Lance Gillies might be a familiar name to “Only The Strong Survive” regulars. In April of 2024, he joined host Dan Kahn to discuss EarthCruiser. Founded in 2008, EarthCruiser specialized in making long-range overland vehicles built on Mitsubishi and Isuzu truck chassis. Born from Lance’s love of off-road travel and exploration, the unique vehicles could be off-grid for months and fit in a shipping container, making them easy to ship worldwide. Unfortunately, shortly after his first appearance on the podcast, Lance was forced to close the doors of EarthCruiser.
Now, EarthCruiser is back with a new focus and business model. In this episode of “Only The Strong Survive,” Lance shares what he learned from having to cease operations of the business he founded and how he brought it back. The tough and transparent conversation about what happens when things don’t go according to plan and how to turn that around is a fascinating one for any entrepreneur. Click on the icon above to watch the entire podcast, and here are our top five takeaways:
Your supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
For manufacturers, location is absolutely critical when it comes time to scale.
A business failure takes an emotional toll on any entrepreneur.
Pivoting and seeing opportunities in challenges is a vital skill.
Never face your problems by yourself.
Your Supply Chain Absolutely Matters
Building vehicles for long-distance global overlanding is a very niche business. That also meant that EarthCruiser’s suppliers were very specialized. Once those smaller suppliers started to go out of business, it significantly impacted EarthCruiser’s ability to keep producing vehicles.
“What started to happen around us was our small suppliers, that we had helped and they had helped us build our supply chain, were starting to close their businesses or dramatically reduce their ability to supply us,” said Lance. “So we had two colliding things happening where the RV market was doing its weird thing, but more than that, our ability to become more efficient was getting harder and harder because we had less choices of how we could produce things.”
Your Location Matters Too
Lance is a big believer in small-town businesses and loves EarthCruiser’s base in Bend, Oregon. However, for a manufacturer, picking the right location is absolutely vital. While Bend is beautiful, its more remote location made it very difficult for EarthCruiser to access a large enough skilled workforce to scale its manufacturing.
“Coming back to our original challenge, is that if we wanted to stay in Bend, could we have a sustainable business model in Bend doing what EarthCruiser did? The answer was no,” said Lance. “Maybe someone else could, but it was clearly beyond my level of capability. Could we have a sustainable model of production for EarthCruiser somewhere else? Yes, for sure.”
Failure is Absolutely Gutting
Most entrepreneurs put their hearts and souls into making their businesses succeed, and Lance was no exception. EarthCruiser was his lifelong passion, so he lived and breathed it. Having to close its doors was the hardest thing Lance had ever done, and it took an emotional toll.
“As a business owner and as someone who started it, and you would feel this way too, it is not what you are but who you are. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that,” said Lance. “It does you damage when it fails because if you are truly passionate about it and this is really what you want to do, you are going to put everything you have plus more into it. When you are no longer that, it is really hard.”
Seeing Opportunity in Challenges
One of the most important traits of an entrepreneur is the ability to see opportunity in challenges and pivot accordingly. While Lance ran into problems scaling EarthCruiser, it was an engineering company at heart. His solution was to keep designing and creating the innovative products EarthCruiser is known for and then use other manufacturers to build them. A new version of EarthCruiser with a completely different business model was born from the old one.
“We have partnered with some large fiberglass manufacturers who all they want is scale. They normally do a lot of stuff for automotive,” said Lance. “So they will produce the EarthCruiser shells for us, and we are partnering with small companies all over the U.S., actually, that will build them out for customers. We will change what we do from being a direct-to-consumer business model to being a business-to-business model, but we can bring to the party the heritage of EarthCruiser.”
Talk to Someone
According to Lance, one of the biggest mistakes he made when things were going south was not talking to anyone. Discussing the difficulties facing your business with others can bring in different outlooks and opinions. Just as importantly, even if other people don’t have answers, sharing your struggles makes you feel less alone in hard times.
“Whether it is your partner, your gym buddies or whoever it is, talk to them. A terrible mistake that I made was not talking to anybody because I was dreadfully embarrassed,” said Lance. “That was a terrible mistake. It is easy to say it and harder to do it, but just find someone to talk to.”
