars, clothes and all that stuff. But he has a great motto to how you look at your business when you're building it. He says, you want to have a business

Starting point is 00:13:20 that is so easy to use for someone that they would feel stupid not to use it. You know, so like us, we're not charging, so it's free. Just use it and go. That's it. Use it and go. So do you mind if I ask how you do make money? If it's proprietary, I'll understand. But for those who are interested in starting a business and doing a freemium type model, how do you guys make it work, if you don't mind? So we're self-funded, and we've been fortunate enough to be able to do that. And I know not a lot of people can, but how we basically make money is data.

Starting point is 00:13:56 We're basically a data company. Now, we're not collecting people's data, but you're making models of cars, where they're located zip codes what tires they're selecting what where what retailers they're going to so we have a lot of data that can help brick and mortar retailers help with their inventory and help know what the right inventory is in that dma or in that thing so when you put all that together the whole back side of it is we're not we're not touching anyone to hurt anyone. It's just tire jargon. It's just, that's what it is. It's about market and tires. And these big companies like tire manufacturers and tire retailers want that information.

Starting point is 00:14:36 There you go. The more that, and imagine people, you know, some of the big websites are probably able to collect that data, the big tire companies. But imagine the smaller retailers don't get access to that, right? Because they don't have probably the most high-end websites if they have websites at all. I mean, I know a lot of tire stores here in my little town. I doubt they have a website. Yeah, and you know what the great thing about it is? So everyone, even the big retailers, they collect all the data.

Starting point is 00:15:04 But guess what? They're only collecting data for people to come to their store. We're agnostic. We're not owned by anyone. We're getting all the people and no matter what retailer they're going to, we know. That's a different way. We don't just have a slice of the pie.

Starting point is 00:15:20 We have the pie. In systems like yours that can steer business to certain things, there's a potential for you to become really huge and own everything. You know, kind of like what Google does. Yeah. You know, you got to pay them if you want to get any traffic to anything. Yeah. And so there's a lot of power in that position in building that out. And like I said, again, I mean, you're low tech. You're not trying to build the next NFT or the next AI

Starting point is 00:15:48 or the next sort of weird thing. You're just taking something that's very simple and going, how can we innovate this? How can we, it's been probably the same sort of tire business for the last, what, 50, 100 years, whatever plus. How can we innovate it and make it different? And then, of course, make it so that it's something that consumers want to use. And that's the real challenge of what you put together there.

Starting point is 00:16:12 Yeah, that was the big opportunity, right, to get to the consumer first. And, you know, honestly, as an entrepreneur, when you start something, you have an idea, but you don't really, you may not really know how it's going to be monetized or know what that is when you're initially building it but at some point it's going to hit you over the head and say oh hey here's what we have and you know what kind of happened to us we thought it was going to be one thing you know like selling dma packages to retailers and let them be at the top of the search like Google. And, you know, we have them packages and give them some stuff, but it ended up being, you know, data and even, you know, and as far as the site goes, you know, we have, we aggregate all these numbers daily. I mean, they're all put up daily and we're

Starting point is 00:16:55 nationwide. So it's all over the United States. So it is a lot of, a lot of data and yeah. And then once when you figure it out, you have to start adding to your team once you figure out what you're really doing it's like the mcdonald's ray crock didn't know he had a real estate business he was like we thought we were you know doing one thing but we have data and the data can be helpful of making companies more efficient and saving money and you know and if they can save money maybe they can you know have a few more employees to help the you know move the tires or the the cars quicker to get the people to the door instead of you know instead of that so there you go other than using your site what what's some cost-effective ways you can give to consumers on tire replacement how to save money how to deal with unforeseen things you know you're gonna nail on the road all that good stuff yeah so the most important thing is that it's going to sound so minute but checking your air

Starting point is 00:17:51 pressures once a month on your tires that's it's like the number one cause of your tires wearing out prematurely is not having the correct inflation and now everybody has some tpms monitors that come the light comes on and tells you but keeping them and then keeping them rotated as well these are a lot of things that people just don't you know it's not off the top of their mind and and when they go to a professional that they should be letting them know but it's not some of the issues get lost in translation because you know when i worked in when i worked for retail and ran a bunch of stores and stuff like that you know most times rotations are free are free. And at the shop, they have the work ethos sometimes where, oh, you know, maybe they don't need it this time.

Starting point is 00:18:29 It's just, you know, so important to be on top of that as yourself. And you're saying, hey, 10 or 15,000 miles, I need to rotate my tires. And you need to let the shop know because, you know, it's free. So, you know, it's an extra 20 minutes and maybe they don't want to whip them tires around. You know, that's a big deal. And then the last thing would be keeping your car aligned. I mean, keeping it aligned properly and making sure that the alignment's good on the car.

Starting point is 00:18:49 If you hit a bump or something, go get it checked out because it's not going to get any better. There's nothing worse than that friend going, I don't like that. For sure. Was I drinking last night? No, don't do that, folks. It could be both. It could shake after you hit something when you're're drinking I think I might have run over some enemies

Starting point is 00:19:07 last night anyway don't do that folks these are jokes hey it's Facebook pull some posts from 2010 there was a picture some sort of comedy of something and I'm just like seriously it's we're you know you can't you can't do jokes anymore people People are like, oh, my feelings. My father stopped his tow in 1979 and never walked the same again. Oh, geez. Anyway, so with tires, do you see yourself expanding into any other fields of auto parts or anything like that? You know, I think we're going to, I think that's one of the things we've, too, is we're just going to stay in our lane. The expansion we're going to have is probably Canada, Australia, UK, stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:19:50 We're going to expand out that way. I mean, we're building a second iteration that's going to help a lot, but still it's the same thing. It's driving you right to the retailer and as quickly as possible. I mean, in our visitors that come on our our site they usually spend four minutes and 28 seconds and they go through four pages that's about how long it takes to go through it and pick your tire you know we're not one of them companies that are like trying to hey we need to get them to stay on the site for longer periods no we want them to get in there and get their information and go you know and you picked such a great business too. This is, I drive by, there are businesses from where my mother lives where I used to go to them when I was a kid.

Starting point is 00:20:31 Like one's at Del Taco. And I remember at 16 going there and getting Del Tacos in the parking lot. And now I'm 56. And while I've seen a lot of my businesses that I've built and sometimes they didn't work out or a lot of businesses have gone out of business you know driving by them over the years that del taco is still there 40 years later and you know there's a whole lot of other type of businesses that you see that just standard bread and butter like people always got to eat i remember seeing a big conglomerates come in and start buying out funeral places and you know you're you're like you know it's there's you're not we're gonna run out of customers in

Starting point is 00:21:10 that sort of business and you're in one like that too with tires you know as near as we can tell you know we're we're always going to need tires at this point i don't think it's going to end anytime soon you know you're in this core business that just, you're never going to run out of need. Yeah, and think about this. This is a, you know, everybody's bringing up, hey, what about all those EVs? And I go, EV cars have tires and guess what on the EV tires?

Starting point is 00:21:36 They go through faster? 30% faster they wear out because of the weight of the car or the battery. So, they're going to need tires too. We want to help them too. We'll just help them too we'll just help them more often i'm always questioning how much those ev cars actually really save on environmental stuff between that and if you've ever seen one catch on fire and yeah the minerals that go into it in fact i think that's why they're moving away from American manufacturing, moving away from EV cars to hydro, water basically or whatever.

Starting point is 00:22:07 Yeah. Hydrogen. Because the fighting to get the resources that makes these minerals is astoundingly hard and crazy and expensive. Yeah. And of course, the Chinese are coming in with some EV cars that are just insane if you're familiar with their thing. But they will need tires. You know, the thing about it is thing but they will need tires you know you know the thing about it is and you said earlier you know your age me and you are the same age

Starting point is 00:22:29 and i imagine we probably have similar thoughts on it but to me success can be defined defined in a bunch of different ways but for me if if i walk out my front door and start a 69 z28 camaro and hear that motor hum. That's beautiful. Yeah, you see those squealing tires thing where the smoke's coming out. Yeah, it's beautiful. Kids are doing those things. You're like, ka-ching, pan out cars. You should just, you know what you should really go to? You should have an agent that goes to those coffee and cars places

Starting point is 00:22:59 because they have all those hot cars and stuff. My nephew goes to one with his hot car. And, you know, they're always doing burnouts and, you hot cars and stuff. My nephew goes to one with his hot car. And, you know, they're always doing burnouts and, you know, doing stuff. And those guys are the perfect group. And then if you tie yourself in with a Bales bondsman, you know, I always see them getting pulled over when they rip out of the cars and coffee and spin their tires. The cops are right there.

Starting point is 00:23:25 Chris, that's a great idea. We should sponsor burnout contest. Think of trophy. You can get away illegally. I mean, what are those? Here's our guard. Yeah, what's those things where they turn the car sideways? I can't.

Starting point is 00:23:39 Oh, drifting. Drifting. Drifting. That's got to go through some tires. And technically on certain tracks it's legal. But you do some of that drifting. I'd sponsor that. You know, Red Bull does.

Starting point is 00:23:51 Just get with Red Bull. They're always doing crap like that. Or Formula One. Formula One. Get with them. For staffing and checkout. They kill it. There you go.

Starting point is 00:24:01 There you go. So there's a lot of places you can go with this. And like i said you know the the point i'm trying to make to entrepreneurs and want to be entrepreneurs out there is you don't have to reinvent like the newest latest technology you don't have to reinvent the phone you don't have to reinvent the calculator you just sit down and go what's something everyone uses that's low tech that hasn't been given you know kind of kind of a tech redress, if you will, by, you know, giving it a website, giving it ways to sell it and market it

Starting point is 00:24:29 and different ways to monetize it. And there you go. And something so simple, you know, even I'm sitting here going, tires, duh. You know, one of the inspiring stories to me is hearing the guy, the guy with the third grade education. And, you know, many years ago, but he invented the hanger. No one thought of the inspiring stories to me is hearing the guy, the guy with the third grade education. And, you know, many years ago, but he invented the hanger. No one thought of the hanger.

Starting point is 00:24:49 Hey, it's a hanger. Everybody uses it. Everybody uses it. The stapler, the, you know, the stapler thing. And I remember, I mean, even, I remember I used this example all the time because I always looked at paperclips and I'm like, those are done. Okay, paperclip, hanger, you know, they're done. the time because i i always looked at paper clips and i'm like those are done okay paper clip hanger you know they're done and then i started seeing this was you know billion years ago i started seeing staples put grids in them so they would hold better and cut grids in them and then they

Starting point is 00:25:15 saw they put them in different colors so you could have your own special color with your you know polka dots with your little paper clip and i'm'm like, oh, wow. I didn't, I thought paperclips were like, you know, done. They peaked. But no, that was probably a billion. There's a billion sizes and specialty paperclips now. You know, when you're an entrepreneur, you look around your world. And when you see stuff that like, hey, you know, this is something simple. Everyone's always going to need.

Starting point is 00:25:42 They're always going to need it. Nothing's really going to change. You know, if anything, if tires get innovated, they're just going to become different tires. Like I've seen the, you've seen the,

Starting point is 00:25:52 probably seen the ones that are, that are airy. They're like, they're made of some sort of special thing, but they're still tires. You're still going to need them. They're still going to wear. And you know, the funny thing about that is,

Starting point is 00:26:01 is that I always, I'm always drawn to what people, what like the new generation, that really doesn't come that is that I'm always drawn to what people, what the new generation really doesn't come to is that I look at service industry businesses. They're the businesses where they're kind of antiquated. They've been doing it the same for years and years and years. Go out there and see what solution you can provide to get them more business or help them out in the plumbing business or selling mattresses. I mean, mattresses, there's all kinds of stuff in that.

Starting point is 00:26:24 I mean, there's just so many. There's a plethora of things that are just right in front of your face, but you just believe that someone else has already thought of it. Do some research. Maybe they have it. Maybe we need to have some tire merchandise on the Chris Voss Show where you can buy tires and it's got our logo on there. So listen to the podcast as it's spinning around.

Starting point is 00:26:46 Watch for that on the merch page of the chris voss show kids we'll be adding tires to the coffee cups and we're just going to go full kiss army you know the bank kiss where we're going to have the chris voss show coffin and you know everything that you know if you're seeing what kiss does so there you go it sounds like you've done some wonderful success give everyone the pitch out on how to search your site and organize it and get involved with it and all that good stuff as we go out. Yeah, just search tires.com. We're more than happy to help you find your set of tires in your local area and help your local communities and don't cost anything and find you the best price on the tires and save you some money in the process. Go out and have dinner on us. There you go.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Save some money. Everybody needs to save money nowadays you know pay the light bill for the kids that leave the light on all the time there you go so thank you very much for coming the show and sharing your entrepreneur experience with us tim we really appreciate it appreciate it chris it's great being here thank you and thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress chris voss linkedin.com fortress chris voss chris voss won the tiktokity and all those crazy places on the interwebs. Thanks for tuning in.

Starting point is 00:27:48 Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – SearchTires.com The World’s First Tire Price Comparison Search Engine

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.