Leading With Love: Ken Langhals Is MTD's 2025 Tire Dealer of the Year

You could argue that Ken Langhals — having spent the last 55 years building his company, K&M Tire Inc., into one of the largest, most successful tire distributors in North America — could afford to rest on his many laurels.

But taking it easy has never been his style.

Langhals, MTD’s 2025 Tire Dealer of the Year, is busy positioning K&M Tire for its next half-century of prosperity — not out of ego, but out of love for the people who will continue to make the enterprise that he founded a resounding success. What’s more, he’s enjoying every minute of it.

“I love our employees,” says Langhals. “I love our customers. I love our partners. I love coming to work. We’re a large company, but I don’t look at us as a large company. I look at us as small-town people who just enjoy selling tires.”

Growth opportunities 

Langhals learned to work hard at an early age. One of 10 children, he grew up on a farm near Delphos, Ohio, a town of 7,000 people that would one day become K&M Tire’s headquarters. Each kid had a different responsibility. Langhals took care of hogs, chickens and other livestock.

After graduating from high school and serving in the Ohio National Guard, Langhals worked briefly for General Motors. Discovering that it wasn’t his cup of tea, he left the auto manufacturer and at the age of 20, opened Kenny’s Sohio, a two-bay service station, “pumping gas, changing oil and repairing cars. I wasn’t getting rich, but I had enough money for gas and beer. I did that for two years.”

Then the first of many opportunities that would set Langhals on the path to even more success materialized. He met a businessman from Findlay, Ohio, who owned a small retreading plant.

“He offered to sell me the shop, so I left the service station and went into the retreading business. I lost money every day I was there! We had one truck tire mold, but we never retreaded any truck tires.”

Passenger tires were in a state of transition “and most of the molds we had didn’t fit and we had to buy new molds. I thought we could make (the business) profitable, but even then, passenger tire retreading was on the way out. I just wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. So now, after two years in the retreading business, I’m 24 years old, I’m married and I’m broke. It was just a plain disaster!”

Another opportunity suddenly arose. 

“I knew this guy, Bill Altenburger, who had a two-bay Marathon gas station” in Ottoville, Ohio. “He wanted to sell it. I wanted to buy it. But I owed a lot of people money” due to the failed retreading venture.

“After a few meetings, Bill agreed to rent me the building and finance the inventory and equipment.” 

Langhals came up with $100 for the shop’s till. “Everything was cash back then,” he notes. "And that’s how we got started. Bill let me take over and pay him over time.”

Altenburger also was a gas and oil distributor, “so I bought all of my gas from him. I had a couple of good employees who came with the business. We were pumping gas. We were doing brakes. We were doing tune-ups. We did a good job and made a decent living.”

Langhals paid off his retread shop debts “and things started to look up.”

In 1970, he renamed the business K&M Tire. (Up until then, it was known as Kenny’s Service.) Langhals was selling a modest number of tires, buying all of them from Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and Cooper Tire & Rubber Co.

Around this time, he began dabbling in wholesale distribution. He quickly learned how challenging that channel could be to break into. “I wanted to distribute tires to some other dealers, but I found out I couldn’t be competitive with other wholesalers due to pricing.”

That’s when another opportunity materialized. Langhals met Paul Zurcher, the founder of Zurcher Tire, which was based in nearby Monroe, Ind. (Zurcher, who went on to establish Best-One Tire Group, was MTD’s Tire Dealer of the Year Award recipient in 2005.)

“I began buying some of my tires from Paul and asked him how I could buy tires for less and be competitive with everyone else. He said, ‘The easiest way to buy your tires for less is to let me be a partner.’ So in 1977, he became a partner in my business and then I was buying tires at a better price and could be competitive with other distributors.”

Best-One continues to hold an ownership stake in K&M Tire. “I learned a lot from Paul over the years, watching him run his business and how he led his family,” says Langhals. “He was just an outstanding guy.”

Langhals soon discovered that he enjoyed wholesaling tires more than selling them at retail. “I liked working with other tire dealers more than working with retail customers.” But to keep up with his growing wholesale business, he needed a hand. 

“There was a guy from West Virginia named Larry Lambert who was looking for a job. He had been in the clothing industry and was a born salesman. I hired him and put him on the road selling tires. He could sell to anybody.

“Of course, back then, there were probably fewer than 20 different (tire) sizes. We didn’t need to inventory too much. We had a second floor at our service station and that became our tire warehouse.”

In 1979, yet another opportunity presented itself. K&M Tire opened its second location, an acquisition, in Delphos — beginning the long line of acquisitions that would power the company’s growth over the ensuing decades. “I felt like if we wanted to grow, we needed to be in a bigger town and we needed to have more than one location,” says Langhals.

“We were open seven days a week and I was working seven days a week.” Business continued to flourish. In 1983, K&M Tire moved to a larger location in Delphos. 

“This gave me the opportunity to store more tires and really increase the distribution side of the business. I hired another salesman, Chris Link, and he and Larry Lambert really grew our distribution.”

At the time, K&M Tire was competing against “quite a few smaller distributors and a few of the bigger ones,” including Capital Tire out of Toledo, Ohio, “who did a really good job,” and Detroit, Mich.-based Rao Tire, which Langhals would eventually acquire in 1996.

According to Langhals, those distributors specialized in selling to larger tire retailers. Seeing an opportunity, K&M Tire went in the other direction and began “calling on the real small service stations and tire dealers.”

Langhals says Lambert and Link were “excellent salespeople” and convinced many small shops to sign with K&M Tire. 

As the company’s client list expanded, “I felt comfortable that we could make a go of it” operating solely as a wholesaler, says Langhals, who adds that he “really didn’t want to compete with the customers I was selling tires to” at the retail level.

In 1990, K&M Tire entered another market, Toledo, by opening a new distribution center in the city. Six years later, the company acquired Rao Tire, giving it a foothold in Detroit.

“Detroit was our first step into a bigger market,” which brought its own set of challenges, according to Langhals. “We were coming in as outsiders and it was harder to collect our receivables in Detroit than in other areas. We needed to be more selective” in screening customers.

As K&M Tire became more comfortable doing business in Detroit, another opportunity emerged. In 1997, the company acquired Detroit Tire, another well-established wholesaler.

By this time, Langhals’ daughter, Cheryl Gossard, now president of K&M Tire, had been working full-time at the company for several years. “She started with us part-time,” he says, working nights and on weekends while holding down a day job at an insurance company.

“We had an office manager and it didn’t work out with her. We let her go and I just couldn’t find the right person to watch over the office and handle accounting. It took me a little while, but I finally convinced Cheryl to come work for me full-time. I think she knew I needed the help and I finally got her pay up to what she had been making! In the beginning, she did all the accounting work and as the years went on, she got to know every job there is at K&M Tire.”

Meanwhile, Langhals was very much a hands-on owner, overseeing K&M Tire’s expansion, working in the Delphos office, unloading trucks, meeting with customers and suppliers — whatever was needed.

But as K&M Tire’s business enlarged, “I had to back up a little bit and let other people start taking over. I felt like I needed to let our managers run their departments. Cheryl was the one who really started to develop our managers.”

It wasn’t easy to pull back, he admits. 

“I wanted to be involved with every little detail and every decision. But Cheryl pretty much showed me that I needed to look at the big picture and what we needed and where we needed to go for future growth.”

A major catalyst of K&M Tire’s growth was its entry into another big market, Chicago, Ill., where in 2001, the company acquired Berry Tire, the largest distributor of Goodyear tires in “The Windy City” for many years. “When we bought Berry Tire, they were down to three locations” from a high of six and owned several retail stores, which K&M Tire later sold.

“I wanted to be in a bigger city,” says Langhals. “We had the opportunity to sell more tires in a big city.”

K&M Tire continued to move into other markets. In 2010, the company acquired Triton Tire & Battery from Universal Cooperatives, which gave it locations in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas and Arkansas. 

Suddenly, K&M Tire had a presence in several more states.

The Triton Tire & Battery deal was pivotal in another way. Universal Cooperatives, which was based in Minnesota, owned, operated and administered the Mr. Tire associate dealer program, which became property of K&M Tire.

Neither Langhals nor Gossard had considered establishing or running an associate dealer program before. Now they were responsible for servicing a broad network of Mr. Tire dealers, but with a caveat: in certain markets, the Mr. Tire name had been licensed to Monro Inc. and it was unavailable to K&M Tire’s customers in those areas. “So we came up with the Big 3 (associate dealer) program,” says Langhals.

“At the time, all of the major manufacturers were coming up with their own programs. Mr. Tire and Big 3 fit really well for us. If there was a Mr. Tire on one side of the street and another dealer across the street wanted to buy from us, we’d sign them up as a Big 3 dealer. It gave them a name that was bigger than just their own name.”

K&M Tire offered numerous benefits to Mr. Tire and Big 3 members, including enhanced buying power, but on an a la carte basis. Members were free to choose what they wanted to use. “We left advertising up to our members,” says Langhals. "We’d offer our support, but as far as setting prices, they did that all themselves.”

Today, there are more than 1,600 Big 3/Mr. Tire members. They remain free to pick and choose what they like, though “We can say, ‘If you do this, we’ll give you that,’” says Langhals. “We can give them incentives to do certain things. We want to make sure they get good value.”

With an influx of new customers in high-potential markets, K&M Tire’s business continued to expand, which required further investment in people, technology and products. Gossard took a bigger role in developing and managing K&M Tire’s leadership team, while building its back-office capabilities.

“To be a good supplier, we had to adjust,” says Langhals. “We had to change. But we had to be very careful. We were very selective of the people we were hiring, trying to make sure they had the right values.”

Langhals and Gossard preferred to promote people from within the company, but sometimes “we brought people in from the outside because we didn’t have enough people to grow fast enough. When we bought Triton, it doubled the number of our locations overnight. We didn’t have the management staff here (in Delphos) and I surely wasn’t ready. That’s where Cheryl started to shine. She brought on the right management, running the back office the way it should be.”

Training also become a higher priority. “Every year, we do more to develop our people,” says Langhals. This includes “traditional classroom training, online videos, mentorship programs” and more.

New IT systems with capabilities far beyond what K&M Tire had at the time were also needed. 

“Back in the early-1980s, we had no computer,” says Langhals, looking back on the company’s initial foray into data processing. “I had a ledger and that’s how we kept track of inventory. We sold two tires, I marked it down and we bought two more tires. It was time-consuming, so we bought a computer. There was no other way that I knew of to download information like tire sizes and all of that.

“After we bought our first computer, my wife and I had to hand-key everything in after work and on weekends. After three months, we had it all keyed-in and then the computer crashed and we lost everything! But we got it back up and running.”

Under Langhals and Gossard’s direction, K&M Tire began developing its own IT systems. 

“Our online ordering system was developed by our own people and as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the best in the industry,” he says. “We control it. We can modify and change it if we want to. And our IT department has done a wonderful job of continuing to build the software. We’re always looking for ways to get better.”

Langhals and Gossard also knew that K&M Tire needed to carry more tire lines and brands to give customers and their clients a broader spectrum of options. “We started very slowly bringing on new brands,” says Langhals. 

“Since Firestone had truck and ag tires, they were a big supplier for us. Then we took on Uniroyal and Armstrong. BFGoodrich was big in our area. We were trying to have tires on-hand that our customers wanted.”

Today, Langhals estimates that K&M Tire carries more than 40 brands in the passenger tire category alone, in addition to numerous commercial truck, ag and OTR tire brands. “The number of SKUs you have to inventory today ... there’s probably 2,000 sizes.”

Customer expectations were changing. Wholesalers were moving to a just-in-time delivery model as retailers stocked fewer units at their stores. “Up until that point, we were used to — and dealers expected us to — deliver tires to them once a week and maybe twice a week,” says Langhals. “But it changed. They wanted deliveries once a day or maybe twice a day. We needed to have the tire they wanted, when they wanted it, so we needed to have a lot more inventory.”

This helped accelerate the need for more locations. “From 2000 to 2010, we bought three locations. Over the next 10 years, we bought 10 other businesses that had a total of 20 locations,” taking K&M Tire into new markets and geographies.

This past May, K&M Tire acquired three warehouses in Michigan and a distribution center near Chicago from Turbo Wholesale Tires LLC. In September 2024, the company acquired K&W Tire of Lancaster, Pa., which gave K&M Tire six distribution centers throughout New England. At press time, K&M Tire operates more than 40 distribution centers, stretching from Maine to New Mexico and from North Dakota to Texas.

K&M Tire also introduced standard operating procedures to enforce consistent, approved practices across the firm’s ever-growing footprint. Guidelines were drawn up to address nearly every aspect of K&M Tire’s business. “I don’t know how you can live without them,” says Langhals.

K&M Tire employs around 1,200 people. “To have as many different people as we do and be in as many different areas as we’re in, I feel like we have to follow our standard operating procedures to have any control over things.

“As we purchased other wholesalers, some of them did business much differently than we do. It took some of them a little while to get accustomed” to K&M Tire’s way of doing things, “but just about every time, they said, ‘This is so much better than the way we did it.’”

K&M Tire’s standard operating procedures have evolved to stay current with the times, according to Langhals. “If our people follow them, they’ll be doing the right thing.”

Langhals and Gossard also realized that some situations may fall outside the purview of a standard operating procedure. In those instances, “if our people are doing the right thing for the customer — or even internally, if they’re doing the right thing for their teammates — then we’re OK with it,” he explains.

“If something goes wrong — if something is a bad decision — we’ll sit down and talk about it and discuss what we could have done to make it better for everybody and what we can do in the future to make sure it doesn’t happen again. If there’s a decision that isn’t good, we accept that. We’re allowed to make mistakes, as long as we’re trying to do the right thing.”

As K&M Tire continued to add locations and personnel, Langhals says he was “somewhat concerned about growing too quickly because I’d seen other businesses grow really aggressively and quicker that what their cash flow allowed. I saw them get into trouble. But we kept our eye on it to make sure we were growing at a comfortable place and not outgrowing ourselves.”

Most of K&M Tire’s customers are small tire dealerships — some with only one location. Many are located in small towns and rural areas. “That’s where we started and that’s why I think we connect well with small dealers,” says Langhals. 

“Another thing is a lot of them sell ag tires and commercial truck tires, whereas in the bigger metro areas, they don’t sell a lot of ag tires. K&M has to be one of the largest ag tire distributors in the country and the same with truck tires.”

Bigger tire dealerships also can buy “direct from the manufacturers,” says Langhals, who adds that access to decision-makers is often easier at smaller dealerships. “At the bigger ones, you may never see the owner. In rural areas, you talk to the owners. They’re out in the shop, doing the work.”

Focused on others

“He’s always focused on the customer,” says Gossard of her father. But she adds that he’s equally focused on K&M Tire’s employees and partners, believing that if K&M Tire can engineer outcomes that benefit all parties, the company will continue to prosper. 

That level of dedication stems from the early days of K&M Tire, she explains. (Gossard is the only one of Langhals’ five children who currently works in the family business. Her siblings have worked at the company at various points. And her four children work at K&M Tire.)

“Growing up, when we were in the living room watching TV, he always had financials or purchasing reports or some kind of paperwork he was looking through. Occasionally, when we were going somewhere, he’d say, ‘Oh, this is a customer. I’m going to run into his store for a couple of minutes.’”

When she started full time at K&M Tire, “there were only four people in the office and we had two warehouses. He basically had to teach me everything. And as new things came on and I asked him and he didn’t know, he taught me how to research it. He gave me books sometimes.”

Back then, there was no grand plan for expansion. However, Gossard and Langhals were ready to capitalize on opportunities. “I think he knew that every year we had to continue to grow, so we could hit the numbers with our vendors.”

Gossard describes her move into a leadership role at K&M Tire as “more of a gradual thing. About a year after I started, he was looking to install a new computer system. He came to me and said, ‘You can do this.’ I would then ask for more work and he’d think of things I could do and I’d just jump in and do them.”

As Gossard became proficient in more facets of K&M Tire’s business, Langhals leaned on her more. When the Triton Tire opportunity came about, he told her he could “take it or leave” the deal. But he also asked for her opinion. “I said, ‘We should do it.’ We learned a lot during that one.”

Working with her father, Gossard saw the need to develop an executive leadership team. Up until then, major decisions like acquisitions were made by Langhals, Gossard and Kevin Schnipke, who began working for Langhals in the 1970s.

“Kevin was like an older brother to me,” she says. “If there was an issue in the warehouse — whatever it was — he’d fix it. He’d figure it out.” (Schnipke, after 49 years of service at K&M Tire, passed away in July 2025.)

Gossard hired Mark Knippen, currently K&M Tire’s vice president of purchasing, in 2004. She brought on Jon Schadl, now K&M Tire’s vice president of sales, six years later.
Knippen was working in the restaurant business when he saw a want ad placed by K&M Tire in the local newspaper. “I didn’t know anything about the tire industry,” he says. “I applied for an inside sales position and got hired.”

He met Langhals two weeks after he started at K&M Tire. “We had moved into this office and what impressed me is he came up to me and introduced himself and was out with the crew in the warehouse, moving tires and office equipment. He was in there, getting his hands dirty.”

Knippen eventually moved into a managing director position, “where I started to interact on a more frequent basis with Ken and Cheryl. One day, they called me and said, ‘We think you might be the right person for the (vice president of purchasing) position.”

He now manages the company’s inventory strategy, leading a team of 19 people “who do all the demand planning for K&M Tire. We oversee all 43 distribution centers and inventory planning across all segments. When I started, we had four locations.”

Though Knippen reports directly to Gossard, he frequently interacts with Langhals, who “leads with a steady hand and clear purpose. Over the years, I think he’s evolved from being very hands-on to empowering a strong leadership team, but what hasn’t changed is his consistency. He still leads with humility and conviction.

“You would never question Ken’s integrity. He’s one of those men who does what he says he’s going to do. And he’s extremely humble. He’s built K&M from a two-bay gas station to 40-plus distribution centers across the country, but I feel he’s the same person I met 21 years ago.

“He started the company to serve customers and that’s never changed,” says Knippen. "We’ll have a conversation (about a topic) and look at Ken and he’ll ask, ‘How does this take care of the customer?’ One of the things he said probably 15 years ago in a meeting that’s always stuck with me is, ‘Just because you earned the business today doesn’t mean you deserve it tomorrow.’ We talk about continuous improvement all the time. ‘What are we doing to get better?’

“Professionally, he’s certainly helped me learn the procurement side of the business and how to interact with our manufacturing partners,” says Knippen, who describes Langhals as being “very even-keeled” with a “very even temperament. When I came in, I was maybe a little too aggressive in how I approached things, but working with Ken, I understood that these are our partners. These are folks who we’re going to depend on for mutual success for a long time and we want to make it a win-win. We need them to be healthy so we can be healthy. He taught me a lot about that part of the business. I made mistakes early on and he was very patient with me and allowed me to fail forward. That really helped my professional development.

“Ken’s reputation (among suppliers) has always been tough, but fair. We want to get the best opportunities we can, so we can do the best for our customers, but having unreasonable asks will never get you anywhere. We really look at our suppliers as partners.

“If you look at our company’s values, all of those align with how Ken approaches business,” says Knippen. “He’s here to serve our customers. He’s here to serve us, as employees. What’s really impressed me is (despite) how much we’ve grown in terms of size, reach and operational sophistication, we’ve managed to maintain that personal feel and the values of a family-owned company. That’s something we’re all stewards of.”

“We’re the tire distributor that doesn’t feel comfortable in a suit and tie,” says Schadl, who worked for an independent tire retailer and then a subsidiary of a major tire manufacturer before joining K&M Tire. “A friend of mine said K&M was looking for a sales manager and I thought I would be a good fit, so I applied.”

Schadl interviewed with both Langhals and Gossard. His first impressions of them? “Thoughtful and deliberate.” 

When they made him an offer, he accepted without hesitation. “I had other offers, but I was waiting for them to make an offer.”

Langhals’ leadership style has remained consistent over the years, according to Schadl. The same can be said for Gossard. “With Ken and Cheryl, you’re responsible for your area, but you do have to follow our values. And Ken is still very competitive. When we used to go to the SEMA Show and Cheryl’s husband would go with us — he was our purchasing manager at the time — Ken would race him up and down stairs. And he usually didn’t lose!”

Even at this stage in his career, Langhals is “very in-tune” with the business. "He knows what’s going on. We bought a warehouse in Winters, Texas. It was an old manufacturing plant. Ken spent months there, helping refurbish it. When Ken unloads a truck, he’s trying to outwork the younger guys. He wants to unload it faster! He wants to go out there and be the best he can be.”

Schadl and Knippen say Langhals wants every K&M Tire employee to feel appreciated and heard. To that end, last year Gossard launched “K&M On the Road,” a roadshow where K&M Tire sends a trailer to its locations, along with K&M Tire executives, to spend a day cooking for employees and visiting with them. Gossard and other members of K&M Tire’s leadership team have visited half of the company’s distribution centers so far and plan to visit the rest next year.

“We felt like we had to go out and visit employees more,” she says. “We wanted to talk to our employees and get feedback from them. I thought, ‘We’ll go in, we’ll grill some hamburgers and spend a couple of hours with them and make it an event. And maybe that will stand out more than one person visiting today and someone visiting six months later.’ It went over better than we thought.”

“What we hear (from employees) are simple little problems that we can fix because we’re listening,” says Schadl. “It’s been a really successful thing.”

Another successful program that Langhals and Gossard created is “K&M Cares, which takes care of employees” who are experiencing hardship in their personal lives, says Jamie Tyrrell, K&M Tire’s inside sales manager. “I just had an employee die,” he says. “He was only with us for a couple of months, but K&M Cares helped (his family) with money. The whole company came together.”

Tyrrell is one of K&M Tire’s longest-serving employees, joining the company when it acquired Detroit Tire. Around that time, Detroit Tire was struggling, according to Tyrrell. “I had several different wholesalers who wanted to hire me.”

He was familiar with K&M Tire, which was relatively new to the Detroit area. “They had a great reputation. They always had great prices. They always had inventory. Their driver, Roger, was at our warehouse first thing every morning.”

Tyrrell asked his friend and then-Bridgestone Americas Inc. executive, Barry Feasel, about K&M Tire. Feasel endorsed the company enthusiastically, telling Tyrell, “If I were to leave Bridgestone, that’s where I would go.”

Tyrrell met with Langhals. “He was very down-to-earth. He was a straight shooter.”

After Tyrrell joined K&M Tire, he managed inside sales for the company. "When I started, Delphos had a call center, Toledo had a call center and we had a call center in Michigan. Every distribution center had its own inside sales department. K&M doesn’t do anything third-party. Everything’s in-house.

“We grew quite a bit. We brought on Chicago” and K&M Tire moved into a new facility in Delphos, “so we added onto our inside sales team.”

Eventually, Tyrrell moved to K&M Tire headquarters in Delphos. “Things have changed at K&M,” he says. “We’ve grown. But Ken has never changed. He’s always been loyal to his employees. He’s always been genuine. I have a sign in my office that shows a quote from Ken. It says, ‘Thank you for making K&M the company customers want to do business with.’ That’s him. He cares about our customers and our employees.

“If something needs done, he’s doing it,” says Tyrrell. “A couple of years ago, everyone in the tire industry was really busy. Every tire you had, you sold. Every day, Ken and Cheryl went out and unloaded trucks. Cheryl had a clipboard and the warehouse guys said, ‘Ken came out here and tossed tires with us!’

“We put Ken on a pedestal, but he doesn’t put himself there. It’s always been, ‘Just take care of the customer and our employees.’ Not everyone treats people with the respect that Ken does.”

“Ken definitely leads by example,” says Donna Burgei, Gossard’s executive assistant and K&M Tire’s administrator manager. She remembers when warehouse workers at the company’s Delphos location said that they would be unable to unload a trailer load of tires in an expected amount of time. “So Ken went home and put his t-shirt and jeans on and helped them unload the trailer. He did it to show them it’s achievable if you stick with it.

“I don’t think he’s ever asked somebody to do anything that he’s never done on his own,” she says. “He’s in the thick of it, all the time. He’s the first one here in the morning. He was the first one in and last to leave for many, many years.”

Burgei joined K&M Tire in 1999. "When I first met Cheryl, I felt like she really had it together. Sometimes you work for a family business and this person is in that position just because they’re the owner’s daughter or grandson or whatever. Cheryl is where she is because she’s worked her tail off.”

Burgei started at K&M Tire as an accounts payable clerk. “I helped with inputting invoices and paying bills out weekly,” while helping with the company’s national accounts. “We were just starting to dip our feet into that.”

Her interactions with Langhals at the time were limited. “He was busy. He was nose-to-the- grindstone. I have a lot more interaction with him now than I did then. After I was here about five or six years, Cheryl came to me and said, ‘Our accounts payable manager is going to leave. You do a great job with national accounts. We would really like it if you came in and became our new accounts payable manager.’ I said, ‘Well, I like the national account stuff.’ And Ken said, ‘You have the potential to run both departments. We’ll just change your job description!’

“I did that until 2019, when Cheryl came to me again and said she needed an assistant and (the company) needed an admin department for all of our vice presidents,” says Burgei. "She said, ‘You know me the best out of anyone here and I think you and I would make a great team.’” Burgei accepted the job.

Looking back on her career at K&M Tire, Burgei says, “If it hadn’t been for those nudges, I think I would still be back in my corner. Ken and Cheryl try to pull you up. Their openness to welcoming you in is what draws people to want to be with them.”

Dave Miller, who runs K&M Tire’s marketing department, says he was drawn to the company because of its “winning ways. As a competitor and a customer of K&M during some stagnant and adverse times in our economy” around 17 years ago, he noticed that K&M Tire “was always growing. Business was booming for them.

“When I came on board with K&M in 2011, I soon realized why K&M was so successful: these folks genuinely lived by their mission, vision and were guided by their core values — and talked about it consistently during any type of meeting or announcement. As a younger professional, it was very eye-opening to see such a clearly defined road map and future plan for success.

“And Ken is very competitive. We’re here to win and to do that, we have to embrace that competitive spirit that started when he made that $100 handshake to start K&M way back in 1970. Ken bet on himself that day and has been driven by winning ways ever since.”

Miller says Langhals’ most outstanding attribute “is his ability to embody a pinnacle level of leadership in the workplace, with his family and in his community. He’s always advocated for the continuous improvement of his team and it shows by the way he sets the course for leadership, then steps out of the way and allows his leadership team to pursue our vision of becoming the leading and most trusted (tire supplier).”

Ready for the future

K&M Tire’s website notes that the company “strives to operate with Christian-based principles.”

Langhals says that K&M Tire’s values “should guide what we do both at work and at home. I believe in God and I believe the world would be a much better place if everybody had a set of values to live by and follow. Most people like to deal with down-to-earth, honest, trustworthy people who try to be fair with everybody. I think myself and most of the people here want to be fair with our customers and suppliers and they want to be fair with each other. If you have people working in a warehouse and one guy does all the work, that’s not fair. K&M is going to stay on the right path because we have people here who want to be on the right path.”

As K&M Tire continues to grow, Langhals says its staff will inevitably expand. "What do you do to get the right people? You keep working at it. You keep training and developing them. Warehousing isn’t always easy work. It’s manual labor, so there’s going to be turnover.”

K&M Tire trains new employees “as soon as we can,” says Langhals. “One of the things we want them to do is learn the K&M culture as soon as possible. If they learn that we care and we want to keep them and work with them, it’s more likely they will stay here longer. And that takes time. You can’t do that overnight. We feel it’s very important that all of our employees are treated as they should be and as they want to be.”

Langhals inspires loyalty in K&M Tire’s employees “because he cares,” says Gossard. "We’re all here, working hard and enjoying who we’re working with, knowing the person we’re working for is going to work just as hard as we do. Why wouldn’t you want to work for someone who cares about you?”

Gossard says Langhals “is always all-in. He always walks fast. He never walks slow. Even when he’s home, he’s always doing something. He just jumps in and gets it done. He’s not going to ask you to do something he won’t do. If he’s the first one here in the winter and some snow needs to be shoveled, he’s the first to grab a shovel. He’s not above doing any job that’s needed. He’s the first one leading the way.

“He’s also very open and honest,” she says. “He isn’t just going to tell you something you want to hear. He’s going to tell you the truth and stand behind what he says. He’s also really good at asking questions. He really enjoys talking with our people. If he thought there was an employee who was afraid to talk to him, he would feel terrible.”

K&M Tire’s status as an independently owned and operated business is extremely important to Langhals. He believes the company’s employees, customers and partners appreciate it, too. “I want our employees and customers to be treated like family,” he says. "How would you treat your own kids? I want them to be treated that way — not as a number or a way to make money.

“I believe that family-owned businesses have more invested in their business than what some of the big corporations do. They care more about their employees and they care more about their customers. Most of our people who deal with customers — and even those who don’t necessarily deal with customers — know how we want them to treat our customers.”

As Langhals works with Gossard and the rest of K&M Tire’s leadership team to set the stage for future success, he doesn’t envision the company becoming a coast-to-coast enterprise. “That’s not our dream. Our dream and our vision is to be the leading and most trusted provider of tires. That’s our main thing. Developing trust with our team and with our customers and also with our suppliers is what we’re really after.

“We want to be trusted by all the people we deal with. We exist to help improve the lives of others. We continue to develop our people with steady, stable jobs they enjoy. We continue to provide training and development opportunities for those who are interested in growing. We continue to reach out in our communities to provide help when we can. We want to be the type of company that people want to be part of. To accomplish these things, the company needs to grow. But it has to grow the right way.

“The tire industry has provided me and my family and a lot of people with a good living,” he says. “It has definitely helped me grow and develop through the years. But what really motivates me is coming here to the office. Most of the people here have been with us for years and years. They’re my friends and my family. I just love watching them grow and develop and seeing the whole company continue to grow. That’s what motivates me.

“We’ve had some of our customers for so many years. We’ve seen their kids grow up and take over businesses. A lot of them are my friends and they feel like my family. I feel so blessed and so honored to have been able to be a part of their lives. God has blessed me with so much.”

You can bet that, true to form, Langhals will continue to share those blessings with K&M Tire’s employees, customers and partners.

Special thanks to the following companies that supported the 2025 MTD Tire Dealer of the Year award program: 31 Incorporated, American Omni Trading, American Pacific Industries, AutoZone, BKT USA Inc., Bridgestone Americas, Carlstar Group, Coats, Continental Tire, Double Coin Tires, Falken Tire, First Choice Sourcing Solutions, Goodyear Tire, Hamaton, Hankook Tire USA, Ironhead Tires, Kumho Tire USA, MaddenCo, Nexen Tire America, Pirelli Tire, Stellar Industries, Sutong Tire Resources, Tech Supply, The Group, Turbo Tires, Yokohama Tire, Yokohama TWS North America.