Rules for success in trucking: 1) Focus on a specialty you know and are good at. 2) Offer consistently excellent service and reasonable prices to your clients. 3) Recruit, train, and retain the best-possible employees, and innovatively organize them for maximum productivity. 4) Minimize reliance on outsiders-banks, computer service bureaus, consultants, or other outfits. Keep control, so you can stay focused and call the shots when and as you wish.

For Andy Balij and his two partners at Mississauga, Ont.-based Musket Transport, those values have paid off big-time. “I started Musket in March of 1994 with three trucks and a few friends who’d worked with me previously,” says Balij, the company’s president. “Today, we have almost 350 employees, 250 power units, 650 container chassis and van trailers, and our gross revenues this year should be close to $50 million.

“So far,” he adds with considerable understatement, “we’ve done reasonably well.”

Musket and its subsidiary, Melburn Truck Lines-a one-time competitor bought out last spring-specialize mainly in container carriage (a significant proportion being reefer cargoes) between southern Ontario and the U.S. Northeast, with the port of Newark, N.J., being the most common destination.

It’s not easy to find experienced drivers to make those runs-it’s demanding work. But Balij, who emigrated from Poland, is committed to giving people, especially recent arrivals to Canada like he once was, an opportunity to get into trucking with good training and a solid job in the industry.

Fair pay and decent equipment are part of the package. Balij notes that Musket has increased mileage rates to 35 cents per mile, and that a highway driver making a run into the ports at Newark, N.J., or similar runs can log about 3000 miles a week. Most of the Musket fleet is new or year-old Volvos, typically with Detroit Diesel 365-horsepower engines and 10-speed Eaton-Fuller transmissions (the daycabs used locally can be rated as low as 250 horsepower). And Balij believes in owning his equipment, not leasing or renting.

But it’s the drivers operating those trucks who are an intriguing part of the Musket way of doing business. For many, Musket is their first job trucking in Canada. Indeed, Musket is among the few fleets that will publicly state its desire for brand-new truck drivers.

The company places a premium on finding good people with a strong work ethic first, and then providing the classroom and behind-the-wheel training to help them become compentent professionals. To that end, in 1997 the company created a driver-training school called Commercial Heavy Equipment Training Ltd. (CHET).

“If a driver needs to be trained from scratch, we have CHET, where the tuition is $60 an hour,” says Dave Pattenick, fleet resource manager at Musket. “Each student gets evaluated individually, and we try to tailor their course to give them just what they need. If the person is short for the tuition, we’ve developed an in-house financing program where we’ll front up to two-thirds of the money and they pay us back, at about $40 a week, once they’re working.

“We know a lot of these people have families or other commitments, and we wanted to make sure the payback arrangements were something that they can handle.”

CHET is particular about who it accepts as students-attitude and motivation matter most, not experience.

With 15 years of driver-trainer experience himself-in his younger years he also worked as a truck driver in Florida and the Bahamas Islands-Toronto-native Pattenick substantially designed the current CHET curriculum to address the good and bad things he’d seen at other truck-driving schools. CHET has three instructors on staff, each with at least 25 years of commercial driving behind them, and eight students currently. Course length can vary from four to six weeks, and is a mix of hands-on and classroom training.

“It can be a 50-hour program, a 75-hour program, or longer-it all depends on the individual student and his or her background and learning capabilities,” he explains. “We’ll usually start a person out with three two-hour lessons, maybe Monday-Wednesday-Friday, that first week to see how fast they pick things up. If that goes well, we’ll increase the number of lessons and maybe bump the duration up to three hours each.”

Critical of what he considers a too-easy regime by the various provincial governments when it comes to licensing commercial drivers-and even more disdainful of the minimal standards of many “licensing mill” driver-training schools-Pattenick was determined to do things differently when he came to Musket in 1998. “The end goal is to inject a better-skilled driver into the system,” he states. “This decreases accidents, lowers the insurance costs, and helps a fleet’s bottom line.”

Pattenick emphasizes that the course is designed to make people employable. “We apply a lot of pressure, and try to see just what button to push with what student to help them achieve as much as possible as quickly as possible,” he says.

CHET primarily exists to supply drivers to Musket’s operations, so there’s a lot of emphasis on container-hauling specifically. Once the student graduates, they don’t just throw him a set of ignition keys and send him on a Jersey run. As with a new hire who’s already licensed, the first jobs may just be shunting containers between the fleet’s yards, then P&D around Toronto, and only then the international runs, if that’s the driver’s goal.

The first two trips down to the container ports in the States are done sitting next to an experienced senior driver who imparts a lot of tips to the rookie. Then the next three trips see the new driver in his own truck, but running in convoy with that senior driver.

After that, a review of performance is done back at head office, and if everything looks solid, the driver is approved for pure solo work.

And the bottom line that’s helped the most is Musket’s, thanks to a policy that guarantees an offer of employment upon successful completion of CHET training. They call it the “Direct-to-Employment” program. Most students take advantage of the opportunity. That’s why the input of trainees must be so carefully monitored by Pattenick, and there are rarely more than 10 on board at any one time. “You can’t make a promise of guaranteed employment and then not deliver,” he says. “Our company has been growing so fast in recent years that we’ve been able to keep those job offers coming.”

He admits that openings occur at Musket due to driver turnover as well. The annual rate is currently 36%, and has been steadily declining in recent years.

“Container work isn’t for everybody, and there are a lot of fleets out there advertising for drivers, with the economy so strong these days,” he says.

“But we’ve found that if a driver stays here after the first three months, he’ll likely be with us for a long time. We try to be very flexible in accommodating the drivers’ personal and family needs, and our runs to the Eastern Seaboard offer a very regular schedule. The driver can be home three nights every week, and most of each weekend, since the ports are only open weekdays. It’s a great deal for most people.”

Pattenick sees exciting opportunities for their approach to driver training, and will only say that he’s been in touch with both the provincial government and other fleets to investigate how CHET might be able to someday make even more of an impact in the marketplace.

Andy Balij has an additional perspective as to why molding their own drivers from scratch is desirable.

“When a driver gets several years of experience under his belt, he’s had enough time to develop some bad habits,” he says. “Now, if he has a serious accident, he’s usually a very careful and scrupulous driver for about the next two years. Then the complacency starts to re-appear.

“With our training course here, we not only want to get the benefit of the caution and attention to the rules that comes from a newly trained driver, but we hope to use our continuing-education efforts-such as a defensive-driving review we recently created-to renew our drivers’ appreciation of the need to always be professional.”

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SIDEBAR: Mixing Work & School: Succeeding With In-House Training

It’s one thing to hire a guy fresh out of driving school and send him out with an old hand to learn the ropes, and quite another to run that driving school and take a guy’s money as tuition. Training schools operated by motor carriers are often criticized as little more than a fast and dirty way to make use of old equipment and unpaid labor on revenue loads in the name of training.

A fleet-based driver-training school should be held to at least the same high industry standards and government rules as the better private schools around, according to several managers of in-house programs.

That means full-time trainers, a well developed curriculum, a low student to trainer ratio, and equipment dedicated to the training program, says Al MacDonald, supervisor, driver relations and training, with Challenger Motor Freight in Cambridge, Ont.

“The thing is to get the right people to function as trainers-people who can handle a wide range of student personalities and attitudes,” he says. At Challenger’s school, most trainers come from the ranks of company drivers. Instructors are assigned to just a single student at a time, usually for one- or two-week periods. Then the student is rotated to another trainer for a similar amount of time, so he can be exposed to different styles of instruction and special knowledge. MacDonald’s operation has 18 to 20 full-time instructors, paid a daily rate equivalent to what they’d average if they were on revenue runs.

Organizations like the Canadian Trucking Human Resources Council (613/237-1780) can help provide guidance as you develop your curriculum.

You also have to be aware of your regulatory obligations as a training school, if any. Provincial education and training authorities may have minimum standards for registered vocational schools and the instructors who teach there. You may have to tailor your teaching methods to adhere to provincial regs.

Take, for example, air-brake endorsements. “In Ontario, where we’re based, many schools teach the mandatory air-brake endorsement course in a classroom because they can stick 30 to 40 students there, charge $100-plus apiece, and make a lot of money,” Musket Transport’s Dave Pattenick says.

“The government also allows you to get air-brake endorsement a different way, which is how we do it here: it’s about 85% practical, in-the-truck during the test, and the other 15% is a short written test,” he says. ” The ‘practical’ way, the instructor can sign them off, while the ‘classroom’ way earns you a certificate you take to the government so they can give you the endorsement. Either way, the result is the same.”

Like MacDonald, Pattenick emphasizes that the key to a successful training program is the instructor, a job that’s largely unregulated. “I know of schools that hire people to instruct immediately after they’ve passed their own licence test,” he says.

“They haven’t worked in the real world at all. And somehow, for some reason, the government turns a blind eye to that. We need a new consensus on ‘how much is good enough’ not only for new truck drivers, but for driver instructors, too.”