Rucker continued to supply parts to Adelaide from time to time, but his business didn't take its next big turn until 1986, when he received a call from an Allison dealer in California. Instead of transmissions for school buses, this dealer wanted Rucker to find him some much larger transmissions used in trucks and industrial equipment.
It wasn't more than a week before he found a salvage yard in Waxahachie, down the road from Fort Worth, that had four of the large transmissions. "I tore my butt down there in an hour and loaded them onto my truck," says Rucker. He paid $6,000 for the four transmissions and sold them to the California dealer the same day for $10,000 -- an instant profit of $4,000, or about as much as the business had been clearing in a single month.
That was all Rucker had to see. Within a few months he had started up a new company, Tracom, to buy and sell big-truck transmissions and engine parts. The truck parts aftermarket is a lively $11-billion business, and the parts portion of it is about $1 billion. But it is not very efficient. Trucking companies typically return used engines to the manufacturers and dealers, who either rebuild the engines and transmissions or scavenge the parts. But many valuable parts remain in junkyards and salvage yards or on the grounds of small trucking companies. It was those parts, in a sense lost to the stream of commerce, that Rucker aimed to acquire and resell.
He began to think about selling overseas. What he had learned from Leon Will was that foreign customers, who generally are not as well off as Americans, tend to rebuild engines again and again rather than buy new ones. The poorer the country, the more they scrounge for parts.
Using nothing more sophisticated than an industry directory of truck dealers, Rucker began placing calls to Australia. One contact, Detco Australia, was among the largest distributors and rebuilders of Detroit Diesel engines in the world; the company told him it needed as many of the engines as he could find. "I'd never seen a Detroit Diesel engine up to that time," says Rucker. "So I bought some manuals and started studying up."
Rucker located the engines in Springfield, Mo., and sold them to Detco for $50,000, a 100% markup. Detco secured a letter of credit from its bank to guarantee payment and asked for three separate shipments of the engines. After sending out the first group, Rucker left for a week's vacation. "I called the office and they said we had a major problem," he says. The bank had released the entire $50,000 instead of a partial payment for the first shipment. "Detco was in a panic because they didn't know me and I had their money and still most of the engines. So I wired $30,000 back to them, which put me at risk since the letter of credit was gone for the last two shipments I had to make. But from then on, they trusted me."
Bill Rucker was in the export business.
In the back of Rucker's plant, inside an open-air metal shed, three men are working on Detroit Diesel engine blocks. By now they are as black with oil as the engines themselves. They inspect each piece quickly and toss the rocker arms in one box, bolts in another, valves in a third. One man can strip an engine to its skeleton in a few hours.
Tim Jordan arrives in his Chevy pickup. Rucker had asked him to look around for Detroit Diesel injectors; he figured it would take even the best of bird dogs like Jordan a couple weeks to come up with them. But Jordan called a few junkers he knew and now here he was, three days later, with 191 injectors in the back of his truck.
He had paid $6 apiece for them -- cash, on the spot, as most of these transactions are -- and would get $10 apiece from Rucker, who would cut him a check within half an hour. Rucker himself would ship the injectors the next day for $15 apiece and would get paid within 10 days. So thin is the veneer of trust in this business that receivables are not allowed to age very long; there are reasons, after all, that dealers have a junkyard dog straining at the collar nearby.
Rucker's business cannot function without an intelligence network to help him find engines and engine parts. They are scattered in thousands of sheds and scrap yards around the country, and no national inventory system exists that can tell you, say, where to find a 740-D Allison transmission, vintage 1982. Rucker has a growing business because he, more than most dealers, knows where the junk is. "We've taken an industry that was disorganized and disjointed and brought a little organization to it," he says.
Half of Tracom's supply comes from calls its employees make to salvage yards, trucking companies, and truck dealers. If they find an especially rich cache in a salvage yard in Morgantown, W. Va., for example, someone from the company, perhaps Rucker himself, will fly there to take a look. Another third or so of the supply comes from people calling and offering their junk for sale.
The balance of Rucker's supply comes from 15 or so people like Jordan, guys who buy and sell from the back of their trucks. Untouched by computer systems, marketing vice-presidents, or any other accoutrements of modern business, they live by their ability to spot the hot parts and to strike a good price on both ends. They are masters at inventory turns, starting on Monday mornings with perhaps $5,000 cash in their pockets and trading that up to maybe $7,000 or $8,000 by week's end.
From the time he started the company, Rucker has focused on ways to track both his own inventory as well as parts available in salvage yards around the country. At first he filed all the information on color-coded paper; although the system worked, more or less, it was tedious and time-consuming. Then last year he converted all his files to a computer system tailored to his own needs.
