Last March, we introduced you to Dennis Ho, HBA ’22, and founder of Wheel Easy, the tire change that comes to you. Combining his entrepreneurial spirit with his experience in a family-owned automotive shop, Ho wanted to develop the ultimate customer experience through an automotive service platform that comes to your door! For consumers, this meant no more wasted Saturdays waiting in dealerships, drinking bad coffee, and anxiously waiting for the sight of a mechanic.
In January, Ho joined the Western Accelerator to continue building Wheel Easy. We caught up with him to see what his learned over the past year and how his business has evolved.
Since launching Wheel Easy in 2022 and graduating from the Ivey HBA Program, you’ve had the opportunity to dedicate yourself full-time to the company. How has that first year of entrepreneurship been, and what are the important lessons you’ve learned about being an entrepreneur?
In this past year, I’ve learned and experienced so much - it’s been amazing to apply so many of the concepts covered in the HBA program to my own business and see the effects in real time. Balancing operations and business development with a young family (we just had our second kid in June!) has been tough at times, but rewarding overall - it’s been extremely gratifying to directly reap the rewards of the work that I’ve personally put in.
As a solo entrepreneur, learning to effectively prioritize a never-ending to-do list has been crucial. Looking at tasks along dimensions of importance and urgency helps determine a sensible timeframe for their completion, in addition to weighing costs vs benefits of the decision and understanding their implications now and into the future.
I’ve also come to appreciate the benefits of networking. Meeting people and exchanging value and connections has helped me in putting together a set of advisors and industry experts that can share their experiences with me. This has been vital in making important decisions and establishing our way forward.
Over the past year, has anything surprised you regarding the business or consumer demands?
Our team has reaffirmed that there is a considerable demand for an improved automotive service experience in terms of expectation-setting and education, beyond just the convenience of having the service completed at home. As technicians, sometimes we realize that the knowledge we take for granted isn’t universally known. For this reason, creating educational content for our channels online and offering people transparency with the service to their cars is often just as important as saving them the time of travelling to and waiting around the shop. We will continue to keep this a priority as we refine the way we interact with our audience and customers.
You’ve also had the chance to spend the last few months at the Western Accelerator. What is the biggest lesson you’ve gathered from the formal and informal elements of the program?
What a great program! The team has reinforced a mantra of keeping an open mind and considering different perspectives. One of our workshop speakers described “strategic opportunism” as keeping a focus on long-term objectives while being aware of different opportunities that may present themselves. We’re trying to solve a problem for drivers (the struggles of automotive service), but are there different ways to overcome these struggles? Are there other pain points for car owners, beyond just getting to the shop - things like booking, communication, and perception? Are there partners we could work with to reach more people? We know folks need help with their cars, but perhaps that means using our tools to help empower other service providers to give their customers a better experience. These questions all offer chances to augment and improve the experience we are providing to our customers.
For a student or alumni thinking of launching their start-up idea, what advice would you pass on?
I’d say give it a try on a small scale to understand your idea’s viability! We talk a lot about MVP (minimum viable product - or in our case, service). Launch with just the basics of your concept to see how it’s received. I started by informally offering at-home car service as part of a New Venture Project at Ivey, which quickly proved that there was a demand for these services. It was because of this positive primary research that I decided that I could go further with Wheel Easy. It was fairly low risk, and if people weren’t interested, I could have pivoted to something else. Either way, once I had tried it, I had the information with which to make the decision.
What’s next for Wheel Easy?
Exciting times! We’re into tire swapping season right now (our primary offering) so we’re looking to help as many people as possible with our growing team and fleet of service vehicles. We’ve also beta launched our new, custom-built booking platform to gather feedback from customers. Our goal is to develop it to make mobile service more efficient for service providers, helping us reach more folks in less time. As we continue to build out our tools, we will be on the lookout for more opportunities to use them in different applications.
We are also looking to build more partnerships in the community. We have worked with Meals on Wheels and Wilma Technologies to provide services to their drivers, and we have organized Tire Change Events with local businesses like Motif Labs and Race Roster to bring tire-changing services to their employees.
Beyond that, just looking forward to giving more people a better experience with our automotive service. Who wants to wait around the shop when we can come to you, right? Check out the services we offer at wheel-easy.ca