A partnership that’s working — Dan’s Service Center and Draw-Tite. Greg Black, Draw-Tite district manager; Ryan Miller, vp-operations, Dan’s Service Center; Dan Miller, founder of Dan’s Service Center; and Todd Rader, Draw-Tite, manager, marketing communications.

It was obvious to us why Draw-Tite wanted to do business with Dan's, but we wanted to know why Dan's does business with Draw-Tite. Dan said, "It boils down to three words: quality, availability, and integrity."

Ryan added, "When you look at the core of what your business is, the thing that everything else radiates out from, it comes down to two things. Everybody has to be happy. Your employee who is putting it on; your customer who bought it and has to use it; and the rest of the people that you work with daily. And the second thing is, you have to make money.

"If you look at it from a customer's standpoint, then you forget about the profitability and you are just looking at: how is it working? is it going to meet my needs? am I going to be happy? Yes. So the answer is basically quality, integrity, and service. That's where Draw-Tite is at."

That's quite an endorsement from a company that didn't do business with Draw-Tite until about five and half years ago. The day we visited Dan's, Draw-Tite's Greg Black, district manager, and Todd Rader, manager, marketing communications, were also on hand.

Ryan credits Black for proving to them that they should take on the Draw-Tite line of hitches. After several sales calls, Black had a breakthrough. Ryan said, "I think it was basically the fact that Greg dropped off some product and it was about two or three days before we actually looked it over. Dan looked at the product to make sure that it was going to meet our needs because our main concern is the customer, it's not necessarily price. So after we looked at the product to make sure it met those needs, we had a discussion about the price and whether it was going to fit our overall criteria. And then we decided to put a little order together.

"It was a funny. We placed the order through Greg at 11:00 one day, and Greg said it would be here the next day before noon. When he promised that I told him he was crazy. It's not possible. It's not going to happen. Go ahead and make your call. Then he calls and he didn't say anything other than, this is the order - ship it.

"At 11:00 the next morning it was here. And as we have learned through experience since then that wasn't anything special. And that obviously helped us decide what we were going to do. Along with having full lines and packaged products, there's a lot of reasons for using Draw-Tite, but from our first day - we knew we could get an order the next day. We had an order from 200 miles away within 24 hours. I have learned in the meantime that Draw-Tite's fill rate is ridiculous - about 98-1/2%. Something that is almost unattainable when you stop to think about it."

Ryan Miller (l) and Greg Black discuss the extensive Draw-Tite packaged towing accessories section at Dan’s Service Center, Elkhart.

As Ryan mentioned, Draw-Tite has a good line of packaged aftermarket towing accessories. And that is an important element in Draw-Tite's commitment to help its customers be more profitable. And it seems to be working at Dan's.

If Draw-Tite were going to build a model store, they could not do much better than Ryan has already done at Dan's. The inventory storage area in the service shop is filled to the rafters with Draw-Tite products, and the neatly kept and well stocked aftermarket store has Draw-Tite's packaged towing accessory lines displayed in a prominent position near the cash register.Continued