Two Brothers Left Cox Automotive to Build a Mobile Fleet Shop

Why did the Coltrain brothers leave the family business they helped scale?

Kyle and Kevin Coltrain grew up in Dickinson Fleet Services, the mobile maintenance company their grandfather Bob Dickinson started in Indianapolis in 1997. They worked weekends in the shop before either had a title. After college, Kyle ran field sales in Tampa. Kevin managed regional operations across multiple markets. Then they watched Ridgemont Equity Partners take majority control, followed by Cox Automotive buying the company outright in January 2021.

At the time of the Cox acquisition, Dickinson operated more than 700 mobile repair units and employed roughly 800 technicians. Under Cox the business grew past 1,500 technicians serving more than 14,000 clients annually and was rebranded as Fleet Services by Cox Automotive. In early 2025, Cox acquired the remaining minority stake held by the brothers' father Ted Coltrain and uncle Mike Dickinson.

Kyle's account of that arc is measured. He describes going from a small family owned business to a private equity backed company to a subsidiary of a large corporation, and says there was good and bad in all of it. His argument is narrower: when large capital arrives, it comes with goals and timelines that get translated into quotas. The quota that concerned him most was the technician headcount target. A manager carrying a mandate to add ten technicians in a month will hire someone off a phone screen who says he can turn a wrench.

That risk is specific to mobile work. A mobile technician is alone. A tech in the field does not have a buddy in the next shop bay to ask for help, and is often working nights, early mornings and weekends. A shop can absorb a marginal hire because someone more experienced is standing nearby. A mobile operation cannot.

The second pressure runs the same direction. Push a technician to finish a four-hour job in two, Kevin said, and things get missed. Not because anyone set out to do poor work. Because the clock was set wrong.

What Coltrain Onsite runs now

The brothers launched Coltrain Onsite Fleet Care in August 2025 with seven states of coverage. Kyle said the company now runs about 70 mobile technicians across 15 states, largely east of the Mississippi plus Texas.

Coltrain's units are equipped with the Miller Trailblazer 330 Air Pak, a combination welder, generator and compressor. That single piece of equipment changes the conversation. It means welding and trailer body work happen in the yard, which Kyle described as close to unheard of in a mobile environment and something that surprises most of the people he sits down with.

The company's own materials put the figure at 95 percent of routine repairs and maintenance handled on site. That covers engine diagnostics through a direct plug into the truck, after-treatment work including DEF system sensors and diesel particulate filter replacement, brake jobs down to shoes, drums and chambers, air conditioning, lighting, and bolt-on components including starters, alternators and radiators.

The remaining 5 percent is defined by two things. Internal engine work means opening the engine, and an open engine in an outdoor environment invites contamination. Pulling a motor introduces a safety exposure for a technician working without a shop's lifting infrastructure. Catastrophic body and accident damage goes to a body shop for paint. Those jobs leave the yard because quality and safety say so, not because the truck cannot carry the tools.

Knowing that line before you need it is the operational point. A carrier who understands what can be handled in the yard stops treating every fault code as a tow decision.

The hours are the product

The most useful reframe in the conversation was about scheduling, not wrenching. Kyle said that when a prospect asks what hours his mobile units operate, his answer is a question: what hours is your fleet not running?

Coltrain's technicians work early mornings, nights and weekends by design, because that is when the asset is idle anyway. That is where the cost comparison most small carriers run goes wrong. Kyle's claim is that mobile rates run roughly on par with a quality shop, and that the real gap opens against quick-lube operations doing a five-point inspection and an oil change, where the savings are front-loaded and the bill arrives later.

The costs that never make it onto the comparison are the ones that matter. A shop keeps business hours, so the truck is down during revenue hours. Somebody drives the unit to the shop and back, on the clock, or sits in a waiting room, or a second driver goes to retrieve the first. None of that appears on the invoice.

Kyle's summary is the line worth writing down: planned downtime is easier to manage and more cost effective than unplanned downtime. When a truck breaks down, the carrier is paying a driver sitting on the shoulder while a load misses its appointment. Kevin's observation is that most fleets never calculate this, though they feel it. The common workaround is buying spare units, which is a real answer that carries its own cost of ownership. Tightening the maintenance program is the cheaper version of the same insurance.

How Coltrain audits inspections that nobody watches

The uncomfortable part of the conversation was about invoices for inspections that did not happen. Kevin framed it as a structural feature of mobile work rather than a character problem. Nobody is standing over the technician's shoulder. Kyle went further and said he does not believe anyone sets out to do a poor job, and that the failure is a pressure problem: told to complete a trailer inspection in ten minutes, a technician does a fast walk-around, applies a pass sticker and moves on.

Coltrain's answer is a proprietary field service application that date and time stamps every individual inspection point rather than the sheet as a whole, with required photo prompts at each point. That produces two things. The customer gets photographic evidence of every item. And the company gets a timing record it can audit, so an inspection point that should take a good technician 20 minutes and instead took two gets flagged for a manager conversation and a quality check.

For a carrier evaluating any provider, the takeaway is not the specific software. It is that the technology to verify this work exists now, which means a provider who cannot produce point-level documentation is making a choice.

What to ask a mobile provider before you sign

Asked what a small carrier should look for in any mobile provider, not just his own, Kyle offered questions that cost nothing to ask.

Request copies of technician certifications. Brake certifications, DOT inspector certifications. Kyle said he welcomes that request and that a provider who balks at it, or does not have the records on file, has told you something.

Then ask the local manager how many technicians he supervises. Coltrain caps its mobile service managers at 10 to 15 technicians. Kyle said he has seen ratios of 40 to 1 across three states and does not understand how a manager at that load can lay eyes on the work, know the customers or understand their problems.

Ask how often that manager sees his technicians in the field, where he is based, and how to reach him directly. If the answer is a call center number, that is a legitimate model that some fleets prefer, but the carrier should know which one he is buying.

The compliance exposure most carriers miss

There is a compliance argument sitting underneath all of this, and it is the piece most likely to bite a small operator. Kyle noted that the Department of Transportation can audit a carrier's DOT inspections and request copies of the certifications held by the technician who performed them. A carrier who collected those records at the start of the relationship has them. A carrier who did not is calling a vendor mid-audit.

His second point concerns what carriers do with a passing inspection. A unit can pass and still carry write-ups, brake pads flagged as wearing, items noted for attention before the next service. Kyle's observation is that carriers see the pass, file the sheet and move on. He put it bluntly: do not wait for that part to fail.

Kevin added that Coltrain retains preventive maintenance sheets, DOT documents and repair records on its own side, and that carriers do call asking for a copy of a last inspection they have misplaced. For a two-truck operation without a maintenance manager, that recordkeeping is part of what is being purchased.

Why the brothers frame it as defending the road

Asked when a small carrier should stop doing its own maintenance, Kyle declined the framing about return on investment. His answer moved to the road. He described a wheel-off event or an accident, and the fact that his own family drives next to these vehicles. Coltrain's internal mantra is "defend the road."

The brothers' shared framing is that a loaded tractor-trailer at 70 miles an hour is not a cost center to be optimized down to the last dollar. Deferred maintenance is the first thing to go when money is tight. That is exactly when the math is least forgiving.

The failures the Coltrains describe are not caused by bad technicians. They are caused by clocks set too short and hiring quotas set too high, which means a carrier evaluating a maintenance provider is really evaluating whether that provider's growth model leaves time to do the work. The questions that surface it are free to ask and take ten minutes: how many technicians does the local manager carry, can I see your certifications, and can you show me point-level proof the inspection happened.