By LYNDON FINNEY, The Trucker Staff
SALT LAKE CITY — To appropriately and completely tell the story of one of the nation’s more successful motor carriers, a quick lesson in music and linguistics is in order.
First, the music.
In 1923, Frank Silver and Irving Cohn collaborated to write a folk song about a Greek who ran a fruit store. Quite popular in its day, we’re told; it faded from lore in recent generations.
“When you ask him anything, never answers ‘no,’” they wrote. “He just ‘yes’-es you to death, and as he takes your dough, he tells you …’Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas today.’”
Quite popular in its day, we’re told; the song has been lost to recent generations.
Now we turn to linguistics.
You’ve heard the saying, “You say potato (pa tay toe), I say potato (pa tah toe),” and yes, maybe the way we tried to illustrate the pronunciations isn’t what you’d find in a dictionary, but it drives home a point. And it does lead us to say that back in the 1940s, Chester Rodney England had plenty of bananas and soon could care less how someone pronounced potato.
He and his sons Gene and Bill just knew folks in Utah liked bananas and the people in Texas liked Idaho potatoes, and the three of them used those two commodities to parlay a small trucking operation into what today is a $750 million-a-year business known today as C.R. England.
What’s more, the company is still owned and operated by the England family, now in its fourth generation.
“Our family grew up in the little town of Plains City, Utah,” said Gene England, one of C.R. England’s sons, and who at age 87 is company president, still holds an active CDL and is in the office every day. “When I was a kid, there were 600 people living in the town. And, of course, dad was the local trucker. He was not a freight carrier. He was a man who bought produce from the local people and marketed it to people in nearby cities.”
Perhaps it should have been predictable that as the Plains City local trucker, a successful business would emerge.
After all, Swift Transportation began there. So did Knight Transportation and Pride Transport, which is owned by Gene’s son Jeff and where Jay England, is operations manager.
At age 14, Gene England had an Idaho driver’s license, which was legal at that time, and was making deliveries up through Cache Valley north of Salt Lake City. Today, he's still driving at 87.
Gene and Bill became familiar with the trucking industry at an early age.
During the summers, they would make the weeklong run with their father to Wyoming.
But the highlight of the whole trip was the feeling of importance that Gene and Bill felt when their father would brag about them to their family and to all the customers.
“Dad was our real mentor,” Gene England said, “and we admired him and loved him. He taught us to work together and that was the cement that put the company together.”
There really wasn’t a formal company in those days. The Englands used 1- or 2-ton trucks with attachments to make a three-axle rig.
“We were pulling almost as much weight with those things as we are today,” Gene England said.
During World War II while his sons were in the service, C.R. England began hauling bananas from El Paso, Texas, to Utah.
Then after the war, as Gene puts it, “We went after the trucking business. Our goal was to build a company.”
And building a company they did.
Today, C.R. England is one of the two largest carriers in the country whose primary freight is refrigerated (the company has some 5,000 trailers and about 90 percent of those are refrigerated).
“When we got back from World War II, I had been at work two weeks when we bought our first Kenworth truck,” Gene England said. “It wasn’t a new one because they just weren’t manufacturing any after the war.”
That first truck was a 1940 Kenworth conventional.
Gene and Bill would soon be heading to Texas with Idaho potatoes, and as their father had done before them, head back to Utah with bananas.
By 1957, the company was going from coast to coast. That included a 72-hour run from California to Philadelphia. “That was a real change in our program,” Gene England said.
Today, neither Gene, who will soon be 88, nor Bill, who is 84, is involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, but they continue to have offices at the company’s headquarters when in town.
C.R. England is now in the hands of the third generation.
Gene England had six sons, four of whom are top executives at C.R. England. Dan is chairman of the board. Dean is CEO. Todd is executive vice president, maintenance and Corey is executive vice president, operations support. Another son, Jeff, has his own company, Pride Transport, also located at Salt Lake City. Jeff England’s son, Jay, is operations manager there. The sixth son, Rod, passed away in 1995.
Like his father, Dan England’s early taste of the trucking industry came from going on long trips with his father.
But Gene England urged Dan to pursue a career in law, so after earning his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Utah and spending two-and-a-half years in Germany on a mission for the Mormon church, Dan England went into law practice in the mid-1970s.
Part of his practice included working to get authorities for C.R. England in the pre-deregulation era, and it didn’t take long for him to get back into trucking full time.
“I left [law practice] in 1977 and came to work for the company and have been here ever since,” Dan England said.
While he said it was always likely that he would eventually wind up working at C.R. England, it was not a foregone conclusion.
“I always enjoyed growing up in the business and just part of being an England is being involved in the trucking business,” Dan England said. “I was intrigued by it, helping to grow it. The company was doing well and I wanted to work with my dad, brothers and uncle. So that was always good motivation.”
Family and the values of a close-knit family such as the Englands continue to be keys to the company’s success.
That, plus the fact that the Englands are real truckers who know what it feels like to be on the road (see Eye on Trucking on Page 34).
“My dad, of course, and all in my generation have our CDLs and in the next generation, there are quite a few who have CDLs,” Dan England said. “So on the one hand, people view us as being truckers since we come from that background. They also say they like working here because of the strong family values we have.”
Those values begin with the mutual respect employees have for one another and are evident in discernable ways, Dan England said.
“We have a family party for the company every summer and we make a special effort to try to get people home for any family functions,” he said. “Hopefully, ours is a culture of inclusion. There are really not a lot of secrets as far as our financial performance and how we are doing in just about any aspect of our company. We are very willing to share that. We don’t keep those things hidden — our revenue, our profits, all those sorts of things. It’s an openness that I think is reflected here.”
Last year, the company announced its Drive Life program for its employees and recently spent part of its management retreat discussing rub points — challenges that the company’s drivers may have in dealing with the organization and points where they might become frustrated (complete information about the Drive Life program is available on the company’s Web site www.crengland.com).
Those family values extend to a good reputation the company has built over the years with its customers, Gene England said.
C.R. England has stood for integrity, an honest deal and good service ever since his father hauled the first load, he added.
“I think we kind of enjoy being able to put together runs and agreements with customers to fill their needs and do it well,” Gene England said. “You mentioned the image we put out with the equipment (the reporter had mentioned how clean and freshly painted the company’s trucks appear on the road). We try to make it impressive and we try to back it up with that kind of service.”
“We’ve always enjoyed a good reputation for the quality of equipment we operate and for safety,” Dan England said. “We’ve done very well in the safety arena over the years and we continue to try and enhance that reputation.”
As great as the past and present have been and are, Dan England sees even brighter days ahead.
“It’s really an exciting time in our company. We had a tremendous year in 2006. We grew 17 or 18 percent last year and profits were very good, our best year ever. We are looking at growing all aspects of our business (see chart on Page xx). Our big fleet we will be growing about 8 percent. In our dedicated fleet, we have about 700 trucks and are looking at a 15 to 20 percent growth rate there. We did about $50 million in our Mexican division last year and hope to increase that 10 to 20 percent next year. On our nonasset side, which we call England Logistics, gross revenues were about $145 million and this year they will exceed $200 million. We’re going to be aggressive in growth in terms of acquisitions. We just feel we are right on the threshold of being one of the major players in the industry and are able to offer a vast array of services to our customers.”
All of which could add up to revenues of $1 billion by 2009, Dan England believes. That would almost double the company’s revenues in less than five years.
One other thing about the future of C.R. England:
Almost without a doubt, it will still be owned and operated by Englands for many, many years.
“I have four sons and Dean has five living,” Dan England said.
But even with family, there are rules.
“Anyone who was to ascend to our Executive Committee has to have a four-year college degree and after completing their undergraduate work, they have to work away for two years before coming back here,” Dan England said. “You always have challenges when you have that much family because you are going to lose your non-family people because they feel threatened by family members. So what we’ve done is in the last three or four years we’ve tried to establish satellite, related-type businesses where we can have some of these kids coming along in the fourth generation and have them start there. For instance, we have England Carrier Services. That’s a freight load factoring business. One of my sons started that up three years ago and they are doing very well. We’re going to expand that business through internal growth and through acquisitions.”
And what about a fifth generation of C.R. England executives?
“Well, let’s see, one of my grand kids is six, so they are a ways off yet,” Dan England concluded.