Redi-Haul Trailers, Inc.

July 1, 2001 Roger Matz

Photo by Jeff Silker

Duane Leach comes across as a plain-spoken, soft-spoken, uncomplicated sort of guy.

He doesn’t rely on rhetoric, doesn’t use $20 words, thinks before he speaks and shrinks the Business Facts of Life to simple terms unblemished by qualifying adjectives.

Leach is president of Redi-Haul Trailers, Inc., a steadily growing manufacturing enterprise in Fairmont. Most of Redi-Haul’s trailers carry construction equipment of varying sizes and shapes, from small skid-loaders to lengthy cable-boring machines. The company employs 46 people, down five from last year but twice as many as it did in 1990. Cramped for space by constant growth, Redi-Haul contemplates erecting a new factory on bare land across the street from its present plant sometime in the next two years.

In just nine words, Leach summarizes the company’s transition from a small fabricator of steel forms in 1969 to a major builder of speciality trailers and trailers for hauling construction equipment in 2001:

“If we hadn’t diversified, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Sure, there were some interesting evolutionary details along the way, but Leach transports you from the company’s austere founding to its thriving survival in a hurry, with minimal verbiage.
With the same brevity, he explains how Redi-Haul markets between 1,300 and 1,500 trailers a year, mostly in the Midwest. Again, it takes just nine words:

“They’d be impossible to sell without our dealer network.”

Redi-Haul has about 120 dealers, 20 percent more than a few years ago. This growth in dealerships provides an illustrative preface to Leach’s sales summary, which he delivers in 10 words:

“We’re doing twice as much business as six years ago.”

The Midwest remains Redi-Haul’s core market, “but we’re shipping further out,” Leach said. The company now has a presence in 49 states, using a combination of its dealers, Redi-Haul traveling salesmen based in Fairmont and independent factory representatives. The only state not covered so far is Hawaii.

Most of the dealers are in the Midwest, with some in Texas, Florida and the coastal states, where they are served by factory reps. Many of the trailers shipped to Texas are bought by utility companies to haul boring machines, which tunnel underground routes for utility lines instead of digging open trenches. The Florida market leans toward trailers for hauling bulldozers and Bobcats.

What accounts for Redi-Haul’s emergence as a major producer of trailers in a widening geographic area? There’s a pause as Leach thinks through his answer. It comes in pieces, short pieces, with a tidy economy of words:

“Quality would be No. 1.” Another pause.

“And customer service.” Another pause.

“And, finally, variety of products.”

Although quality leads his explanation for Redi-Haul’s success, the company has no hierarchy of inspectors and processes. As trailers move along the production line, employees are responsible for inspecting their own work. “They sign for it, initial it, and send it down the line,” Leach said. “If an inspector was looking over their shoulder, they wouldn’t have to pay so much attention to what they’re doing. This way each person is responsible for their own job out there. They take personal pride in their work. And it works.”

However, Leach said “each unit goes under a final scrutiny when it reaches our shipping department. But our self-inspection system ties right in with the idea of employee ownership.”

Redi-Haul became an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) company in 1989. Through the ESOP program, employees now own 40 percent of the company’s stock. His father, Clayton Leach, founded the company in 1969 and remains the majority stockholder. The younger Leach and Roger Voss, Redi-Haul’s executive vice-president, also own stock.

When Leach cites “variety of product” as a reason for the company’s success, he definitely means variety. “Our standard line is close to 100 different models of trailers,” he said. They’re engineered to haul specific types of equipment or loads pinpointing the specific needs of customers.

The ideas for these differing models come from Redi-Haul’s salesmen listening and responding to both dealers and customers. Voss, the vice-president, also “works closely with dealers to find out what they need in a trailer,” Leach said.

Redi-Haul’s two salesmen, Don Knapp and Bob Cramer, waste little time sitting in the home office doing paperwork. “They’re on the road 90 percent of the time, working with dealers to determine their needs, watching market trends, seeing what the economy is doing, what’s up and what’s down,” Leach said.

The intelligence gathered by Knapp, Cramer and Voss helps the company respond to market demands and forms the basis for new trailer designs. They huddle with Bill Bremer, Redi-Haul’s design engineer, to translate customer needs into buildable trailers. Then it’s up to Todd Edgington, production manager and coordinator, to integrate these new models into his assembly lines.

“Steve Reckard serves as Redi-Haul’s customer service coordinator. He and the sales force really are the front line of our customer service,” Leach said. “We just don’t build a trailer, ship it and say ‘forget it’ if they have problems. We solve them. This company was built on quality and customer service and that will never change. Our customers haul pretty expensive equipment and they don’t want to have something wrong with the trailer.”

Redi-Haul began life as Fairmont Steel Products when Clayton Leach moved from St. Louis Park to launch the company in Fairmont. He produced steel forms used in the pouring of concrete sidewalks, steps and bridges. (He also manufactured aircraft tow bars, an item still produced by Redi-Haul.) By 1973, the company began easing toward an entirely different product. “We started making gooseneck grain trailers that could be pulled by a 3/4-ton pickup. We wanted to diversify and that product really took off,” Leach said. That was the year he graduated from Fairmont High School and went to work full time in the plant, where he’d been a part-timer as a student.

Demand stretched the small plant’s capacity, so Leach’s father bought the old Coca Cola Bottling building for additional space and ran a two-plant operation several blocks apart. The elder Leach also traveled and did most of the selling, helped by independent factory reps. “When the ag market slowed down in the late 1970s, we diversified again into trailers for hauling construction equipment like backhoes and skid-steer loaders,” Leach said.

In the late 1970s, the company also began building small utility trailers, selling them to rental companies. “That’s the point when we switched over to dealers, setting up dealerships in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota and Nebraska,” Leach said. These are open trailers, most often rented to haul equipment, not the enclosed trailers rented to transport household goods. Many of the trailers produced in Fairmont today are sold to rental companies such as Hertz, Rental Service Corp. and United Rental, Leach said. “It’s about 15 percent of our production,” Leach said. “It’s still growing. Everything’s growing.”

In 1981, Fairmont Steel Products changed its name to Redi-Haul Trailers, Inc. These days, there isn’t much call for the original gooseneck grain trailer that gave Redi-Haul its start. “The ag trailer is pretty much out right now. Most farmers are using big semis,” Leach said. But the old design has been resurrected. “We build them for people in the roofing and construction industries. The rear gate swings open. It’s a contractor’s dump trailer,” Leach said.

Redi-Haul is down five employees from last year because of the slowing economy, according to Leach. “Way back last June we sensed it was softening, but we had a backlog of orders that we had to keep building,” Leach said. “We shut down our second shift for a couple of the winter months, which saved us some on the high heating costs. But we’re back with two shifts now.”

Raw steel arrives at the plant by truck, most of it in channel, bars and I-beams which are sawed and punched for the trailer frames. The bulkheads and sides are formed from flat sheets of steel, while 2 x 8 oak boards are fashioned into floors. Most of the employees are welders, machine operators or assemblers, with a finishing crew doing the painting and wiring.

Leach says Redi-Haul faces “a lot of competition,” some of it from “people who build trailers at home in their garage. Anybody who’s a welder figures they can build a trailer.” But Leach doesn’t think these home-built models have much of a detrimental effect on sales. “Most trailer manufacturers must follow certain standards” established by state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Dept. of Transportation.

Redi-Haul’s plant, which has 20,000 square feet, is somewhat hidden in the north part of Fairmont at 1205 N. Dewey, on one of the city’s few gravel streets. It leases another 3,600 square feet of manufacturing space two blocks away, where it can haul not-quite finished trailers without encountering much traffic.

Its new retail operation is much more visible, located in a former implement dealership on Hwy. 15 about a mile south of I-90. “We started out looking for a place to do service work on our own trailers because we couldn’t do it in the plant anymore. Our production has grown too much,” Leach said. While hunting space for a service facility, Leach kept in mind the customer requests Redi-Haul gets for the kinds of trailers it doesn’t build, and decided to open a combined sales-service facility. “We decided to sell some less expensive brands and some enclosed trailers that we don’t build here.”

The sign out front says “Lakes Trailers and RV Center.” The inventory includes a variety of trailers along with pickup toppers, pull-type and gooseneck campers, snowplows for pickups, hitches and a variety of truck equipment. “The store opened three years ago. It’s been working out pretty good. It keeps picking up,” Leach said.

With the retail operation up and running, Leach’s attention now centers on relieving the crowded conditions in the main plant. “You’d be surprised at how much iron we run through this building,” he said. From his office window, he can see across the street to a narrow city block of bare ground, extending to the rear of the Kmart building which fronts on Hwy. 15. He envisions putting up a long, narrow building of about 40,000 square feet on that block. That’s twice as large as its existing plant, which Redi-Haul intends to keep operating. “We plan to set up a whole new production line in the new plant. It will give us more machine shop area and subassembly space in this building here. It’ll ease our cramped production here. We can still run the smaller products here and run the big products over there.”

The big products Leach has in mind are “40 feet long and longer, semi-type trailers. There’s a market out there for bigger trailers.” The biggest Redi-Haul trailers now are 35 feet. “Right now we could get a 40-footer through here, but we can’t go around the turns in the production line,” he said. “We’d have to take them outside and bring them in a different door to finish the production.”

The last time Redi-Haul expanded on such a major scale was in 1984, when Leach’s father sold the Coca Cola facility and put 10,000 square feet on the back of the present plant, doubling its size. About the same time, his father acquired the bare land where the new factory will go. “That land was in corn and soybeans when I was growing up,” Leach said.

He was 15 years old when the family moved to Fairmont. “It’s a nice town to live in. I like the lakes. It’s a lot calmer pace than Minneapolis, a more relaxing town,” he said.

Although Redi-Haul continually faces a “shortage of workers,” Leach puts the labor situation in perspective. “That’s true anywhere in the U.S.” But it’s a particular concern as the company looks ahead to building the new plant, which will mean hiring about 20 new workers. “That’s always one of our toughest challenges, finding people to fill the positions. We offer profit sharing, ESOP, all the insurance, but a smaller company can’t compete with large companies like 3M,” he said.

Leach became president in 1998, bringing to the job his 25 years of experience building trailers. “Most of the work that gets done in this plant, I’ve done. I worked in the machine shop, welding shop, painted for awhile way back when. I was welding foreman for awhile, production manager, then vice-president of manufacturing,” he said. Now his own son, Adem, a 1996 Fairmont High School graduate, works as a Redi-Haul welder.

Founder Clayton Leach semi-retired in 1995 but still serves as chairman of the board. “One of my father’s dreams was to build this company and he succeeded at that,” Leach said. “Now I’m contributing to that dream, sharing that dream by growing this company.”

Leach has some interesting observations about the ramifications of being the son of Redi-Haul’s founder. “On the job, you feel a lot of pressure or critical eyes on you because you are the boss’s kid,” he said. “But I don’t feel it’s interfered with our relationship. It probably enhanced it because it gave us a lot in common.”

Still, Leach said, “some days we do have to make an effort to keep our business and family lives separated. But there are also those days when you can do some important business planning in the boat when the fish aren’t biting. So it has worked out very well for us.”

Perhaps that’s true because Leach remains ever mindful of his father’s advice about being successful. “He’s always said that to succeed, you need to do whatever it takes to do your job,” Leach said. “That’s what he did to get Redi-Haul Trailers to where it is today. That’s what we’ll continue to do in the future — whatever it takes. It seems to be working.”