Episode 4: Setting You Up for Success: How Fuel Moto Handles Tech, Sales, and Support Calls

When you call Fuel Moto, the goal isn’t to sell you a part — it’s to set you up for success.

In this episode, Jamie sits down with Bob Menning, a 12-year Fuel Moto veteran and one of the first voices many customers hear when they call. Together, they walk through exactly what you can expect when you contact Fuel Moto by phone or email, and why the questions we ask matter so much.

Bob shares what it’s really like answering hundreds of calls every week, from cam recommendations to big bore builds, tuning questions, and realistic performance expectations. Rather than chasing peak horsepower numbers, Fuel Moto focuses on building street-driven engines that deliver torque, reliability, and results you can actually feel.

You’ll learn:

• How Fuel Moto’s phone system works and who you’ll talk to
• Why riding style and RPM habits matter more than hype
• The difference between race builds and real-world street engines
• Why realistic expectations lead to better outcomes
• When to call, when to email, and how to get faster support
• How tuning requests and Power Vision maps are handled
• Why Fuel Moto relies on its own dyno data and R&D — not internet opinions

This conversation also highlights the importance of long-term customer relationships, data-driven recommendations, and honest communication. Whether you’re new to performance upgrades or planning your next build, this episode explains how Fuel Moto helps customers make informed decisions that last.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get the most out of a call to Fuel Moto — or why we ask so many questions — this episode lays the foundation.

📞 Phone: 920-423-3309
📧 Email: info@fuelmotousa.com
🌐 Website: www.fuelmotousa.com

Real conversations. Real data. Real results.

Transcript

This is Jamie and I'm here today with Bob. And many of you know Bob, talked to him on the phone. Many of you have seen him at the front counter. Bob has been with us for about 12 years or so, correct? Yep, just about 12 years. And today we want to talk a bit about what you can expect when you call Fuel Moto. Bob, along with the rest of our staff, manages the phone system.

Tech calls, sales calls, recommendation on parts, services, or basic technical information on any of the products we carry, or past or present. And we're gonna give you a little bit of background on what you can expect when you call here and give you some objectives and expectations.

In these first few podcasts, we're trying to lay down the foundation to get a better feeling for what Fuel Moto really has to offer. And  I'll let Bob take over on what he does day to day, along with some of the other people we have on the phones here.

For my background, I've been in this industry for quite a long time, about 25 years, and this is different than what I've done in the past when I worked in the dealership world, where everybody we dealt with was face to face. Well, now here, we end up on the phone a lot. 

And I get phone calls on everything from "oh what's the best cam for my bike?" "what should I do for oils?" "what should I do for whatever?" And because of the experience level here, not only with myself, but with Tony and Rob, we can answer those questions, even though some of the stuff you may be asking about isn't actually something we sell. But understand that we don't have that same level of knowledge on products that we don't sell. 

But you're going to get from us is information on how to get the best outcome for how you ride your bike. Not, "hey, use this cam because it's the best cam." It is based off of the answers you provide us. For example, if you call in and you want to put a cam in your bike, one of the number one questions I'm going to ask you
is how you ride the bike.

What RPMs you use, and I know a lot of people shift by sound, but if you can tell me at what RPM you shift at, I can better recommend a cam that's going to get you a really solid outcome. And one of my normal jokes is, I get it that you're going to ride differently if you're taking your neighbor's granddaughter for her very first Harley Davidson ride or if you're riding with that one buddy of yours where you can still think up stupid crap to do. I get that. But it's gotta be the average. Do you normally shift at 3,500? 4,000? That's really important when it comes to selecting a cam. And a big bore for that.

Well, it's really all about giving a customer the realistic expectations and it isn't always what they ask for at first. It's a lot of times it's about bringing people back down to earth.

That's a huge thing, because one of the biggest things that we get is customers call in wanting to make the most horsepower.

I want 200 horsepower and we know, I we've done that. I think as far as I know we were the first people with the M8 to be over 200 horsepower back in 2019 and it wasn't easy. It still isn't easy and everybody thinks it's real simple but it takes a lot of effort to get those full effort builds. Everybody thinks they want that and they need that and maybe not everybody but the realistic expectations that can kind of trickle down into: I want a hot rod 128 or 132 or 114 or 110 or whatever, twin cam.

How many people a day call? "I want this all this stuff" and "I want this outlaw motor". And then all of a sudden they end up with a 103 with a cam, because that's what they really wanted. 

The number one thing that you got to keep in mind when you're talking to Fuel Moto, we don't build race engines. We build street engines, which means we're looking for torque. We're not chasing this magical horsepower number because horsepower is made right before the engine hits the rev limiter. Torque is what you feel pulling away from a stop. Torque is what smokes the tire. That's not horsepower.

Our R &D is so awesome. I love that part of it here. Pushing these things to the limit and nothing is more awesome than building some of the high level engines that we do and watching that trickle back into the engine kits. Right down to the basic camshaft designs and profiles and even the air cleaners and exhaust systems. Some of the benchmarks we set like...

More stuff, I would say, doesn't come to market than that does. Like, for example, the 124 that we call the Slingshot that we did last year. That ended up making 198 horsepower on pump gas and an M8. We never introduced a part off that bike, off the engine. It had a production cam in it and it had a special set of cylinder heads on, and a few other things but nothing ever came to market.

So much that we learned went back into other products. That's invaluable. And that's really what we love to do. And taking our R&D and the stuff we learn, not just from the products themselves, but from the tuning and making that work with everyday products that we get to customers. And I think the people really understand that when they call here,hether they talk to Bob or Tony or Rob or Jim or any of the other people here, really comes across as as knowledge. 

Not even just knowledge, relationships. I think that's probably one of the biggest things that the phone does. I've been using a term that we use called our long game. One of the things we do, it is not just because my name is Long, my last name, but in the beginning, we took the time to build relationships with customers.

Some of the customers that we were working with back in the early days, we're still building engines and tuning bikes and even the metric stuff today.

Right before I came up here to do this recording, the customer I was talking to on the phone, the last time I talked to him was 2017 when he did his first M8. I helped him through a 110 build that he did on his Twin Cam that was a 13. So like Jamie says, it's the relationships, the people that call back. And he said to me, "Oh Bob, I talked to you back then. I want to talk to you again." But the lucky thing for me, I've been here so long that I have talked to so many people.

And it is a relationship thing. And years ago, it was pretty funny when the other people that answer the phones were joking that they were just in answering, taking notes for me because at that point, everybody wanted to talk to me because I had been here so long.

Right? And before you were here, everybody wanted to talk to me.

Oh, it still happens. I still get phone calls. "Hey, I want to talk to Jamie. Last time I called you, I talked to Jamie."

I would say now we have the best foundation for the phones as we ever had. We got Rob, Tony, Jim, you and me and Lucas and Katie and Michaela. We got a full staff. So it doesn't matter if you're placing orders, tech support, shipping...we got everything kind of handled there.

To be honest, we have a really high volume of calls here. And we understand that it's sometimes hard to get through. We take many, many hundreds of phone calls a day here and the average call is quite long.

We have between six and ten people that will be on the phones during the day. So it would be Bob. I would say you're on the phone from the time you get here, to the time you leave (besides lunch) and and getting some emails in there too. But our phones are live 9:00 to 5:00 central time.

I've always joked because I've had people that are here to talk with Tony or to get something set up for an appointment and I've literally had tens of people say: "I couldn't do what you do." Because I'm on the phone all the time and I jokingly say, well, "Jamie pays me to do this. That's my job!" And luckily for me, I can get the information to you in a fashion that you can understand what I'm talking about.

Jamie talking about being on the phone, and he talked about the time. A phone call for me, for the most part, is going to be somewhere between 15 and 45 minutes. I have some that go a little quicker. I have some that go longer. I have some that go quite a bit longer.

There's been times where I've been here and seen you here at 7:30 at night, with a phone call I picked up here at 5:00pm. Many times here, well after six o'clock. Hour after close, common, common. 

And it's really cool, meeting these people and knowing them and just the look on their faces when they pick up a bike or when you can show them a dyno chart. That's always really awesome too.

But when a customer comes and picks up their bike and I started the first time. The look on their face because I'll guarantee it sure doesn't sound like it did when they dropped it off. Right? And that's always impressive. But we were talking about on the phone and Jamie was talking about Rob, Tony, and everybody else.

Yep, Bob is on the phone, and these are all tech guys by the way. We also have Tony, by the way, is my nephew, Tony Long. He's been here for about seven years I believe. I believe, right? Yep, and before that he's been in the car industry, and he's been a rider his whole life. Since we've been kids, riding dirt bikes and stuff. He's been riding since he was three and a half, actually.

So Tony is the one that handles doing estimates for people that are coming here and he handles our schedule.

So all of you, those of you that email in and ask for quotes, Tony would be the one that would have the estimates that you email back and forth. Very, very busy doing that.

He has a Road King. And why don't you tell them about your bike too for a minute? We didn't even talk about bikes yet. Tony rides a real spicy 1999 Road King that's making almost 130 horsepower.

Me, I ride a 2022 Road Glide ST. Nothing major done to it, you know, pipe and a cam, but the cam combination, Jamie posted it on our Facebook page, be a couple years ago in April and my bike was...

I think that's the highest 117 we ever did. Almost 140, 139 and change out of a Gen 1. And that's my daily rider. My wife and I spend a lot of time on that bike, but I'm that guy that if it's I don't even care if it's raining, I'll ride. You have show up in snow before, come on. I have. I have. We had ice on the windshield sitting outside in the parking lot one morning. He Rides. That was little more uncomfortable than normal. 

When Jamie hired me, he hired me away from a Harley shop. And I've been riding these things for probably about 40 years, if not more. And I used to be a 20 plus thousand mile a year rider. So that's part of the foundation of what brings me to give you information on the phones. You got to put a combination together that's going to work for how you want it to ride for you.

I think it's important that we ride too, and we have our own bikes. The guys you're talking to are on the phones, are the guys that ride and modify the bikes, work with the parts you're gonna be talking about. They're just not looking in the catalog, they know.

And then Rob, Rob Gamble. He is also on the phones. He is a former parts rep, worked in shops for many years, so he's an industry veteran.

He's when you call, he's the on hold voice.

Yeah, he's actually the voice for our phone system. The guy that you hear talking with the deep voice. He sounds like a radio DJ.

Rob and I are generationally a little different. I'm the oldest guy here and Rob is a year behind me. I'm a 60 year old guy, right? So I'm not a young guy. But the experience level that all of us have is expetional. Rob's got a little different spin on it because he looks at a wider array of parts than what what I do.

And that's just because that's how his brain works. Me, I'm very focused. I'm very focused on what we do, the cams, the big bore kits, the exhaust, the tuners. I'm focused on what you see on our website. And my job is to make sure that your outcome exceeds your expectations. That's why, I've had some customers be uncomfortable on the phone because I'm asking so many questions.

And I ask questions that you may not be able to answer today. Right. You may have to call me back, but I would rather have you call me back so I can get you on a path that is gonna be successful for you. And I'm gonna go back to what I said earlier. We don't build race bikes, we build street bikes. And we want you to be able to get the best performance for how you ride your bike.

To have it last as long as it can, taking care of this bike as we recommend that you do...which by the way is changing the oils more frequently than Harley says. Right? But that's the major thing, Jamie always wants to use the phrase setting you up for success.

With realistic expectations. So much of the stuff we do here is based on data. My entire life is based on mathematics and numbers, equations and calculations and that's just how I'm wired. But the biggest thing that I see is, we don't focus on other people's work. We focus on ours. 

And when we see numbers, like dyno numbers, for example, we see one or two places that are posting charts that are higher than normal. We don't throw those out or not use them. We use common denominators and we go "oh, okay, if we got an X amount of places that show an engine making, say, 125 horsepower and you got one that's making 132 or 135...well, you just kind of take and use the medium.

We just stay to our own data, stay to what we do and hope that we can give a realistic expectation so when we tell you what this engine or vehicle is going to do, that's what it really does.

Right, and that's one of the big things is when you get one of us here and we're talking about what we recommend...you know what it should do for performance, that is based off of our data. That's based off of our dyno runs. That's based off of our R&D. It doesn't include anybody else's stuff because quite frankly, not to be rude, but I don't care.

A very, very important statement that we try to get across, is the stuff that we are sharing is based off our data, our information, our testing on what we do. It's not based off of what somebody else told them, not based off of Facebook posts or a forum article from 15 years ago. This is what we've done. This is what we've found.

There's so much stuff out there is information that somebody told them, somebody said, somebody this, somebody that, second, third, fourth, fifth-hand information. And now, honestly, with the age of AI and all this other stuff, that's a whole other conversation we could have on it. It comes back to trust relationships, friendships, and things that we've all really have valued over the years.

Going back to the phones, getting to the more technical side of the staff, would have Jim. Jim Monson, he's in back in the service department tech side. He would be the person you'd be calling when you're going to ask questions like, "how do I check my ring end gap?" Or "how many CCs are these cylinder heads?" "What's the compression height on this piston?" All those kind of questions.

He was a instructor at MMI. Before that he was a master tech at a dealership and I know he has master certifications for half a dozen OEMs. He's a racer and lifelong motorcycle enthusiast for sure and me and him have known each other since the 90's.

One of things I'm going to add to that one of the things that this goes back to the phone calls. One of the questions I get is, "hey, I did this to my bike and now it's doing that. What's wrong?" Right? Well, I can't diagnose something over the phone because I can't see it. I can't touch it. I can't hear it. Right now I can make some recommendations about maybe what you should do for diagnostic.

Just, why don't we just be honest? There's the guy that takes and starts his engine up on the phone and asks you...Yeah, it happens. "Hey, it's making this noise." Well, did it make that noise before? There's all those things that go along with it. But I get it. Something's different and you don't know what. So you want to ask us if we maybe know what it is. And I understand it's the maybe do we know what it is, but we can't diagnose them over the phone just like I can't tune them over the phone.

Right, well that's a big thing too, going on the tuning thing. Yeah, we can't tune over the phone. And I'll say flat out, we don't send fuel maps over the phone. 

Over the years that I've been here, I don't know if you can fathom the number of map requests that we get a day. It's unbelievable. And for us, if we had to do those over the phone or if we had to write notes, somebody in this building would probably die.

It's no disrespect, but that all has to go through the fuel map form on the website because that's the only way me and Lucas can get it and know all the information's there with the amount of the infinite amount of modifications, not to mention the year model of the bike. You leave one little piece out and the calibration is going to be wrong. And our map form is very easy to use. It's very easy to find. It on the front page of the website, right in the drop down. It's also towards the middle of the page on the fuel maps. Get it there.

Lucas is pretty much the person that heads that up. We're distributing thousands of maps a month. And you the beautiful part of PV4 now with the cloud-based maps, really makes it seamless for us.

But as far as calling up and saying "hey I need a map can you just run over to Lucas or Jamie and send the maps" It's just not efficient for us. For every time that happens it's taken away from somebody and and we're not trying to cut anybody short but it just screws the system up.

There's another aspect to that is we're trying to get things handled in an appropriate timeframe. We want people to get handled in the order that they contacted us. We don't let people butt to the front of the line, if you will. Right. So that's the big thing. Number one, want to be successful. And yes, we have the mapping, and it's just getting it sent to you. But there's 45 other people in front of you.

And the other thing we'll talk about here is email versus phone.

Obviously we get a ton of phone traffic. We also get a zillion emails. That is is a very efficient way to contact us. Especially if it's quick questions we can answer. We're always happy to do that.

There's two ways to get ahold us: by email, either can email the info@fuelmotousa.com  And then that comes to the main inbox, from there that gets distributed to the proper channel. So you don't need to worry about who it's going to go to, if you use the info@fuelmotousa.com email. 

Or you can use the contact form on the front page of the website. You just hit that with your email address in there. Again, it goes to the same place and then it gets distributed here. On our phone message, you will also hear that whether you call sales or call tech, it'll say for for quicker response on tech to use the email and that is that is the case a lot.

We're in contact with, I mean, multiple thousands of people a week, whether it's phone, email. And we don't ever want anybody to feel like being left behind. And I hope that we do a good job of getting out to everybody and there ain't anybody left behind there with that feeling.

And one of the things that I'm going to back up quite a bit here, I'm to talk about how long phone calls end up being. My phone calls may end up being a little longer than other people that work here, but when somebody calls and talks to me, they're probably going to get more explanation what they expected. Are you saying your a long talker? I am a long talker, all day long, but that's what you pay me for. But the whole thing is...

When you're done talking with me, I want to make sure you understand why you got the answer you got. And not what you wanted to hear. Right. Again, Jamie said maybe not the answer you want, but I'm going to explain it to you so you understand why I said yes or no to something. So it's, again, Jamie talks about relationships. It's about making sure that when you guys get off the phone, that you hang up and you go, "oh, okay, I see why you said that." Or "you know, I never thought about it that way. I think I will go that way." Or it may be, "well, no, that blows it out of the water. I'm not doing that!"

But the whole thing is, again, making sure that you get the right information. And again, the information from us is going to be our information. This is going to sound a little rude, but quite frankly, I don't care about anybody else's information because I can't back that up. I can back up our information because I can go find it and I can look at it.

So it's about getting that information out there and hopefully having anybody who calls here leave here with a better understanding. it may not be exactly what you wanted, but a better understanding.

I think that's what it's all about. So that that wraps things up and and if anybody has any questions or as we just spoke, welcome to call. Welcome to email and phone number here is 920-423-3309 or fuelmotousa.com. Thank you very much.

See ya.

Alright that's a wrap for today's episode of the Fuel Throttle Podcast. If you like what you heard, be sure to leave us a rating or share it with on of your riding buddies. Have a topic you'd like us to discuss? Send it our way at marketing@fuelmotousa.com Thank you for tuning in.