Liberty Fleet Solutions shop profile

Back in the 1980s, Liberty Fleet Solutions (LFS), a truck repair shop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, would fix anything. Bob Chambers initially started the company out of a service truck under the name ‘Liberty Equipment’ and drove to construction sites to fix any construction equipment he could get his hands on, from bulldozers and excavators to haul trucks, backhoes, and skid steers. But the company would not be limited to construction equipment for long.

Bobby Chambers, who is the current president of LFS, said his father is a "serial entrepreneur—and he tells people he's a recovering entrepreneur,” in a webinar with Fullbay, a heavy-duty shop management platform.

"He started multiple businesses along the way and within Liberty [and] tried many different things," Chambers explained.

And it's true, as in the mid-1990s, Bob Chambers took LFS through a Navistar program to become an associate dealer for the company. But not content to stop there, during that process, he also began farming, growing corn and soybeans in an operation that's grown to three acres today. Then around 1998, he became an AGCO dealer as well, and continued to drop and pickup dealerships from then on, such as John Deere and Caterpillar.

Then in 2008 to 2009, when the construction market contracted, Bob Chambers was forced to downsize from two locations to the company’s main site. LFS struggled through those lean years as a Bobcat dealership, even picking up two NAPA stores in 2010 and opening a third, before dropping Bobcat again in 2011. During those years, they also served as Navistar, and then Freightliner dealerships, too.

But despite the tumult, the agile company discovered "that what we were really good at was the service side, fixing things, and providing solutions to customers," Chambers said.

And that remained true when Chambers first joined his father’s workforce in 2015, filling various roles in the organization until he was ready to take over in 2020. Once at the helm, Chambers sought to stabilize a lot of that groundwork by pivoting away from the construction side of the business, adding technology, and approaching compensation in a new way.

But as he was still his father’s son, Chambers made two more adaptations before settling for good: He transitioned the business away from servicing equipment to focus on trucks and updated the shop’s incentive system. Five years later, LFS works out of 20,000 sq. ft. between two different buildings, with 11 bays and 12 technicians.

Updating operations

LFS had already been moving away from equipment since the construction bust in 2009. But even after that market began to recover, the shop was hiring more technicians and management that focused on trucks, gradually shifting LFS’ focus. In fact, by the time Chambers took over, he said the shop serviced about 80% trucks and 20% equipment.

That wasn’t the only rationale to shift the business’ direction. In LFS’ area, Chambers said that dealers such as Caterpillar and John Deere have a very strong presence and tend to do a good job retaining their service work. Unfortunately, this leaves the less-than-ideal equipment jobs for independent shops.

“I found, over time, that all the equipment we were working on was junk,” Chambers said. “It was black-market equipment or off-brand equipment, a Takeuchi or a JCB or an old case skid steer that nobody wanted to touch.”

This meant that LFS was left with frustrating jobs that had little diagnostic support and hard-to-find parts. So instead, they shut down that part of the business, limiting their equipment work to hydraulic hose and cylinder repair and basic maintenance.

Losing the equipment side

However, making the business transition was a journey in and of itself.

“It took time, it was not an overnight decision,” Chambers asserted. “And it was a slow transition.”

Early on in Chambers’ ownership, they first changed the logo, removing the ‘equipment’ part of the design. Now, they’re slowly working on removing ‘equipment’ from the rest of the business, including their domain name, website, email addresses, and DBA registration.

“Naturally, that comes with some technical confusion,” Chambers admitted. For instance, communication can get scrambled with an email domain change. This means LFS has had to make sure messages are forwarding correctly and that they’re receiving emails.

But according to the business president, the effort has been beneficial.

“I remember the day that I changed [our] logo in Fullbay’s system, and my whole team saw and they're like, ‘Oh yes, it's finally here,’” Chambers recalled. “It was well worth it.

“You don't want to be doing this every six months on a whim or for a new niche market,” Chambers admitted. “[But] don't stay stuck in the past with something that's not working out that well anymore.”

Creating consistency with streamlining

With all of the changes LFS has undergone throughout its history, one of the last evolutions Chambers implemented was one that provided his technicians both consistency and opportunity. To do this, he streamlined his workers’ efficiency bonus system.

When he first started, LFS’ president said the shop offered techs a flat $200 at the end of the month if they hit a certain efficiency. Wanting to advance the system, the shop tried a flat-rate hybrid program.

But unfortunately, Chambers found that system to be “super cumbersome to administer.”

“I was doing payroll at the time, and it would take me three or four hours to formulate,” Chambers explained. “Even with Fullbay’s systems, I had to go into every ticket and allocate the hours and pay the technician based on how much of the job we thought was complete.”

So, instead, they switched to a simpler system that guarantees every tech their 40 hours of base pay, and then for every hour they bill, they get a pay bump.

“It's an incentive for them to move faster, work harder, and understand what it actually takes to bill the tickets,” Chambers stated. “I know it's working when the technician is coming to the service advisor and saying, ‘Why didn't they pick up that truck? Why isn't the invoice closed? Why aren’t my hours counted?’”

Transparency with change

Also, for all the updates and tweaks LFS has undergone, Chambers has said that he always wants his employees to know how these changes are impacting them.

“I believe that if I was an employee, I would want to know if I was working for a successful company, or if I was working for a company that was on the rocks, or somewhere in between, and what I actually do to affect that,” Chambers insisted.

To do this, he holds monthly meetings with all of his employees. During these, Chambers not only talks about any changes to their process or core values, but shares their most recent financial numbers.

“I will share openly with anybody on my [team],” Chambers asserted. “[Our numbers are] not what I want them to be all the time, but that doesn't mean that I need to hide them. And when we do make money, I don't feel like I have to hide that, either.”

Also, Chambers gamifies the money discussion. To start, Chambers breaks down his P&L into percentages and categories. Then he takes $100 and distributes that amount into envelopes to represent the shop’s expenses. As an example, if LFS’ labor cost was 12% and its rent was 5%, he’ll put $12 and $5 into respective labelled envelopes. Then he’ll pass these envelopes out to his techs in the meeting, and they each get to keep the money in their respective envelopes. This helps his techs understand a dry subject and avoids any potential resentment when an employee compares their paycheck of $45/hour to a billing rate of $190/hour.

“They don't understand where that money goes, unless you help them understand it,” Chambers said. “We try to be generous with where that profit goes… When there's a big investment in tools, I think they can understand where that money has to be generated and where it has to come from to make their lives better.”