Page 328 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

CORE VALUE: EXCELLENCE
MENTORS MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Everyone has to start somewhere. The wise ones find a mentor to show them the way. For Tom Bag- well, executive VP and GM of Peterson Trucks, that beacon was Peterson’s truck engine salesman, Ken Ehni. It began on Bagwell’s first day as a salesman for Coast Counties Truck—one of Peterson’s
Ken Ehni
TEPS dealers—back in January 1986. At the time, he was a diehard Cum- mins man, but Ken Ehni turned him around. “Ken really wasn’t an expert on Peterbilt, but he was on Cat. He would pick me up when he was out driving around visiting his customers, and he’d make me a deal. ‘I’ll buy you lunch for every Cat truck engine you sell,’ he would say. So that’s how I gained fifty pounds—selling a lot of Peterbilts with Cat engines.”
As Bagwell’s career progressed at Coast Counties, he continued to rely on Ehni’s expertise. When a customer called one day complaining about his new trucks being sluggish, Bagwell phoned Ehni.
“He’s probably used to 2100 rpms,” said Ehni, “which has more throttle re- sponse than the 1850s. It’s a simple fix you can change electronically.”
“How do I tell him to fix it?” asked Bagwell.
“Find out where his trucks are, and I’ll show you how to take care of your customers. We’re not going to ask the customer to go out of his way. If he wants something better and he has Cat, we’re going to go fix them right where they’re at.”
Twenty minutes later, Bagwell and Ehni were on the road looking for the first truck. They found it in Hayward in the middle of dumping its load.
“It’s going to take about five minutes to reprogram this engine,” Ehni said, then jumped up into the cab and typed in some commands. A few minutes later, he was back in the car. “Okay. Where’s truck number two?”
“It was due into the customer’s Fremont yard in twenty minutes. So we head down there and have a great conversation on the way,” recalls Bagwell, “and I’m learning that this is how you take care of your customers.”
At the Fremont yard, it took another five minutes to reprogram that engine. Done.
326 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG