John is one of Alberta’s brightest young entrepreneurs and has one of its fastest growing companies. Here are the secrets of his success. See if you can guess what business he’s in.
- His top priority? Warm and fuzzy stuff.
“The first thing I tell prospective employees is that you’ll never catch us in a bad mood and that’s the challenge we’ll make to you,” he said. “I’m talking 24-7, 365 days a year. No one is going to catch us in a bad mood.”
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- Most important asset? “We’ve built our business entirely on the relationship side, not price. I can’t say that price isn’t a factor, but it’s our relationships that have built the business.”
- The secret to building a good relationship? “Good service for sure, but we also have fun. There probably isn’t a week that goes by where we’re not playing a practical joke on someone.”
- Favourite practical joke? “Telling a few clients they’d been selected for a new event called merchant bull riding. We did our research: we matched it up so it was just before the rodeo came through their town; gave them the bull’s name and their chute time, and dropped the name of somebody they knew and said that person had volunteered them.”
One customer
actually said he was willing to climb on the back of 2,000 pounds of cantankerous beef and risk being stomped to death.
Here’s one last anecdote about John. He’s only 31, started his business from scratch six years ago and each Christmas treats his more than 40 employees and their families to a company-paid holiday in Banff.
“If you put the cost-benefit down on paper, you wouldn’t begin to come close. But we think we get paid back in other ways.”
So what’s John’s business? Something wildly creative like a web design company or extremely lucrative like a financial planner for rich oil executives?
Nope. John Koliaska runs a trucking company that hauls grain and cattle.
Can you believe it? Think of the business of trucking and “warm and fuzzy” doesn’t exactly spring to mind. Isn’t this a business where rates and being on time are the only things that count?
Maybe not. As a farm kid who has worked as a grain broker and farm supply marketer, Koliaska looked at trucking and saw a broken business model: an industry failing to offer customers something they really wanted.
“I had seen it from all sides and I felt there were some areas where the whole industry was clearly lacking,” he said.
“So we bought a few trucks to find out if there was profitability in building relationships with customers. As it turns out, we’ve hit on a formula that’s working.”
Working like gangbusters is more like it. JK Trucking started with one truck in 1999, grew to seven by 2000 and has added one more rig, on average, every couple of months since then. Koliaska and wife Jeannie have nearly three dozen trucks and, not surprisingly, have no trouble finding people despite a severe nationwide shortage of drivers.
The real test came when BSE struck and the market was flooded with desperate cattle truckers willing to haul grain for ridiculously low rates. It was then that Koliaska’s customers remembered how JK always says exactly when the driver will show up and calls well in advance if there’s a snag. They remembered how the firm does everything possible to make sure there’s no problem with customs documents. They remembered all the laughs they had. So they told Koliaska, “just find a number we can both live with.”
“They totally understood what we needed to make it work and that’s pretty cool,” Koliaska said.
Are there lessons here for farmers? Absolutely.
He deals with some of the country’s largest and most prosperous grain farmers. (Yes, they do exist.) There’s some he wouldn’t want to deal with. You can tell, he said, that the ones who treat people right will be the ones who continue to prosper over the long term.
They encourage their employees to be the most they can be. They put themselves in the shoes of their customers and ask themselves, “what can I do to make their life better?” And they know that being quick to smile and slow to anger pays dividends.
“I know that when I was buying grain or selling fertilizer, if you liked working with someone, you’d try to be more creative or work that much harder to create a win-win situation,” Koliaska said.
“That doesn’t happen if the person is rude or doesn’t care about your side of things.”
Do you want suppliers who go the extra mile for you? Do you want enthusiastic people asking for work when everyone else is complaining they can’t get people? Do you want customers willing to pay a bit more because they see value in the relationship they have with you?
If getting warm and fuzzy makes sense in the unsentimental world of trucking, why wouldn’t it make sense on the farm?
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the
Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found in the news desk section at www.farmcentre.com. The views stated here are for information only and are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
