This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Ben Hartford [00:00:00]:
I think all EV sales should be at this stage, and it’s a two way street, too. So when I sit in this position between the manufacturer and the customer, I give my opinion and what I’ve learned from the experience of what my other customers have had from certain vehicles and brands and deployments. But I also get feedback from the customer who have deployed those, and those go right back to the manufacturer to create a better product for them.

Kyler Mason [00:00:22]:
Whether you’re going to market through dealers, distributors, or some other partner channel, the mediated sale is complex. We call it B2B2X.

John Gough [00:00:31]:
But the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I’m John Gough.

Kyler Mason [00:00:36]:
And I’m Kyler Mason. And this is why you win. Presented by Element Three in today’s episode.

John Gough [00:00:41]:
We talked to Ben Hartford, the Electric Vehicle Sales Manager at Pritchard EV, and Ben is a believer not just in EV, but in what they can do for all of us in the future. We also talked about how they’re an important player in the buying process, and he outlined the criteria that they are using to choose manufacturers to put in front of their potential customers. It’s a great conversation. We hope you enjoy it. Ben, thanks so much for coming on the show today. We really appreciate having you. We’ve been looking forward to this for a while.

Ben Hartford [00:01:11]:
Yeah, I’d like one. Thanks for having me, guys, to get.

John Gough [00:01:13]:
Started, can you kind of just give us an intro to where you are now and tell us a little bit about your role?

Ben Hartford [00:01:19]:
Yeah, sure. So, Ben Hartford. I’m the electric vehicle sales manager over at Pritchard Commercial, based south of Boston, Massachusetts, and really what my job is is to help all of our customers, both advising them and strategizing with them to pave a path for an all electric fleet. So we’re a nationwide dealership commercial auto group. Really, we’ve been around for over 100 years, and as we look at the next 100 years of existence of the company, we see electrification as inevitability. So I’m here to make that transition easier for all. But the fleets out there, both government and commercial, they need to make the switch.

John Gough [00:01:56]:
All electric fleet is an awesome way to start this. That’s a big bet for sure, something that we see a lot of enthusiasm for in some segments of the market and less, I’ll say less enthusiasm in other segments. Who’s coming along with you on that? Who’s excited about that?

Ben Hartford [00:02:14]:
I would say there’s a lot of commercial fleets in the Fortune 500 size enterprise, fleets that have set sustainability goals for themselves. Much like we’ve seen from a regulatory side with states and federal government, where they put a year, they put a line in the sand. 2030, 2035, we need an x percent transfusion or infusion of electric vehicles, or we need to reduce our carbon emissions by x amount by this year. So they’re kind of taking that first step in being leaders in the space, saying, we know stuff’s not going to work perfectly the first time around. This is still a developing industry and product, but as leaders in the industry, we need to set an example. A lot of fleets come along, but you’re right. Like you mentioned, there’s a lot more that I would say are kind of tiptoeing around it, not really jumping in headfirst, and are kind of waiting for really a sign, whether that comes from leadership or from the government, that it’s time to actually start doing this. It’s not just.

Ben Hartford [00:03:16]:
Not just the fantasy that we’re open for, it’s reality. It’s happening globally and needs to happen here in the United States.

Kyler Mason [00:03:22]:
So did you step into an open role, or was this a newly created role? Tell us how that came to be.

Ben Hartford [00:03:29]:
Yeah, it was a newly created role. I would say. The team at Pritchards are our experts in their field. They’re great at gas and diesel sales. But what Pritchard realized is, if we’re going to be serious about this, we need someone 100% dedicated to the electric vehicle side. I’ve heard they had to look for a good amount of time. I’ve never sold a gas or diesel engine in my life. I never planned on doing it.

Ben Hartford [00:03:52]:
And so once we made that connection, I think it was pretty clear to them that I was the right candidate. I knew the company for a while, and I knew I wanted to work for them and know their prowess in the industry. So took a little bit of looking, but once they found me and I applied for it, we’ve been pedal to the metal ever since.

Kyler Mason [00:04:09]:
Awesome. So for those listening to this, can you kind of paint a picture of Prichard and the structure and where your role fits into the whole scale of things?

Ben Hartford [00:04:19]:
Yeah, sure. So I would say majority of the sales team at Pritchard are national account managers and inside sales reps that focus on both new business to a certain extent, but as well as taking care of a lot of our enterprise customers that order in the thousands from us each year, I work on the business development team. It’s a little bit different focus where I am bringing in new business as well, as supporting that team as their fleets, which are pretty large, I need to make this transition as well. I’m kind of an advisor in that role.

Kyler Mason [00:04:49]:
Got it. So on the business development front, I’m sure you don’t have very many similar weeks, but if you could tell us what a day in the life or week for you looks like. What is that?

Ben Hartford [00:05:02]:
Yeah, so majority of my career is traveling. So I would say at the beginning and ends of the weeks, right, the Mondays and Fridays, hopefully, I’m in the home office. I’m either prospecting at the beginning of the week, staying up to date with industry trends, making sure that I’m getting updates from all of our manufacturers that we represent as a dealership, and sending up meetings. And then really Tuesday through Thursday, I hit the road. It could be a whole combination of people I’m visiting. A lot of it is visiting new customers, talking to them about their fleet strategy, Discovery calls, really figuring out where they need to go and how I can insert myself to help them get there. We also attend a lot of industry trade shows, so going out, meeting new business through there, talking to partners in the industry peers to see what they’re doing and how we can help each other out. And then a lot of it’s demoing, I’d say the best way for anyone interested in electric vehicles actually get behind the wheel and drive it.

Ben Hartford [00:05:55]:
And we’ve definitely seen an uptick. If we can get a vehicle out to someone, whether it’s a light duty van or it’s a big truck, there’s usually a big grin on their face after they drive an electric vehicle, and they want to move forward faster with putting them in their own fleet.

Kyler Mason [00:06:10]:
I want to go there in a second, but I’m curious, is it a piece of cake for you to fill up your calendar, or is there some grinding and prospecting and making connections? Tell us where you are on that spectrum. I have a feeling of what it might look like.

Ben Hartford [00:06:27]:
Yeah, I mean, I’d say it’s about 50 50. Luckily, I’ve been working in this industry for, I believe, six years now. So I kind of know who are the fleets that have an interest in this and who the first call I need to make is. And really, that was my first six months at the company. It was calling old contacts, old customers, saying I’m meetings that way. I think as I work more and more, it will turn into more serving. It’d be. Be more of a grind, because at a certain point that well is going to dry up, and I’m going to need to find new business, but I’d say I focus very strategically on certain areas of the country to at least narrow down that list of people I’m prospecting.

Ben Hartford [00:07:04]:
And really, that’s where EV’s are being sold. So west coast as well as the northeast. And as that changes and new EV’s come out, new use cases are available that will expand into the middle of the country, into the southeast, as EV interest advances.

Kyler Mason [00:07:19]:
So in your outreach, what does the journey look like in your communications? Are you showing up first as Pritchard, and when are you bringing in one of your partner brands, oems, that you’re carrying? How does that work in your world?

Ben Hartford [00:07:36]:
Yeah, I try not to lead with the product. I’ve worked for manufacturers before where that’s what you had to do, need to sell what you make. I think the benefit of working with Pritchard, I like it so much as I have, you know, over 13 oems with vehicles that we represent, which is around 50 makes and models of EV’s. So if I use that approach, right, of who’s going to buy a 4D transit or who’s going to buy a Ram promaster bed, it’d be a much more difficult approach, I think. So I always like to start with use case. I find the customers that are either in states where they’re being forced to electrify, unfortunately, or a commercial company that has ESG reports they publish every year and have set out goals, like I’ve mentioned before. That way, once I get in the room with them, I learn as many, much as I can about the vehicles that they currently use, how many miles are doing a day, how much dwell time do they have in between shifts, what kind of payload they’re putting on there, what kind of upset they’re putting on there, how long they keep them. Then we can look into tco roi.

Ben Hartford [00:08:33]:
Before I’m bringing in brands, let’s say a gas truck gets x amount of miles per gallon, and they drive this many miles a year. Well, this is how much you’re spending in fuel. This is how much you’re spending in maintenance. Let’s compare that to an EV. And at that stage, once I know the fleet makeup and composition, then I can start matching them with the appropriate vehicles, and I’ll give them two or three or four options because I don’t want to push in any certain direction. I’m more concerned about finding the right solution for their use case than I am trying to sell a particular brand.

John Gough [00:09:04]:
Got it. I like the way you frame that, though, you talk about the ESG or the environmental social governance guidance that the organization is giving. Is that right? You also mentioned a few minutes ago this idea of like a portfolio approach to sustainability that these organizations are taking. And that’s really reflective of the way the manufacturers are thinking about it too. Right? They’ve got regulations on top of them to say you have to hit these particular standards. And to do that, they are building, many of them are doing a portfolio approach where they will build ice engines or like standard traditional engines as well as Evdeenen. And so it’s interesting to see how the market customers are buying in that same way, so that they can approach their entire portfolio through that social lens or the environmental lens or whatever internal guidance they have on that. And I think your role is really interesting as you get to serve as an advisor on both sides of that.

John Gough [00:09:57]:
I imagine it takes a lot of your time to probably stay up on all of the evolving regulation there as well, right?

Ben Hartford [00:10:04]:
Yeah. It’s important to know what the customer’s experience day to day is and take that into account when we’re building out fleet assessment, essentially, because we don’t want to send them down the run path. And I think what a lot of fleets are realizing is not all this is apples to apples. You’re not going to get the same exact electric vehicle look and feel than you would on the gas car that you’re used to. So there doesn’t need to be a change in fleet management to a certain extent in operations of how that’s run.

John Gough [00:10:32]:
One of the things I love about this model where you get to sit as this, I mean, you have OEM partners that you have contracts with and preferences for, obviously. But you get to sit in the middle of this balance between the OEM manufacturer and the buyer and really be in some ways agnostic, despite the fact that you have these agreements. You get to tell them, here are the angles you need to understand. Here’s why you might choose this over that. And just for me is just one more example why this multiple party sales process is actually a benefit to the end consumer rather than just another middleman who’s adding cost and complexity.

Ben Hartford [00:11:11]:
Yeah, it’s a consultative sales approach. I think all EV sales should be at this stage, and it’s a two way street, too. So when I sit in this position between the manufacturer and the customer, I give my opinion and what I’ve learned from the experience, what my other customers have had from certain vehicles and brands and deployments. But I also get feedback from the customer who have deployed those, and those go right back to the manufacturer to create a better product for them. So the positive feedback loop, when you do it that way.

John Gough [00:11:38]:
Yeah, you become a really valuable source of truth on both sides for sure.

Kyler Mason [00:11:41]:
Earlier you mentioned, you said unfortunately when you were describing states where they’re forcing your customers to make a change, I would have assumed that it’s a good thing for you. But why do you say unfortunately?

Ben Hartford [00:11:53]:
I think my opinions change on that over time. Personally, I agree with it, but sitting down with customers and seeing the stresses that it’s put on them in their day to day lives and their positions, I feel for them. I think a lot of that has created a pushback for adoption for a lot of people that are looking at doing this, that have an open mind about it, but don’t appreciate the government telling them what they can and cannot buy.

John Gough [00:12:18]:
Right.

Kyler Mason [00:12:19]:
How much market making are you doing? Are you often working to convert a mindset in the sales process or are you usually engaging with a buyer that has already understands the value of Ev? What does that environment look like for you?

Ben Hartford [00:12:37]:
Yeah, I would say it’s a little bit of both. At first contact, I’m trying to get in touch with the person that I’d call a champion at that company. They may not be the CEO or someone with a c in front of their title, but they know how the company works. They’re respected internally and they have an interest in electrification and really the winning over the hearts of it is done up. So using that champion at the company to convince the people above them that this is a good decision financially and sustainability wise. But once again, I’m sure as the team gets bigger and we get more out there as pritchards with electrification that it will be more of an education piece that we’re going to need to provide because I think a lot of the pushback is from misinformation in the industry pushed on different mediums, but people think that it’s a big scary boogeyman EV’s. And when I look at it, I get excited. I see the future and I want them to see the same vision I have.

Kyler Mason [00:13:36]:
Tell us more.

Ben Hartford [00:13:37]:
Yeah, well, I mean, I think electric vehicles have been around, right, for almost as long, if not longer. I would have to check that. And internal combustion engines. When I look at an internal combustion engine, no offense to any of the great brands that I represent, but it’s almost caveman. It’s archaic technology. You see what’s going on in other industries with AI and data centers and just global politics. We’re moving into the future. And electrification just makes sense in that respect.

Ben Hartford [00:14:06]:
You’re sitting in a gas car, you can smell the emissions, you can hear the machine at work. Ryan Pritchard, one of the fifth generation of our company, says, well, he looks at EV’s, it almost feels organic when you’re driving them. There’s something that brings more life about it. Right. And we’re more in tune with it as humans. So I hope to see a future with not only electric vehicles, with autonomy, with less congestion, with less air pollution, with less accidents. This is all going down that same path, and EV’s is an important part of it.

John Gough [00:14:37]:
What do you say to customers? I mean, I’m sure you have to deal with these kinds of objections all the time. I want to hear the pitch. What do you say to the customer who says, yeah, that might be nice when you’re sitting in the car and your personal experience changes a lot, but in the entire ecosystem of the platform, buying an electric car isn’t actually better for the environment. The battery, the component entry, where the electricity comes from. Yes, let’s hear it.

Ben Hartford [00:15:06]:
Yeah, I mean, I get that every day. And then, you know, you just kind of named a few different misinformation facts. We’ll call them air quotes. And I come across. So I would have to dig into each one of those separately. Right. So, like, let’s just take that. It’s not actually better from the environment.

Ben Hartford [00:15:25]:
People will say that, yeah, they have no point source emissions. Right. There’s nothing coming out of the tailpipe. But where are you getting your energy from? I think that’s a good question. But there’s statistics out there. Right there. We can look this up pretty quickly. Even if you’re charging a electric vehicle 100% off a coal powered grid, it’s still 33% cleaner for the environment than a gas counterpart.

Ben Hartford [00:15:47]:
So doing that, just going one by one, saying, hold on, you just said a lot of things. Let’s go ABC, and let me try to explain it. The way I see it, it doesn’t work. We just tell people what’s right and wrong. You really have to dig into why they think that way and then dismantle their beliefs and then redouble them to reality.

John Gough [00:16:08]:
Yeah, I think that’s a great approach. We were watching an economist from the NTEA last week talk about projections into the future, about energy demand and where that’s going to come from, and how over the course of the next ten or 15 years, so much at least in the United States is going to shift into solar. And I think that’s a really key part of that answer. Yeah, today that may be true. You still have to burn coal to get this electricity, but were not many years away from a pretty core shift in where some of that energy is going to come from. Again, this is me repeating something that I learned very recently. So I have this much information to share about that. But thats what Im thinking about.

Ben Hartford [00:16:49]:
Preston, youre right. You cant look at it in a vacuum. You cant just assume that just because things are the way they are today doesnt mean theyre not going to be different in five years. Technology advances an exponential curve, not a linear one. That question on the grid, right. We’re putting more renewable energy into our infrastructure to fix that problem. With range anxiety, for example, that’s probably number one reason people don’t get EV’s is I can’t go as far as I need to. Well, battery technology is going to advance so far in the next five years, that’s going to blow our minds.

Ben Hartford [00:17:19]:
So you already see some EV alternatives on the road that can go farther on a charge than a gas alternative could unfull tank. And so once you start to see that it’s not only a one for one comparison, it’s I can do much better every day, performance wise, in this ev than I can gas, that’s when I think you’ll start to see people shift a little bit more.

John Gough [00:17:43]:
Yeah. I mean, we talk about bets about in terms of strategy, where are you going and what are you going to make a bet on that you can’t see the real outcome of today. And it feels like what were hearing more and more. And Weve had guests on the podcast come on and talk about hybrid engines and how thats going to extend the range to your point. It seems like theres a tipping point, though, right? Its like some early adopters are already there. We may be a little bit further on in the curve than that, but I think that theres a really good argument to be made by a lot of more conservative large organizations that are going to say, yeah, im really excited about all the stuff that youre saying and seeing. And I can see that future, too. I’d rather wait three or four more years until the, until that hybrid range extends or until I can get past the two b sort of classification that like, does everything I need to do or, you know, last mile deliver however much they are going to like lean in or be willing to participate up to this point in electrification.

John Gough [00:18:42]:
I think that, I think it’s really incumbent on the industry, on, on dealers, on oems, on everybody to find as many of these early adopters as they can to get that sort of groundswell and an ecosystem of belief so that these late stage adopters or disbelievers are going to be able or willing to come along.

Ben Hartford [00:19:05]:
Yeah, I don’t like when people try to make perfect be the enemy of good. Right. So it’s the solution. The best solution may be five or ten years away, but that doesn’t mean that you should wait for that to happen, because in that time you’re waiting. If, for example, you’re running a gas or diesel fleet, there’s 4510 years more of emissions that you’ve just put out in your efforts to get the best solution, which at the end of the day may have hurt you more.

John Gough [00:19:34]:
Is there a business advantage for the fleet to go fully electric now? I mean, that’s the goal, right? Why would I do that now instead of maybe step into that or instead of wait one or two years?

Ben Hartford [00:19:47]:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t tell you to electrify the whole fleet tomorrow unless it made sense for the use case and it financially worked out once we run the models, but I certainly wouldn’t tell you to wait. I would say at the very least, you should be taking baby steps and learning from pilots of these things, both charging and with vehicles, so you’re better prepared when that solution comes from the lessons you’ve learned from already trying it jump in head first. It’s the best way to do it and you won’t leave yourself behind.

John Gough [00:20:15]:
Does that mean usually hiring new roles? You talk about lessons learned. I’m wondering what kind of lessons are people picking up?

Ben Hartford [00:20:22]:
Yeah, I mean, one could just be the interdepartmental coordination here. So before as a fleet manager, you were concerned with your vehicles and how they’re upfitted and how they’re serviced and supported so that your operators could get the job done every day. The most you’d have to worry about fuel was a fuel card, making sure that you’re going to the pump and dragging how much fuel you use. And that was reimbursed however the fleet does it. But now with charging, you’re putting in that fuel pump essentially at the depot at your locations. So that’s a whole other variable that you never had to worry about before in that role as a fleet manager. Doesn’t mean you have to do it all by yourself. So it means you probably have to go across the hall or to another office and talk to the facilities guy, who’s the one that’s maintained with facility and talking to the utility providers.

Ben Hartford [00:21:11]:
And all that goes into managing it, because you guys need to be best friends, because now you need to plug in at work, you need to plug in at the depot and not be sending your drivers to the gas station all the time. So making sure you’re both on the same page is going to make that transition easier because it’s going to happen one day. If we’re ten years down the road and say, the state you’re in says no more gas sales, you can only buy electric vehicles and you don’t have any charging stations in the ground, you’re going to be running in circles trying to figure that out last minute.

John Gough [00:21:43]:
One of the things that I’m picking up from this, Ben, if I were listening to this, is not only like your own personal belief in the thing that you’re selling, but also just your dexterity with all of the conflicts and challenges that your customers and these flight managers are, are fighting through and fighting with and internal politics and all this stuff. And I would be really keyed in on like, how is my organization set up to help me understand all of the complexities that I’m operating within and fighting through? And do I have all the right kinds of information to really facilitate the change that I’m trying to sell in? Because it’s not as easy as just buying a truck. It is really an enterprise level decision.

Ben Hartford [00:22:31]:
Right. And I would add, if you’re in that position, you’re listening to this, you don’t have to do it all on your own. You don’t have to hire a bunch of new people at your company to figure out this problem. There are plenty of partners in the industry, me being one of them, on particularly vehicle and charging side, that it’s their job every day to help police do this. They figured out the incentives, they know the regulations, they know the charging, they know the vehicles. So you don’t need to do this in a silo. You don’t need to isolate yourself. The best thing you can do is reach out and ask for help from the experts that you do this every.

Kyler Mason [00:23:03]:
Day in your role. Stepping back a little bit, you look back at a year of time. What is the business expecting from you? What would be a fantastic year for you?

Ben Hartford [00:23:14]:
A fantastic year for me would be a higher sales volume of electric vehicles for the company. And I would say, assuming this may be a follow up question, but really looking down the next five to ten years where I see success in my position, and I sound crazy for it, even internally, but I want to be selling more ev’s year over year than we do gas and diesel. And eventually I’d like to get to a point where we’re not selling a single gas and diesel truck and it’s all electric or whatever the solution may be at that time.

Kyler Mason [00:23:45]:
Do you have, like, a healthy competition or banter internally on this topic?

Ben Hartford [00:23:52]:
Yeah, yeah. Everyone thinks I’m crazy, but that’s okay. I hope to be in a position in ten years where I can look at people and say politely, I told you so, and for it to work out well.

Kyler Mason [00:24:07]:
What are they saying to you when they’re saying you’re crazy?

Ben Hartford [00:24:10]:
Well, I’m just saying, why would you choose a career doing this? Right.

John Gough [00:24:14]:
I.

Ben Hartford [00:24:15]:
You’re in sales, you know, gas and diesel sales. It’s been. It’s been an industry for hundreds of years, 100 years. And it’s much easier to sell a gas and diesel truck. Why would you pigeonhole yourself into this focus? And it just goes back to my personal beliefs. It’s what I want to do with my career. It’s what I believe in the planet needs. I think it’s better for all humankind to go from a really high level.

Ben Hartford [00:24:38]:
But I hope at the end of my career, I can sit back and say I did something to help the planet next generation, you know, coming after us with putting more Ev’s on the road and reducing emissions.

John Gough [00:24:50]:
Ben’s a futurist.

Kyler Mason [00:24:51]:
Yep, I am.

Ben Hartford [00:24:52]:
Yeah.

Kyler Mason [00:24:53]:
Very good. So you knew. You knew the kind of world you wanted to work in years ago. Is that right?

Ben Hartford [00:24:59]:
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. How I landed upon it was a little interesting, but yeah. Do you want to hear that stuff? Yeah, totally.

John Gough [00:25:07]:
Of course.

Kyler Mason [00:25:08]:
He’s like, I was building the ice.

John Gough [00:25:09]:
And there’s an auto shop in high school. That’s my guess.

Ben Hartford [00:25:14]:
Yeah. No, no, actually, I unfortunately do not work my hands. But dad’s an engineer. That could have been a good career path for me because I definitely see an interest there. But no, I went to. I was pre med in college for three years. So I actually wanted to be a doctor, an Orthopedic Surgeon. The reason why I wanted to do that, I wanted to do something in my career where I could help people.

Ben Hartford [00:25:32]:
And so I think around my junior year of college, halfway through, I almost had an epiphany of like, okay, I’m going to have to go to school for X amount more years. And here’s the process of becoming a doctor and then a Surgeon. So how old will I be when I can start bringing in positive income and be out of debt and live a life? So I quickly made a switch. I said, well, I already have a degree in biology. I can pick up an environmental studies minor with a lot of the same credits. And I see that as, how else can I help people? Well, I can fight climate change. You know, it’s the biggest existential threat to humanity, I believe, right now on planet Earth. So if I can do something to help with that, then I can get the same result in a career that I’m looking for.

Ben Hartford [00:26:18]:
So that pivoted me to picking up that minor. And my first job out of college was working for Tesla, doing electric vehicle sales back in 2018. So Tesla was brand new on the scene. They’re just coming out with their model three, which is their economy car, their ev for the everyday person. And after that, that catapulted me into the fleet world and working on the vehicles, really, that are responsible for the most emissions. Right. So you and I that drive 20 miles a day certainly have emissions, that we have a burden of emissions on us. But if you’re a fleet that’s running close to 24/7 running vehicles that have such low fuel economy, you know, five, 6 miles per gallon, you’re the one that’s contributing the most to that transportation emissions percentage that we see year over year.

Ben Hartford [00:27:05]:
And so that’s why I landed here, and that’s why I do what I do.

Kyler Mason [00:27:09]:
That’s fantastic. I’m glad we asked. It’s awesome to have the belief that you have in the role that you have.

Ben Hartford [00:27:14]:
I tried my best. Yeah, punch you down. But I think from when I started in 2018 to now in 2024, there’s been such a shift in adoption and belief for this thing and excitement around it that I’m nothing but optimistic for the next ten years.

John Gough [00:27:33]:
Honestly, Ben, your enthusiasm comes right through, and your excitement is kind of contagious. Like, I’m getting pumped up. Yeah. Yeah, that is. All right.

Ben Hartford [00:27:41]:
Appreciate it.

John Gough [00:27:44]:
But, I mean, I think it also goes back to the premise of the podcast, and you maybe have nailed it better than we have in our previous episodes. Why do you win, in your case, like, apparently, a lifelong quest to serve humanity? I love it.

Kyler Mason [00:28:01]:
Period.

John Gough [00:28:02]:
Appreciate it.

Ben Hartford [00:28:04]:
You’re my best, guys. Don’t worry.

Kyler Mason [00:28:07]:
Oh, that’s good question for you. Shifting gears, what’s your role, if any, in establishing partnerships with manufacturers?

Ben Hartford [00:28:17]:
Yeah, I would say I’m first line of defense. So, you know, Pritchard, being a big name in the industry, we get a lot of inquiries from, you know, I’d call them startup oems or non traditional oems. They’re really the ones in the ev space that are tackling the medium heavy duty problem. Right now. Our big three, the Ford gams, the Stellantis of the world, do a really good job with light duty consumer models, really up to class two b vans with pickup trucks as well. But fleets can’t just only look at that, right? If you’re in a state like California, you’re being asked to let you buy every vehicle you have on the road. So the startup oems are filling that space. It’s a risky play because we’ve just seen look over the past five years, a lot of them, I’ve worked for a couple of them, they’ll come out with a really great product, get a lot of excitement and investment around it, and then something goes wrong and the company is no longer in business.

Ben Hartford [00:29:09]:
So when we get those inquiries, I’m usually the one that would fly out, go and take a tour of their offices, their factory, get the test drive their vehicles, walk under them, ask questions, and then come back and really put a report together for leadership and figure out if this is something we should put our name behind or not.

Kyler Mason [00:29:29]:
It’s a big deal. You all are like the homecoming queen in this world, and you’re very popular. So what’s the winning recipe like? What are the things you’re considering in your first line of defense?

Ben Hartford [00:29:42]:
Yeah. So just from getting there, you know, seeing the facilities is one thing. How does this place run? Many people are working there. What kind of investments do they have? Whats their strategy, whats their story and their goals? And then actually getting to the physical product part of it. How does this thing perform compared to every other electric vehicle that ive sold or ive driven before? I had to put myself in the shoes of the customer in that respect, its not just, is this something Ben would like to drive to the grocery store every day? What if I’m an Amazon delivery driver and I have to drive 100 miles a day and make a lot of stops and move packages? So is it easy to get in and out of the vehicle? Is it easy to key on the vehicle? Is the range that it tells me I have on the screen actually the range that I’m getting at the end of the day, how will things like payload affect my range? How will things like climate affect my range? One thing that I really appreciate that Pritchards does is that we have a whole third party testing validation process for these startup oems. So we’ll bring in unbiased third parties, give them a demo and ask them to put a certain amount of miles on the truck, charge it in different environments, drive it in different climates and environments, so that we have really the best data that we can to make a decision. And so also that our customers don’t need to be the guinea pigs, they don’t need to be the first ones to try this out. We have tried it out and we can tell you what to look out for, or we could advise you in a different direction.

Kyler Mason [00:31:12]:
So as a marketer, you mentioned what’s their story earlier. What is that and why is that important?

Ben Hartford [00:31:18]:
I think that will tell you a lot about how that business is run and what their values are. I wouldn’t want someone that’s just trying to make a quick buck because they see an opportunity with incentives or regulations or whatever it is, and not be paying the attention to things like product quality and customer experience and serviceability. I really want to see a full understanding of the industry and what the customer is going to be asking for in a plan to address each of those, so that once it’s actually on the road, we’re not figuring it out. Then a big one is serviceability. I would say, in the fleet world, reliability and ease to repair to ensure uptime is a big concern for people when they look at electric vehicles, because when the vehicle’s not running, then the company’s not making money. So it’s a much bigger deal than maybe Uri’s car has to go to the shop. So I like to see not only a regional plan for making sure that the vehicles stay in operation by the nationwide and even global warming, that’s what the aspirations of that manufacturer are, because we’re selling the fleets that don’t all have vehicles in one zip code. It’s all over the place and things happen, things go wrong, and we need to prepare for not that, not just assume that it’s an EV, it has less parts, it will be easier to fix.

John Gough [00:32:33]:
I think that’s a really helpful perspective on, again, as marketers and we’re thinking about brand and story, and we think about brands as the lens that you want your customer to understand your business through. If you can hand you some colored sunglasses to put on and say, this is how the world looks when you work with us, but the things that you’re looking at through those lenses are still very operational and tactical and very meaningful from the way the business works or the way the vehicle works or their plans to expand or service a particular market, I think that that’s really relevant, that you and your first two or three items are listing that near the top of your list of how are these people understanding and experiencing the market? It comes through in their story first.

Ben Hartford [00:33:25]:
Yeah, I would say that the pandemic kind of shook that idea up a little bit, whereas before 2020, you would see a lot of the major fleets falling back on brand loyalty. You’d walk into a meeting and say, they’d say, we’re a Ford fleet, we’re a Chevy fleet. With the chip shortage and supply chain shortages in the pandemic, fleets had to make purchases that maybe they weren’t typically not sticking to brand loyalty because they still need vehicles that are going to operate, so they’ll take whatever they can get. I think that impression is still left on the fleet industry. So when we look at electrification, it’s not, I need a Ford, I need a GM, I need a solution that’s going to fix the problem and not give me more interest.

Kyler Mason [00:34:06]:
So you’ve experienced a shift in the way that your customer is asking you for a solution versus starting with brand.

Ben Hartford [00:34:14]:
Absolutely. Wow.

Kyler Mason [00:34:16]:
And you credit some of that or a lot of it to the, just like the shake up during the pandemic.

Ben Hartford [00:34:22]:
I think that’s something you can point at for a reason.

John Gough [00:34:24]:
Why?

Ben Hartford [00:34:24]:
I’m sure there’s more or factors that I’m not considering, but absolutely, that’s when I first started to notice it, at least in my day to day, is all right. People are starting to open their minds to different types of products here, not just sticking with what we’ve always done.

Kyler Mason [00:34:39]:
Makes sense. So I don’t know how to ask this question well, but from your point of view and your strategy with Pritchard, is it, are you looking to form deep relationships with manufacturers and selecting just, like, a select few, or are you looking to have a wide array of relationships, a large portfolio? What is the approach for strategy there and how to best serve your customers?

Ben Hartford [00:35:06]:
Yeah, I would say it’s strengthening the relationships that we already have with our major manufacturers, the Ford, General Motors, Solanus to Suzuk, Nissan, but also not closing our eyes to new solutions in the industry. We’re not really here to pick winners and losers. We’re here to make sure that we can. I’ll go back and say it. We’re here to make sure we provide a solution for our customer, and our job is to support that solution as long as the customer wants to use it.

John Gough [00:35:34]:
A lot of dealers traditionally make the bulk of their revenue off of the service side of the business. Is that true for Prichard?

Ben Hartford [00:35:43]:
I don’t know if I can comment on that.

John Gough [00:35:44]:
Yeah, sorry. That was an incredibly direct way to ask that. How true or not true is that in the category of EV, in your experience?

Ben Hartford [00:35:53]:
I would pivot to that out.

John Gough [00:35:55]:
Don’t answer my question quick.

Ben Hartford [00:35:56]:
No, but I would say a lot of dealerships are looking at electrification, right? Because a lot of their revenue is with servicing the vehicles. And when we look at EV’s, a big selling point is it’s far less maintenance than a gas vehicle just because of the mere fewer parts that you actually have in the vehicle, and that can break. So it’s an important. I think it’s important for dealerships to be thinking about that in their business models and also thinking about how they can adapt their service offer service offering to cater to what electrification brings. I think we need a shift from mechanics to technicians.

John Gough [00:36:34]:
That’s fascinating. The other category of that shift in the business model you were referring to earlier was like, what about facilities maintenance? What about the infrastructure that needs to go into these buildings? And then when it’s in there, maintained as well, it may be. This is just me riffing, so tell me if I’m anywhere close, it may be extending up into different parts of the ecosystem or value chain where that service traditionally has just been on the vehicle itself. Maybe it extends in different places. Is that something you guys are thinking about?

Ben Hartford [00:37:08]:
Yeah, absolutely. With charging stations specifically, I think it’s an industry wide focus right now is making sure that they have even better uptime than the vehicles do. Because the last thing you want is to roll up to a charging station and there’s not another one in 50 miles and your vehicle won’t charge because the stations down. I’ve seen some concerning figures. I won’t quote them because I don’t know the absolute, but the amount of service, the amount of DC fast chargers that are down at any given time in this country, I believe, is one in three. And so if you’re not using a reliable network, like a Tesla supercharger network, you have a 33% chance. I mean, you roll up to a charger, you’re not gonna be able to charge, and then you got a whole myriad of problems. You gotta figure out what to do with that vehicle.

Ben Hartford [00:37:52]:
And so, yeah, making sure that you’re thinking more about maintaining those assets as well as your vehicle assets is just as important.

Kyler Mason [00:37:59]:
Just curious what are some of the biggest challenges for you right now? If you could just make a problem or two go away, what would that be?

Ben Hartford [00:38:06]:
I would say my biggest challenge is education. I don’t think enough people have the right information in front of them about what EV’s are, what benefits they can bring and why they should add them into their fleet or buy them as their personal vehicle. And then another challenge would be infrastructure. I think it’s improving rapidly, but it’s still at the point where it will turn someone away from buying a vehicle because they don’t think they’re going to have somewhere to charge it. And I think that one will probably get fixed before the education piece.

Kyler Mason [00:38:40]:
Do you see the education pieces? It’s everyone’s job, or, I mean, whose job is it?

Ben Hartford [00:38:47]:
I think it’s all of us that work in the industry and our experts in our space that we have a burden to get in front of people and teach them what we’ve learned and give them the real facts and get out. I mean, I don’t want to put it on one. Right. I would say, and I see it everywhere. I see it in media, you know, I see it on LinkedIn. I see it just in day to day conversations at a charger when people see them driving an electric vehicle. But at least, you know, we could point to the people that know what they’re doing and know this stuff and say it should start here. When that’s charging companies, that’s dealerships, that’s manufacturers, that’s fleet operators, that’s fleet management, companies that deal with this stuff.

Kyler Mason [00:39:24]:
Love it.

Ben Hartford [00:39:25]:
Good.

Kyler Mason [00:39:25]:
1020 million people are going to hear this podcast. So that’ll do. That’ll do the trick.

Ben Hartford [00:39:30]:
Yeah.

John Gough [00:39:31]:
You’re welcome.

Ben Hartford [00:39:34]:
Well, there’s tons of information out there. YouTube’s great, right? You go in the wrong direction, but you use multiple sources. And I don’t know everyone. I don’t think everyone at this point knows someone at your eyes and electric vehicle. So call them and ask them about their experience, ask them how they charge it. Ask them how much money they’re saving and maintenance and fuel, and go from there. See if they’ll, they’ll bring it over and let you drive it. That’s.

Ben Hartford [00:39:56]:
That’d be the best. Oh, yeah.

Kyler Mason [00:39:58]:
What else, John?

John Gough [00:40:00]:
I mean, I’ll second that. I got to get on a work truck, a work truck week here last March. And those things are fun to drive that take a little getting used to in the braking if you’re not used to that, regenerative braking, but once you get in it, they’re a lot of fun.

Ben Hartford [00:40:16]:
Yeah. You can imagine, right, if you’re spending 12 hours a day in your car, which if most of us don’t, I’d much rather it be electric. And I’m sitting at the stop sign. I’m not shaking because of the engine. I don’t smell the fumes. It’s just a whole better experience. Like I say, it’s just more organic at the end of the day than the alternative that we’ve been used to.

John Gough [00:40:36]:
Ben, it sounds like you’ve sort of known for a while about how you’re going to direct your career and direct your life. For those of us who haven’t had such a clear vision into the future, if you could give some advice to people just getting started out, what would you say to them?

Ben Hartford [00:40:53]:
Yeah, I would say I kind of figured out what I wanted to do based on my hobbies and interests. So when I looked at, I didn’t just look at the transportation industry and EV’s first, it was, all right, how do we address climate change? We need to reduce emissions. You could go into solar, you could go in the wind, you go into trading credits, you can go into all sorts of different industries. But I found myself on the side watching YouTube videos about teslas a lot because they drove themselves and they were cool. And ive always liked cars my whole life. And so when kind of bulb went off, like, wait a minute, I can do, you know, I can have a purpose in my career and achieve the goals that I want to achieve by reducing emissions and helping the planet. And I can do it with products and hardware that when I’m not at work, I’m obsessing over. So I’d say, find that thing that you find yourself obsessing over when you’re not at work and figure out how to make that into a career.

John Gough [00:41:54]:
All right, as a futurist, you’ve made a bet to go 100% electric on these fleets. Now I’m going to ask you to take one more step and make one more big bet. So if you had to go beyond 100% electric, what’s the thing on the horizon that you said? Yeah, electric.

Ben Hartford [00:42:10]:
But also, I would say hydrogen. It’s another alternative fuel. It is facing the challenges that the EV industry was facing ten years ago. The biggest question is infrastructure. How do we put stations? And even above that, how do we generate hydrogen that’s clean and so that it makes sense from a sustainability standpoint to move into that fuel source. But if I were to and I say this to people all the time. So I’ll say. I would say, honestly, class three and class four vehicles, size of vehicles and up, will probably be hydrogen solutions in the next ten years.

Ben Hartford [00:42:48]:
The problem we see with EV’s, especially in the medium duty sized vehicles, is a physics equation. The more payload that you’re putting on the vehicle, the less range you’re getting. And so there’s a natural endpoint there if you’re trying to electrify wherever, it doesn’t make financial sense. I use the class eight example, right? If you want a class eight vehicle, semi truck that goes across the country to deliver goods to be all electric, you’re going to need to add so many batteries into that thing to have it do the route that what you’re actually carrying behind it and making new revenue is not going to make sense financially. So hydrogen gets rid of that problem. Hydrogen doesn’t weigh anywhere as close to as much as lithium ion batteries do. And as you use it, you get less. Your weight goes down like a plane.

Ben Hartford [00:43:34]:
So I would see that as being the future of a lot of these vehicle segments. And it’s a zero emission solution, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to figure out how to steward that into existence. But I’d also say there’s a lot. All the big companies, everyone that works in this space and creates products here, they’re thinking about it, too.

John Gough [00:43:55]:
So I think that class three, class four think like Amazon delivery truck or like a big box truck or something like that’s going around the city. I think that makes a ton of sense. And also, for whatever hesitation people have about hydrogen, what I like about your approach there is that it doesn’t have to be binary. It doesn’t have to be, okay, we’re going to be 100% electric, and therefore, we have to figure out how to make every truck ever, every city bus, ever, every, you know, garbage truck run only on batteries. There are more interesting, diverse approaches to do this.

Ben Hartford [00:44:30]:
Just like gasket diesel, you know, they both have different applications where one makes sense over the other. So ev’s, will they go away when hygiene comes around? No, I would think still, you know, as a consumer and light duty stuff up to the class, even like the, we’re talking last mile Amazon delivery, I would still see that as an electric use case. But as soon as you start moving goods long distances and you got to move a lot of weight, that’s a hydrogen solution, and they’ll coexist.

John Gough [00:44:58]:
I believe we’ll wait and see.

Ben Hartford [00:45:01]:
Yes, we will. Well, hopefully I’ll call you. We’ll hop on here in ten years, and I can say, I told you so.

John Gough [00:45:08]:
I look forward to it.

Ben Hartford [00:45:09]:
Yeah.

Kyler Mason [00:45:09]:
Calendar reminder set.

John Gough [00:45:11]:
All right, Ben, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on and for sharing your perspective and your background and the bets you’re making. We appreciate it.

Kyler Mason [00:45:20]:
Thanks, man.

Ben Hartford [00:45:21]:
It was my pleasure. Thank you, guys.

John Gough [00:45:23]:
Why You Win is presented by Element Three, a marketing firm focused on modernizing go to market strategies for manufacturers that sell through complex distribution channels. We help leaders solve problems across demand generation, sales channel support, and brand development.

Kyler Mason [00:45:39]:
If you’d like more from myself or John, connect with us on LinkedIn. And for more from Element Three, visit Element Three. That’s Element Three.