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High Quality
In 1992, Gary Ruby was a young military veteran working part-time as a delivery driver for King Soopers. When he would take his vehicles for service, he noticed that the service facilities were ripping off King Soopers with bad service at high prices. He knew he could do better, took a gamble, and offered his services to his store manager. She gave him his first break by giving him the phone number for a contact at corporate headquarters. The rest is FMS history. Mr. Ruby bought his first service truck for $1,200 and conscripted his eldest son, Steve. Out of the back of that truck, they started doing oil changes and other preventative maintenance on King Soopers delivery vehicles. They did their work after business hours, long into the night, onsite at a King Soopers facility. Eventually, the King Soopers facilities department heard about their good work for the delivery department and asked the Rubys to come over and service their vehicles. They clinched their second customer. Then a staff member at King Soopers told his brother about the Rubys’ good work. The brother worked at Guy’s Floor Service, which became FMS’s third customer and first non-King Soopers customer. Now they were off to the races. Mr. Ruby did not have a business background, but his strategy was simple: Be a one-stop shop and handle everything for his customers. Maximize convenience by working onsite and on the roadside. Perform quality work with no shortcuts. Charge a fair price. Build long-term relationships over making a quick buck. If he did all that, he knew his customers would refer FMS to their family, friends, and colleagues. Just good ol’ American common sense.
While Mr. Ruby was turning wrenches at night, his wife Barbara Ruby handled all of the non-service aspects of the business—a sweeping array of functions from bookkeeping to IT to human resources. Notably, she led the company’s early adoption of digitized forms and other digital records. But she quickly ran into a problem. Then, as of now, most off-the-shelf software for vehicle maintenance and repair facilities was not designed to handle multiple service categories, such as towing, paint, body, mechanical, electrical, hydraulic, oil changes, and transports. They also couldn’t handle multiple types of vehicles, such as light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty. And they weren’t designed to handle business customers, with their dozens of sub-departments and offices, even more drivers, hundreds of vehicles, and unique invoicing requirements (including third-party payers such as leasing, fleet management, and insurance companies). So, what did the young entrepreneur do? She made her own. To this day, FMS still operates its own, bespoke, in-house shop management and point of sale system.
Upon this foundation of relentless customer service and innovation, the dynamic duo steadily grew FMS more and more. In 1994, the Rubys established the company’s first “fixed” facility by co-locating FMS with one of its customers, Ferrell Gas, to do more complex maintenance and repair work. When they outgrew that arrangement, the Rubys leased space in a shared shopette in Wheat Ridge and then quickly ran out of room again. In 2000, the Rubys moved FMS to its first solely operated facility in Denver, but again outgrew it. FMS continued growing and moving through several leased spaces in Commerce City until finally, in 2015, nearly twenty years after starting out of the back of a truck, FMS bought its first and current facility in Commerce City. The Rubys re-designed the office space to make it home and then pulled down the shop's second story to make space for tall bay doors and tall vehicles.
Along the way, the Rubys underwent all of the ups and downs of being entrepreneurs in a family-owned business. Mr. Ruby handled all of the service activities, from managing the shop to going on late-night road calls. He knew every customer’s operations manager and driver by name. Mrs. Ruby enlisted neighbors to work late into the night at home, inputting data, billing customers, and making payments to vendors. Customers were demanding and quick with requests but less quick with payment. The Rubys struggled to find quality service technicians who could perform the wide array of services offered at FMS. But the ones they did find loved them, and turnover was low. In the early 2000s, they brought their younger son, Jason Ruby, into the business. Jason worked his way up from office manager to vice president of operations to chief operating officer. The Rubys strived to maintain a family atmosphere while growing and professionalizing the business. In 2017, FMS became a licensed dealer of vehicles in Colorado, which allows it to further service its customers by acquiring vehicles for them and re-selling their used vehicles on the open market. Today, we seek to preserve Mr. and Mrs. Ruby’s legacy with a relentless focus on scrappy entrepreneurship, constant innovation, a family atmosphere, extreme proximity to our customers, premium customer service, word-of-mouth referrals, and steady, prudent growth. King Soopers and Guy’s Floor Service remain loyal FMS customers. Jason Ruby still works in the business helping with information technology.
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