Morrison's Auto Parts / Mack Trucks

Earning the Business

How Kriete Truck Centers built a relationship with Morrison Auto Parts — one phone call, one stranded driver, one truck at a time.

Garrett Schaefer walked into Morrison's Auto Parts one day with no appointment and one question. "What can we do to earn your business?"

Bill Morrison, second-generation owner of the Edgerton, Wisconsin family business, had been asking his own customers the same thing for forty years. Hearing it from the other side of the counter got his attention.

"What can we do to earn your business?"

That was the opening. What closed it came later — on a day Morrison's fleet wasn't running Mack Trucks yet, and Kriete wasn't obligated to help.

The Phone Call

One of Morrison's trucks — a different brand, Bill won't go out of his way to name it — broke down mid-route. Nowhere near a dealership equipped to service it. Driver stranded. Route behind schedule. Parts sitting in a trailer instead of getting to the body shops waiting on them.

In the used-parts business, a late delivery isn't just an inconvenience. It's a mechanic who can't finish a job, a car that stays on a lift, a customer who starts looking elsewhere next time. The truck was the problem, but the problem was never really the truck. The problem was the day falling apart behind it.

Bill called Kriete.

Not his truck brand. Not Kriete's problem. They helped anyway.

They told him to pull into the nearest Kriete location. They took care of it. Then they did something Bill didn't expect: they pulled up the rest of the day's route and handed him a list.

“They gave us multiple locations throughout our route that day,” Bill says, “and said, ‘If you have another problem, stop at one of these, and we’ll make sure we get that truck back home for you.’”

A different brand. A different company's problem. Fixed like it was their own.

"That, to me, was the first step of forming a great relationship with one of our vendors."

"That was the first step of forming a great relationship with one of our vendors."

Since then, Morrison has bought three new Mack trucks from Kriete. The fourth is coming. Bill is already thinking about the one after that.

The Business Behind the Trucks

Morrison Auto Parts has been in Edgerton since 1959. Bill's parents started it. Bill joined in 1982, right out of high school. The business deals in late-model used auto parts, and the mission statement hasn't changed in sixty-six years:

The right part, the first time, every time.

"The right part, the first time, every time."

The fleet makes that promise real. Morrison's trucks run 400 to 500 miles a day, every day, moving parts across Wisconsin and beyond. The drivers are on the road before most people have finished breakfast and still out there when the sun goes down. A truck that breaks is a customer that doesn't get served. A driver who's uncomfortable is a driver who gets tired. Both cost money.

Bill runs Mack for two reasons. The trucks are built better. And the dealer behind them picks up the phone.

Why Mack

"They're built a lot better," Bill says. "I like the style, honestly — just the look. Looks tough. You see it coming and you're like, 'Oh, look at that.'"

The drivers, who do the actual miles, talk less about the look and more about the M-Drive transmission. It makes heavy traffic easier to handle. The controls sit where your hand goes. Nothing to fight with, nothing to reach across the cab for.

All of that matters. But none of it is why Morrison keeps coming back.

Why Kriete

Kriete's multiple locations were part of what first caught Bill's attention. In the medium-truck line especially, Bill had been looking at the map. Kriete's footprint lines up with Morrison's delivery routes — the places where a breakdown actually happens, not the places where a breakdown is theoretically possible.

That overlap isn't marketing. It's the difference between a bad afternoon and a lost day.

The breakdown story proved the theory. The relationship has run on repetition ever since. A call gets answered. A truck gets fixed. A driver gets home. Then it happens again. Then again. None of it individually is dramatic. Added up over three trucks and counting, it's the whole business case.

"Just take care of our trucks," Bill says, when asked what he values. "Give us a good-quality truck that we don't have to worry about every day."

That's the entire ask. It sounds simple. Most vendors can't do it — or don't do it once the paperwork is signed and the truck is off the lot. Kriete keeps doing it. That's the whole difference.

The Plan

"I can see our fleet transitioning into a complete line of Mack trucks to get that job done for us," Bill says.

That's a full fleet conversion. Not a pilot. Not a trial. A commitment, stated plainly, in a way Bill doesn't state things he isn't sure about.

It didn't come from a pitch. It came from service — the unglamorous, unscheduled, nobody-watching kind. The kind that happens when a driver in the wrong brand of truck gets stranded and somebody picks up the phone anyway.

Bill still asks his own customers the same question Garrett Shaffer asked him that first day.

"What can we do to earn your business?"

The answer, it turns out, is the same on both sides of the counter. You show up. You fix the problem. You don't look for reasons to say no.

Morrison is on its third new Mack from Kriete. The fourth is already in the conversation. The fleet plan keeps getting longer.

That's what earning it looks like.