Kevko Inc.

November 1, 1999 Roger Matz

Photos by Kris Kathmann

It doesn’t take much channel surfing these days to get your TV set vibrating with the metallic symphony of powerful engines. Auto racing is a growth sport as fans fade from traditional diversions like baseball and gravitate toward the vicarious thrill of seeing helmeted warriors chase each other around oval tracks.

Paralleling the high TV ratings of NASCAR races, speedways in Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa pull thousands of fans every week to watch local favorites pilot late-model stocks, modified stocks and sprint cars. Seeking an extra measure of speed and horsepower, drivers and race-car builders all around the U.S. turn to KEVKO, Inc., which manufactures racing parts in Fairmont, a long way from the speedways of Daytona Beach or Indianapolis. Owner Kevin Kollofski penciled and tinkered his way into the business via his garage and a borrowed welder. He’s been successful enough to tempt copycat manufacturers in the Far East into making imitation KEVKO parts. That threat eventually strengthened KEVKO, but it left Kollofski with the notion that he ought to expand his product line with something more high-tech and less inviting to cheap imitation, even if it has nothing to do with racing. (And it doesn’t. He’s perfecting a Zamboni-like ice resurfacing machine for hockey rinks, but he’s not quite ready to set a target date for producing these.)

Kollofski, a race driver himself, started fabricating oil pans for racing cars in his garage in 1986. Now he ships 2,000 pans a year to drivers who want to strengthen the performance and lengthen the life of their Ford, Chevrolet or Chrysler engines.

Most folks could drive a lifetime without ever buying a new oil pan, although four-wheelers sometimes punch a hole in theirs by running over boulders. But when racers buy a factory-built engine, the oil pan is one of several parts just not good enough for racing.

“The oil pan in a typical passenger car holds four quarts,” Kollofski said. “Our pan holds seven. Racing engines run at higher revolutions per minute than the engine of a car going down I-90. That means pumping more oil. You need more capacity.”

But KEVKO pans offer more than extra capacity. “They have gates and diverters that keep the oil flowing to the oil pump when you accelerate or keep going around corners. (Race cars run in perpetual circles.) Otherwise centrifugal force would pull the oil away and the pump would suck air.” (An engine sucking air instead of oil soon overheats and explodes.)

When an engine’s crankshaft spins at high speeds, it creates a mist of oil inside the pan, according to Kollofski. KEVKO pans contain “scrapers and windage trays to pull that mist back down into the pan and keep it away from the crankshaft. When you pull the oil away from the crank, it can spin faster and generate more horsepower.”

KEVKO pans have been sold in every state except Hawaii and “we’ve even had inquiries from Australia. Racing is huge down there,” Kollofski said. But the NASCAR racers you see rotating around your TV screen aren’t likely to be wearing pans made in Fairmont. “Those teams build their own pans. They have tricks to make them work better. They’re secretive about what they do,” Kollofski said. “The guys who buy our pans are not full-time drivers. They’re in it for the fun of it.” He won’t even consider chasing the NASCAR market. “They would want us to give it to them. I can sell a lot more pans to others. I design products I can sell to the average guy.”

Kollofski and his wife, Jane, find an obvious satisfaction in making their living manufacturing an obscure part that bolts to the bottom of an engine and is never seen unless a car turns upside down. “I love to tell people about his oil pans,” said Jane, who works full-time at KEVKO. “We don’t do something that’s traditional. It’s never boring.” It’s fun to do stuff that nobody else does. That’s what Kevin likes to do.”

He also has a knack for simple solutions. He designed packaging so his oil pans could ship via UPS. When answering the phone “Kollofski Manufacturing” became too much of a mouthful, he shortened it to KEVKO, using the first three letters of his given name and the first two of his last name.

Although Fairmont Speedway has been running weekly races since the early 1960s, Kollofski never saw one until he was 16. Watching the late-models roar around the half-mile dirt track, Kollofski thought to himself: “This I can do!” Four years later he ventured out on the track himself. He’s won a couple of season championships and he still puts on his helmet half a dozen times a season. “I enjoy competing. I’m mechanical and like to work on stuff,” he said. “It’s pretty safe. I enjoy racing and the people.” It’s also a way to test the oil pans.

Getting Revved Up

Kollofski graduated from Fairmont High School in 1973, finished a one-year vo-tech course in small engine repair at Brainerd, and returned to begin fixing engines for himself and others. Then he took his skills to Fairmont Tamper, Inc., a large manufacturer of railroad maintenance equipment, where he worked in everything from assembly to the machine shop. While some Fairmonters work a lifetime at that plant, Kollofski was too restless for much more than the 10 years he spent there. “I was always searching for something I wanted to do,” he said.

A door opened for him when the International Motor Car Assn. (IMCA) established a new economy class of racing car in the 1980s, attempting to make the sport more affordable for the thousands of people who race part-time. These modified stock cars had no fenders, no aluminum wheels, no fancy transmissions and tire sizes were limited to just slightly wider than a passenger car’s, according to Kollofski. To discourage drivers from pouring thousands of dollars into their engines, IMCA instituted a “$350 claim rule.” That meant if a driver seemed to be winning too many races, any competitor could claim his engine for only $350. The rule “forced people to put less money in their engines. It called for more economical kinds of parts,” Kollofski said. His constant search for “something to do” ended when he decided to build oil pans for less than the $250 to $300 drivers were paying in the mid-1980s. “I figured if we could build an economy style that would sell for $80 or $90, we would be successful. This class was just starting out and I could see its growth and the opportunity for a pan like this. I knew it would be in demand if we just came up with something simple and inexpensive.”

In 1986, Kollofski began fabricating pans in his garage. “I kind of figured out a design and took that basic design and figured out how to get the material and build it in the simplest way,” he said. That was before CAD (computer-aided design) software was readily available so he sketched his ideas with pencil and paper. “I didn’t even have a welder. I borrowed one from a gas station.”

Kollofski sent samples to racing speciality shops, one in Iowa and another in Minnesota. “I asked them to take a look and see if they were marketable. They both said they liked it and asked if we could do more.”

Armed with confidence and orders, Kollofski quit his job at Fairmont Tamper in 1988 and devoted full-time to manufacturing pans in his garage for the two speciality shops. In 1991, he took the business out of his garage and put it into a building of about 2,000 square feet on the north end of Fairmont’s business district. Then he gained a third outlet for his pans when an employee of the Iowa racing shop moved to a similar store in Nebraska and began ordering significant quantities.

This spurt in new business wasn’t a blessing, however. In 1993, Kollofski became the victim of industrial espionage when the Nebraska store engaged a copycat manufacturer in Taiwan to produce KEVKO imitations, or “knock-offs,” as Kollofski calls them. “When you make something and sell it for a year, you can’t patent it,” so KEVKO had no recourse.

Without the Nebraska firm, “we were back down to two dealers, so we regrouped, made some improvements in our pans, came up with more designs and moved to higher-end products. And we spread out our distribution and set up more dealers,” Kollofski said. Meanwhile, the Nebraska company “became the victim of its own strategy” when a Chinese manufacturer began making “knock-offs” of the Taiwanese pans.

KEVKO survived this setback and continued to grow, strengthened by improved pans, a bigger dealer network and its long-standing emphasis on quality. “We used to sell generic pans, but now a lot of our growth is as KEVKO pans. People ask for it because it’s a good product,” said Jane, who quit her job at a Fairmont bank to work alongside Kevin. “We really strive for quality. We rarely have complaints. Staying small enables us to have the quality of workmanship.” She is one of four full-time employees. “I haven’t welded yet but I can do about everything else.”

By 1997, KEVKO had outgrown the downtown building so the Kollofskis bought a 7,000-square foot building in an industrial part of town, rewiring and insulating it as a manufacturing facility. The payroll now includes four full-time and three part-time employees. “Our growth was 20 to 25 percent last year. If we could hit 15 percent in 2000, I’d be happy,” Kollofski said.

Pumping Up Sales And New Products

Besides being a one-man engineering department and working in the shop, Kollofski is KEVKO’s only salesperson other than dealers. Last year he made his first trip to the Performance Racing Industry annual trade show in Indianapolis, becoming acquainted with dealers he’d never met. “I always sold over the phone or by sending out samples,” Kollofski said. The Indianapolis trip resulted in more dealers taking on KEVKO pans plus increased sales to existing dealers, so he’s going back this year. Kollofski wants to see new oil pumps displayed at the show. “The industry is going to a little different oil pump,” which means he may need to come home and redesign some of his pans.

He’ll also be immersed in perfecting what he calls the KEVKO Ice Resurfacer, the new product he believes to be immune from cheap imitation. With the “can-do” attitude so typical of entrepreneurs, Kollofski shows no fear of taking on Zamboni of the U.S. and Olympia of Canada. Together, those two companies “have all the market. But we don’t have to get a lot of the market to be successful.”

Although Kevin had “talked and talked about this for a couple of years,” Jane said the actual start of the project came as a surprise to her. “I went out in the shop one day last fall and one of our employees was working on this big frame. I said “what are you doing?” and he said “this is the frame for the ice resurfacer.” That’s how I found out about it.”

Like many husband-and-wife teams, Jane said “we work together, but we don’t talk. I learn more about this business by listening when he talks to customers. He’s got a lot of ideas he doesn’t tell me about because I might get scared,” she laughed.

Just as Kollofski’s association with racing led to the oil pan business, the ice resurfacer idea grew from his involvement in Fairmont’s hockey program. (Son Oliver Kollofski, 16, is a hockey player.) “I’ve always been on the hockey board. If they were short of help, I’d go resurface the ice. I’ve done some maintenance on their Zamboni,” Kollofski said. “It had a gasoline engine and the fumes were bad. It drove me nuts, so I converted it to propane.”

Stung by the Taiwanese imitations of his oil pan, Kollofski began to see the ice resurfacing machine as something that “couldn’t be knocked off. It was another challenge with more profit margin.” (Zambonis sell for up to $55,000 while KEVKO pans range from $79 to $600.)

Kollofski took the same methodical, careful approach to designing this machine as he did in developing his first oil pans. “I’ve built race cars, so I knew I could build a really simple machine that was functional. The axles and springs are coming from California, I have a company in Sioux Falls lined up to help with the hydraulics and I know exactly what the insurance costs are,” Kollofski said.

The prototype sits in KEVKO’s shop, dwarfing the neatly-stacked oil pans. It’s 13 feet long, 7 feet wide and weighs 5,500 pounds. A 60-horsepower Ford engine powers the four-wheel drive machine. “When he starts it up, it makes the building vibrate,” Jane said.

Kollofski plans to sell the prototype to the Fairmont Hockey Assn. “at a demo price” so he can continue working on it and show it to potential customers. Rather than sell directly to rinks, he hopes to market it to distributors who provide arenas with boards, glass, compressors and other accessories. “We’d be a part of their package,” he said.

KEVKOs machine might offer a small price advantage over Zamboni or Olympia, “but not huge. It has to have high-quality components.” Kollofski has already tested it at the Martin County Arena and is making continual modifications. “It’s never done. I’m changing the drive on it because I’ve found a better way to do it. I’m putting tire-washers on it so it doesn’t track dirt on the ice,” he said. And he’s working on the concept of installing electronic ice sensors, a feature not offered by Zamboni and Olympia.

With minor remodeling of the building, Kollofski figures he can have three or four machines in production simultaneously, but he isn’t ready to set a date for starting production. “We have to make sure this one has no bugs in it and we have to line up the market too. The No. 1 thing is to have it so good that it can compete with the other people,” he said. “It can’t be a lesser machine than the competition.”