TORONTO – Kumar Alagaratnam, the founder and CEO of Dynevor Express, has been named the best Entrepreneur of 2012 by the Canadian Tamils’ Chamber of Commerce.

The presentation was made at the 14th annual Tamil CofC Awards Gala in late April in Toronto.

Dynevor Express – founded in 1999 – was named for the street that Alagaratnam lived on in north Toronto.

He came to Canada from Sri Lanka at 18 in 1988 and began working with NOMA’s automotive lighting division.

At one point, he was a full-time student with a full-time job, but he also started up a single-vehicle across-town expediting service for an auto-parts manufacturers. “Two to three hours of sleep was enough for me,” he says.

As demand for the expediting grew, so did Alagaratnam’s reputation at NOMA until he had risen to the position of senior supervisor. When NOMA announced that it was moving its plants to Mexico, they invited Alagaratnam to move but he decided to stay in Canada to grow his cartage business.

Today, Dynevor Express employs about 150 staff with a fleet of more than 150 company power units and trailers. The lion’s share of his haulage involves paper from Northern Ontario into the U.S.

For more on this industrious entrepreneur, watch for the July issue of Today’s Trucking.