Adam Torres and Brigham Timpson discuss the AED Summit.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Associated Equipment Distributor’s annual summit coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Brigham Timpson, CEO of MODERN, explore MODERN and the Associated Equipment Distributor’s annual summit thanks to the support of our sponsor, Vanguard Captive Management.
About MODERN
MODERN connects equipment dealers to their customers creating an exceptional, frictionless customer experience via communication through SMS and email. The company’s cloud software solution is a centralized communication platform for teams and departments to maximize communication efficiency while allowing customers to receive real-time updates and track work-in-progress, send and save photos
MODERN is an independent software company serving the entire equipment dealer community driving measurable improvements for dealers of major brands such as Caterpillar, Komatsu, John Deere, Volvo Equipment, CNH, Bobcat, Ditch Witch, Vermeer, and more.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today we are recording the latest episode in our AED Summit 2025, This entire series has been sponsored by Vanguard Captive Management, which helps manufacturers of all sizes with innovative captive finance strategies.
You can learn more at vancapp. com. And my guest today is Brigham Timpson, who is CEO over at Modern. Brigham, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. It’s great to be here. All right, Brigham. So first things first, that AED Summit in Orlando, Florida, , what’d you think, man?
That was my first time to one of the summits and I was impressed. I learned so much. I had so much fun. Lots and lots of great people. Great community. what’d you think? Yeah, I had a very similar experience. It was great. This is my first year going to a, oh, that’s your first year too. That’s awesome.
Yeah. I’d heard about it from various sources, but primarily from customers. They said, Hey, you really should be at this show. So we signed up and went out to Orlando and had a great time. Not only was the weather perfect, but the show was very well put together. I was very impressed. Yeah, I do a lot of shows.
I cover a lot of conferences and various industries heavy equipment and rental being one of them. But what stuck out to you, like to me, some of the education component was just really helpful, how engaged people were into the content, but I’m just curious from your perspective, like what stuck out to you?
Yeah, I agree. The education sessions were very valuable, and I learned things quite a few things from the educational sessions. I sat in on a few as many as we could make it to our team attended, and we came away with something. Very valuable that aligns really well with what we’ve heard in the industry.
There was nothing to me. That was off Key or to earth shattering, but I think this is somewhat of an underserved industry with dealerships both in terms of software and Even things like consulting the industry just has room to grow even though it’s been around for hundreds of years I think they’ve been neglected by some of the mainstream players Which creates opportunity both for those dealerships to grow and improve, but also for Vendors like our company.
Yeah, talk to me a little bit more about modern And I thought that it was originally owned by a caterpillar if I might be off on this But tell me a little bit more about modern. Yeah, that was one of the big takeaways from the show Everyone that came by our booth said hey, I thought this was owned by cat.
Why are you here? But Martin was started. Yeah you know, it was eye opening to us, but we hadn’t done a great job of getting those press releases out and making that announcement more clear. But modern was a great little startup serving in Colorado and got some good traction among a lot of dealerships.
And particularly Caterpillar dealerships. So eventually Caterpillar bought Modern and took the technology they needed and adapted it for their own purposes to serve their dealers well. But the purchase of it alienated a bunch of non CAT dealers. And process, some left and some weren’t able to, you know, they didn’t leave.
It wasn’t too egregious. But CAT could see that it wasn’t an ideal situation and they weren’t going to be able to service those customers well. So they decided to sell for all the other customers that are not cat and long story short, we’re the, we’re the ones that ended up buying it and we see a lot of potential.
It’s a really great business. We’ve loved working with cat. They handed it over nicely and I think it’s a mutually beneficial thing. It’s a win, win, win for us, for these customers. for us to be able to jump in and put some focus on it, and so it’s been 100 percent independently owned since March of 2024.
That’s when we got the transaction done. And so our team has dived in the technology is the same technology that customers have known and loved with the exception of the changes that we’ve made since then. And we’ve added a handful of updates and tweaks and features that customers are really liking.
Amazing. And so , go a little bit further into the day to day of Modern and really how you’re improving with a service operations. Like, like talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. So Modern sits on top of the dealer management system. Typically most customers have a dealer management system that they’re more or less happy with.
And there’s a gap between what they’re able to do in the system and, the, Seamless communication they’d like to have with customers. One of the main points that we learned at AED that more confirmed what we had known, a lot of the education sessions talked about the critical nature of communication with a customer and how impactful that is.
For customer satisfaction, good or bad. And I’ll give a shout out to the Lynn Daniels with the Daniels group. I sat through one of their education sessions where they made it very clear with data, empirical data. And that’s, you know, in line perfectly with the thesis of this business to be able to smooth out that communication with the customers.
Oftentimes, I’m the. That’s really the failure point, is when there’s not adequate communication. So with a tool like Modern, you know, if you’ve got a piece of equipment, you need to have service. You may drop it off at the shop. Immediately, you’ll get a text message saying, Hey, we’ve received your piece of equipment.
Here are our photos from the initial walk around or the check in. You’ll get updates automatically when it gets pulled in for diagnosis. When that diagnosis, yields a result, you’ll get updates. So it’s showing what needs to be done. You’ll get an estimate for the parts and the service, which you can approve on the phone immediately.
And so from a customer perspective, you’re getting that communication. Even if it’s bad news that your machine has something on it more than you thought, at least you’re getting the communication right up front and we’re not wasting time for the customer or for the dealership. And so it really actually moves the needle on throughput for that dealership service department.
But also for the customer there, they’re finding out and getting their machine dealt with sooner and back to work sooner. So we can get more done that year. Yeah. And because I mean, every day matters, right? We’re talking about like burn, right? If every, every day matters. So the faster you can get this, this, it’s not everything up and running and approved.
And the less people that have to touch it like that, that equals money. Exactly. A lot of companies do realize this, but quite a few don’t realize how expensive. Yeah. These are expensive machines, expensive tools. Oh yeah. And if they’re sitting around underutilized, that is money just evaporating. It’s not doing anyone any good.
It’s not helping society for that money to evaporate. Nobody’s getting rich off of it. It’s just disappearing. The more streamlined we can make this, the better. What kind of dealerships, or who benefits most by turning on a tool like Modern? Is it size of dealership? Give me a little bit of a feel for that.
avatar? Yeah, it’s a great question. Every heavy equipment dealership is our, is our forte and we do have adjacencies where, you know, you may not consider your products exactly heavy equipment. Still, it’s still worth checking out. Modern. If you’re not super satisfied with your communication with customers, check it out.
But our bread and butter has been around the heavy equipment dealerships. It doesn’t matter the number of locations, one to 101 and beyond the, tool is going to work great. Even if you don’t have a good dealer management system, you can the tool still makes an incredible difference. But with the dealer management system where work orders are being processed, we can do the integration and it really automates a lot that has to be done in the service department.
And of course we have impact on the parts department and rental fleets and, so on. But if you just started in the service department where the highest profit margin is You can make such an incredible difference for your company by just getting it up and running and automate that Communication you get more satisfied customers There are surveys at the end where you’re getting feedback that you may not have been getting before But you’re also just freeing up the time of your team where one service writer might be calling each customer manually And the burning up, say five minutes for every customer when it’s automated, you can hit 50 customers in the same five minutes and not waste that time.
That’s not really benefiting anyone. I know this will vary from like, you know, dealership to dealership size, things like this, but just in general, like how long does it take to get something like this set up? Like somebody, a dealer is listening to this, like, ah, we should really look into this. Like, let’s, you know, let’s figure this out.
Or is it going to be another thing like, like how long does something like this take to set up? Yeah, this is definitely not a magic button. It’s not for sure. It doesn’t solve every every ill, but it’s a tool that you need to solve this particular ill. And so the time to set up the tool, you could be looking at a couple of weeks to a couple of months, depending on the complexity.
The integration, how many things you you can and want to automate, but it’s not a massive list. It does involve our team. Somebody from the I T side, which may be third party or in house to get the thing technically working, but the real the real change is cultural change. If your company is ready for.
like this. You may have one location that’s forward thinking or frustrated with major pain points. Start with the one location that’s that’s suffering or that’s really ready, ready for a change, and it will spread like wildfire. And so you don’t, have to eat the whole elephant at once.
And I don’t even mean to paint this like it’s a hard thing. It’s An hour or two training. We can customize the training for your particular team, and most people are up and running same day, but we want to be realistic about the fact that there is a, it is a cultural change to start to implement a tool.
Make sure no balls are being dropped. No billable items are being forgotten. No customers are being left and really change the pace at which projects get in and out of your service department. Yeah, that’s great. I could see it and I know that many of the people that are listening are gonna be interested in possibly even learning more.
So that being said, if somebody’s listening to this or watching this and they want to learn more, they want to connect with your team, how do they do that? Yeah, the fastest way is jump on our website. Modern is dot com. Modern is dot com. And, fill out the throwing your email address so we can contact you or contact us directly.
We’ve got a really great support team. We’ve got Joanne, who’s our director of client success, who will be more than happy to reach out and the conversation. Fantastic. And for everybody tuning in we’ll definitely put the links the show notes so you can just, you can reach out to moderate and connect with their team, with Brigham’s team.
And speaking of the audience if this is the first time with us and you haven’t hit the subscribe or follow button yet, definitely hit that. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration. To help you along the way on your journey.
And a special thanks to our sponsor the a a D Summit Series is sponsored by Vanguard Captive Management, which enables manufacturers of all sizes to harness the power of innovative captive finance to achieve market success. You can learn more [email protected]. And Brigham again, really appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing more, and congrats , on , all the good work you’re doing over there.
And the. And wishing you much more continued success at Modern, and man, I’ll see you next year at the AED summit. Right? I’m looking forward to it, Adam. Thank you for having me on the show. It’s been a real pleasure.