Ray Kuntz sees clear benefits of a partnership among a carrier, bank and driving school to Watkins & Shepard.
Service to the trucking industry yields rewards, but seldom do the benefits come so quickly and directly as they did for Ray Kuntz and his trucking company, Watkins & Shepard Trucking. Kuntz – chairman and chief executive officer of the Helena, Mont.-based carrier – is a vice chairman of the American Trucking Associations. For several months he has co-chaired an ATA-Truckload Carriers Association task force on driver recruiting.
Operating about 700 power units from a sparsely populated region of the country, Kuntz understands well the struggles of finding enough quality drivers. But his intense focus on the recruiting issue opened his eyes to deeper challenges, including one he heard in a task force meeting this spring from the owner of a major truck driving school. Watkins & Shepard has worked closely with the driving school for many years. Although the carrier offers primary and secondary training at its self-funded school in Missoula, Mont., it also recruits a number of drivers directly out of other truck driving schools.
“Ray had asked me how many drivers we complete in a year,” says Gregg Aversa, president of The Sage Corporation, which operates 32 truck driving schools across the United States. “I told him that this year we would have 4,000 drivers in our schools but that we could almost double that number. We have so many drivers who are interested, but they can’t get financing.”
That comment astounded Kuntz. The trucking industry was begging for quality personnel, and truck driving schools were turning away thousands of interested applicants because of a weak credit history. “These people are low-hanging fruit,” he says. “I thought, ‘How can I solve the funding problem?’ ”
Kuntz’s idea was that banks involved in financing equipment also could offer the financing of driving school tuition. It seemed logical, because increasing the supply of drivers should encourage fleets to grow.
A few weeks after the eye-opening task force meeting, senior management of Transportation Alliance Bank (TAB) – a subsidiary of Flying J that works exclusively in the transportation industry – paid a routine visit to Watkins & Shepard, an important customer. J.J. Singh, vice president of financial services for Flying J and chairman and president of TAB, mentioned in that meeting that he had read about testimony Kuntz had presented to a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee regarding making the Montgomery GI Bill useful for commercial driver’s license training.
