Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Vinny Himes. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Vinny, appreciate you joining us today. Innovation comes in all shapes, sizes and across all industries, so we’d love to hear about something you’ve done that you feel was particularly innovative.
When I started in the diesel performance industry, marketing was the number one expense. The marketing expenses were through the roof. We were paying for Google Add Words, Magazine spreads, attending diesel events almost every single weekend, which meant flying employees all over the country to set up booths at these events. The cost was astronomical but it was working.

Facebook was young and not really much of a thing at the time, My Space was all the rage. So I decked my myspace page out with the company logo, diesel trucks doing burnouts, sled pulling, drag racing whatever cool action shot I could get at these events we were attending. This too was starting to work!

Then Facebook took off like wildfire, I was using both platforms equally at first and as they developed and grew, Facebook just started steamrolling. Likes and shares made it so much more advanced and people were sharing the content I was putting up. In the beginning they didn’t have business pages, so I was doing everything off my personal page. My profile picture was our company logo, my about section was plastered with information on how customers could place orders for parts, and schedule appointments to get their trucks in the shop. My daily posts included cool projects we were doing here at the shop, one off builds, custom conversions and events we were attending.

People were actively following to find out where we were going to be the following weekend. They would stop by our booth and say they saw we were going to be there on my social media page so they came by to say hi in person. I was literally watching our marketing strategy change before my eyes. We started cutting back on the $13,000 magazine spreads we were paying for, we stopped paying for google add words all together.

I focused all my efforts on social media and then business pages came along. We built our business page and hit it hard with the most amazing content… nothing happened. I got so obsessed with the business page I had stopped working on my personal page. What was happening, we were so unbelievably busy, the phones were ringing off the hook for years running on the social media marketing program I had developed. Now all of a sudden I rapidly noticed the dwindling phone calls, the cult following we had developed was not what it used to be. Then Facebook started popping up suggestions at the top of my feed, telling me I could boost my posts on the business page. I didn’t know what this meant, so I started digging into it. Basically they wanted us to pay, in order for our audience to see the content we were sharing.

This hit me like a ton of bricks, it felt so wrong. All the work I was doing, all my focus was only being seen by me and a select few that had followed along. So we started paying, the owner of the shop’s wife started helping me budget for these facebook adds, and boosting our posts so people would actually see what we were working so hard on. For a couple years this went on and the next thing we knew we were paying just as much to boost our facebook content, as we had been paying years before on magazine adds and google add words.

I woke up in the dead of night and realized we didn’t need to be paying for all these facebook adds, and boosting posts. We canceled all of it, cut up the credit card associated with our company Facebook page and I went back to focusing on my personal profile. It didn’t matter what I was posting, could be a picture of the kids playing at the park with our dog, I described what was happening in the post, and checked in at Lead Foot Diesel Performance. I could be hunting deer in another state, post up a picture of deer camp, checked in at Lead Foot Diesel Performance.

I couldn’t just abandon the business page either, we’d built an audience of almost 200,000 followers so I would post on the business page, but instead of boosting our post with money, I would share the post to my personal page, share it to group pages I was in, tag friends, family and customers in the post. It worked, and it worked fast! I answer as many phone calls as I can each day, but I get twice as many facebook messages as I do phone calls in a day. The best parts about this is I can answer facebook messages while I’m on the phone. I can now help as many as 5 or 6 customers at once, where in the past I was only able to help the person on the phone, or the person standing in front of my desk.

Facebook and social media are amazing business tools if you can figure out how to use them properly. Our massive success and major growth over the past 9 years is mainly due to learning and adapting to how we use social media. It’s been a fantastic journey and we are only getting better every day.

Vinny, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
The diesel performance industry, when I first stepped into it, was pretty new. Diesel performance in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t even a thought in the 90’s. In the early 2000’s diesel engines transitioned from being mostly mechanical to electronically controlled engines. With the introduction of electronically controlled fuel systems, programmers and tuners started being developed to manipulate the engine controls to increase not only horsepower, but also fuel economy.

This was HUGE! To tell a customer you could plug a little plastic box into the vehicles diagnostics port, press a few buttons and gain them 3 to 4 miles per gallon… it was a no brainer! People couldn’t afford not to purchase a device with these kinds of economic gains. At first I was just helping close friends and family members with their trucks in my driveway. Then I started hanging around a good friends diesel repair shop and I would do the performance stuff on the side while he was doing the repair stuff full time.

I owned a company called Traditional Timber Frames in northern Idaho at the time, this diesel stuff was just a hobby for me. I enjoyed it so much though, seeing people’s faces light up after you tweaked their truck a bit and getting those phone calls of praise when they realized just how much better their fuel economy really was. That feeling of making people happy is like a drug. You can’t get enough of it.

As it would end up, the economy tanked, people stopped spending millions of dollars on timber framed vacation homes around the lake. I was barely getting by doing little odds and ends construction jobs. I broke my back when I was 25 and that pretty much put an end to my timber framing and construction career. I was asked by a friend that ran an online diesel parts website if I would help him answer phones as he was a one man show at the time. The financial blow was rough for my wife and I. Going from running a very successful business for 5 years to answering phones at a diesel parts store isn’t even in the same area code. Life was rough with 2 brand new babies at home and making a very small fraction of the pay I was used to.

We buckled down and I focused on work. I had never even sat in front of a computer before. I didn’t even know how to type. I got to work most days around 6am and wouldn’t leave until every phone call had been returned, and every parts order had been processed. I had been installing the parts we were selling for 5 years prior, so I knew a lot about the parts, which ones fit better, which ones were made of better materials. This had a massive impact on our potential customers. Being able to tell them exactly what tools they would need to install the part they were ordering from me, and exactly how long it would take. This made it almost impossible for them not to purchase the part from me versus our unknowledgeable competition.

Most online parts vendors have a sales team of people just able to place parts in a virtual shopping cart, and take a credit card. Very few online parts vendors can tell you how to install the part, which of the five different brands of that specific part is best, and why. There’s 20 different manufacturers that make cold air intakes for diesel trucks, but I knew from installing all of them for years, that one brand was best due to perfect fitment, best materials, and easiest to install. That knowledge is invaluable to customers, you can’t put a price on that.

It literally felt like we were taking over the world, we were in the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in the country, we were smashing sales goals and just killing it in the industry. I blame that success and growth on social media and just an overall love for the industry as a team.

Then one of my customers that was buying parts from me asked if I would move to Georgia to help grow his business. My wife and I talked it over, having lived in the Northwest our entire lives we were both excited for a new view. We moved to Georgia and went right back to work. I used the same social media tactics I had employed previously. We struggled to get the steam rolling at first, but once that train lit off it was gone! We’ve done nothing but grow the past 9 years and it’s been awesome to watch.

There’s always struggles and stumbling stones in any business and we’ve had our share. Having a good attitude and never giving up when things get rough is the only way to make it through. Covid has brought on many challenges, but we’re just adapting and overcoming those issues and becoming an even better version of what we were.

Our number one accomplishment here has been making the 6.0L Powerstroke a reliable platform for our customers. This engine from the factory is riddled with faulty parts. We’ve dedicated this business to figuring out those faulty parts, sourcing aftermarket upgraded parts to resolve the issues once and for all. We have a package deal we’ve put together that addresses all of the 6.0L’s down falls and makes them a really great vehicle that our customers can trust to drive across the country with no fear of being stranded with costly repairs. This package deal came about from many years of doing things by the book, then having them come back, figure out why it came back, don’t do that again. Doing what was right for the customer meant some nights of eating ramen noodles because the profit off the initial sale didn’t cover the warranty process that fixed it. But that’s how the owner here built our reputation, that’s what he instilled in all of us.

We always do what’s right for the customer no matter what. In the end it’s resulted in amazing growth and a reputation known around the world. We ship parts to customers in Australia, Sweden, Holland etc. None of that would be possible without our reputation and social media.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
One of the things we will never overcome in this industry is faulty parts. It’s just a thing. You can install a brand new started bought from a reputable manufacturer, test drive the vehicle, call the customer to come get their truck. Two days later that brand new starter can fail due to a manufacturing flaw. We made $35 profit on the starter, we made $80 profit off the labor. We pay $235 to send a roll back to get it, bring it back to the shop and pay a mechanic $35 an hour to replace the brand new starter. It sucks, it’s a negative at the end of the day. Doing our best to source top quality parts helps reduce the number of those instances. Those situations will continue to happen, we will continue doing what’s right even if it means a loss.

We have enough good parts experiences that it will always outweigh those bad ones. Taking that loss for one customer will gain us 20 customers though. Especially in an age of online reviews. We can’t make everyone happy, there’s some seriously delusional people on this planet that just refuse to see us trying our best. Those individuals will never be happy. The ones that choose to be happy and share those good reviews are the people we get out of bed each morning to serve, those are the customers we work our hardest for.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
Youtube, I was so hyper focused on Facebook that I never really caught on to youtube. In 2017 I really wanted to create a youtube channel for the business, I was simply spread too thin and couldn’t make it happen with all of my other responsibilities. Now with covid hitting the planet, youtube has sky rocketed to the front of social media. It’s available on every single phone, on every single smart TV and people are spending way more time on it. We totally missed that bus and I regret it.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.leadfootdiesel.com
• Instagram: leadfootdiesel
• Facebook: Lead Foot Diesel Performance, LLC
• Youtube: Vinny Himes
• Yelp: Lead Foot Diesel Performance LLC
• Other: info@leadfootdiesel.com 770-267-3322

Image Credits
Angeline Brooklyn