Tennessee shop finds niche in light duty pickup truck service

“This place was on the market, bank-owned, and we were able to scoop it up recently,” explains owner Ryan Casserly. “There’s hardly any commercial property around us, but it was something we could jump into. We pretty much had to turn an empty, no wall, 13,000 square foot facility into a mechanics shop first, just to move out of our old building. Then we moved our fuel shop and everything else over about four months later.”

Totaling 27 acres, the compound consists of a house, now the headquarters for the company, with offices and a waiting area, and the aforementioned ‘barn’, half of which is devoted to the repair shop. And while the latter was the first part of Full Force to reside at the new location, it’s the last part of the company to evolve from its original purpose. 

When Full Force was founded in 2005, it remanufactured injectors for the 7.3L Ford Powerstroke; later the business would grow into retail and ultimately repair. “We were starting to sell more parts that complemented those injectors,” recalls Casserly, “and we‘d get a phone call here and there asking if we could install those parts. I’m always looking for a challenge, so me and a couple of the guys here decided to tackle a drive-in business.”

Dealing strictly with light duty pickup trucks, Full Force dabbles in Cummins and Duramax but the bulk of their market is the Powerstroke. “We do general maintenance, oil changes, brakes, all the way up to motor swaps with Ford reman engines,” outlines Casserly. “We do a fair share of performance work, because (diesel pickups) are this era’s muscle car, but that’s not what drives the shop by any means. For the most part we get people’s trucks in and out and on the road again.” 

And by now Full Force had established something of a national reputation via their injectors. “We’ve never used any advertising,” Casserly reports. “But we’ve had a lot of people from northern Alabama, southern Kentucky, all of middle Tennessee; these guys will drive to get their trucks worked on. I’ve had one guy come from Arizona to get stuff done.”

Despite starting off ‘in a little corner of the shop,’ Casserly has quickly learned how to take care of his customers. “I’m not going to sit there and nickel and dime them to death,” he explains. “I can’t tell you how many tens of thousands of dollars I’ve probably spent over the years on taking care of stuff just to say ‘here you go, don’t worry about it.’ I learned that from my dad, watching him run his business. He took care of the little things.”

Casserly currently has four technicians dedicated solely to the shop. “I think about what I would want as a customer, and I’ll ask my guys here the same question,” he states. “You can look at what the industry’s doing, but in the grand scheme of things it’s our business to run. I’ve bucked plenty of trends; me and my wife put it on the line every day.”

For instance: “There’s one thing I refuse to do,” Casserly proclaims. “When you call up here you will never get an automated answering service. I absolutely hate it. I do not want to press ‘1’ for sales, ‘2 for service, ‘3’ for tracking…Would it make it little bit easier for us? Yeah. But I’ll pay somebody to direct phone calls before I put a phone system in. I want you to talk to somebody.”

Occasionally some of Casserly’s technicians will emulate this old-fashioned approach. They once had a late 2000 model Ford with an enigmatic vibration; “(the techs) don’t come to me for much,” says Casserly, “but at one point there were five of us on this truck, trying to figure it out. It even made one of the best mechanics we ever had scratch his head--and that’s saying something.

“This mechanic sat there chasing down that vibration for four to five days,” Casserly continues. “He just would not give up on it. He pulled the cab off, looked again, put the cab back down. Drove it, pulled the cab again, and he finally sat down at the computer for three or four hours and found the answer hidden in a TSB somewhere—not a bulletin about the problem itself, just buried in one. He was not going to be deterred or let it defeat him.”

That set quite a benchmark for the kind of employee Casserly wants in his shop. “You’ve got a lot of guys now who if they can’t plug up a scan tool or have that scanner point out the problem, they don’t want to work on the vehicle. But we sell parts to a lot of shops around here so we’ve got something of an inside line on who’s good at their job. You’ve got to keep your ear to the ground, and you’ve got to make strong offers to people in order to get them to come in. And it’s not beneath me to hire a headhunter.”

Needless to say, managing a multifaceted business is “crazy right now,” he laughs. “My wife and I own the business and we’ve got several managers in place, but it’s one of those things where you can’t plan for everything, and they don’t offer any classes on stuff like that anyway. We’re doing so much right now that our suppliers are running out, so I’ve been talking to the parts manufacturers, getting us good deals for the stuff that we sell.”

As Casserly has discovered, management has its own set of headaches. “I’m transitioning into that role,” he muses. “You’ve got to put aside what you used to do and trust in the guys who you’ve taught and let them do it. I tend to take a bigger role in the remanufacturing aspect of things.” That doesn’t mean he isn’t looking for advice. “I just happened to run into a business professor who I’ll be getting in touch with here shortly,” he adds.

For even after the recent move, Casserly is already making plans for the future. “If we do anything, we’ll probably build another building just to house the manufacturing process, maybe some different manufacturing as well. There’s going to come a time when the 7.3L injector market goes away. I didn’t think it would stay this strong, and it’s going to be around a little bit longer because there are more companies getting into the market; there’s still money to be made there. But if anything, we’ll also make our drive-in shop a little bigger.”

Because when you’re Full Force, you don’t do things halfway.