The following comes from the June 2016 issue of Truck Parts & Service. To read a digital version of the magazine, please CLICK HERE.
To read more articles from our special issue, please check out our TPSat50 archive page.
Let me first start with the obvious. Thank you. Thank you for reading Truck Parts & Service.
No business hits the 50-year plateau without help, and we’ve had a lot of it.
Truck Parts & Service has been solely focused on the independent aftermarket since 1966. We’ve never wavered from that, and as we stand here today five decades removed from our first issue as Fleet Distribution, we are proud to remain the voice of this industry.
But while our goals and messages have never changed, our product has. Truck Parts & Service has always been the aftermarket’s publication, but it’s still been a publication. And producing a quality publication for five decades is anything but easy.
We’ve changed our name, our design, our distribution structure. We’ve built an online community to complement our print product, and have managed to maintain and improve our products in both areas in an increasingly volatile media landscape.
It is thanks to your support that we’ve pulled it off.
You are our readers, but you are also our sources. You are our news tips line. You tell us what to cover and who to call to do it effectively. You let us know when we’re on the right track with one story idea and when we’re lost on another.
We write the stories, edit the content and tell you what we’ve learned, but it is thanks to you that we know what to cover in the first place.
And I, for one, hope that relationship can continue.
I want to know as much as I possibly can about the independent aftermarket, and I want to know what you’re dealing with in your businesses every day that Truck Parts & Service can address.
We will do everything in our power to provide you answers if you’re willing to keep posing us questions.
My contact information is at the top of this page and in the byline of every article I write in our magazine. It is peppered across this website. My phone number is as well. I want to know more about your business, and the independent aftermarket as a whole.
I want to know what problems you want solved, what issues you want addressed, what aftermarket stories need — and deserve — to be told.
Some of you already do this and I thank you for it. One article featured in the pages of Truck Parts & Service this year was developed thanks to a reader request, and I am currently researching two more reader-recommended stories that may reach these pages or our website in the future.
It’s become abundantly clear to me in producing this month’s anniversary issue that Truck Parts & Service’s sustained success in this industry can be pretty directly linked back to its Founder and long-time Publisher Jim Moss.
Jim Moss knew everyone in the aftermarket, and talked shop with all of them. I still get compliments via association for his ‘In My Opinion’ monthly editorials. Readers say Moss had an ear for any aftermarket news and once he caught wind of something it didn’t take long before everyone was reading about it here.
Truck Parts & Service wants to continue to do this. The long-term viability of our industry will be determined by our ability to work together to evolve and solve problems. We want to help. We want to bring our industry’s biggest issues to the forefront. We want to generate discussion that will lead to real, tangible solutions. We want to help the aftermarket remain strong and prosperous.
And yes, we want to survive another 50 years. And we want the same for you as well.
