www.kcsmallbiz.com/march-2009/profile-keep-on-truckin.h -
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Published on: 3/1/2009
Last Visited: 3/3/2009
Entrepreneur: Tom Duvall
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Tom Duvall
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Take, for instance, Tom Duvall, president of TruckMovers, which specializes in providing transportation for truck dealers, fleets and manufacturers.
In the early 1990s, Duvall was a CPA who had TruckMovers as a client.
At that time, the company, then named Dealers Choice Truckaway, was more or less a one-man operation running out of the basement of the owner.
Today, it's the nation's second largest volume truck moving company.
In 1996, the owner wanted to sell the company, and Duvall decided to buy it.
His start as an entrepreneur, however, was inauspicious, to be sure.
"I spent a week in the office and realized I had nothing," Duvall said.
"Everyone quit.
Some gave two weeks' notice, but most didn't."
The employees left to start a competing business, which quickly failed.
Two of the former employees, including the nephew of the original owner, later returned to work with Duvall.
In the meantime, though, faced with a business to run and no help, Duvall called and asked for help from a lifelong friend, Don Houk, who managed a truck stop in Dallas.
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Duvall then set about digging in; and digging out of the hole he found the business was in. Since he'd defended the previous owners through an IRS audit, he had some knowledge of the business' numbers, but didn't know much about the operation and how the company actually did its work.
"We went through all of the files," he said.
"We searched out ex-employees to find out what the model was before."
The company worked with a Department of Transportation consultant to determine exactly what it needed to do to be in compliance with industry and government rules, how to hire drivers, etc. Duvall also met with existing and potential customers in an effort to build the business.
"We just kept pushing forward," he said.
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Duvall signed a sub-contract agreement to work with a larger company, which brought $5 million of business to TruckMovers in 1999.
But in 2000, the company it was subbing for lost its client and TruckMovers took a step back with just over $2 million in revenues.
Duvall decided it was time to take a hard look at the business and figure out how to differentiate it from the competition, so it wouldn't just survive, but would thrive.
First, the company had to get another big client.
Duvall spent more than a week working on a full-blown proposal-unheard of in those days when so much business was done by companies simply quoting their fees over the phone.
Gettin' Techie With It
TruckMovers won the contract, but the incident pointed out one of the major hurdles TruckMovers faced: The trucking industry was woefully antiquated when it came to business practices and technology.
Business had been done the same way for many years and change was slow in coming.
"No one did e-mail in the truck industry," Duvall said.
But it was worse than just lack of e-mail.
The industry on the whole-TruckMovers included-hadn't automated any systems.
TruckMovers' world revolved entirely around a binder with handwritten contracts and delivery notes inside.
Duvall realized that was no way to run or build a business.
"We made a flow chart of how the system should work," he said.
"The way technology was taking off, we thought that if we could develop software to do what we were doing (on paper) efficiently, then we could do more with less and do it cheaper."
One of the biggest problems with any automation software that had been developed up to that point was that it lacked the ability to calculate mileage.
Being able to do that automatically would help TruckMovers make its bids quicker and more accurate.
As it happened, Duvall's mother worked at the University of Central Missouri (then Central Missouri State University).
She knew a member) of the university's technology department was leaving and looking for new opportunities.
In 2002, Duvall hired him as an in-house programmer.
His work immediately transformed the company.
"He really understood what we were trying to accomplish," Duvall said.
Within a few months, the new software was ready to launch and TruckMovers was taking it to customers and showing how it could link into their systems and make the whole truck moving process more efficient.
It helps customers know where their trucks are at any time, while assisting TruckMovers in finding drivers when and where they're needed.
Soon after the software was developed, Duvall pitched it to Daimler (then named Freightliner), an existing customer.
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The road to becoming a national leader in truck moving hasn't been a smooth one, Duvall is quick to admit.
There were times he wasn't sure he'd really made a good decision in buying TruckMovers in the first place.
And, there are decisions he would change if he could do things again.
One involves hiring and waiting for the right person for a job.
"At one point, we were just getting warm bodies," he said.
"That doesn't work.
You have to do what it takes to find the right people and then work on retaining them."
Duvall also wishes he'd spent more time working to understand Department of Transportation issues early on.
He was lucky to figure out what was going wrong and was able to get into compliance before the department audited the company.
TruckMovers is now in complete compliance, but getting there was tough.
One of the strategies Duvall took from the start to put TruckMovers on the right road was not taking any work for granted.
"We took the approach that we were new," he said.
"We were not going to get more than one shot at getting business.
We wouldn't get the chance to fail.
The customer is always right, which is sometimes difficult because they are occasionally wrong.
But I've bit my tongue and tried to do the right thing to develop relationships and anticipate customers' needs."
Duvall's philosophy about technology is that they never ask their customers to change what they do.
TruckMovers can move them toward their methods once they are in the door, but Duvall and his team do everything they can to make their system adaptable to clients.
"We can do anything.
You tell us what you need and we'll adapt to your model.
We'll work together to get to what works best for them," Duvall said.
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"We did a lot in 2008 to grab marketshare, " Duvall said.
"We don't know when or if a pre-buy will happen this time."
To insure its long-term viability, TruckMovers is working on shoring up the foundations of its business.
"As we go from a very small business to a larger small business, the foundation has to be built to support our long-term growth," he said.
"We are reinvesting our earnings because we don't want to get to a point where we can't grow because we don't have a foundation."
The company continues working on development of new software and distancing itself from the competition who are all trying to catch up technologically.
It recently announced that it signed a contract with Volvo Logistics that will have it moving most Volvo and Mack trucks in the United States and Canada.
"We're not settling," Duvall said.
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