Tires, specifically big tires, have been Bob and Juanita Purcell’s passion for the past 60 years.
Bob’s father, Robert M. Purcell, opened the first Purcell Tire and Service Center in Washington, Mo., in 1936 and a second location in Granite City, Ill., in 1951. When he opened a store in De Soto in 1963, he brought in his son to run that location.
Bob and Juanita, who currently split their time between homes in De Soto and Las Vegas, took over ownership of Purcell Tire and Service Center following Robert Purcell’s death in 1970.
The two have been married 68 years, and together, they have worked to expand the company, which now has more than 50 service centers and four tire-retread plants across the country. The tire company employs 769 full-time and about 40 temporary staff members.
According to the company’s website, Purcell Tire ranks as the third-largest, independent tire dealership in North America for commercial vehicle tires and one of the 10 largest independent tire store chains.
But the business’ main focus and point of pride is the fact that it’s a world leader in off-the-road tire service, repair and retreading, said Juanita, a self-described workaholic who ran the business from their Potosi base for decades. Bob, the company’s CEO until Roger Lucas was hired in 2014, spent most of his life on the road establishing accounts and customers for the company.
Bob, 89, and Juanita, who just turned 88, remained a part of the day-to-day operations, visiting their worksites daily, until just a couple of years ago when they began having health problems.
Juanita, who is still the company’s chief operating officer, experienced a brain bleed a few years ago and said she was lucky to be close to a great hospital in Phoenix at the time.
“The doctor said, ‘You were supposed to die today,’ and I said, ‘Fooled you!’”
Bob, the board chairman, recently received cancer treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
“But I’m getting well,” Bob said. “I’m getting better every day.”
The two say they are semi-retired.
“There’s a quote (Bob said in 2015 when he was asked about his retirement plans) that I love,” Juanita said. “They said, ‘Why don’t you retire? And he says, ‘I don’t know. I guess it’s easier to retread than retire.’ I thought that was good.”
Building a legacy
Born and raised in Washington, Mo., Bob helped out with his dad’s business in high school, “changing tires and that sort of thing,” he said.
Bob left the area to serve a tour in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and then went on to graduate from the University of Missouri in Columbia with a business degree. Juanita, who grew up in Warren County, also attended the University of Missouri for two years. They married and moved to Nashville, Tenn., where she finished her business degree at Vanderbilt University.
“We were living in Nashville (in 1963) and his dad said, ‘Well, now you got to move back because I just bought a store in De Soto,” Juanita said.
She said she didn’t want to leave Nashville.
“I didn’t know a tire from a tree,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about it. I was teaching in Nashville.”
But the two moved to De Soto, and Bob ran the little retail tire store.
“It’s still there by the way,” Juanita said.
She taught for the Hillsboro R-3 School District one year before Bob asked her to come work with him.
Juanita said she liked teaching and protested at first but after looking over the books, changed her mind.
“I did an audit, and it turned out that we’d been billed for a box of envelopes. Instead of $12.50, we were charged $12,500 and our people paid it,” she said. “Oh and the next thing, they were shipping tires to southern Missouri and billing us for big tires. And that was $25,000. So, I said, ‘Bob, you made yourself almost $35,000 the first year and didn’t know it.’ So that’s how we got together business-wise.”
Bob said he traveled all around the country by plane seeking accounts for the growing company, and Juanita was the one everyone went to for answers in his absence.
It wasn’t always easy, she said, because people weren’t sure what to think of a woman in the tire business.
“They’d be on the phone and say, ‘I need to talk to a tire salesman,’” Juanita said. “I’d say ‘well, I guess you got to talk to me. I’m all you got.”
The business could have come to an end in 1969 when a fire destroyed the De Soto retread plant.
“It destroyed everything,” Bob said.
“We lost everything. Everything was brand new and paid for. And guess what? No insurance,” Juanita added.
They borrowed money and quickly built a 30,000-square-foot retread plant in Potosi, which was larger than the one in De Soto.
Bob said they thought that was all the space they’d ever need.
“We’ve added on and added on and added on,” Juanita said with a laugh.
They recalled being featured in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Careers under 40” special section just two years after the fire.
“The story covered multiple people,” he said.
“Big people, people we thought were so important and so rich,” Jaunita added. “And we were in there with them and we were nothing. That was OK.”
Juanita said she believes the two have been successful because of how they treat their employees, adding that she prided herself on knowing the names of employees’ children and spouses and where they are from.
On Dec. 15, she found herself feeling a bit frustrated when she didn’t know a new employee at the Potosi plant.
The Purcells said they have many longtime employees, and some of those employees’ children and grandchildren have gone on to work for the company, too.
“We’re good to people and they’re good to us,” Juanita said.
She said the company grew through acquisitions across the country, as well as through “big tires.”
Juanita said the company provides big tires for airports, and Bob said Purcell is one of just a few companies that can provide tires for mining operations.
“We design (tire) molds,” Juanita added. “Bob would check what mines needed and come back and he would design … just draw a picture of what we should use. The new tire companies were coming here to see how to make new tires because they wanted to see how we were so successful with our retreads.”
Juanita said the company has been “green” since 1936 because retreading is recycling and a cheaper option for businesses.
According to the company website, retreading extends the tire life and performance to maximize efficiency.
The business boasts it’s a world leader in the retread business and it can retread the largest tires in the world.
“We take that old tire and make it like a new tire and guarantee it like a new tire,” Bob said. “In most instances we can outperform a new tire. We can tailor-make the compound (of the rubber).”
He said President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, first funded in 1956, also helped the company grow.
“I did a lot of business in West Virginia when they were building the highways,” he said. “The road program, by far (helped), and we were in that business in a small way. We just expanded and now we’re doing a lot of mine business.”
The couple said they continue to do a lot of business out West.
“That’s where we expanded mostly,” Bob said, adding that’s how they ended up with a home in Las Vegas. “Bigger mines.”
Lucas, the current CEO, commended the Purcells for taking the company in the right direction.
“When I came to this company, the first thing I did was ask myself, ‘What makes this company good?” Lucas said. “I found out rather quickly that Bob is very strategic in the way he looks at things. He had a vision. This vision was uncharacteristic; he just saw things.
“For Juanita, operationally, she could just put things together. Whatever Bob took on, or whatever they decided to take on together, she could make it work. Her attention to details in the operations and her hands-on ownership of the business brought that. Bob brought the vision, strategy, and growth elements. But having that combination between them, to me, is the recipe for how they are so successful.”
Lucas said Bob’s vision around tire retreading is what really helped the business grow.
“That is what differentiated them a lot, because Bob saw an opportunity in the retread world,” Lucas said. “By seeing that and having that vision, it opened that opportunity for the company, which really got us in a unique, go-to-market presence.
“They continued to grow with Goodyear; they had bought the Goodyear stores down in Texas. They went on to acquire Western States Tire out in Arizona, and that is how we got out in the West. Going back 20 years, the D&D Tire acquisition piece got us into the mining world. From there, acquiring Phelps got us into the Pacific Northwest. After that, we had a mixed bag of acquisitions, including a more recent one, Quality Tire in 2021. It was just geared around providing services for the customers and opening opportunities where we were.”
Juanita said the company now focuses a little less on the retail part of their business and more on the big tires and recently sold nine stores.
