For Conny Weyers, there’s never been a better time to be in growth mode. Conny operates Trailers Canada, a trailer sales and leasing business that occupies a new building on 16 acres along the big Fountain St. curve in Breslau, Ont. It’s a beautiful facility with space to spare inside and out. The yard is busy and efficient. Any unoccupied office is full of optimism.

Conny’s company is a 40-year-old operation with two fine product lines-Stoughton and Doepker trailers-and a rental and leasing business that thrives in uncertain times. When Conny looks at the future of his business, the building is his framework.

“I started working in the trucking industry in 1967 as a mechanic,” he told me at an open house in May. “I got into sales and leasing in 1990. I’ve been in it all my life. So have many of the good people around me. When we bought the land four years ago and started to talk about the kind of place to house our business, we weren’t just looking for more square footage.”

A building says a lot about your mission as a company and your values as an owner and employer. Planning the physical space where you’ll spend so many waking hours demands serious thinking about the activities that pay the bills today and what those activities might be in the future. Your decisions will affect the way your employees move, learn, and work for years to come.
When I asked Conny what his priorities were when he and his team started to plan their space, he said, “We were pretty cramped in that old place over there,” gesturing up the road, where an old farmhouse was the base of operations. “We wanted plenty of room for people to work. We wanted light for people to grow. We wanted to do better work.”

More room. More light. Do better work.

Growth, of course, brings new obligations. More debt, perhaps, or having to give up part your company’s ownership to outside investors. It means more employees, certainly-including managers who will want to put their own personal stamp on the way your business is run. Amid all of this, it’s easy to lose sight of your bread-and-butter customers or products-the ones upon which your expansion plans are based.

Having covered the trucking business for 11 years, I’ve seen companies sputter, cruise, or swerve through every step from start-up to maturity and, for some, sad decline and hopeful regeneration. Talking to Conny Weyers, though, reinforces the idea that growth isn’t always about revenue or trucks or square footage.

A growth company is a place where owners constantly challenge themselves and their employees to do something meaningful and helpful. Where owners measure success in the achievements of their workers and in their own sense of happiness and satisfaction. Growth can be personal, fuelled by pride, creativity, and imagination. The guy who’s been running four trucks for 10 years straight but is a better, more sophisticated business owner today (or a better boss or parent or less of a heart-attack risk) is every bit as entrepreneurial as the one who went from four trucks to 1,400 over the same period of time.

I take inspiration from that, and from so many of you who are out there pursuing a path toward taking charge of your own economic destiny.

This is my last column as editor of Today’s Trucking. By the time you read this, I’ll be into my own entrepreneurial endeavour, moving to Issaquah, Wash., to help suppliers to the trucking industry do a better job of reaching their customers. I’m teaming up with former Heavy Duty Trucking magazine editor Drew Ryder, Max Kvidera, and Doug Siefkes at The Siefkes Group, a small, smart public relations and marketing firm that caters to truck equipment manufacturers and technology companies. I’ll also be working closely with Chris Bennett and his team at TFS Group in Waterloo, Ont. (frequent contributors to Today’s Trucking), to promote a suite of business services for fleets and owner-operators.

I also want to write articles and work on projects for this magazine and others in the New Communications Group family. I was a partner in this company and I believe in it because the owners-Rolf Lockwood, Tony Hohenadel, Wilson Smith, and especially Jim Glionna-are committed to providing the room and the light an editor needs to do better work.

Finally, thank you for reading. If a magazine does indeed reflect the editor’s values and sensibilities, I hope Today’s Trucking has been meaningful and helpful to you. I’m grateful to those of you who have been my touchstones in the industry. You refuelled my sense of pride, creativity, and imagination whenever I needed it and kept me in growth mode the entire time.

I hope you’ll keep in touch. You can reach me at my new email address: sptruck@mac.com