PETERBILT MOTORS: GM Bill Jackson adapts quickly to job he loves
BILL JACKSON
The Trucker News Services
6/1/2007
By LYNDON FINNEY, The Trucker Staff
DENTON, Texas — This time last year, Bill Jackson was in his fourth year as general manager of the parts division at PACCAR, the huge multi-national technology company known for its design, manufacture and customer support of premium light-, medium- and heavy-duty trucks under the Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF nameplates.
PACCAR Parts operates a network of parts distribution centers that offers after-sales support to Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF dealerships around the world.
He was in his ninth year with PACCAR having joined the company almost by chance after a call from a headhunter while working at Belden Wire & Cable in Richmond, Ind., in 1998.
PACCAR was seeking to fill a position and the headhunter wanted to know if Jackson was interested.
“It just happened to be the right day at the right time and I said I’ll talk to them,” Jackson said recently. He had friends in Seattle and thought that if nothing else, he’d just go to Seattle, where PACCAR is headquartered, do the interview and visit his friends.
But when he returned to Indiana, PACCAR called with an offer.
“I was ready for a change,” Jackson recalled. “So about a month later, I took my whole family out there and didn’t tell my kids ? they were 8 ½ and 10 at the time ? and when we got there, I said, ‘I’m thinking about taking a job here in Seattle.’ My wife was OK, but my children were dead set against it. We moved to Seattle anyway and it worked out very well for the whole family.”
Fast forward to 2007.
Jackson had moved up through the organization as an operations controller for various divisions, eventually being asked to become assistant general manager for PACCAR Parts. Nine months later, the general manager of PACCAR Parts was promoted and Jackson was elevated to general manager.
“PACCAR senior management has confidence in people they put in these roles,” he said. “They don’t do it for you and you have to do these jobs on your own. But PACCAR does offer support and guidance, and provides all the tools you need to be successful. So I was assistant general manager for PACCAR Parts for nine months and manager for a little more than four years, some of the most successful years in PACCAR Parts’ history. It wasn’t my doing; it was the organization at work.”
Then came a request.
PACCAR officials asked Jackson if he would move to Denton, Texas, to be general manager of Peterbilt.
“How could I say no?” he said. “It’s one of the best known brand names in the world. It was a yes. I said I absolutely wanted to do that. The only reservation I had was that I had a senior in high school and I’m very close to my family. I said I’d love to do it, but I have a family situation to work out. They said we would worry about the timetable later. It was a great conversation [with PACCAR executives] and it was totally unexpected.”
So on January 2, 2007, Jackson officially became general manager of Peterbilt Motors Co., succeeding Dan Sobic, who had been promoted to the position of senior vice president at PACCAR.
“At the time I was asked to move to Denton, I thought I had the best job within the company running the parts division,” Jackson told The Trucker during an interview at Peterbilt headquarters here. “But not any more. I have the best job in the company now.”
Jackson is acutely aware of the importance of the role he’s assumed and can tell you in only a few words the overarching goal for his work at Peterbilt.
“The success Peterbilt has today isn’t my doing, it’s Dan Sobic, Tom Plimpton, the people who set the stage and helped build this brand before I got here,” he said. “All I can do is continue on that path and make sure my legacy here is that I leave the company in better shape than when I got here. And that’s my intent.’”
Jackson, whose father was a truck driver for Borden’s Dairy in Akron, Ohio, said, “I never thought that I would be in the trucking business, but I guess it’s been in my blood since I was born.” He takes over at Peterbilt during a very pronounced downturn in heavy truck sales which primarily are a result of the new 2007 emissions standards (OEM sales are off 28.2 percent this year).
So was there any apprehension about taking over as a GM knowing what was happening in the marketplace?
Not one bit.
“We have a great team here at Peterbilt that will get us through it,” Jackson said, adding that Peterbilt’s percentage share of industry orders has exceeded its percentage take for the same period of time last year. “It’s a difficult situation to go through, but we are doing the right things to position ourselves to come through this successfully. I think from a business viewpoint, we do very well in a down market; we get our fair share ? we had record market share last year at 13 percent ? but we weather these storms better, I think, because of the quality of the people and the quality of the product. Can we do better? Yes, always. But we can get through this.”
Quality and quantity in terms of service is another way to put it.
At the Denton facility there is a combined 17,000 years of cumulative service.
The plant opened in 1980 with 81 employees and over the past 27 years more than 275,000 Peterbilt trucks have rolled off the line. Some 10 percent of the original employees are still actively employed at the facility today.
One person familiar with the employment scene in Denton told The Trucker a job at the Peterbilt plant is one of the most coveted in the area.
Jackson also believes the speed with which Peterbilt responded to the new emissions standards has been and will continue to be important to the company’s success.
“I believe we have been successful by being the first company to be 100 percent compliant with the new environmental 2007 engines,” he said. “We’re doing the right thing for the environment and the right thing for the customer. We’ve adapted that technology quicker than anybody else and we’ve implemented it quicker than anybody else. We’re doing the right things with our new product lineup introduced in January, which was the result of largest product investment in Peterbilt’s almost 70-year history. The customers are<