How Empire Trailer Hire grew from a front lawn to 200 trailers and 30 locations with Lockii

Tied to the driveway: why one trailer was not a business yet

The early days had one very obvious problem. Matt had to be there for every single hire. Someone needed a trailer at 7am? He had to be there. Saturday afternoon? There. He was physically tied to that driveway.

That is not a business. That is a second job with worse hours. Every successful hire still depended on Matt's calendar, his sleep, and whether he happened to be home when a customer needed the gear. Growth would only make the trap tighter.

So the brief wrote itself. Trailer hire had to work whether Matt was standing in the yard or not. If the customer experience could not survive without him at the lock, Empire would never leave West Mackay.

Coded padlocks, text messages, and the first self-serve spark

Matt started getting creative. He bought a second trailer, then a third, and began experimenting with coded padlocks, sending customers a code before pickup so they could collect the trailer themselves. It was rough around the edges. Codes went out by message. The process depended on Matt remembering every detail. But the concept worked: people could hire a trailer anytime, whether he was there or not.

By the time five trailers were sitting on that West Mackay front yard, he knew the next step could not be more padlocks and more texts. The business needed a proper system, not a patchwork held together by memory and good luck.

That is where the software story begins.

Building the first system

Matt worked with Bodhi, the founder of Lockii, to create a system that automated the process between customers booking trailers and accessing them. In those early days it was still all done through email and text. It had limitations. Codes, confirmations, and handovers still lived in channels that were never designed to run a fleet.

Even so, it was a huge step in the right direction, and the foundation of what made Empire Trailer Hire what it is today. No calls. No waiting. No Matt in the driveway. Just instant trailers. Customers could book online, get a PIN, unlock the keybox, and go. Matt became optional for the hire itself.

That partnership matters for more than nostalgia. The product that later became Lockii was shaped by the same operator problems Empire hit first: how do you take payment, issue access, and keep a hire moving without a person standing at the trailer?

A retired truckie, a block of land, and the first real base

With a working system in place, Matt needed somewhere to actually scale from. Five trailers on a residential front lawn had a ceiling. He met a bloke who was retiring from his trucking company and had a block of land sitting unused. The lease made sense. That yard at Paget became Empire's first real base.

The fleet grew from five trailers to twenty-five in that yard. The business finally had space to operate like a fleet instead of a side hustle. Then it was time to go further than one site.

One cold walk-in. Four locations. A playbook for growth.

Empire's first big partnership came from a cold walk-in. Matt walked into a Mackay City store, spoke to the manager on the floor, and within weeks had trailers across four Porters Group locations. One conversation. That is how straightforward the model is to sell when you believe in it.

The offer to partners was simple. Empire places trailers at an established business. That business earns monthly passive revenue without touching the operation. No staff involvement. No customer calls. No maintenance. Empire handles equipment, smart locks, bookings, payments, and support. Partners also get branded signage and the foot traffic that comes with being a listed hire location.

Once businesses saw how the model worked, it stopped being a hard conversation. Shopping centres, service stations, hardware stores, sporting clubs, air conditioning companies, bathroom suppliers, landscape suppliers. Every new town became another version of the same playbook, refined a little more each time.

Mackay to the Whitsundays. Then west. Then north.

Expansion picked up pace across Central and North Queensland. Whitsundays. Moranbah. Ayr. Townsville. Emerald. Gladstone. Bowen. The fleet pushed into remote mining towns as well as coastal centres, proving the model was not limited to one kind of main street.

By the middle of that growth curve the network had already proven something important: trailer hire did not need a giant depot in every town. It needed trailers in the right places, partners who understood the value, and systems that could keep every site running without Matt flying between them.

That is also where the demands on software changed. What started as emails and text messages had to become something far more capable. Bookings and lock access were no longer enough on their own. Fleet tracking, maintenance scheduling, and customer communications all had to live in the same operation.

The part customers do not see

From the outside, Empire looks simple. Book in about a minute. Collect it yourself. Return when you are done, day or night. No calls. No check-ins. No fuss.

Behind that sit hundreds of trailers across dozens of locations that all need to stay road-ready, clean, and compliant. Tyres, lights, hitches, brakes, tie-down points. Every component gets checked on a schedule. One poorly maintained trailer at 6am is a problem that falls on a customer who did everything right. That is not acceptable.

Empire invested heavily in systems and processes to stay on top of a geographically spread fleet. Alongside booking and access, they built dedicated maintenance workflows to track inspections, servicing, repairs, and compliance. Third-party maintenance crews operate across the regions. When a trailer is due, the team knows before the customer ever does.

The system looks simple from the outside. That simplicity is earned. Fleet tracking, scheduled maintenance, and smart locks at every location are not extras. They are how a front-yard idea becomes a network people can trust at any hour.

From three systems to one platform: Lockii

The early build with Bodhi was never meant to stay a side project forever. As Empire scaled, Matt was still juggling three different systems to keep the network running. The fleet and location count climbed, and the stack became the bottleneck. What started as a clever self-serve workaround had to become infrastructure for a regional operation.

Lockii became that platform. Booking, payments, access, and the day-to-day work of running hires moved into one place instead of living across tools that did not talk to each other. Matt got time and focus back. The business stopped depending on him stitching every hire together by hand.

For a distributed trailer network, that is not a nice UI upgrade. It is the difference between managing a yard and running locations across half of Queensland, on software shaped by the same partnership that got Empire self-serve in the first place.

Matt is clear about what changed. Things got much easier. The platform is user-friendly. Support actually listens. And for the first time in a long stretch of growth, he could focus on running the business again instead of holding the systems together.

200 trailers. 30 locations. Still compounding

Empire has now scaled to 200 trailers and 30 locations, from Mackay to Townsville, Emerald to Gladstone, with partner sites still coming online. The customer flow stays deliberately plain: book online, collect with a smart lock, hitch up, and return when done. The operation behind it is anything but plain.

Every town on the map is a relationship. A partner who saw the value. A community that needed a trailer when nowhere else was open. Empire was built in regional Queensland, by someone who actually lives there and knows what it is like to need gear on a weekend with no depot open and no staff to call.

Matt's read on Lockii is that the value compounds. Every month the platform takes more off the plate, which is exactly what a growing multi-location hire business needs if the next town is going to feel like the last one, not a reset.

Since switching to Lockii, things have gotten so much easier. I was juggling three different systems before, and now it's all in one place. It's saved me a heap of time and stress, and I can actually focus on running the business again. The platform's really user-friendly, and the support has been unreal, the team genuinely cares and listens.

Matt Cole, Empire Trailer Hire

What comes next for Empire Trailer Hire

Empire did not get here through a franchise kit or a giant depot strategy. It got here one location at a time: find a site with space and traffic, place the trailers, automate the hire, and keep the fleet road-ready. New partners still come online the same way the Porters Group conversation started, with a model that is easy to explain because the operation does not land on the partner's staff.

Matt puts the operating philosophy simply. The business gets better one step at a time. Every location, every trailer, every system is repetition, refinement, and showing up. Repetition is the mother of skill. They are not done yet.

With Lockii taking more operational load each month, Empire has room to keep doing exactly that: open the next town, place the next trailers, and keep 24/7 hire feeling as simple as it did when the whole business still fit on a front lawn.