The Supplier Game: How DuraMAX Beat Pennzoil

Tyreese: Look. This morning's briefing dropped a headline that stopped me mid-coffee, and I promised you the full story on the Friday show. So here it is. This past Tuesday, JobbersWorld reported that DuraMAX, an oil brand most drivers have never heard of, just passed Pennzoil and Mobil to become the number two motor oil in American service bays. Not on store shelves. In the bays. Where the work actually happens.

Now, I want you to sit with that for a second, because if you run a truck like I do, this story is not really about oil. It's about who decides what goes in the car. And the answer, it turns out, is us.

Here's the numbers, straight from Petroleum Trends International, the firm that tracks this stuff. In twenty twenty-five, DuraMAX sold about forty-five million gallons through service bays. That's fifteen point six percent of the installed market. Valvoline is number one at forty-eight million gallons, sixteen point seven percent. So DuraMAX is three million gallons behind Valvoline. Pennzoil is third at thirty-eight million. Mobil is fourth at thirty-one million. Castrol is fifth at fourteen million. And here's the number that should make every independent operator sit up straight: private label and house brands, the no-name stuff, is eighty-four million gallons. Twenty-nine point two percent. The biggest slice of the whole market belongs to oil with nobody's famous name on the jug at all.

The total installed market is two hundred eighty-eight million gallons. And the installed channel, the do-it-for-me world, oil changes done by a professional, is now about seventy-nine percent of the roughly three hundred sixty-five million gallons of passenger car motor oil sold in America in twenty twenty-five. Back in the year two thousand, it was fifty-two percent. By twenty nineteen, about seventy percent. So nearly eight out of every ten gallons of oil sold in this country now goes in through a service bay, not off a shelf at an auto parts store. Which means the person standing under the car decides the brand. Not the customer. Not the commercial on television. The shop.

And that's exactly how DuraMAX did it. They never tried to win the shelf. They won the shop.

Here's the thing. DuraMAX is owned by RelaDyne, and RelaDyne is not really an oil company. It's a distributor. It was formed in November of twenty ten, when an investment firm bolted together four established regional distributors, one from Illinois, one from Ohio, one from Texas, one from Louisiana. The DuraMAX name itself came from the Ohio distributor, which had dreamed it up that summer. They got their licenses, started selling under the trademark in March of twenty twelve, and by twenty fourteen they had the full lineup, including the dexos one approvals the GM cars need.

Then they went shopping. By their tenth anniversary in twenty twenty, RelaDyne had bought more than forty businesses. Not oil brands. Distributors. Trucks, routes, warehouses, customer lists. In twenty twenty-two they bought Orange Line Oil in Southern California. In twenty twenty-three they bought Allied Oil in the Midwest and combined with Sun Coast Resources down south. Today they run more than a hundred and sixty-five locations in the United States, plus thirty-seven more in Central and South America.

Now, why does that matter? Because in distribution, the game is route density. It's not just how many states you're in. It's how close your stops are to each other. A truck that drops oil at six shops on one street in Philly makes money. A truck that drives forty miles between two stops doesn't. Every acquisition packed more customers onto the same routes, which made every delivery cheaper, which let them compete harder on price and service at the same time. That's the machine underneath the brand. The oil is the product. The distribution is the business.

And then they took that machine to the chains. In twenty twenty-four, RelaDyne extended its deal with Driven Brands to supply Take 5 Oil Change, which has grown to more than eighteen hundred locations, nearly fourteen hundred company-owned and more than five hundred franchised. Later that same year, they signed FullSpeed Automotive and Sun Auto Tire and Service, which runs nearly six hundred locations. In March of twenty twenty-five, a multi-year deal with Strickland Brothers, more than two hundred fifty centers serving over two point two million customers a year. They've supplied Oilstop in California since twenty twenty-three, and DuraMAX is now in about eighty percent of Oilstop's locations. And their preferred supplier program is still open to Meineke franchises.

Now, look, I'm a one-van operator in Ambler, Pennsylvania. I'm not getting a national chain deal. But here's what I want you to hear: every one of those chain deals was won the same way you win a fleet account. Not on the price per gallon. On the program around the gallon.

Because DuraMAX doesn't just sell oil. They sell the stuff that makes a shop owner's life easier. Online ordering. A Lube Advisor that matches the right oil to any car. An installer locator that sends customers to your door. Customer rebates through a program they call DuraMAX Dollars. Marketing help. Inventory management. Lube equipment service. And the big one, a free ten-year, three-hundred-thousand-mile engine protection plan for customers who use their premium oil and keep up with the maintenance schedule. Read that again. Ten years. Three hundred thousand miles. That is a retention tool disguised as a warranty, and it's the kind of thing that brings a customer back to the same bay four, five, six times.

And they've been voted the number one best-selling motor oil brand by quick lube owners since twenty eighteen, in the National Oil and Lube News survey. Not by drivers. By owners. By the people who buy the drums.

So what does all of this mean for a mobile operator running one truck, or two trucks, or five? It means three things, and I want to be straight with you about all three.

First, your supplier is not a vendor. Your supplier is a business partner, and you should be grading them like one. Most of us, me included for too many years, bought oil the lazy way. We called whoever answered the phone, asked the price per gallon, and ordered. That's buying a commodity. DuraMAX just proved that the companies winning this market don't sell a commodity. They sell a program. So the question isn't what your oil costs per gallon. The question is what comes with the gallon.

Second, the math that actually matters. Let's say a distributor offers you oil a dollar a gallon cheaper. Sounds great. But if that distributor misses a Friday delivery and you have to cancel two jobs, you just lost two hundred and thirty-eight dollars of revenue on a hundred and nineteen dollar oil change, plus the customer who might never rebook. The cheap gallon cost you more than the expensive one ever would. Flip it around. A distributor who shows up on time, every time, who gives you a rebate program that brings the customer back, who hands you a warranty you can put in front of a fleet manager and say, your engines are covered for ten years, that distributor is worth more per gallon, not less. Price per gallon is the smallest number in the deal. Reliability and retention are the biggest.

And third, the brand on the jug is not your brand. Twenty-nine point two percent of the installed market is private label. Almost a third of the oil going into American cars has no famous name on it. The customer is not buying Pennzoil or Mobil or DuraMAX. The customer is buying you. They are buying the fact that you showed up on time, that you knew their car, that you didn't try to sell them something they didn't need, that you were there again six months later. When I pull up to a fleet lot in Philly, nobody asks me what brand is in the drum. They ask me if I'm the MOMS guy. That's the brand that matters. DuraMAX figured that out fifteen years ago. They built their whole company around the shop's name, not their own.

Now, here's the part I love about this story, and it's the part that hits closest to home. DuraMAX's biggest region is the East Coast. Sixteen million gallons. The Gulf Coast is fourteen million, the Midwest is eleven million. The Lower Atlantic alone is thirteen million gallons, about eighty percent of the whole East Coast total. My backyard is their stronghold. And the West Coast is only three million gallons, the Rocky Mountains one million. That tells you this wasn't some national advertising blitz. This was a distribution company winning territory, town by town, route by route, shop by shop. The same way you win a neighborhood. One relationship at a time, until one day you look up and you're number two in the country.

They did spend money on racing, by the way. They've been in motorsports since twenty seventeen, sponsored the Cup race at Dover in twenty twenty-two, were on Corey LaJoie's car at the Daytona five hundred in twenty twenty-five, and this year they took over the Cup race at Circuit of the Americas in Austin. But JobbersWorld says it plainly, and I agree with them: the racing is the cherry on top. The foundation was distribution and installer programs. The race cars didn't build this company. The delivery trucks did.

So here's the playbook. This is what I want you to actually do with this, because information without action is just noise.

This week, call your oil distributor. Not an email. A call. And ask five questions. One, what installer programs come with my volume, rebates, warranties, marketing help, all of it. Two, what's my price if I commit to one brand for the quarter instead of buying week to week. Three, what retention tools do you give my customers, something that brings them back to me instead of to the shop down the street. Four, what happens when I run out on a Friday, how fast can you get a truck to me, and has that ever actually happened. And five, can you consolidate me, oil, filters, coolant, wipers, one supplier, one invoice, one delivery, because every extra vendor is an extra phone call and an extra failure point.

Write the answers down. Then next week, call one other supplier and ask the same five questions. Compare them side by side, not on price per gallon, but on the whole package. Reliability, programs, consolidation, and price, in that order. And then make a decision and stick with it for a quarter, because a supplier relationship that changes every month is no relationship at all.

And one more thing, while you're at it. Ask yourself what your customer actually buys from you. Because if the answer is the brand on the jug, you've got a problem. The answer should be your name, your reliability, your truck showing up when you said it would. That's the only brand that can't be undercut by a dollar a gallon.

That's the lesson of DuraMAX. A company nobody's heard of, selling oil nobody asks for by name, just became the number two brand in American service bays. They didn't out-advertise Pennzoil and Mobil. They out-served them. They won the shop, and the shop won the customer.

That's the show. Go call your distributor, ask the five questions, and run your numbers. See you at the next one.