Hitching a Ride

These days, business for Ken Konrad and his wife Mel moves faster than the high-performance BMWs the couple hauls between Vancouver and Toronto. The Konrads own Winnipeg-based Kee West Auto Carriers, a company that has evolved from a daily car rental operation they were operating into one of the more successful and reliable car-haulers in Western Canada. They bought their first carrier to transfer their own goods between their offices in Winnipeg and Calgary.

“We got to know a lot of auto dealers and began getting requests from some of them to move their products,” Konrad says.

It wasn’t long after launching the car-hauling business in the fall of 1997 that ADESA Auctions pulled up Kee West’s driveway. The North America-wide auto auction house needed someone to deliver cars to auction sites in Western Canada. The problem was, at the time, only one trucking company specialized in auto hauling across Canada, and that carrier’s priority was delivering new cars to dealers.

“We move over two million cars a year,” says Gregg Maidment, ADESA’s general manager for Western Canada. “Our business is growing by leaps and bounds. We needed to find a reliable company to deliver our autos to our buyers.”

That’s where Kee West stepped in. The small company’s hands-on operation, good delivery times, and willingness to specialize in the secondary car moving market got it the job, says Maidment.

The alliance with ADESA has propelled Kee West in just two years from a mom and pop operation with three trucks to a fleet of 50 and growing. Konrad expects to be operating 100 units within the next three years.

Kee West has a mix of truck bodies. To build the overheads and trailers, the company looks to Boydston Metalworks in Portland, Ore. The power units are a combination of company-owned and owner-operator vehicles.

“We have owner-operators with up to 25 years experience in the car hauling business,” Konrad says. “It’s hard to find the right people.”

It’s not because of the money. Some drivers can make a six-figure salary in this business. But it’s a rigorous job, both mentally and physically. Konrad speculates that complex loading procedures, stringent safety requirements, the responsibility of handling more than a million dollars worth of equipment and product, and the critical thinking involved are reasons why drivers shy away from the opportunity to pull a trailer full of four-wheelers.

“Loading and unloading cars is grueling work,” Konrad says. “It’s like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle. You have to load different sized units safely one atop another. It can take two to three hours per load.

“Every load is unique,” he says. “In the secondary market, you don’t have a repetitive action. You have to keep in mind over-dimensional objects, keep in mind heights, different regional weights and measures, proper tie-down procedures. In order to be successful at this, you just can’t take a pin-to-pin guy and make him a car hauler. It’s a unique trade.”

Once a new driver has been recruited, he will spend the first few months in the cab with an experienced driver. Konrad says training the driver to travel loaded down a highway and trusting him with the equipment is the easy part. He estimates that it takes at least two years for a new driver to physically understand the proper load sequence for the cars and the load potential of the trailer unit.

“To begin with, a driver has to be comfortable driving the cars onto the carriers,” he says. “Then, every vehicle is unique with its own tie-down slots. The higher-end vehicles are hidden and must be exposed. You have to structure your load and overlap cars,” he says. “What’s most important, and what takes time, is being able to visualize the load prior to having it on. If dispatch hands you a sheet of paper with six trucks and two cars, you need to sit back and know where all the cars are going to be sitting . and be able to load them in accordance with laws and regulations.”

After opening offices in all the ADESA outlets in Western Canada, Kee West is beginning to work with manufactures in transporting new cars to dealers. Konrad, whose company hauls for BMW in Western Canada, says the new car market is looking for other alternatives to the larger, one-stop-shop carriers.

The next stage for the fleet, Konrad says, is to install an equipment tracking system. “Our offices are computerized and we are communicating with the trucks by cell phone,” he says. It works for now, but the fleet is growing to the point where Kee-West will need a more sophisticated system for managing its loads and fleet.

An increasing number of American dealers and auction houses looking to take advantage of Canadian currency by importing Canadian vehicles into the States gave Kee West the opportunity last year to expand south of the border. Kee West is truly a small Canadian business success story. But don’t expect this company to follow their former hometown hockey franchise down south. Key West Auto Carriers? No way. Business in Canada is just too good.