When customers manufacture

July 1, 2007
KEITH HILL didn't set out to be a truck body and trailer manufacturer. He was a dump truck operator with a decade of experience, and he just wanted a

KEITH HILL didn't set out to be a truck body and trailer manufacturer. He was a dump truck operator with a decade of experience, and he just wanted a dump body and trailer that looked and worked exactly like he wanted.

So he built himself one.

And then he built another one for a buddy. And another for a buddy's buddy.

Today Hill is a much larger manufacturer than he ever expected to be, producing 140 units last year. His company, Rogue Truck Body LLC, just opened its first factory branch in Southern California and a separate fabrication facility that provides parts to its assembly plant in Kerby, Oregon.

The growth of the company has been surprising, Hill says, but it really interferes with his fishing.

“I had been in trucking for 10 years before I built my first body,” Hill says. “We were building a few bodies in Southern California. The kids were young back then (1990). We wanted to get out of the hassles of city life, and we wanted a better place to raise a family.”

Hill chose the town of Kerby, a suburb of Cave Junction, Oregon (population 6,518) to live, fish, and build an occasional truck body or trailer. He named his company after the nearby Rogue River, a stream that sometimes merely flows, sometimes explodes into Class IV rapids. Designated under federal law as a National Wild and Scenic River, the Rogue starts inside Crater Lake National Park and then works its way down the Cascade Mountains and through the redwood forests of southwest Oregon before emptying into the Pacific Ocean.

In Hill's mind, the area was a great place to live.

“The idea was to move up here, buy a few kits, assemble a few bodies, and call it good,” Hill says. “The economy was flat back then, and the first few years were slow. We only had two or three guys, but that was enough.”

Things are a lot different now.

Rogue has expanded several times in its relatively brief history, most recently in May when the company opened a factory branch in Lake Elsinore, California, near Hill's old neighborhood. The location, between Los Angeles and San Diego, is a base for providing truck body and trailer sales, parts, and service for customers in the largest transfer dump market in the country.

That takes care of southern California, but Rogue still needed some help filling the gap between Hollywood and Kerby. To do that, Rogue recently signed its first independent dealer. The dealer, scheduled to begin representing the company in July, is based near Woodland, California, northwest of Sacramento. This will enable Rogue to intensify its sales and service in northern California, particularly the Bay Area, Sacramento, and the northern end of the San Joaquin valley.

Aloha, truckers

Rogue Truck Body has a surprisingly strong customer base in Hawaii.

“There's a lot of construction going on there,” says John Testa, sales manager. “In the case of our customers in Hawaii, we produce the body, build out the truck, and deliver it to the port.”

The approach to selling in Hawaii is atypical for Rogue. Now that the company is marketing through outlets other than its base in Kerby, Rogue will be supplying completed bodies and shipping them for local installation. That should continue to increase now that the company has representation in Northern and Southern California.

The Southern California branch, which the company has labeled Rogue California, includes an eight-bay, 14,000-sq-ft shop and 2,600 square feet of offices. It is built on three acres.

“We now can provide great service for Southern California,” Testa says. “And our service shop here in Kerby can concentrate on taking care of trailers in the Northwest.”

Until Rogue opened the branch, the company relied on third parties to service the trailers it sold into its largest market. Rogue now can provide the service itself, yet those independent service shops are still available to provide service if the branch has more work than it can handle.

Expanded fabrication

The California branch is Rogue's most recent major cap-ex move. Last year the company opened a separate fabrication building south of Cave Junction.

Components are fabricated at the new shop and trucked up to the Kerby location for assembly. In a perfect world, of course, fabrication and assembly would be under one roof. That is exactly how things operated at Rogue until the company decided that the one roof Rogue had was way too small.

Management acquired an existing building and began using it as a fabrication shop in October. The building required some work to get it ready for truck body and trailer fabrication, but it provided the company with an economical way to expand production. The main plant in Kerby, expanded several times over the years, now occupies a far greater portion of the small tract that Hill acquired in 1990.

By opening the fabrication facility, Rogue now has a lot more room for trailer assembly.

“We moved a lot of stuff out of Kerby,” Testa says.

Setting up shop

To prepare the building, Rogue had to substantially increase the capacity of the electrical system. The floor also had to be upgraded in order to support the loads generated by the fabrication equipment.

“When that shear comes down, the earth rumbles,” Testa says. “Imaging what it would be like without the 12-ft thick concrete pad we built to support it.”

Just getting the 400-ton press brake and matching shear moved into the new location was a challenge.

“We did it ourselves,” Testa says. “The moving companies we called gave us bids that were mind boggling. It was actually cheaper for us to go out and buy a special loader — which we did — and install the equipment ourselves.”

By generating 400 tons of force, the shear can slice a 20-ft long plate of half-inch thick steel. The shop also is equipped with a CNC cutting table that can process inch-thick steel, along with a full machine shop.

Standard specs

Because of their experience as dump truck operators, they know what the equipment needs to do and what their customers consider important.

Standard specs for a Rogue truck body include 12-gauge GR-50 steel sides with two LED lights per side, 11-gauge Domex steel floor, 12-gauge GR-50 steel tailgate, 7" cab shield, 8" spreader apron, and aluminum light brackets with three taillights per side.

The standard Rogue transfer trailer includes tandem axles equipped with ArivinMeritor's SteelLite lightweight drums and hubs, 1/4" formed Domex steel frame, three-leaf Hutch suspension, three-channel air-lift drawbar, aluminum bright fenders, rear aluminum light bar with 11 taillights, 22.5" radial tires, hub-piloted polished aluminum wheels, and one-color polyurethane enamel paint.

Rogue's forte is transfer dumps, but the company also offers end dumps. These are low-volume trailers, however. Even with the additional space created by the new fabrication shop, there still is not sufficient floor space in the Kerby plant for Rogue to produce such a large product as an end-dump trailer on a regular production basis.

“End dumps are something we only build for key customers,” Testa says.

The company has seen the “super dump” concept (ultra-large dump body with a swing-down stinger axle) become increasingly popular.

“It's all about productivity,” Testa says. “The super dump can handle more than 20 tons of material. It's great when you are running in a 50-mile radius or less. Since there are no bodies to transfer, a super dump typically can deliver six loads per day — one more than a transfer dump in the same operation.”

Getting personal

Management attributes much of its success to the fact that it knows its customers — very well. Dump truck operators such as Keith Hill tend to form tight communities.

“Tom Langston manages Rogue California,” Hill says. “His father bought the first trailer I ever built.”

Testa is another example. Like Hill, he was a dump truck operator before his recent arrival at Rogue Truck Body.

“I have known Keith for a long time,” he says. “I'm glad to be able to come in and help him here.”

Because the word spreads, it's the custom treatment that Rogue provides that has gotten the company noticed.

“When I was a fulltime truck operator, I wanted my trucks to look their best,” Testa says. “No matter how late it was, my truck would get washed at the end of the day. And as far as appearance goes, the more lights the better. When I passed another truck at night, I had enough light to read every graphic on the side.”

The size of Rogue Truck Body makes it possible for the company to give the customer exactly what he wants.

“I have an entire file cabinet filled with napkins that customers have used to draw out what they want,” Testa says.

The ultimate personal touch, however, is for a customer to have a certain product feature named after him. One customer, for example, has a special preference for light housings. Rogue built it according to the customer's spec, and now anyone wanting that particular housing specifies the Campbell lights.

“How cool is that?” Testa asks. “People really like that.”

In transition

Rogue is making the transition from a small, custom manufacturer. The company may have started with Keith Hill and Gregorio Martinez moving up from Romoland, California, to build a few dumps for friends, but that is no longer the case.

“Right off, I built a trailer for a guy and he said, ‘great, build me six more in the next couple of months,’” Hill recalls. “I'm thinking, ‘How are the two of us going to do that?’ But we did.”

Today the company has 45 people at its Kerby location and another 10 in Rogue California — including Hill's daughter Misty.

The company has been strengthening its management team, hiring its first sales manager, a general manager, and customer service manager. Rogue also is implementing a new computer system with the help of input from its various managers. These are all steps the company has taken to help it with its dilemma — how to stay small when customers want to make you bigger.

“We just want to be able to build guys a quality product,” Hill says. “I don't think we can do that if we get too big. Maybe we will grow to the point that we build 200-250 bodies a year, but then that's it.”

If the company continues to grow, Hill faces another dilemma — either hire more managers or do less fishing.

“I like to fish, but I haven't done much in a long time. I just went fishing the other day for the first time in quite a while,” Hill says. “I don't know how long it had been, but the last time I went, I could tie the hook on without reading glasses.”