Spend some time with Ben Falkner, President of Teraflex and learn more about their almost 70-year history and the innovative line of products for all your Jeep styles.
Be sure to SUBSCRIBE to Conversations with Big Rich on your favorite Podcast Player
3:55 – Growing up in Manti, the best small town experience
8:07 – I loved dinking around with Jeeps
9:04 – Grandpa started MEPCO in the 50’s
12:28 – the start of Teraflex
14:46 – it was worse than factory!
17:16 – they don’t maintain their vehicles
27:00 – we call it Clarence
32:31 – more than a 60 program
37:29 – Falcon shocks began in 2016
53:30 – the people of Teraflex
57:50 – he’s pretty amped up
1:05:29 –All these new customers
We want to thank our sponsors Maxxis Tires and 4Low Magazine.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:01:20.780] – Big Rich Klein
On today’s conversations with Big Rich, we have Ben Falkner, who is the president of Teraflex. His family, has a long history in offroad, starting with his grandfather with MEPCO out of Salt Lake City.
[00:01:36.790] – Ben Falkner
Hey Rich, how’s it going?
[00:01:37.900]
It’s going great and how are you doing today?
[00:01:41.870]
It’s going great, the sun is shining and all is good.
[00:01:45.040] – Big Rich Klein
Excellent. We’re down on the Gulf Coast in Texas and we haven’t seen Sun all week. We had just enough break on the Fourth of July, the evening, Sunday evening, to where they were able to fire off the fireworks here in Port Aransas. And then it’s pretty much been raining since.
[00:02:04.240] – Ben Falkner
Man, that’s crazy. Is that down by, are you worried about Elsa down there that I haven’t checked that storm much, but I’ve heard about it.
[00:02:11.590] – Big Rich Klein
No, Elsa is going up from Cuba into Florida and then should hit Georgia and South Carolina. Well, we are in the south coast on what they call the coastal bend. So we’re closer to what we’re the entry area into the Corpus Christi Bay. OK, we’re pretty I mean, within, I don’t know, 70 miles, 80 miles of Mexico. So it’s it’s a really nice area down here, but this we got to some kind of a low pressure that came out of the north and is sitting on top of us.
[00:02:50.150] – Big Rich Klein
So it’s creating all this rain, which is fine when you’re on a boat. You know, it really doesn’t affect the boat much because we’re already floating.
[00:02:59.920] – Ben Falkner
Yeah. If you don’t want to get wet, you probably shouldn’t get on the boat.
[00:03:02.270] – Big Rich Klein
Correct. So let’s let’s jump right in and, you know, tell us about your history, where you grew up and you know, where you went to school. Some things like that will get started that way.
[00:03:18.590] – Ben Falkner
OK, so I was born in Murray, Utah, which is up here in the Salt Lake Valley, for those that don’t know, shortly after we moved down to a town called Manti that’s down in central Utah and. I live down there for, I think around eight years, and I love that place. Love, small town livin’ and I love the fact that I could get on my dirt bike and just go wherever I wanted and nobody cared. And that was great.
[00:03:51.190] – Big Rich Klein
How old were you when you moved to Manti?
[00:03:55.050] – Ben Falkner
Two or three too young to remember. OK, so all my my young childhood memories are all of Manti that I actually remember. And yeah, it was a great place to to grow up. Lots of good friends and plenty of time on bikes and dirt bikes and growing up in the mountains, which is right outside of town there. Those beautiful loved it. And I love the small town feel. And. So we move back. I’ll take my dad to get in trouble for leaving his keys in the rig because down in Manti, everybody left them in the rig.
[00:04:36.810] – Big Rich Klein
All right. I can understand that. That’s how I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. But after college, pretty much Placerville, California, small town, 10000 people on the way to Tahoe and same thing. We we lived on the end of it of a while. The road was dirt past us and there was no and only two houses. So, you know, you didn’t take the keys out of the vehicle. You never locked the house.
[00:05:06.420] – Big Rich Klein
And that was really cool. It’s my kids grew up there, too, as well.
[00:05:12.090] – Ben Falkner
And that’s awesome. I love small town stuff, and then we moved back up into Salt Lake area and we lived in Sandy basically for the rest of my life. We my dad started working for my grandpa. Again, he worked for them before and then we went down to Manti and he was a service manager for Ron Green Chevrolet down there, and then Grandpa asked him if he would come back and they partnered up and he came back. And I think that was in.
[00:05:49.700] – Ben Falkner
Eighty nine or ninety, and then basically been up here ever since, and we love this area, too, it’s great.
[00:05:59.970] – Big Rich Klein
So when you were in that school age is small town, so was it very rural? The the school was it, you know, multiple grades or a lot of grades, all in one school, or did they have it separated between like an elementary and then a middle school and high school.
[00:06:24.060] – Ben Falkner
I was only there for elementary school, but they had five grades there, I believe, and I think they had even a couple of the small towns outside of Manti that kids would come from to go to school there because there was towns around that were even smaller than Manti. And Manti was, I think, only around three thousand people at the time.
[00:06:44.040] – Big Rich Klein
Oh, wow.
[00:06:44.750] – Ben Falkner
OK, but began in high school. I know that there was multiple towns that went to the high school too, but I wasn’t there for that experience so.
[00:06:55.470] – Big Rich Klein
OK, and then after the after. You guys moved back up into the Salt Lake basin from Manti, what town did you move into then?
[00:07:07.970] – Ben Falkner
We moved into Sandy, which is Salt Lake, and that’s a great place to live. I went to still remain elementary there and some great experiences, great friends there. And then. Went on to go to Churchill Junior High and then Hillcrest High School on. That was pretty much my school. I didn’t really go to school after high school because. I knew what I wanted to do and I didn’t know of any. College courses that we’re going to.
[00:07:44.020] – Ben Falkner
Help me do exactly what I wanted better, and I had a really hard time paying to go to school because. I didn’t love school anyway, and paying to go to school was like crazy.
[00:07:54.980] – Big Rich Klein
So when you were in school, say high school? Did you did you play sports or were you just more, you know, outdoorsy?
[00:08:07.400] – Ben Falkner
I was outdoors in a gear head, so I spent a lot of time dinking around with jeeps and stuff and Jeep parts and all that kind of stuff, I actually worked with my dad every chance I got. And so as young as eight or nine, I would get super excited when my dad would take me to work and he put me to work and I loved it. And I would take any opportunity that I could go to work for them because I just love the Jeep parts and figuring out how they worked and stuff like that. READ MORE
