 The first challenge was getting in front of customers. The second one is building trust. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Popney Glove. And we've got a great show lineup for you, Beth. We haven't done a podcast together. Like the two of us in like a month. Is that right? Maybe longer. We made it happen just for Kevin. He brought us, he brought us together. Thanks, Kevin. Good to meet you guys. We're really excited to welcome with Kevin Forstel into the studio today. He is the CEO and co-founder of Dozer and has got some incredible insights about how to build better relationships with contractors. Kevin, thanks so much for your time. Welcome to the show. Thanks guys. Really happy to be here. Appreciate you having me on. Kevin, before we dive in, why don't you take a few minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about Dozer? I am Kevin Forstel, co-founder of Dozer. I'm a contractor by trade. I went to school for landscape architecture. Came out, started a landscaping business. You know, grew to be one of the larger landscaping businesses in Canada out of the need for that business. Started Dozer. Dozer is a company that's obsessed with bringing e-commerce to the heavy equipment rental space. It started as a peer-to-peer platform, kind of like an Airbnb for heavy equipment rentals. And over the years, we have transitioned into more of an aggregator for professional supply of heavy equipment rental. So you can think of us kind of like hotels.com for the rentals of Dozer, sex freighters, skid steers and all area work platforms. Airbnb for heavy equipment is a fantastic tagline, by the way, just fantastic. So understandable out of the gate. I love it. Kevin, so I've got a good buddy of mine who is a, you know, in the excavation business. And so I know very, very little about like the heavy machinery space. I actually went to Conag back in January. Nice. And I watched the show with him. I was telling Beth about it. I was like, man, like the inner five-year-old in me was nerding out the entire time because it's a bunch of just massive equipment. And they're like, yeah, come on in. Come sit in this million-dollar dump truck. My understanding is that traditionally in the heavy machinery space, there's one of two options, either a, you're going to buy something used and the quality might break down more quickly, or you're going to have to get a loan to lease it instead of actually purchasing it. And so it's a very capital intensive option for these contractors and excavation companies and whoever even developers for that matter to do this work. Can you explain a little about how you all are, for lack of our term, trying to disrupt that space a bit and pick up any pieces that I missed with issues that currently exist in the marketplace? Yeah, you bet. So, you know, I can talk about my previous career. You know, we used to own hundreds of these pieces of equipment, you know, large tractors, 120 horsepower agricultural tractors, three-yard articulating wheel loaders, mini-ice rators, skisters, you know, all the above. They are very expensive, capital intensive. It's a challenge for growing businesses to kind of protect their debt to equity ratio. And, you know, what I used to do is, you know, there's a combination of outright owning equipment, you know, financing it, leasing it, and then renting it. So half of my fleet would have been rented for various reasons, but probably number one, just because it is so capital intensive and difficult to, you know, be able to borrow that amount of money. But my learnings over the years, you know, well at that landscaping company and then, you know, even more so now being at a dozer is there is a real trend moving towards rental of equipment. I found it very, very difficult to maintain a fleet of that size, right? So, you know, we were really great at, you know, doing landscape maintenance and building world-class, you know, landscape construction projects and, you know, winning awards for them, but we weren't a rental company, right? And this is what rental companies really specialize in is owning equipment and servicing it and, you know, having it kind of rental ready. It's always, you know, ready for whatever job is next. And that requires a lot of resources, a lot of people, you know, a great shop and just processes. And it was way more expensive than we expected it to be and just required a lot of focus from management as well. So maybe like a bit of a downfall at that company, but a lot of learnings, you know, to be able to get ready for the next one and really kind of seeing that that need out there in the industry to be able to support rental. Rental is a very, very important piece of equipment lifecycle and construction. You have this really cool business idea. It clearly speaks to a pain point. It solves a very big problem that's holding back a lot of really talented contractors. I look at your business and when you explain it, especially like the Airbnb of heavy machinery, I'm like, this is a no-brainer. I, if I'm a contractor, I'm like, I can suddenly do basically anything. What hurdles are you experiencing that you're maybe surprised by or having to continually overcome that makes it seem like not such a no-brainer for contractors potentially? I know I mentioned the Airbnb for heavy equipment rentals and we've made a bit of a pivot and it's an important point out where we're more like hotels.com for heavy equipment rentals now. How do you see the difference between the two? Well, my previous company, you know, our landscape company would list our equipment when we weren't using it, like our snow tractors. We'd list them for rent and our time and our farmers would rent them. What the challenge was there is, you know, myself being a contractor, I really didn't know how to keep my equipment rental ready. So the example that I'll use is I had these snow tractors. I'd rent them to farmers. Farmers would call and say, hey, the air conditioner doesn't work in, you know, this tractor. And I would say, I didn't know it had an air conditioner. Right, it was a snow tractor. That's kind of like an extreme example of, you know, the challenge with sort of the Airbnb model. I think that there will be that model in the future, but maybe not quite yet. The hotels.com experience is that where we have sort of evolved to is the contractors want to rent equipment online. The suppliers, you know, the United Rentals of the world, all of the independence suppliers, you know, the one branch to the 20 branch to the, you know, the United Rentals that has, you know, 1,200, 1,300 branches. They're all trying to figure out how to connect with contractors who are online searching for the equipment. And that's really where Dozier comes in. We're saying, hey, look, we can help facilitate this transaction. The challenge, you know, that the contractors are looking to overcome is I want to find the equipment and I don't really want to spend a whole lot of time setting up accounts with different rental houses because that takes a lot of time, right? Like they don't necessarily have, you know, the back office staff to help with this. So setting up 10 rental accounts is difficult. But, you know, setting up one that can access 10,000 rental companies is easy, right? So, you know, it's these kind of things that, you know, is kind of where we were paying attention to and trying to step in and help. What hurdles are you finding with that model? Do you have to overcome from the contractor side? There's two things. One is it takes a lot of time and effort and money to be able to get in front of contractors. Generally, once we're in front of them, the value prop is really obvious and they like it and, you know, we can grow. But getting that brand recognition out there is like a very important but, you know, challenging hurdle that we have to get past. The other thing is building trust. Contractors are renting equipment, you know, and we kind of started the conversation saying, hey, some of these pieces of equipment are like a million bucks. And, you know, the rental on these equipment is like, you know, it could be $200 a day, but it could be $15,000 a month. And that's a lot of money to put on a credit card for the first time. You know, I've just seen this new company online. They're an aggregator. It makes so much sense. I really want to use it, but like, should I put my credit card in? So that's kind of a hurdle that we have to get by. And, you know, that takes a really, like, a really focused, iterative approach to, you know, really have to pay attention to the customer and be able to solve that challenge. So you mentioned there, Kevin, that your biggest challenge is getting in front of the contractor. Can you share with us what's working for you to get in front of them? Like, what are some of the tactics and strategies that you're using? We do a lot of different things. It's a multi-faceted approach. We have a, you know, really strong email communication strategy. We have a social strategy. We do a lot of SEM, you know, Google ads, but probably our most important is organic. So we spend a lot of time working on optimizing from a technical perspective our website to optimize for search engine optimization. And then we also spend a lot of time building quality content, making sure that they show up on the site and they see exactly what they wanted and then they engage with it. So, you know, we spend a lot of time on working on that driving organic on paid traffic. When it comes to your messaging in social and email, is there anything that you've seen work better than others? I assume it's not just to have product. Do you want to rent for all of the reasons that you just said? So is there a specific message or perception that contractors are responding to? The first challenge was getting in front of customers. The second one is building trust. So, you know, we spend a lot of time building trust on these channels. We talk about things that are relevant to contractors and what's really cool is I'm now in a position that I can talk about things as a contractor that I may not have been able to talk about in the past. I can open up. Other contractors aren't my competitors anymore. I'm in the know and a friendly and I can talk about like, for example, pain points, right? Like, hey, you know, sometimes it's very, very difficult to snow removal contractor to work with, you know, property managers. It can be a very thankless job, right? You put in a whole lot of hours. You know, you're missing like Christmas morning because you have to make sure that the snow is plowed by 6am so that people can get out of their driveways. I can talk about this kind of stuff now, which is really fun. And like, I really enjoy it. But it's also the kind of stuff that I think, you know, other contractors that I've heard from is like, thank goodness somebody is talking about this because, you know, we're working our butts off here and, you know, nobody appreciates it. So, you know, I think, you know, we do a lot of that kind of stuff and try to, you know, kind of build trust that way. There's a lot of different ways, but that's an example. I'd be curious to get your take on advice you would give manufacturers knowing what you know about changes that are happening and how contractors are purchasing and what they're thinking about, both as somebody who played in the space and now is kind of selling into it. What would you tell a manufacturer is like, hey, I'm trying to increase market share. I'm trying to go after this market. What would you recommend? One thing that those are, we're starting to realize, we have this really, really unique data set where we know where equipment is needed, where there just is not enough supply in certain GOs with certain CAD classes of equipment because we have such high demand coming through our platform and we can see what goes unfulfilled, right? So when we have the majority of suppliers online and the equipment still is unable to be fulfilled, equipment requests, you know, we can kind of say, hey, this is exactly where you need to drop another 30 ton articulating dump truck and we know that that's consistent year over year and that machine would sit at 70% utilization if you were to put a machine there tomorrow. Maybe it's not as much advice, but just, hey, we've got some really interesting data available that we're trying to figure out how we can share back. Those are trying to build a platform that is really friendly to everyone, right? We're trying to build it so that, you know, it is, it's solving all the problems that, you know, the suppliers have that, you know, the OEMs are interested in also solving and then that the contractors have without really being a disruptor. We're not really big into talking about ourselves as a disruptor. We don't think that we are. We think that we want to, we want to be sort of the nice friendly company that's building really great technological solutions to assist something that's already trying to happen and kind of keep everyone involved at the same time. Does that make any sense? This has been really helpful for our listeners. If they want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? LinkedIn, Kevin Forstall on our Dozer LinkedIn is probably the best way as well. Pretty active on there and happy to answer any, any questions as they come around. Kevin, again, thank you so much for coming on the show and for our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, check us out at venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe and get more. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams alongside Beth Pompnyglove. Thanks everybody.