A Trucker's Passion - a man and his father start a trucking company - Brief Article

Mark Richard Moss is a free-lance writer in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Karl H. Robinson is, and always will be, a truck driver. Although he is the co-founder and president of R & R Transportation Inc. in Greensboro, N.C., there are still times when he has to get behind the wheel of one of his company's trucks.

"I don't like to be cooped up in the office," Robinson says. "I get grief all the time from my father for driving a truck, but that's what I am. I am a truck driver. I still love to get out there and drive."

That passion for driving has helped create a nine-year-old, family-owned trucking business with 1998 sales of about $1.3 million. Last year, Robinson was named minority small-business person for 1998 by the Greensboro Area Chamber of Commerce. The nominating committee found that R & R had "grown wonderfully" despite being in a very competitive industry, says Kathy Elliott, the chamber's small-business developer. "[The Robinsons] have a very strong and stable company"

The company covers the Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point area, a market that Robinson says accounts for more than $20 million a year m delivery business. R & R Transportation (the R's represent Karl and his father, Henry) serves its 200 customers, mostly small companies, with a fleet of trucks, vans, cars, and tractor-trailers.

Leander Isaac, shipping supervisor at PBM Graphics in Greensboro, has been using R & R Transportation for about five years. "They do a great job. They're always willing to do what they have to do to get the job done," he says.

Robinson says that his father, a company vice president, doesn't approve of him driving because he feels his son should be at the office running the company. But Karl says that his father is at least partly responsible for his love of driving and the trucking business.

When Karl was in his early 20s, Henry, a plumber at the time, bought a tractor-trailer to make extra money hauling goods. On a trip to Texas with a driver his father had hired, Karl got behind the wheel of the tractor-trailer for the first time.

When he returned, he quit his job managing a liquor store and took over the driving responsibilities. Eight months later he was injured when befell off a rusted trailer stop, and he couldn't work for more than a month. His father sold the tractor-trailer.

Karl held a series of truck-driving jobs, and at one, for a trucking company at Piedmont Thad International Airport in the late 1980s, he gained dispatching experience. He was promoted to terminal manager, the position he held five years later when the firm filed for bankruptcy.

Looking for work in 1990, he was often told that he was overqualified for a driver's position. But he had established good relations with the customers of his most recent employer. They started calling him at home, wondering if he was available for deliveries. After he started contacting other customers, business picked up, and he and his father established R & R. Robinson also borrowed $3,000 from his mother for business expenses.

"After about three months, we were swamped," Robinson says. Sales the first year reached $61,000.

Robinson now has refined and packaged a business plan that he says is a marketable product. The LTL (less than a truckload) industry, he explains, applies to large trucking companies that combine partial truckloads of freight to make a complete load for dispatch to various destinations nationwide. To describe his business, Robinson added "local" to the term and copyrighted it.

He says his LLTL concept is a proven game plan" that outlines how to get started without buying expensive tractor-trailers, how to give favorable rates to customers, and how to negotiate contracts with large corporations.

LLTL comes with software and Robinson's expertise through consulting. The price is $100,000--half for business start-up costs; half for the package itself. Robinson says he hasn't yet sold an LLTL program because he hasn't found the time to market it.

"I'm not a salesperson," he says. "I'm a truck driver."

COPYRIGHT 1999 U.S. Chamber of Commerce
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group