OUR HISTORY
A message from Henry (Hank) Fracalossi, Chairman and owner of C&S Motors/Tri-County Truck Centers:
Our dealership started in 1949 in Flint, Michigan under the name of C&S Motors, Inc., as a parts and service location only for what was then International Harvester Company. At the time, International was skeptical of the truck market in Flint as the city was the birthplace of General Motors and home to Buick and numerous GM & Chevrolet truck plants.
After much work and negotiation with International, C&S Motors, Inc., was awarded a whole goods contract in 1951. This contract allowed the dealership to sell trucks as well as home appliances. The majority of sales for a few years hence consisted of home appliances and pickup trucks.
I (Hank) arrived on the job in 1958 as a parts driver. In the latter part of 1959, I started calling on local concrete and construction firms. We set up our parts department with a manual physical inventory system. I was made Parts Manager and through my efforts and that of my co-workers, we started increasing our parts sales by over $200,000 a year for the next six years. As parts sales grew, we gradually increased our truck sales to ten medium duty trucks and fifteen to twenty-five heavy duty trucks per year.
In 1973, I was appointed General Manager. For the next five years, the economy boomed in the Flint area. General Motors was expanding at a rapid rate and road construction was at an all-time high in Michigan. Our dealership was selling up to fifty trucks per year with a good net profit.
In 1974, a small, local propane company with 3 locations and a few trucks was purchased by Marathon Oil who then leveraged it into 45 branch locations and hundreds of trucks. I became very good friends with their management team and so their principal truck vendor. As I was the primary contact, the existing dealer principal thought I should assume that role and buy him out. As a result, I became dealer principal in August of 1978. The next few years evidenced low truck sales due to stifling economic conditions with interest rates approaching 25%. The profitability of our parts and service departments were our savior along with a good relationship with our local bank. In the succeeding years of the 1980s, we installed our first computer system and expanded our operation to cover two additional counties around the Flint area as International discontinued its industrial and farm equipment divisions and sold its company-owned branches.
In 1988, an opportunity was presented to us to purchase International’s Southeast Michigan territory, which included the city of Detroit and two locations in Dearborn and Warren. It was then the name Tri-County International Trucks was born. Though these branches had millions of dollars in sales, profits were low, even negative. It took over five years of effort to reach and exceed the breakeven point. In those years, we introduced the accounting policies that had been successful in Flint along with a seamless transaction policy when dealing with customers. Our philosophy of “The Customer Is Always Right!” worked well and we gained the trust of the Southeast Michigan customer base.
In the succeeding years, we acquired a number of major accounts along the I-75 corridor through our contacts in their parts and service departments. These prime accounts allowed us to sell over 500 trucks and accomplish a doubling of our annual revenue with great profit potential in just a few short years.
In the years 2007 and 2008, we added branch operations in the cities of Jackson MI and Ypsilanti MI, further increasing our market reach and ability to offer top quality diesel products and services to truck users throughout Southeast Michigan and the surrounding area.
Let me close with a word of thanks to our loyal employees at C&S Motors and Tri-County Truck Centers who made great sacrifices in time and effort during the early and lean years in order to make Tri-County the successful and profitable company we are now. I hope and look forward to sharing that success with them and our valued customers going into the future.
Sincerely,
Henry (Hank) Fracalossi Tri-County Truck Centers