Built Together. Built To Grow. Stihl/Toro Dealer RJ’s Grows From a $400 Truck into a Thriving OPE Dealership

Bob and Judy Jennings started RJ’s with a $400 service truck and a loyal customer base. Nearly three decades later, they’ve built a thriving dealership, and an operating foundation, ready for its next stage of growth.

“Companies that you’ve seen their name for years on billboards…. that’s us now.”
— Bob Jennings, Owner, RJ’s

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“Flyntlok is the least friction point that we deal with,” he says. “It blows my mind how quickly I can take somebody who doesn’t even know anything about the industry and can get into Flyntlok and navigate it rather quickly.” — Bob Jennings

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1996
RJ’s gets its start

$400
Cost of Bob’s first service truck

~$1.5M
Current annual revenue average

1 WEEK
About how long Bob says it takes to get a new employee up and running in Flyntlok

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Starting With a $400 Truck, and a Customer Base That Trusted Him

When Bob Jennings started RJ’s Outdoor Power in 1996, there was no showroom. There wasn’t even a garage.

There was a $400 bread truck.

Bob had spent more than a decade as the only mechanic for a heavy equipment operation, largely teaching himself by going directly to manufacturers whenever he needed technical help. When that company shut down, the customers Bob had served for years still needed someone to keep their equipment running.

So he scraped the failing paint off an old bread truck, loaded up his tools, and went mobile.

“I think I paid $400 for the truck because that’s all I could afford,” Bob remembers. “I threw all my tools in it and I went out and did road service.”

There was already enough demand that the new business became busy almost immediately. Bob needed help keeping work orders organized, making sure customers were billed, and getting the business side of RJ’s under control.

That’s when his wife Judy joined him.

What began as Bob turning wrenches and Judy keeping the operation together behind the scenes became a partnership that would shape RJ’s for the next three decades.

And they built it together.

“We got married to be together. When we were working for other people, we were always apart. Where else can you spend all day with your best friend?”

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As RJ’s Grew, So Did the Need for Better Systems

Bob has always had a tendency to look for a better way to do things.

Even when RJ’s was handling only a handful of machines each month, he wanted a better way to track customers and work. Long before “CRM” became common dealership terminology, Bob was experimenting with software, setting up his own server, and looking for ways to bring more structure to the business.

At one point, the dealership was working from a 30-by-50-foot building with two small bays. Work orders were physically stacked on a desk and worked through one by one.

“I was constantly looking for a better program,” Bob says.

The business eventually moved into a much larger facility. RJ’s expanded its retail operations, took on Cub Cadet, and worked closely with the Bob Clements team to put stronger dealership processes in place.

The result was dramatic growth.

RJ’s went from roughly $100,000–$200,000 in annual revenue after moving into its current operation to hitting $1 million within a year of that next stage of growth. Today, Bob says the dealership averages around $1.5 million annually, with Toro now joining its product lineup.

But a bigger dealership created bigger operational demands.

Bob needed technology that could keep up.

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Looking for a DMS That Made the Business Easier, Not Harder

For Bob, choosing another DMS wasn’t simply about finding more features.

It was about reducing friction.

“Ease of use” was near the top of his list. So was the ability to integrate seamlessly with QuickBooks.

RJ’s previous accounting workflow had become especially burdensome. Bob struggled to find bookkeepers and accountants comfortable working with the previous system, leaving him and Judy doing much of the work themselves.

“That’s what I was doing all weekend: bookkeeping,” Bob recalls.

A modern DMS connected to QuickBooks offered a different path: let the dealership system manage dealership operations while putting the financials in accounting software that accountants already understand.

Bob was also looking for flexibility. When he first sat down with Flyntlok, his questions quickly moved beyond basic workflows into APIs, integrations, and what else the platform could eventually help RJ’s accomplish.

What stood out was not simply what Flyntlok could do at that moment.

It was how quickly it kept evolving.

“Flyntlok is constantly evolving,” Bob says. “Flyntlok's updates are coming so much faster now that I can’t keep up with the updates.”

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“Flyntlok Is the Least Friction Point That We Deal With.”

For an owner who is still involved in nearly every part of the dealership, one of Flyntlok’s biggest impacts has been surprisingly simple:

Bob doesn’t have to worry about whether a new employee can learn it.

He estimates that within a week, a new team member can understand enough of Flyntlok to navigate work orders and complete basic tasks. By the end of a month, they are typically very functional in the system.

That includes people who arrive with little or no equipment-industry experience.

“It blows my mind how quickly I can take somebody who doesn’t even know anything about the industry and can get into Flyntlok and navigate it rather quickly,” Bob says.

New employees can begin processing over-the-counter parts sales. Technicians learn to work from repair orders. One recent part-time technician quickly picked up Flyntlok’s scanning workflow and began working with repair orders far faster than Bob expected.

“Flyntlok is the least friction point that we deal with,” he says. “I don’t have to worry about them getting in there.”

For Bob and Judy, who spent years having to personally carry so much of the dealership’s workload, easier adoption matters.

Every process an employee can confidently own is one less process that has to stay with the owners.

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From Customer Conversations to Machine Inventory, If It’s in Flyntlok, RJ’s Can Find It and Track It

Ease of use doesn’t mean sacrificing depth.

Bob describes Flyntlok as both streamlined and robust: a smaller dealership can start with the workflows it needs today and take advantage of more functionality as the operation becomes more sophisticated.

For RJ’s, that increasingly means creating a reliable history of what is happening throughout the dealership.

The team makes heavy use of Activities to document conversations and customer interactions.

“That activity tool is gospel for us,” Bob says.

If someone speaks with a customer about a repair order, the expectation is that it gets documented. Technicians record detailed notes about the complaint, cause, and correction so the front counter has better information when communicating with customers or preparing future estimates.

“If my people put the information in there, it’s findable and it’s trackable.”

That same visibility extends into machine inventory.

Managing machines and floor plan obligations had previously been difficult to navigate. With Flyntlok, Bob has clearer visibility into machine inventory, what needs to be paid off, purchase orders, and the information associated with each unit.

And as Flyntlok has continued improving its workflows, Bob says many of those processes have become increasingly streamlined.

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Getting Accounting Out of the Owners’ Weekends

The accounting problem that initially pushed Bob toward QuickBooks-connected DMS Flyntlok didn’t disappear overnight.

Years of historical accounting issues still needed to be untangled.

But now RJ’s is working with Flyntlok’s accounting specialists as part of the company’s managed accounting initiative to help clean up that history and build a stronger process moving forward.

When you’re running a smaller dealership without separate departments for every function, something inevitably competes for the owner’s time. Sales, service, staffing, customers, inventory, vendors, and bookkeeping can all land on the same desk.

“It’s not that we’re not organized,” Bob explains. “You have to give up something when you’re running a dealership like this.”

That is precisely why he sees value in getting more accounting expertise around the dealership.

When asked about the help RJ’s has received so far from the Flyntlok accounting team, Bob’s answer is straightforward:

“It is priceless.”

For Bob and Judy, the goal is bigger than cleaner books.

It’s having fewer critical dealership functions that depend entirely on the two of them finding extra hours in the weekend.

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Ready to See What AI Can Take Off Their Plate

Ask Bob what he would like AI to take off his plate and he doesn’t hesitate.

“Everything.”

He’s only half joking.

Long before AI became a standard part of every software roadmap, Bob was already experimenting. Today, he and Judy are using AI alongside the dealership’s historical service information to accelerate processes such as creating preliminary service estimates.

A task that Bob says could previously take Judy 10, 15, 20 minutes, or even half an hour, can sometimes produce a usable starting point in around 30 seconds.

The experiment isn’t a native Flyntlok workflow today, and Bob is careful to put guardrails around the information it produces.

But it illustrates exactly why he cares so much about capturing good dealership data in the first place.

The work orders, technician notes, customer history, parts information, and service records RJ’s creates every day become more valuable as the tools available to analyze and act on that information improve.

Bob has already begun experimenting with Flyntlok’s Smart Tech Notes, which uses AI to turn a technician’s spoken notes into structured Complaint, Cause, and Correction documentation.

He’s also eyeing Smart Campaigns as a winter project, giving RJ’s another way to put the customer information already inside Flyntlok to work.

For Bob, that pace of experimentation is a feature, not a risk.

“The AI world, for me, is phenomenal,” he says. “I can’t wait to see where else it goes.”

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A Business Built With His Best Friend

For all the technology Bob loves to experiment with, ask him what makes RJ’s special and the conversation quickly stops being about software.

It comes back to Judy.

Bob and Judy have been building RJ’s side by side for more than 20 years.

They have gone from mobile service and a $400 truck to a dealership where employees can take ownership of more of the day-to-day work; where customers who remember the old shop stop by and congratulate them on what they have built; and where Bob can look around the community and see the RJ’s name alongside businesses he once viewed as the established names in town.

And there is one place where that feeling hits especially hard.

Growing up, Bob remembers attending local Thunderbirds hockey games as a Cub Scout. The arena felt enormous.

Today, RJ’s sponsors a sign inside it.

Once a year, Bob brings employees and vendors to a game, rents a suite, and gives the people who helped build the business a night to enjoy what they have accomplished together.

It’s one of the things he is proudest of.

“Companies that you’ve seen their name for years on billboards,” Bob says. “That’s us now.”

For a business that began with a mechanic, his wife, and a $400 bread truck, that moment means something.

Flyntlok may help RJ’s run more smoothly today.

But the business behind the software is Bob and Judy’s.

And nearly 30 years after they started building it together, they still get to do it alongside their best partner and friend.

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THE IMPACT AT A GLANCE

A DMS employees can actually learn
Bob says new employees can begin navigating Flyntlok within about a week and become highly functional within their first month.

Better visibility and accountability
Activities, technician notes, machine records, and service history give RJ’s information the team can find and track instead of leaving it buried in someone’s memory.

Operations and accounting that can work together
Flyntlok supports dealership workflows while integrating with QuickBooks, giving RJ’s access to a more familiar accounting ecosystem and specialized accounting support.

A platform that can grow with the dealership
Bob describes Flyntlok as streamlined but robust: RJ’s can use the functionality it needs today and continue adopting new workflows as the dealership evolves.

A foundation for what comes next
From Smart Tech Notes to Smart Campaigns and future AI applications, RJ’s is building the structured dealership data—and the experimentation mindset—to keep finding better ways to work.

“It’s clean. It’s streamlined, but yet robust. You can use as much or as little as you want.”
— Bob Jennings, Owner, RJ’s

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