Why We Stopped Buying Service Vans — And You Should Too

The vans are just too much money. It's like $55,000 to $65,000. But you can go get a Maverick for like $26,000, $27,000.

I love Mavericks.

Why am I sending this guy in this $60,000 truck when a $27,000 truck will get better fuel economy and be cheaper?

A big portion of that is reduced inventory. Like, you can't store $30,000 in inventory. Like, you have to be meaningful and thoughtful about what inventory you have on stock.

All right, so full Mavericks, bunch of trailers. I kind of— I'm kind of into it. I think I'm into it.

That's my crazy harebrained idea.

Yeah, I think the only thing I don't like— Welcome back.

Welcome back. Welcome back.

Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I am your host, John Wilson. On the show with me today, I have the infamous Jack Carr, the bald bearded man from Nashville, the local Nashville man. It doesn't roll off the tongue quite like local Florida man, but It's pretty good.

Yeah.

You'll know it's him if he's denser than he should be and wearing cowboy boots.

All of this is accurate and it doesn't offend me whatsoever.

Good, good.

I've said it a long time ago on many occasions is I'm bald.

Yeah.

And I'm short. And so like, I got to work hard, man. That's what it's about.

You got to overdeliver.

I got to overcome my Shortcomings. So I'm super pumped about today's topic. I'm leading into this.

Yeah, me too. All right, let's do it.

So I got a harebrained idea.

I'm ready.

Okay, so everybody knows, or at least everybody who's on Twitter, so not everybody, probably not even half of our audience. I love Mavericks. The Ford Maverick, specifically Ford Mavericks, not the political Mavericks, are by far my favorite vehicle. So I'm gonna set the stage for you. We just had Snowmageddon here in Nashville.

Yes.

Ice storm, trees down, like everything screwed up. We didn't have one single Maverick get stuck this entire week of ice.

Actually, I don't think we did either. I don't think I thought about that.

So that's the first thing is we didn't have a single Maverick stuck. Our vans got stuck all the time, like regularly. Our 2 Transit vans that we have get stuck in snow and ice just because they're the high top and just— I don't, I don't know. But the Mavericks, no. And yeah, so we are working through trying to come up with, um, a way to do more with the Mavericks. So I, I just think that they are the one of the most perfect vehicles for essentially almost all HVAC, plumbing, and electrical. And so what I'm, I'm working through is how to come up with a way that I never have to buy another high-top Ford again.

Oh yeah, I'm so here for this. I mean, so we, we started doing Mavericks, we started doing pickups I think 2 years ago. Um, I want to say half our fleet is pickup now. And so we— the vans are just Too much money. Uh, like, we're buying these high-roof vans and it's like $55,000 to $65,000.

Yeah.

But you can go get a Maverick for like $26,000, $27,000. So we started switching over purely for cost. We're like, oh, why am I— why am I sending this guy in this $60,000 truck when a $27,000 truck will get better fuel economy and Be cheaper. So yeah, we switched at the tail end of COVID and it has been huge. I don't think we bought a van for three years now. If you are a home service business spending ten, twenty, or even thirty grand a month on marketing and you still can't confidently say where book jobs are actually coming from, then you need to hear this. Service Scalers is hosting an in-person workshop called Booked Solid, where a small group of operators get in a room and work through the stuff. Nobody ever has time to slow down and do. What can I actually track? What's working that I should double down on? What's not working that I should kill? And how do I consistently fill the call board without wasting money? Sam and his team go deep on Google Ads, LSA, SEO, Facebook, and even traditional marketing. But the big thing is lead handling and follow-up, which is where revenue quietly links. You'll leave with a real actionable 90-day marketing plan and so much more. It's hosted by Sam and his team at Service Scalers, happening March 3rd through the 5th in Akron, Ohio at Wilson. You can save $500 with code BOOKEDEARLYBIRD, but it's a small room, so seats are limited. If marketing has been sitting on your to-do list for way too long, then this is probably the nudge that you need.

Yeah, we haven't bought a van for the last 3 years. And so our setup, because I get asked this a lot specifically, is we go with a white Maverick. We usually try to get the year before. So what happens is like a lot of these larger groups, pest control, pool routes, whatever, they're buying 40 of these at a time or 30 of these at a time, and they don't necessarily actually— so they order 30, I should say, but they only buy 28.

Yeah.

And so we pick up the last 2 that have been sitting on some lot in, in kind of some off area of Tennessee, and our guy at Ford knows that's what we're looking for. So we get a 2024 white Ford Maverick.

Nice.

I don't really have a preference on eco versus or hybrid versus non-hybrid. We have a mix in the fleet. Some people do have preference just because like there's some known issues with the hybrid models. They're a little bit more difficult to work on because they're a hybrid, right? That being said, overall, we haven't had too many issues in general with them. We've had one recall. Um, but we get that. Then about '26, '27, we have the DCU, um, cover by ARE, uh, which is like the 3-door, um, yeah, what do you call this, uh, toppers with the roof rack already built in.

I think, I think that's what we're missing because that gives you the ability to put like a full water heater in there, and we're using the tonneau covers, which, um, you just can't put as much.

Exactly.

But we also, we had to do that during COVID because it used to take 30 weeks to get the thing that you have. 'Cause I think we have 8 or 9 of those and like we just literally couldn't.

Yeah.

So we ended up with tonneaus and then we ended up sticking with 'em.

But those are nice though. 'Cause like that's where we can put, we put the, the tubes that you put your, your other pipes in and then we put a ladder, a like little giant ladder on it. And like that's what sits on the top of the rack. Any kind of, you know, any kind of material that's oversized we, we get. But overall, the only thing we're changing, which we were, as we're kind of learning our systems, is we were doing the Rat Packs, which are just pull-out drawers inside the bottom of that. And, I don't know the size, whatever the bed size is, like 5 by 4 or whatever, but we're actually moving away from those. So, I don't want to say that that's what we're using, but most of them do have that because those are about $1,000.

Yeah.

And we can buy 3 Milwaukee Packouts, like brand Milwaukee Packouts for that same cost.

Well, I just found out that Milwaukee Packouts have a full, like, truck stock system. So we bought a business at the end. Yeah.

What does that like look like?

Dude, I don't even freaking know. Like it, it, well, it's the Packouts, but there's a way that you can hang them on the wall of a van.

Yeah. Oh yeah, I've seen that.

I didn't know that. Oh, I have never seen that. So we, we, yeah, we bought this business and they have 6 plumbing vehicles and all of them have Milwaukee Packout. Like, it was freaking awesome.

Yeah, that's the reason why the plumbing business in itself, it's that you got 6 Milwaukee.

Oh yeah, I was like, oh, this, this alone, you know, you've got me.

But yeah, so that's what we started doing. So our, our fleet, because like the idea behind it, right, is, and we've talked about this a lot, so I'm not going to beat the dead horse here. But like the idea behind going to Mavericks, a big portion of that is reduced inventory. Like you can't store $30,000 in inventory, which is a catch-22.

You can't hide.

But realistically, I don't even feel like it's a catch-22. Like you just can't hide multiple motors and multiple things from 10 years ago, 6 or 7 drums of like 407C and some random R, you know, 132 for this one job you had 10 years ago. Like you have to be meaningful and thoughtful about what inventory you have on stock. But so we're able to do a couple Packouts now instead of the Rat Pack. And then our only rule is like, hey, you keep your tools inside the truck, like all the nice tools, like the, the pump-down system, the recovery machine, your, your gauge set, like all that kind of stuff. Just keep that in the truck. And then in the back is where you keep, you know, a roll of copper and Um, any kind of tank. We have a little tank strap that we do to the back wall for, uh, our 410A.

Yeah.

Uh, an R32. And like, it is perfect. We, we had the ice storm, nobody got stuck. We were able to run a ton of calls.

Yeah.

We had very little issues with, uh, inventory or like crashes. No problem. And we're getting into this, we're all in for like 33 per per truck. So that's, that's not the harebrained idea. So that's just setting the stage because everybody asks. I love it. I think it's the best thing ever.

I think we're in the, we're in the 20s with it. Like we brought on 20 last year, 5 or something the year before. We have a ton of Rangers, we have a ton of Tacomas, but we ended up with Mavericks because they're so much cheaper.

Also great gas mileage.

I definitely think it's just like the right decision.

Yeah.

To be honest, it is the most like cash efficient decision that you can make.

Yeah. I mean, we started—

It's half the price.

Yeah, we started just for like our salespeople who were running around in, in like F-150s. Like an F-150 is—

So we actually— we, man, like, yeah, it's crazy. Well, we, we ended up doing the Chevy Trailblazers for salespeople, and those are like $17,000 brand new.

That's pretty good too.

So that's great.

Have to look into that one.

You're good.

Bye Mavericks, hello Chevy Trailblazer.

So yeah, for, for salespeople, we started putting them in I mean, it's still an SUV, but yeah, it was, uh, $17,000. Yeah, I mean, with tax it was maybe like $20,000.

And so the harebrained idea, John, is—

Yeah, I'm ready.

We want to move away from vans and trucks altogether, or vans and box trucks altogether. Yeah. And so the way that we are thinking about doing this, right—

And I think the big, the big pushback is going to be install. The big pushback for install. That's going to be like, how do we do this?

Because Admittedly, like, you cannot fit anything else in the back of the truck. There's no— like, you maybe get an evap coil. Like, there's nothing that can go back there that's over a certain size.

Yeah.

They're able to carry a water heater around because we have custom fab racks that sit on the back of the tailgate. But outside of that, like, you cannot carry an HVAC unit and we have to do 5-ton package units here in Nashville. So the— what we're thinking is the Mavericks can tow up to 4,400 pounds, which is about— I mean, you can get a pretty big trailer for 4,400.

That's 2 other Mavericks.

One Maverick can tow 2 other Mavericks. And so what we're thinking is like, what if we created a system? And we're working on it right now. It's— and the system is Instead of Milwaukee Packouts for our installs, we're doing trailer Packouts where you have an extra $2,000 enclosed trailer, a 6 by 10 enclosed trailer that can fit— not only fit a package unit, but sits lower and has the dropdown gate. So they're not actually lifting anything up and over. It is full roll in, roll out.

And yeah.

For $2,500 in outfitting on a brand new enclosed trailer, 6 by 10 trailer, It can haul that plus a 5-ton gas package unit, which is only 500, 600 pounds more, still be underweight. And then you could outfit that thing with all the gas fittings and everything you need. And then once that one's done, at the end of the day, you pull it back in and they go and grab the next trailer. So it's really just disconnecting trailer, hooking up new trailer, and that's your packout. So that's my crazy harebrained idea.

Okay.

What do you think? Where am I missing something?

I think, yeah, I think the only thing I don't like is driving with trailers is a skill, and some idiot's gonna jackknife that thing. Uh, so I don't love that. Um, you'll probably have more accidents, so you'll have to noodle on that. Maybe like one extra year, I don't know. Uh, what I, what I like a lot is it's the same reason I like box trucks. Like, you can just change the box but keep the chassis. So all the investment into the box, like into the trailer, like you can— a trailer can last like 30 freaking years. Like, it doesn't matter.

Yeah.

Uh, so that's kind of nice, is useful life is a long time. Uh, so I think I like that a lot. We, we've talked about doing this before. Um, we talked about it. Well, we have one for excavation, but we've talked about doing this for boilers, I think, and maybe generators, like there being like a trailer that goes and handles generators. Uh, but we obviously have not done it.

Yeah.

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Yeah, and so the way I try to look at that, right, so when you're talking about accidents, you're really talking about like he backed into something or he jackknifed something. And the way I look at that is the damage—

Or took a corner too sharp.

Yeah, the damage that you generate from one of those accidents, is it $30,000 equivalency to paying for A van. And not to mention, like, they also screw up those vans in the same exact way by jack— not jackknifing it, but like taking a turn too tight in a gas station. And now your, your nice white van has a yellow stripe across the side. So like, I don't think that, that it's equivalent to 1 to 0. It's like 1 to 0.3.

Yeah.

And so that 0.7 of risk, how much is that worth? But that's what— that's the way we're moving is we're going to move forward.

So you'd have 3? Or like 2 or something.

3. We're thinking about 3 enclosed trailers. The only downside— and we're gonna, we're gonna do the same for water heaters. It's like, hey, this is our water heater, um, packout van or packout, uh, trailer. Uh, the—

Well, I feel like you could almost do that in the same, because I mean, HVAC guys can put in a water heater either way.

Yeah, I mean, I think that it has gas fittings. It has a— like, an HVAC packout is very similar to a water heater packout. Right. There's not— all the tools are in the back of the truck anyway. So it's not really— again, it's not— the trailer is just the equipment and like the equipment installation, which is gas pipe, whip.

How big is the trailer?

6 by 10.

That's not bad.

It's not bad at all. Single axle.

And you could, you could honestly probably pull that with something like a Trailblazer. You might not even need a Maverick to pull that.

I like it that it runs kind of like a billboard. So it runs like a box truck still, right? In the sense of when you wrap it.

Yeah.

Um, and then the only thing that I am discouraged on is there's— I'm 100% sure that there's no way that we can pull excavation equipment with a Maverick. Um, so the, the—

No, not with the trailer you have. I mean, that's a big trailer.

Well, I just mean like in general, like that, that That excavation needs like an F-250 minimal to pull that thing.

Yeah. So, I mean, we, we have a, we have a 350 pulling ours.

Yeah.

But that was a, you know, the first time we bought a, uh, excavation like dump, it was a 750. That thing was humongous. Yeah. Um, and it was like $125 grand. And then we downgraded to, uh, a 350. And that, I mean, that thing's been great. It's like, it's a big truck that happens to have a dump back. It's good. Like, we'll probably get another one.

Yeah. And so that's my only downside. But again, it's really for excavation only. We already have the truck, so we're not getting rid of that one. And for the most part—

So full Mavericks, bunch of trailers. I kind of— I'm kind of into it. I think I'm into it.

Full Mavericks, bunch of trailers. Like our Mavericks already have, like a lot of them already have like 50,000 miles on it. But we saw, we also saw meaningful change to our gas. Like the amount of gas we spend is—

Oh yeah, our gas is down.

Our gas is down too.

Yeah. Now I think, I think that, um, I think that gas prices changed. I'd have to look, but in 2024 we spent $456,000 on gas and in 2025 we spent $298,000.

Yeah.

So like $157,000 of a difference. Like it was enough that I remember the numbers 'cause I was like, what the hell happened to this line item?

Yeah. So we're about the same. So I think it was a bit of, yeah, gas pricing went down, but Also, there's some level of drop.

We controlled it. It's one of the few things you can do to control gas prices.

Yeah. I mean, I drove, so I had to run some calls this last week because of Snowmageddon. And yeah, man, I was going some distance. I drove for like 3 or 4 days without having to fill that thing up. And I'm talking about like 100 miles a day. Like, it was wild. And then when I filled it up, $30, I'm blown away, man. Maverick's a big fan.

Um, well, I'm, I'm trying to convince Brandon to do the same. He's like, dude, we can't. But I've slowly, we've actually been able to pull it off because I've told him, I'm like, so the way I'm gonna get you onto this is I'm just not gonna buy any more vans. Like, we're not. So you just, uh, so we've, you just, you're gonna, we're like forcing him in there.

You're just gonna wait till I have a, a install trailer rolling around and then I'm gonna take some pictures and, and then you're gonna finally pull the trigger.

Yeah.

Brandon will be okay with it.

It's, it's gonna be, It's gonna be great. But yeah, so we've, we started moving like primarily pickup a couple years ago. And yeah, I don't think we've maybe bought one van in the past 3 years that wasn't like a cheap pickup, 'cause like I don't wanna pay $50 fricking thousand.

Yeah.

I think my other solution, and this is something that I think is kind of funny. So like when we first started off in the business, we were buying used vans and like the only measurement for I'm gonna buy this van is was it below 20 grand? And like we moved in 2019 to Enterprise, and we've been doing that whole shindig. And now we're like trying to figure out vans again. And I'm like, I don't want to keep paying $60,000 for a vehicle. Like I just think that sucks. I think that you know when I started off in Enterprise, like the Chevy vans were like thirty grand. It was 2020, 2019, 2020. Like it didn't double yet. So yeah, so so I started calling some friends, and I mean I talked to people running hundred million dollar businesses. And they're buying $20,000 used vans. Like, so it, it would— it was just— it was like, man, okay, maybe we should have just been doing that the whole time. Uh, because I think it is— it's such a drag to the business going and buying these. Like, it's just a bad balance sheet decision. Like, hey, I'm gonna go buy a $60,000 vehicle that's also worse on gas and probably more repairs. Yeah, I mean, like, and I'm gonna lose more inventory in it. Like, it's a— it is a Bad business decision.

I think the only side to it that is a good business decision, which I will give up, is like the ability to repair anything on site. You do not have to put in any extra labor or time or material into something. But again, especially in HVAC, like plumbing is a little bit different just because I think that you can, you can actively have a better truck stock list to manage what is on a house, right? Because like pipes all the same, outdoor fittings like a hose bib.

Yeah.

Is going to be a hose bib no matter what brand it is. Like customers don't care. The problem comes into play is like once you start running into warranty and non-warranty, OEM versus non-OEM on Lennox versus Trane versus Goodman. And like, so how— it's always blown my mind to me, like how, how do people try to stock for all those contingencies? When it just doesn't make sense to me. You're going to have to run to the factory anyway to get that warranty board, or otherwise you're installing a non-warranty thing on, on a warrantied system, which then—

Yeah, I think we, we came up with like a $2,000 per truck, per Maverick truck HVAC service system, and it was very like generic parts driven. Um, so that's been good for us.

Let me ask you a question on that. Do you guys do— is that for all year, or do you guys do 2 separate ones?

I think it changes by the season.

Yeah, because that's what we did. Because I was gonna say 2,000 would be hard for all year, but we are about 2,000 a season. So we do 2,000 in cooling and about a little more in heating because we carry a couple different sets of inducers just in case. But like, you can't— again, same thing with inducer motors is like all of them are very specific to the type of unit and the brand of unit. There's really no OEM that fits all. And, um, It makes it, it makes it difficult. But like, whether you had a truck that was like a K-Vev or whatever they're called, topper, that was a $100,000 truck with a bunch of stuff in it, like you still can't fix that problem. And now you're spending the gas to get up to the warehouse and back where, you know, at least in the Maverick you can do it fast. So yeah, it's a very interesting segment. But in like plumbing, again, I think that you can truly have a better impact.

Yeah.

Um, and then electrical, we're still—

and electrical is super easy. Like, you can do install. The only issue is generators. Yeah, but you can get a lot done in a Maverick in electrical.

I was just looking up though, like, a 22-kilowatt whole home generator is still only 600 pounds, like crated 600 pounds with transfer switch. So that would still fit into the back of a—

yeah, you could do the trailer of a trailer. So Yeah, no, you could do a trailer for sure. Might even, might even be easier because then otherwise our— like, we have a truck that has a liftgate and we have to use the liftgate truck for generators because it's 600 pounds.

Yeah, so I mean, being able to roll it out I think is a huge win. Um, yeah, overall. So you're, you're on Team Maverick then?

Oh yeah, fully. As much as, as much as we can, because it mainly just like, I don't want to spend $50,000, $60,000 on a vehicle. Like, I just won't. For not, not even I don't want to, I'm not going to. So, if I have to buy a van, it's going to be used. So, yeah, my motivation is if I'm buying a vehicle, it's going to be under $30,000. I'm back on that. I'd rather a brand new Maverick than a used van, but I would take a used van. But I'm not going to spend more than $30,000.

And is that based on—

Done with it.

Is there a number that is associated with that? So, for example, we get like a—

I just think it's a bad capital decision. I think it's a drag on my balance sheet. I think it's a bad use of cash. I don't, I don't think it's like the right investment.

Yeah, that's how we looked at it. It was more so if like we were at a 7% interest rate or give or change, give or take. Um, and so that comes out to be like $590, $560 a month, which is wild compared to like the numbers I was getting for a $60,000 van. Like just crazy amounts.

Oh yeah, it's like $1,200 a month for a van.

So you can buy 2, you can have 2 technicians running Driving— if a technician, each HVAC technician is driving $40K a month in sales, like you can drive $80K a month of sales. And if you say that even if there was an inefficiency in the van that caused the technician to sell less at 10%, um, now we're running, uh, $36K per tech. So you're at $72,000 for those 2 technicians running in those 2 trucks. versus a van running 40 and then paying more to do so. Like, just the economics for me just don't work. I love them, man.

I love them so much. Yeah, yeah. No, I, I think it's, I think it's like needed. I think you basically have to switch to them as much as you can and have the fewest amount of vans in fleet as possible, because I, I don't think it helps anybody. It only drags the business down.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see. There's probably some big names out there that would completely disagree with me and you here. I mean, I don't— not to throw him under the bus, but like Hoffman, like Hoffman runs massive vans and I just don't understand the economics behind it.

Ask him.

Yeah, probably will.

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Tell— comment below where I'm wrong, because I'm still trying to figure out. I think this is one of those ones that I'm right in the wrong way, man.

I don't think you are, dude. I don't think you are.

Honestly, Jon, it's rare too that we agree at this level. So I love it.

Dude, I'm like cheap, cheap trucks. You have me at cheap trucks. Hey, Jon, you wanna spend less on trucks? Yeah. Yeah, I do.

Comment below why I'm wrong or why you are now going to buy all Mavericks and then we can have massive fleets of all Mavericks. Sweet. Hell yeah.