With Tyler Robertson's first sale on eBay to earn beer money, Diesel Laptops was born.

Tyler was simply trying to solve a problem for anyone wanting to fix their diesel engine themselves. He shares how he's scaled his business to $70 million a year and expects to break $100m in 2023. All while debt free.

Tyler shares 9 takeaways on this episode of the Close The Deal. Com Podcast: 

1. Best restaurant to close the deal in Columbia, SC
2. How he used eBay to test market a product
3. How he used LinkedIn to generate over ten million in sales
4. How he still uses Linkedin continuously sharing his journey
5. Which Youtube videos DL produces that perform best generating millions of views
6. How he got rid of cold calling for sales team
7. His vision for growing the company and the future of the company
8. He shares the perfect time to launch a product
9. He shares why being debt free made it possible for him to launch his company 

Connect with Tyler:

https://www.diesellaptops.com/

Linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-robertson-diesel/

Products we ❤️  for our health: Athletic Greens -  AGI

Show Notes with Tyler Robertson

Tyler: The problem was me being the one holding everything back, I was the person there that everyone had to get answers from.

I was the only one that knew anything we had been. It was just chaos everywhere. I had only focused on sales and marketing and said, screw it to the rest. And I, I don't know if I'd taken that back. Cause it, it grew us and we're here today doing well, but that creates a lot of problems. By me choosing that we had hackers break into our accounts.

We had employees embezzle money from us. We made a bunch of bad hires. We had 99% of our phone calls went in tech support at one point. Cause we weren't staffed enough, we didn't grow all the departments at the same speed. So growing pains, man, that is I never knew how difficult that would be until I was in the middle of it.

And I never understood why companies hit that certain. That revenue number where they just can't get it past that, that cap or the number, they just get stuck there. They go. And then they hit that wall. I never understood why. And now that I was in it, and I'm still in it, and we go, we always hit walls.

It's okay I gotta change who I am. I gotta run this company differently. I need to think differently

Ewell: That is Tyler Robertson. He is the CEO of Diesel Laptops, and he just gave you a glimpse of what happens overcoming challenges when you go from zero to 70 million a year in sales in seven years. You're listening to the Close The Deal.Com Podcast. I'm your host Ewell Smith. And this all started because Tyler needed beer money.

For real. The first product sold was through eBay. He shares with you on this show how Linkedin generated 10 million worth of sales. He also shares how to eliminate cold calling. All this is just a snapshot. He's expecting to break 100 million in sales in 2023.

Now let's begin the show. Tyler, I wanna welcome you to the Close The Deal.com Podcast. I know you're based in Columbia, SC. I had the privilege to come visit your shop. The size and scale of your shop actually took me back. Knowing where you've come from in just a short period of time. But first of all, if somebody's coming to visit Columbia, South Carolina, where do you court them to do business with them, where would you take them out to eat?

Best restaurant to close the deal in Columbia, SC

Tyler: I'm a steak guy, right? So usually like Halls Chop House, downtown, great. Great place to go downtown. But I always try to pair it up with an event. So, there's like a basketball game going on, or ax throwing or bowling or something, right? Like I always try to like, Hey, let's go. Let's go do something else while you're here, beyond just the dinner, which I know is not typical, but that's usually what I try to do.

Ewell: Ax throwing. Okay, that's a first. I love it.

Tyler: I'm like that neat potatoes, beer type of guy, so I like to just go out and have a good time and go do stuff.

Ewell: I love it. I love it. Now, this is a really important question to me. What are you grateful for Or who are you grateful for that helped you get you where you are today, in your business today, and with everything you're doing?

Tyler on growing up in an  entreprenurial family

Tyler: Yeah, like I, I was really fortunate to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs and business owners. So, my great-grandfather started a business. My grandfather took it over, my dad took it over. I grew up that way, so I grew up on a dining room table listening to payables and union contracts and customer issues and all these things that I just didn't understand at the time.

But looking back at it, man, I am grateful for all that because that really got my mindset on business and understanding the way business works. And I don't know how people do it without that kind of background. Cause there's a lot to learn and unpack.

Ewell: Absolutely there's so much to be said for that when you're indoctrinated, that's the mindset that's kind of plant, those seeds have been planted with you. And I think they have a lot to do with when folks, when you hear about the success of this journey, it's unreal.

The problem Tyler solves then some...

What is the problem that you identified in the marketplace? Becuase you come from a background that is in the field that you're in as well. What is the problem that you saw in the marketplace? And describe the journey of how you came to your solution, how you tested your solution, because this is a fun journey.

Tyler: I think the problem for me has evolved over time. So, the initial problem was people wanna fix and work on their own commercial trucks, just as people have their own automobiles or their own cell phones or their own. Any devices or equipment, they wanna be able to diagnose and order parts and figure it out themselves.

They'd have to bring it somewhere. So that was the initial problem, was I was a service manager and customers would come into the shop and they'd be like, Hey, can you my check engine light's on? Can you help me out here? And we would just do that for them and schedule them in and prioritize their repairs .

But you start doing that for customers and you start to learn, customers start to say I want that same software. I want that same thing to do that thing. 

And when I was in the business running truck dealerships at different capacities it got really obvious that customers just want to get that truck or that piece of equipment back on the road as quick as possible.

It's a, it's like a knife and a fork. It's a tool to make money like that, that it is there to do a job. It's not like a personal automobile. And. There was such, when I started this over 10 years ago, part-time there was such a demand for people just saying, can I please have a piece of software that I can hook up to any truck and tell me what's wrong with it?

Like that? It was that simple of a problem in the beginning, but it just morphed into that because soon as people realized I got a tool that tells me the problem, then they realize now I have another problem. I don't. It tells me a code. I don’t know how to. Now I gotta go, now I gotta go figure that out.

And then you can't possibly know how to fix every make model truck that exists or piece of off highway equipment. So now you need training and you need a phone to friends. I'm gonna call and say, how do I fix this thing? Have you ran across this before? 

So they morph from this small, just help people diagnose and figure out their own stuff to let's be a complete solutions provider to these facilities and to these shops that are out there that are trying to fix these.

Ewell: And talk about you tested this, you experimented with eBay

Tyler: Yeah that's where it started.

How Tyler used eBay to test his product

Ewell: How did you even say, okay, that's the route I'm gonna go to test this and then what? Tell us what you did.

Tyler: Yeah. People don't even believe me cause most people are like eBay, they still exist. Like they have no idea. Like it's a, but it was a big thing in the nineties and actually how I got started on eBay was I just wanted to make beer money. So, I used to go on like liquidation.com and some other, And go buy pallet loads of store returns.

And then I would just get 'em home, clean 'em up, make sure they worked, and then I would resell 'em. So that's how I got started on eBay.

Ewell: Let's, okay, so you, so we'll talk about your product, but describe the first product that you created to help. Cause you, you were shocked when it's sold, like within, what, an hour or so? One, yeah.

Tyler: Yeah so I was like, okay. I actually, it was really weird, like I didn't really develop anything in the beginning, but I found this guy on the internet and he had a piece of software that would hook up to any commercial truck and read all the fault codes. I worked at a dealership and I was like, wow, like we have to have three pieces of software at my own dealership to hook up and do the same thing that your one piece of software does.

And his worked on all makes models. Mine only worked on one. And I basically emailed the guy and I was like actually I didn't even email at first. I just like to do diagnostics; you need three things. You need software, you need a computer, and you need a hardware device that goes between the vehicle and the laptop.

And I, at first I was like, oh, I'll just go buy a used laptop. I'll go buy an adapter from the company. I work for the piece of hardware, and I'll go buy a software license from this guy and I'll just put a kit together ready to go. Most shop owners don't know how to install software, install drivers, update firmware, config, the settings.

They just didn't know to do these things. And I did, cause I had the experience, so I literally put one on eBay and that thing sold like right away. And I was like, huh. That was quick. That was a quick, I had never made like a thousand dollars that quick before.

And I was like, okay, that was insane.

Like what? I'm like, let me put another one on there, but I'll raise the. And it sold again right away. And I'm like, what the heck? And I kept, I kept doing that, just raising the price. People kept buying them. I'm like, this is crazy. And it just took off from there with eBay.

But yeah, eBay was a hundred percent of our revenue, my revenue part-time, and I did it for beer money at the time. And people just, they're begging for solutions to solve their problems.

Ewell: That's the staple product. Are there other services that you all provide? Are the solutions that you all provide now that you all have grown into or?

Tyler: Yeah. To give people context here, like when I first started seven years ago, we, I did about like 1.2 million a year in revenue. Now we did. Yeah, we did almost 70 in year seven, so it's grown really big, really fast. 

Seven zero, yeah. 70 million. So it's gone really fast and what we've really learned is that people need solutions.

People don't buy products, they buy solutions

We all know this. People don't buy products, they buy solutions. And that's really what I stumbled across and it was me just doing. For free to sell more of my product. So, for an example, I was selling the diagnostic tool. I would tell you the fault code. It wouldn't tell you how to fix it. So, I'm about a year into this thing and I'm like, you know what I need to do?

And I get sick of answering the phone call 20 times a day on how to fix a fault code. So, I'm like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna build a piece of software that has every fault code that's ever existed and how to fix it. That way they never have to call me again and I can just go somewhere.

Ewell: You solve the problem for yourself

Tyler: Yeah, I was like, I'm just trying solve my own problem.

I don't have time to deal with all these tech support calls. And people like, oh, that's impossible. Gimme codes there are, and blah, blah, blah. But what we've realized today is, yeah, people and everybody listening to this knows this. If you wanna work on your lawnmower, your pedal bike, your car, your commercial truck, your house you need a couple things.

A, you need the tools to do it, and we definitely sell those. You need training on those tools to know how to use them properly and how to do those. Whatever you're working on, you need a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of access to information. A wiring diagram, how it's built how long it should take me, what tools I should need.

You need a little bit of that, and you need the phone or friend. You need someone to be like, man, I got this thing. I just don't know how to fix it. Hey, I've done it before. Let me show you. 

And we're really the only company that really came out and said, look we're not gonna like just sell somebody a $10,000 tool and let 'em just hang there and not deal with. Figured out themselves, let's actually be with them for the long run. The next 12 months, the next five years, the next 10 years. An extension of their company, and help them be successful, what they're trying to accomplish. So that's really what it's pivoted to now, is we're a solution, not a product.

Giving value for free  to grow the business

Ewell: Now, do you provide, do you charge for the other services? Is the training something you charge for or is that part of the serv part of the package? When you buy a diesel laptop. 

Tyler: So both, so we realized at a point that. We were just giving this stuff away so people would buy more. And then we were great cuz we were buying more and we're selling our product for 20, 30, 40% more than anybody else sells some of those products for, because we put those services around it and they're of value to people.

And what we started to figure out was, okay, if we keep offering that stuff with annual support packages, we can increase our annual. Volume on our renewal. So now we do over 10 million a year in renewals. And then the other piece of it was, man, that thing is so good like that B2B SaaS platform we have for repair information that we literally give to our customers for the first year, or we include with our renewals.

That is so good. Why don't we just open it up to the general public, so anybody that has any tool or no.

Can actually buy that from us as well. So that's been the big pivot in 2022, is selling standalone repair information. The diesel technician training classes are available to anybody. The call center's now available to anybody as well.

The parts cataloging as well. So, it's created new revenue streams for us through that process.

Ewell: We're gonna take a break right here. We're gonna come right back in a second and we're gonna go a little deeper on some of the challenges you face with how are you growing this business? Hold on Tyler. We'll be right back.

You've heard me talk about it. You know, I love this product, and you probably know I'm talking about AG1. I take it every morning before I go to the gym. It's a green powder. I put it into my shaker, mix it up, and boom, I'm done. I've got 75 minerals and vitamins and I'm set for the day. If you'd like to learn more about this product and why I love it so much, visit Close The Deal.com.

Visit Tyler Robertson's show notes page and there will be a link that will get you to AG1. And on that page there's gonna be a special offer for a year's supply, a free year's supply of D three and k2, and five free travel packs. Visit closethedeal.com. Now let's get back to the show.

Tyler, welcome back to the Close The Deal.Com Podcast.

So, you have grown this business from $0 to 70 million essentially, what, seven years? Is that about? 

Tyler: Yeah, seven years. Wrapping it up soon.

Ewell: Wow. So, then you look at this, you'd like the epitome of an entrepreneur because. You're not just solving a problem you, you identified a larger problem. People want to fix their own trucks so they don't their own diesel legends.

But then you've got the benefit, which I think accelerates your massive growth, is you're solving one problem after the other. But you and the problems are endless with diesel engines. And you even talked about when you took me on a tour of your facility, which is you keep expanding.

 Have you all moved again? 

Tyler: I did buy another building and property in Columbia, South Carolina, where we're located for our training center. So yeah, we keep buying and leasing more property in the country. 

Ewell: You're expanding at a rapid pace , and you'll also bring something else to, to equation. It's a level of hospitality. That's the word I come from, the hospitality world promoting seafood, marketing food and so forth.

You're bringing that level of service that was not there before and you were doing that inherently when you created the first product, you were try you just trying to help the guy help your customers out at the shop that you were working. So, all that makes sense. Let me ask you this the road to grow this business even though, I think you're sitting based on the problems that you solve, you're probably sitting on a billion dollar business in the next four to five years. I'm guessing, and I think that's realistic. You've tapped in the, you've tapped a nerve that's absolutely working, but that does not go without challenges.

What I mean and the growth. When you grow as fast as you're growing. How many employees are you up to today?

Tyler: 220 now.

Ewell: 220.

Tyler: Yeah.

Ewell: So, what are the biggest challenges you as an entrepreneur scaling this. 

Bootstrapping the business till this day

Tyler: I guess I can go by category, right? So, number one, we're bootstrapped. We're not like raising tens and tens of millions of dollars and throwing fuel in the, using it as just to grow it. So, when you bootstrap, and I'm, it's weird, I'm anti-debt, so we have no debt.

When you choose to not take on debt and you choose to scale and grow your company, you wake up basically all the time. We don't have much cash in the bank. And that's because all of a sudden you wake up one day and you're like, wow, I got 8 million in inventory sitting on the ground. I got 5 million in receivables.

And that's, that takes cash to go do those things. And you can only grow as fast as your cash allows you to go. So, I'm, people think I'm like a risk taker and I am, but I'm, I feel I'm playing with house money at this point, so I'm like, okay, I'll go double down on some things and go sprinkle some money over there.

But it's. It's not risk, I'm not willing to take. So that's one challenge. And I value my equity, so I agree with you. I think my company is worth a lot of money today and I think it's worth a lot more money in the years down the road. So that equity is very valuable to me. And I know I can leverage that at any point if I want to.

It's just, I haven't needed to at this point in order to get to the goals, to where we wanna get to. And so that's one. The other is just you growing pains. So, there was about year. That we hit and our revenue still grew. But it was like really choppy, like great month, horrible month, great month, horrible month.

And when you looked at the whole year it was, it was going up, but it just wasn't going up. We're doubling revenue up until that point every year. That has to stop at some point.

Tyler was the problem

But what we found out, what I found out was the problem. And I was me being the one holding everything back, I was the person there that everyone had to get answers from.

I was the only one that knew anything we had been. It was just chaos everywhere. I had only focused on sales and marketing and said, screw it to the rest. And I, I don't know if I'd taken that back. Cause it, it grew us and we're here today doing well, but that creates a lot of problems. By me choosing that we had hackers break into our accounts.

We had employees embezzle money from us. We made a bunch of bad hires. We had 99% of our phone calls went in tech support at one point. Cause we weren't staffed enough, we didn't grow all the departments at the same speed. So growing pains, man, that is I never knew how difficult that would be until I was in the middle of it.

And I never understood why companies hit that certain. That revenue number where they just can't get it past that, that cap or the number, they just get stuck there. They go. And then they hit that wall. I never understood why. And now that I was in it, and I'm still in it, and we go, we always hit walls.

It's okay I gotta change who I am. I gotta run this company differently. I need to think differently. And that's a really tough thing for especially like founder CEOs to try.

Ewell: And you just hit that on a key word change because the constant is change.

Tyler:  It is. I'm much more comfortable doing things that that are easy. And I think anyone that works in their job can say this same thing like, oh, I do this thing, I do it. It's easy. And not a lot of people, a lot of people are afraid to get out of their comfort zone and go learn something new and go do something totally different.

Tyler on making the changes necessary

And that was the, my reality was if I keep running the company the same way I. I'm never gonna grow this thing. And I had to get outta my own way. I had to go hire a bunch of people that I was paying I put them on salary higher than my own salary was at the, in the company. But I was like, if I want to grow, I don't have a choice.

I have to do these things. And the, and I'm not saying everyone, listeners has to go grow their company or keep doing these things. Some people are happy with where they're at and that's fine. But I just knew, I just know like deep down inside I tell the employees all the. Look how many companies have the chain, have the opportunity to change on industry works and operates like diesel laptops has that opportunity to create a positive impact in our industry and in our space for decades to come.

So, let's go. Let's go find out if we can do it. And that's the guiding lights on a lot of the decisions I make over there is I know where I want to go. It's not the profit, it's not what I take home. Those are, I don't care about those things as much as the bigger. Of helping an industry that really freaking needs help and has a lot of inefficiency in the market.

Ewell: So I wanna use this to transition to the marketing, by virtue what you did promoting and marketing your business hard out the gate. That's what a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to do. That is the number one job of an entrepreneur to promote marketing. The business, of course, can't neglect all these other things that cause great dumpster fires for you.

But you've found that, that sweet spot, it seems like, and you're starting to hit stride. Is that about where you are

Tyler: Yeah, so personally, like LinkedIn's the big one for me, right? Like my, my, my post get millions and millions of views every year on LinkedIn. And it just started with me, like I was, I'm like, you know what? I have no brand name recognition. Nobody knows who I am, nobody knows what I do. I don't have people I can talk to about trying to figure out how to scale up a company.

How Tyler leverages Linkedin

I might as well just go on LinkedIn and search, sharing my journey and see seeing what happens. And it, LinkedIn's definitely a grind, but I can tell you that is like single handedly the best B2B networking tool that's ever been built. I have gotten so much business, tens of millions of dollars of business off.

I have gotten so many strategic partner relationships going with a variety of companies. We met on LinkedIn. You can go really change the trajectory of your professional career, your company, through channels like that. And I've spent the last seven or eight years building up brand name recognition.

So it's crazy. And we had over half a million unique visitors to our website last. And that still grows 20% year over year. Our YouTube channel, it's over 8 million views. And it's, we have, I have eight people, nine people now I'm in my marketing department and multiple podcast shows.

So we're in the B2B space in truck repair doing podcast shows. That makes no sense in any other context of conversation, but it's today's world and that's how you go reach a lot of people in mass.

Ewell: And I come back to you actually follow, solve a problem, YouTube videos, it's probably how to right? How to fix this. And people just keep coming back and then it becomes word about, I learned how to do this from blah, blah, blah, so you've got, you've built this machine that just is starting to this hamster wheel.

It keeps getting, it's gonna keep going faster and faster.

Tyler: It's funny our most viewed videos are literally like me outside working on a truck, one hand on the laptop, one hand holding the camera up, like walking people through things. Those have way more views than these, $10,000 professional videos that we put together. And it's because exactly what you said people are just going down there to learn and absorb information That's, what YouTube is in the B2B space.

Ewell: So when I got the tour, you gave me the tour of your place, you showed me your studio,  is that your number one way for getting the word out about your business is using social.

How to get rid of cold calling

Tyler: Yeah, I got 50 salespeople and we don't cold call. We get literally hundreds of inquiries a day, phone calls, chats, social media, website hits, forms, people buying online. And we are, we're not out there knocking on doors. We're not out doing live demos. To give the audience perspective we're selling $10,000 tools without showing people the tool, what it looks like.

Ewell: Man, you just hit on something that's so important. Lot of people think sales is the holy grail. It's the marketing that leads up to the sales, which makes the sale A soft sale for you makes it really easy for you. You not have to, cold calling's hard. Any and any business, it's hard.

You have to, you've eliminated the cold calling process. That's

Tyler: Yeah, because what we do is we just provide a ton of value. So, all those videos we do like our best videos we do are actually us just doing, like showing people something. Like one of our guys just using a c scope to show people how to do a cylinder cutout contribution test to figure out what cylinder said on their engine.

And literally they can do it in less than 15 minutes, and that's way quicker than remove a valve cover or running whatever other tests and commands. Those get tremendous content clicks, comments and just leads traffic back. So we're, we want traffic and we want relevant traffic.

So that's really the name of the game. And I can tell you, seven, eight years into this thing I've actually been shifting here in 2023 cuz now I'm sitting here saying now I got tons of traffic. I got more traffic than I know what to deal with. I'm now it's more focused on, okay, let's convert that traffic.

To a lead. And let's do that through a bunch of different ways, right? So we do a bunch of different strategies to convert them, to actually engage with us and do things. And then let's start tweaking the sales process. So now that they know us, they're contacting us, they're interested, how do I get them to buy?

And we start there thinking man, what if we just got 1% more of the customers that got to our website to buy something?

Ewell: What would happen if you just got 20% of the people already buying from you to buy more?

Tyler: That's what we look at that too and we're like, man, we're not even going after we're not even trying to upsell or cross sell current customers. We're just still going after new business. And we all know it's more expensive and difficult to get a new customer versus sell more to a current customer.

But yet, yet, we still have diesel. We're like we, cause we do the same thing for so many years and the volume keeps going. So that's, that is one of the challenges we have is we've launched new products and services and we go to our sales people like, Hey, we got a new thing, go sell it. And they're like, I can't.

I'm back on the month trying to call my current business. What do you expect me to do? I'm like, okay we gotta, so literally this week, here I am ending year seven and I'm like, we need to completely reorg the entire sales.

Ewell: Yeah.

Tyler: And a lot of people are like, what do you really wanna screw up this business?

We got we're at 70 million this year. We grew 35% last year. What do we, how are you sure you wanna do that? And I'm like, I know I have to. Cause if I know I can't get to a hundred or hundred 50 million unless we go fix what we know is broken today. So, I'm willing to roll those dice and I'm willing to go do that.

And I, and that's what, that's the other big challenge of the. The bigger you get, man, those changes. They got a lot of commas and zeros on 'em all of a sudden. And they're big scary things and you just gotta still kinda go at it the same way you did when you were small.

Tyler on carrying no personal debt getting started

Ewell: Okay. I wanna shift to tips one or two tips for the listener. But before I do that, I'm gonna tap into what you said about LinkedIn and how that has just you, you're exploded through LinkedIn and I read one of your posts. That's how we, you and I got to know each other. And one of your posts struck a nerve with me, and it talks, and you already alluded to it, you have no debt in your business, but to, to what made it possible.

This is, I think, really important for the listener here. And you can talk about this. I'll you'll, you're gonna know where I'm going in just a second. What made it possible for you to get into do a business is you did not have that.

Tyler: Yeah. Yeah.

I had no personal debt. Like we I can tell people when I came to South Carolina 15 years ago, I was broke. I had credit card debt my wife didn't know about. It took me three credit cards to get through a grocery store trip. Like it was not good. And it was, at that point I was like, okay, like I have not putting myself in this hole again.

And paid off the credit card debt, paid off the student loans, paid off the car payments. The house. I had that house like right for recommended. It was like I was like right there to the finish line to having that thing paid off. But what that did is it gave me freedom and it gave me runway to go do my buisness.

And that's the part people don't understand. And I know when the market's booming, people talk about taking debt on threating, the market, buying crypto, all this crazy stuff like, man, just pay off your debt, get rich. Slowly put it in the market you're gonna be fine. You don't need to do these crazy things to go grow your business.

Ewell: I agree. All right. What's one more tip that you can offer up to any entrepreneur that you would, that bubbles up to the top of your mind right now?

Tyler on the perfect time to launch your product



Tyler: Yeah, I see so many, I've ran across so many entrepreneurs that they just keep working on a product, working on a product, working on a product. It's not perfect. It's not perfect. It's not perfect. Just get it to like where it's functional and just put it out there and see what the market says.

You will learn more doing. Then obsessing over a bunch of features and user interfaces and things. I've put plenty of crappy products out there that look crappy at the time that customers didn't get, they don't understand. We scrapped it, we moved on, and other ones they didn't care what it looked like or was missing some things.

They loved it and we just kept iterating it up. So don't be afraid to put something out there, get feedback and just keep working on it.

Ewell: Well said. One more question for you. What is the vision that you have for your business over the next, say two, three years?

Tyler: Yeah. The next two to three years, so we just finished, this is our last year of our three year plan. We're gonna be really close hitting our three year strategic goals. So this year we're working on a five year goal for the company. So I, I always tell people this, look I'm 44 now.

I don't have kids in it. I don't want my kids in the business. I don't have family involved. I, as an owner of a company, you have a decision to make. You gotta decide what's your exit and you can let fate decide for you, or you can go make your own plan. And I'm more of the, I'm gonna go make my own plan.

So, I'm, that is the big one for me this next year is really putting a plan in place to figure out, okay what's my end game? And how am I gonna control it? What's that look like? I want diesel laptops to be around for a really long time. Ev when EV's come, that's fine. We'll deal with that.

Robots driving trucks, we'll deal with that. But I need to put a plan together and put the right people in charge of things so that I'm not feeling holding the company back. And it can grow and it can do and what it needs to do. And it can go help a lot of people. And I know if it's me owning it and being the guy in charge for the next 20 years, it's probably not gonna be that fullest.

Ewell: Yeah.

Tyler: So I gotta figure out what that plan looks like. I'm gonna be around for a long time, don't wanna freak people off or listen to this, but I do gotta put a plan together. I'm not gonna let fake decide the future of my, my, my family, our family wealth, our generational stuff going on, and what happens to the company.

I'm gonna, we're gonna make sure this things locked down.

Ewell: Very smart strategy. Where can people find your products? Where would you send them to?

Tyler: Yeah, so diesellaptops.com. If you know nothing about us, great, go to the learn section, podcast series, all kinds of great stuff going on there. Or LinkedIn like we've been talking about.

 I'd love to connect with people on there.

I'll, I've been sharing my journey since day one. You can go all the way back in the post history and see where I started if they really want to, but  it's been a fun ride and I look forward to the next couple years.

Ewell: Tyler, this has been a fun ride too, and I look forward to working with you further in the future, and thank you for being here. And thank you for sharing your insights with our community. Thank you, sir.

Tyler: No problem at all, man. Thank you very much for having me come on the podcast.

Ewell: And that is a wrap with Tyler. What a ride. Imagine just trying to figure out how to pick up a few dollars for beer and next thing you know,, you're sitting on a hundred million dollar business in sales. This year, I, he hasn't hit it yet, but I'm certain he's gonna hit it. I put my money on it that he's going to.

In fact, I said it on the show. I've seen his facilities. I've seen his operations. I would not be surprised if this does turn into a billion dollar business and he's debt free. That how unusual is that? Pretty cool stuff. Let me know what you thought about this show. I'd love to get your feedback and I wanna thank you for being here.

As this show is starting to get traction, which is pretty cool to see, we've got requests coming in every week to be on the show. We've got like seven more shows already in the can that need to be produced and then we'll have those ready to go pretty soon. So, I wanna thank you for being here and being part of that.

This journey's just getting started for us as well. So, I want you to make it a great day. I want you to be intentional about that. And I also hope this show opened your mind up to what's possible because I promise you, I can tell you Tyler certainly didn't think beer money would turn into a hundred million dollar business.

Make it a great day. Bye.