With over 6,000 authorized dealers worldwide, XPEL is one of the most influential businesses in the industry. PPFMag and Window Film magazine sat down with Ryan Pape, president and CEO of the San Antonio-based company, to discuss its current successes and challenges as well as its future hopes and fears.
Why is having a network of authorized dealers important to XPEL?
Ryan Pape, president and CEO of XPELYou have to have something for the end consumer to have confidence in. The dealer network is thousands of individual businesses. When you’re looking at the social media world and Yelp reviews, the businesses themselves can be amazing, but the consumers want to know what’s behind that brand. We approach this with a tightly curated, exclusive, dealer network that we stand behind. That creates a ton of value for the dealers as opposed to taking a transactional approach where we sell product to anyone. The branding doesn’t mean as much at that point. We have a dealer-centric way of doing things as opposed to just a widget-centric approach.
Do you find that generates more trust in your brand?
Having an authorized, controlled dealer network is a huge part of why the XPEL brand is the most recognized in this category. If we had taken a different approach to just sell the product to anyone who wanted it that would not have been the case.
In XPEL’s early days, did you anticipate it would ever develop to where it is now?
No. There have been many points along the way that the company has become more than I thought it would have been.
We’re humbled by that, but at the same time, you just never stop. You have to keep pushing and moving toward what’s next. We have close to 1,200 employees now, and I need to provide them with opportunities and career progression. So we can’t stop building.
If you asked me 10 or 15 years ago if I thought we would be where we are today, I’d love to tell you I knew the answer would be yes, but the answer is no.
What are some of XPEL’s recent milestones?
The global presence of the brand is recent but also old. We’re a company that’s based in Texas, but [at XPEL’s annual dealer conference XDC] we have people here from 38 countries. They were willing to travel a long distance to get here. Having such a global reach and a global brand is something that exceeded, and maybe continues to exceed, my expectations
You have several partnerships that you’re rolling out, including one with Rivian. Tell us about that.
We know that the number one thing that we can do to grow our business and to grow our customers’ businesses is to bring more consumers into the mix. Most people don’t know about paint protection film. More know about window tint, but only a certain portion of those will go to the aftermarket to buy anything, whether it’s our products or anyone else’s. Looking at the ambition to grow the company and to grow the industry, we asked ourselves how we reach more buyers.
We take an “all of the above” approach to reaching more consumers: marketing, lead generation and just telling consumers about the product’s availability and existence. Car dealerships and manufacturers are great product-selling candidates. They can reach every car buyer. We want to partner with dealerships and manufacturers to bring more consumers to our XPEL-authorized installers.
Bringing those partnerships together is new. We’re learning about it and trying new things. We want to act quickly and adjust as we go. But we think if we can bring all of these pieces together, it can be an amazing opportunity for everyone involved.
Who’s doing the installations on the vehicles with pre-installed XPEL products?
Installation is important at every point in the chain. One of our recent launches with Rivian is a referral program. In this program, you can buy the product as a consumer online and be directed to your local XPEL-authorized dealer for the installation. In that case, the consumer is actually going to the shop and having the product installed.
That’s not the only way these products can be installed. You can install them at a factory or install them at a processing center, but looking at the number of vehicles made and the sheer scale of the industry we’re in, the best way to do more installations at scale is with our dealer base around the world. Trying to do the installation all at one point in the manufacturing process is challenging. It could be done to a certain extent, but it has limitations. Our installer base is everywhere. It’s huge. It has tons of capacity and can increase. The more we can push through the authorized installer channel, the better.
Are your authorized dealers the ones working with car dealerships to install the products?
Many of our authorized installers work with local car dealerships to install the product for the dealer. Our goal is to increase our ability to connect more dealerships with more XPEL installers and have the dealerships actually do some of the sales activity for the installers if they’re interested in building that business.
Dealers have sales, operations and installation responsibilities. It’s a lot, so if we could use our brand and our team to connect more car dealerships with more of our installers, that’s a win for everybody.
It’s similar for manufacturers. Our aftermarket installers are not generally going to call on the car manufacturer because they are enormous organizations, but where we can and where it makes sense, we can connect them and send business from the manufacturer to the installer network.
What are some of the most impactful things XPEL has done in the past few years?
We’ve made a big investment in our new windshield protection film that’s been well received.
We’ve also worked to add marine products. We see marine as a category of the business that really doesn’t exist. I mean, if you think that there’s a lack of awareness of paint protection film in automotive, there’s even less awareness of other opportunities. Working to start that as another vertical of opportunity for our customers has been important in the past year.
We’ve made large investments in our software, which we continue to roll out. It’s really designed around operations and how we can help shops make their business more profitable or efficient. It’s really a lot of behind-the-scenes work, but it’s been starting to trickle out over the past year.
What are you most excited about for the future?
We’re focused on how we can grow our authorized installer network, and that excites me the most. That growth comes with dealership, OEM and marine opportunities. We’re offering tools and processes to help installers be more efficient and willing to grow.
Every day, our authorized installers have to decide how much to reinvest in their business. We want to make it as compelling as possible to say, “Hey, reinvest more, because there’s more growth for you.”
For the full interview with Ryan Pape, look for the next issue of PPFMag.