Texas Arrangers

The Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement signed in 1988 and the North American Free Trade Agreement inked four years later re-oriented Canada’s trade flows to the north and south, and no one has felt that shift more than truckers. Crossborder truck trips have been on the rise every year from 1990 to 2002–by an average of 5 per cent.

The bulk of international freight either originates or ends up in Southern Ontario. Just ask anyone who lives there. They’ll tell you how important–no, vital–that market really is.

“Being from Toronto originally, I’m allowed to say this,” explains Brian Page, president and general manager of Winnipeg Motor Express, with a wry smile. “There’s a perception that Ontario is the centre of the universe, that everything headed in or out of Canada by truck goes through there. Don’t get me wrong, Ontario is a big market. But we discovered a secret at our company: a lot of freight flows out of Chicago, too, and Minneapolis, Tulsa, Dallas, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. There’s plenty of freight going all over Western Canada and the Western United States.”

Page is happy to chase it. Since the early 1990s when Winnipeg Motor Express expanded from its origins as a consolidator and courier in the Prairies and took on long-distance truckload freight, the company has carved out a niche triangulating routes from Manitoba down the I-29 and I-35 corridor to Texas, and back north to cities in Western Canada before returning home to Manitoba.

Initially, it wasn’t the sort of haul every carrier jumped at. Shortly after free trade took effect, many Manitoba-based manufacturers were finding markets in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, but at the time only a handful of local carriers seemed eager to go there. The distance between Winnipeg and Houston is 1,500 miles–too far if you’re a trucking company worried about scrambling for freight coming north to Canada.

Page says his management group figured if the company could focus on the right markets, namely Dallas, Houston, and the border crossings such as Laredo, El Paso, and Brownsville, it could build a healthy return business with a core of steady accounts.

“To us, 1,500 miles is our sweet spot,” Page says. “On any given week, more than half of our arrivals are in the state of Texas. We like that distance and we certainly like the market.”

Page acknowledges that Winnipeg Motor Freight isn’t the only Canadian carrier making hay in the Lone Star state. But most run between Ontario and Texas. “We’ve tried to specialize by connecting Texas with Western Canada,” Page says. “We don’t run up against guys like Challenger Motor Freight or BLM (two large Cambridge, Ont., carriers with established Ontario-Texas lanes) quite so much, and big American truckload carriers like U.S. Xpress, Covenant Transport, and J.B. Hunt don’t want to come to Western Canada.”

As a result, Page says, there’s less competition on price. That means his company can focus on service and long-term customers instead.

It’s doing just that in Houston, where Winnipeg Motor Express has opened an office.

“Our attitude is that Texas isn’t our backhaul; Texas is our headhaul,” Page states. “It gets back to us making sure that we’re making three-position hauls, where at least two of the three are in that 1,200-miles-or-more kind of range, and the third is our shortest leg and ideally our only Canadian-dollar move. In order to make that system work, we can’t be transactional in nature, picking up business here and there from load brokers. We need secured accounts.”

The company hauls paper products, consumer goods, and subassemblies south and brings back manufactured goods, textiles, resins, and polymers for distribution in Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. Texas also has a robust petrochemical industry. Page says the Houston office is part of an important but simple sales strategy. Folks in Texas like dealing with a homegrown rep.

When asked if there’s anything unique about doing business in Texas, Page talks about having to dodge alligators in the trailer drop lots. That, and how much easier it is to get an informal meeting with a customer there than one in, say, a more buttoned-down account in Chicago or Toronto.

“The people in Texas are a lot like the folks here in Winnipeg or anywhere in Western Canada–they’re accommodating and friendly people to do business with,” he says. “I got used to that pretty quickly.”

Much more quickly than the sight of those alligators.Winnipeg Motor Express

Base: Winnipeg

Fleet: 225 power units, including

120 owner-operator vehicles, and 370 trailers. The company operates terminals with warehousing in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, and Toronto.

Services: Truckload, LTL, local cartage, temperature-controlled, third-party logistics. The company is hazmat licensed and certified.

History: Winnipeg Motor Express is a division of The Ram Group of Companies, which grew out of a courier business started by owner Rick Sobey in 1979. The company was acting as a delivery agent for consolidators in Ontario and Quebec, but started trucking freight into Winnipeg themselves. Today, that run accounts for less than 5 per cent of revenues at Winnipeg Motor Express, but it was the springboard for longer hauls into the United States. Now roughly 70 per cent of the company’s revenues come from moving international freight.