Look, "47 mobile service vans" is a stat that should stop you mid-scroll on its own. But the real flex here isn't the fleet size, it's what Ed Roberts and the Bozard Ford Lincoln team did once they realized bigger wasn't automatically better.
Bozard now runs 47 mobile service units, and according to COO/GM Ed Roberts, they're servicing more vehicles outside the dealership every month than a lot of stores manage to service inside theirs. That's not a typo. That's a whole second dealership's worth of service volume, just, you know, driving around.
The Before and After, By the Numbers
Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
Mobile service units | Growing, unclear ceiling | 47 on the road |
BDC screens in use | 32 | 9 (still "twice what I need," per Roberts) |
Customer visibility | Standard appointment window | Real-time, Uber-like tracking |
Platform | Legacy tech stack | Curbee |
Roberts didn't just grow the fleet, he ripped out the tech stack underneath it and moved to Curbee, giving customers an Uber-like experience
See who's coming, how far out they are, real visibility into the whole appointment.
Transparency really builds trust.
And honestly, we've all lived the alternative. That home-service appointment window that's basically a guess, "sometime between 8 and noon," and then you're a hostage in your own house all morning. Knowing exactly where the tech is removes that entire anxiety loop. Customers weren't asking for mobile service as a nice-to-have. They were asking for information, and Bozard finally gave it to them in real time.
While everyone's fixated on the van count, the sneakier stat is buried in the back office.
Bozard's communication center used to operate across 32 screens. Thirty-two. Roberts and team got that down to 9, and he still thinks that's roughly double what's actually necessary.
It enhances what we do. It doesn't replace anything that we do. It just enhances what we do.
That's the whole efficiency philosophy in one sentence: if your team is entering the same customer info into three different systems to get one outcome, you're not running a tech stack, you're running a part-time data entry job nobody signed up for.
🎙️ Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion.
Forty-seven vans will get you noticed. Nine screens instead of thirty-two is what actually gets you paid.
The flashy number gets the headline. The boring number, the duplicate data entry nobody wanted to audit, is usually where the real money's hiding. Worth asking your own team this week: how many screens does it actually take to close out a service ticket at your store? If you don't know off the top of your head, that's probably the answer right there.
