Directions to the corporate headquarters of Glen Transport may seem a little cryptic if you’re from out of town. Go south from Calgary on Hwy. 2 to Fort Macleod and take Hwy. 3 to Pincher Creek is clear enough. Then you have to listen carefully, and maybe ask the gentle voice on the other end of the line to repeat the words because you don’t want to risk them to memory. Pass through the town of Cowley, take the first right after the Hwy. 22 cutoff-it’s not marked-and then make a left turn onto the dirt road with the cattle guard. We’re up the hill in the little brown building with the satellite dish out front. We’ve got coffee on. Drive safe.

The coulees and canyons of Crowsnest Pass, just a few miles west on Hwy. 3, are a long way from the office towers that line Bay Street in Toronto, where the only climbers around are up-and-coming managers with their masters degree in business administration.

Guys like Shane Stewart. When Stewart graduated from the de Vos School of Management at Northwood University in Midland, Mich., a year and a half ago, his almost straight-A grade point average and work experience at his family’s tobacco distributorship in Barrie, Ont., turned heads at the likes of Philip Morris and AT&T.

Then he was introduced to Don Glen, owner of this little woodchip-hauler with the P.O. box in Cowley and the brown building on the hill.

“I had job offers that would make your head spin,” recalls Stewart, “but Don laid out the best package. He appealed to what was important to me. After talking to him, I didn’t want to work anywhere but Glen Transport.”

What Stewart wanted was to be an active part of a management team. “I know people with big-time graduate degrees who do exceptionally well financially but otherwise lead pretty unfulfilled professional lives,” he says. “Conversely, I know trucking company managers who are frustrated because they get in over their head when it comes to managing the ‘business’ part of their trucking business. What Don understands, to his credit, is that there are people like me who are happiest when they put a big contract together, or find thousands of dollars in savings by negotiating a better financing package, or who want to put together a decent employee handbook. I can do a lot to enhance the profit potential of a company, and Don told me I would have the chance to prove it.

One of the payoffs was a chance to gain some meaningful equity in the company.

“I was sold right there,” Stewart says. “With Glen Transport being a family business, I was blown away at how other family members who are equity partners in the company were willing to make such a commitment to me and allow someone outside the family to be involved at the ownership level. I joined the company Feb. 1, 2000.”

For all the talk about the shortage of professional drivers in Canada’s trucking industry, there’s little said about the dearth of professional managers. It’s difficult to entice talented people into trucking if they have no real connection to it, says Barry Groves of Groves & Partners International, a Mississauga, Ont.-based recruiting firm that specializes in transportation. “The images are hard to shake: the industry is blue-collar, it’s unsophisticated, it’s not intellectually stimulating.”

These stereotypes are perpetuated, he says, “by trucking company owners who have their heads stuck in the sand and cannot see the value in hiring someone with business expertise, who show contempt for people who have a string of letters behind their name but not a lot of practical experience.”

That’s a shame, Groves says, because many trucking operations are fertile ground for young managers to come in and earn their keep. “Typically, a trucking company is an entrepreneurial environment that needs to improve its financial performance and formalize its management policies. That, folks, is what MBAs do. In fact, a hot-shot business manager will make strategic decisions that could earn back what the company pays him,” Groves says. “A bookkeeper or accountant will not.”

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It was a chance meeting that brought Don Glen and Shane Stewart together in October 1999, a few months before Stewart’s graduation. Stewart and Glen’s youngest son, Bob, attended the same MBA program, and Don and his wife flew down to Midland for a Canadian Thanksgiving gathering. “We’d been looking for someone like Shane for nearly three years,” Glen recalls. “Although he provided advice wherever he could, Bob took a job in the States. We had gotten to a point where I was really at the edge of my abilities to manage the business the way a growing company should be managed. I was stuck at my desk all the time, and that’s not my favorite place to be. We wanted to make the move before times got tougher.”

Glen relied on his company’s accountant for financial advice, and even talked about him coming to work for Glen full-time. But at 57, he was getting ready to retire, and Glen wanted “someone with fresh ideas and who would have a future with us. I had my eye on some projects I wanted to take on, but I needed a really sharp guy to help us out with the business-side of things.”

One of those projects was a large contract to haul woodchips to a mill in Cranbrook, B.C., owned by Crestbrook Forest Industries. Glen Transport already worked with Crestbrook on a smaller deal, and the two companies had a good relationship. Glen would be competing for the contract with the Bulk Systems division of Trimac Corp., a mammoth operation where economies of scale invariably weigh heavily in its favor. Bulk Systems had held the pulp-delivery contract for the previous 12 years. An adjunct to the pulp-hauling deal was an agreement to bring in hog fuel-a mix of bark and other wood residue-to fire an electricity generator at the mill.

Winning both contracts would increase Glen Transport’s revenues by more than 40%. It would have to expand from 26 to 50 trucks and begin adding the specialized trailer equipment within a matter of weeks of a decision by Crestbrook.

“We saw both deals as significant to us because of the amount of trucks and trailers involved, and the length of the agreements: five years, renewable to 10 years,” says Stewart. “It would mean a steady cash flow and security for our employees, as well as a chance to do business with a customer we really enjoy working for.”

Glen was confident he had the trucking expertise to provide more efficient service than Bulk Systems. He started mapping out specs for a chip trailer that would yield more volume than anything Bulk Systems had in its stable.

“We showed how flexible we could be,” say Stewart. “For example, Cranbrook didn’t have enough chip-dumping capacity, and the customer didn’t have $2 million to put a new dumper in. In our rates, we factored in that we would buy a used dumper that’s permanent-about a $200,000 commitment. Ownership of the dumper would revert to Cranbrook at the end of the 10-year contract.

“Bulk Systems wanted to use live floors to handle the overflow. We looked at the expense: take five live-floor trailers, plus all the expense of running the tractors versus the stationary dumper, and it’s not even comparable.”

Glen Transport won the contract in November, and then the real work began. “We had to get up and running in a hurry-a little more than two months, I guess-with drivers and equipment,” says Glen. “We took on 14 lease operators from Bulk Systems, and then brought a lot of their company drivers on board when Bulk decided it couldn’t use them. That brought our total up to about 88 drivers.

“Shane’s input was important there, because we wanted to make sure we kept continuity with the compensation packages, since Bulk Systems is a unionized operation. He also made sure we had all the financing and insurance lined up for the new equipment. It was quite a job for him, but it’s what we hired him to do.”

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For a talented young manager, there’s only one thing worse than being stuck in a mid-level job at a big firm, says recruiter Barry Groves: “And that’s being stuck in a mid-level job at a small firm, having been lured there by the owner’s promise that he would play an active role in running the business.”

Like a lot of the people in his graduating class, Stewart was looking for an opportunity to make a contribution that would prove his worth. “I didn’t come cheap at all, but I paid for myself completely in our insurance savings for one year,” he says. “I think Don was as much embarrassed as he was thrilled. He just had so many other things going on, he didn’t have time to spend a month beating on an insurance company about getting pricing in line.

“Make no mistake, we have all kinds of good fights around here,” he says. “I had the hardest time understanding why you take a truck that’s already expensive and put $8000 worth of chrome and extras on it. But Don’s philosophy is that that type of equipment attracts drivers and keeps them in the seats. And it’s true. We have a lot of mainstay, excellent guys, and they’re with us because we offer attractive, well-maintained equipment.”

There are times “when the bottom line of an issue isn’t dollars and cents,” Stewart explains. “The benevolence Don and his wife, Betty, and their family show their employees sometimes is simply the right thing to do, regardless of cost.

“But if you say to an ambitious person, You’re going to have input on direction, on vision, on strategy, you’re going to be able to attract good people,” he says. “Yes, competitive salary and benefits are important, but the appeal of a small company is that you’re a big cog in a little machine. I count my blessings that I have an owner who is following through.”

SIDEBAR: Compensation: Creative Financing

Barry Groves says the recipe for attracting good, young, professional managers is an imprecise mix of dollars and sense.

“B-school grads see some head-spinning compensation packages,” he explains. The best in their class can earn six figures out of the gate, plus signing bonuses, pay-for-performance schemes, stock options, company cars, and profit sharing.

“I talk to the owners of trucking companies-big and small-who think they can’t compete for good management talent,” Groves says. It’s true, they can’t match the absurd dollars Bay Street firms toss around, and they have to work harder to overcome the blue-collar-and-belt-buckle image of the trucking industry.

But Groves says smaller firms have something valuable to offer young managers that most multi-layered companies can’t touch: the chance to make an immediate impact.

“The best performers are motivated by opportunity,” he says. “They want to be able to put their schooling to use and be empowered to make decisions that move the needle right away. There’s more opportunity for that kind of responsibility and satisfaction at a small business than there is at some monster corporation.”

Factor that desire in your offer. “Consider results-based compensation,” Groves says. Open the books, provide a clear idea of your expectations, and then give your best assurances as an owner that you’ll back off and let your new manager perform.

That’s what happened in Shane Stewart’s case.

“I made it a pre-condition of my employment that I see the financial statements for the past few years, and also to talk with the accountant,” Stewart says. “It gave me confidence that the company is financially sound, and has great potential. After that, I was willing to tone down my salary expectation for an upside bonus.”

Employers can get more creative than offering a percentage of profits.

“I wish I’d done mine on gross profit improvement. In the year I’ve been at Glen Transport, we’ve had a 25% improvement in gross profit. A lot of those things are directly attributable to my ideas-and the fact that Don listened to what I said. ”

Ultimately if a reward system is fair, in market terms, it will provide real incentives for accomplishments and create the kind of challenge any high performer wants to rise to. “In a pay-for-play scenario, you want your hot-shot manager to make a mint,” says Groves, “because that means your company is exceeding expectations. That means he’s paying for himself.”