Randy Marten
More than risk-taking is involved in order to become a successful entrepreneur. It takes hard work.
Deregulation helped level the playing field, and Roger Marten was poised to take advantage of it.
'My father was an entrepreneur, plain and simple. He rolled the dice every day." That's how Randy Marten, president and CEO of Marten Transport, describes his father, Roger. The senior Marten founded the company in Mondovi, Wis., back in 1946 at the age of 17, delivering milk in a 1940 Chevrolet truck bought with $400 borrowed from his mother.
But it takes more than risk-taking to be a successful entrepreneur - it takes hard work. Randy learned about that early in life. When he was about 13 years old, he started washing trucks, changing oil and fixing tires. "Then I got to go to my grandfather's farm and work on that," he recalls.
"I got to know what it was like to be real broke. I got to know what it was like to live with people who bet everything they had and worked 20 hours a day to make their company go. I was brought up with that."
In fact, Randy likes to say his father managed with an MBA - "that stands for major boot in the ass in Wisconsin."
After delivering milk for the Modena Co-Op Creamery in the Modena, Wis., area where he was born and raised, Roger Marten expended his milk delivery routes in the 1950s. He also bought his first tractor-trailer combination and started hauling petroleum, and doubled the company's volume by acquiring Mondovi Trucking Co.
In 1962, the Land O' Lakes drying operation in Mondovi closed, creating a need for milk to be transported to its other powdered milk facilities. Marten secured a contract to haul the products, purchased two tractor-trailer units and began what would become a long-term, profitable relationship with this dairy cooperative.
Having experienced some regional success in the early 1960s, Roger began to focus on developing his interstate carrier business, serving customers in the Midwest and on the West Coast. He also planned a small office complex and service terminal on the property that now houses the company's headquarters in Mondovi. In 1965 a one-bay garage (in Mondovi) became Marten's first terminal.
By 1972, the company began hauling milk to Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, expanding the company's long-haul milk transport business. In 1976 Marten purchased Hiawatha Produce of Winona, Minn. This acquisition was the start of Marten's long-distance hauling of perishable foods in refrigerated trailers.
Randy, meanwhile, got a degree in business at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, while continuing to work at his father's trucking company since the college was only 30 miles away. After he graduated in 1974, he started working for Marten Transport full-time. He did whatever was needed - calling on customers, dispatching trucks, driving a truck.
Because Marten was hauling exempt commodities in the first place, deregulation in 1980 was not a big change for them, Randy says.
"When my dad started this business, we couldn't acquire operating authority. We couldn't afford an attorney, and if we did apply, we couldn't fight all these companies that were all protective. My dad always used to say we started out in that jungle [of unregulated trucking], so we knew what the jungle was like."
However, deregulation did level the playing field, and Roger Marten was poised to take advantage of it. When he saw deregulation on the horizon, he bought some operating authority from other companies. This gave the company a bit of a head start, Randy says.
His father predicted that if he could ever get into one of the companies in that operating authority profile, they would be on their way. Today, that company is still a Marten customer, and Marten is its largest temperature-controlled carrier.
Another thing that helped his company and the truckload industry as a whole, Marten says, was the rise of large chain grocery stores and large discount stores.
"Suddenly they were taking full truckloads of product instead of two pallets," he says. "I remember one of my customers in 1983 - their pricing schematic was built around 'super truckload.' I bought 15 48-foot trailers to accommodate this customer. It was one of our first customers to be able to buy full truckloads of product."
Since Roger Marten elected to take the company public in 1986, it has averaged 11.3% growth per year, without any acquisitions.
"We're a pretty conservative bunch up here," Randy says. Part of it is simply the nature of the refrigerated trucking business. "In fast economic times, a dry van carrier can grow faster," he says. The food business - 65% of our business - doesn't move at the same breakneck pace. So it's really a steady, consistent process."
Growth is also limited by the ability to find good employees. "For every 5.66 tractors we add to Marten, I have to add another support person. That doesn't count the people I had to hire to drive those trucks. It's a very people-intense business. So it all goes back to how well you take care of the people you have."
No matter what the issues - whether it's driver turnover, the price of fuel or skyrocketing insurance - Marten believes they can all be conquered with the help of a four-letter word: work.
"There's no magic buttons, no magic pills," he says. "You have to work at it. You have to try different things, and you can't try to continue to fix something that's broke. You have to try something different."
Randy got his work ethic from his father.
"My father used to tell me when I was growing up, 'You don't know what it's like to have really tough times,' " he recalls. "I used to say, 'What do you want me to do, create a depression so I can have a hard time?' "
Shortly before Roger Marten died in 1993, Randy and his sister, Christine K. Marten re-created their father's first truck as a gift. (The two siblings are the largest stockholders in the company, and Christine Marten is also on the board of directors.)
Built from three salvaged trucks of the same year and model, the truck was presented to the company's founder at the annual meeting in May. "It cost $55,000 to restore it, but I'd have spent a million and $55,000 to see that smile on his face," Randy says. His father passed away three months later.
Motorcycles are what put a smile on Randy's face today - Harleys, to be exact.
"Yes, I have quite a number of Harley Davidsons," he admits. "I build my own motorcycles for a hobby. I've been lucky. Some of them have been featured in some of the national bike magazines, so it's a fun deal. It's called mental therapy. I have a small garage with no windows, one overhead door and one walk-in door. I can turn on the TV or radio and assemble a motorcycle."
His hobby certainly hasn't hurt his standing with his drivers. "Drivers like Harleys, they sure do," Marten says. "I do everything a good boy from Wisconsin does - I hunt and fish and ride a motorcycle."
Apparently good boys from Wisconsin also run successful trucking companies, or at least this one does. Today, Marten Transport runs more than 2,000 units, and recently completed an 11,000-square-foot addition to its corporate headquarters in Mondovi.
"Back in the '70s, one of the local bankers - when my father tried to get money from him - they thought we'd never survive," Marten says. "Today, we do about the same revenue in three weeks as that bank did in a year."
Marten has attracted attention from publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Traffic World for some innovative business practices. His driver turnover hovers around 60%, 30 to 40 points below national averages. Marten offers opportunities in dedicated and regional routes, as well as drop-and-hook, to help get drivers home more often. But he believes the real key to recruiting and keeping drivers lies in their wallets, and says Marten is one of the leaders in driver pay.
"If you're going to give somebody more time at home and they have less money to spend when they're at home, did it help anything?" he says.
Another unusual practice is charging customers for the time drivers have to wait, and rewarding clients that help keep the trucks moving. Thanks to satellite tracking, the company can document time spent at the docks, and it works with customers to eliminate time-wasting practices. If that doesn't work, Marten raises its rates. One receiver used to take four to six hours to unload Marten trailers, but got it down to two hours.
"I've never been known to be a real good follower," Marten says. "We have a different attitude at Marten. The temperature-controlled segment of the business seems to be more fragmented than the dry van arena. We don't have a big care as to what the other guys do. If one of our big customers says, 'XYZ company is doing this,' we say, 'Well, that's OK, but we're going to do what's right for us, what's right for Marten, for our shareholders, for the people who work here every day, and what's right for the customers.' "
Randy Marten keeps that in mind when it comes to ensuring the future of the company. Neither Marten nor his sister have offspring to whom they can pass on the company, but they have already prepared for the future. The company recently completed a secondary stock offering that put more stock into the public's hands.
"It increased our market cap, increased our trading volume, and unlocked some of the value of the company," Randy says. "So it does create an avenue if something happens to me. At this point, everything I have would go to my sister. She has more than competent help to run the company."
Marten is referring to his management group. "My father allowed me to select my own people, and instead of just having somebody I could put that boot in the butt, I have every management position filled with two people - one someone in their 50s to 60s, and a backup in their 30s. That's one of the smartest things I've done." Decisions are made by committee, he says, with the youngest management team member having just as much voting power as Randy himself.
This approach, he says, will help ensure the long-term success of the company his father founded.
"When you're in a small family business, you look to the next generation. In a public company, you grow the management group along with the company."
Unlike a family business, where perhaps the next generation isn't as passionate about trucking as the company's founders, he says, "I've had the luxury of selecting people that want to be in this business."
Not that the 52-year-old has any plans to retire soon. He still loves every day. When asked what he loves about the trucking industry, he says, "It's never the same every day. When your mindset is living for the chase, if you have the same chase every day, it gets a little old.
"With trucking, there's always something."
— Deborah Lockridge
