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It seemed like a good idea at the time. Wieland made a product that demanded special handling, which meant that common carriers -- the packhorses of the trucking industry -- were not an option. Specialty shippers, on the other hand, were expensive and not always reliable. So when the fellow who was then head of plant operations proposed one day that the company lease his brother's idle rig and hire the brother to make deliveries, the consensus within the company was "OK, let's give it a try."
Note the aim: customer service. It was a way to close the quality arc from design to production to delivery, to limit the variables at the end of the transaction. At least now the Wieland brothers could be reasonably sure that their chairs, sofas, and love seats would be handled with care and arrive on time. And when problems arose, they would have their own man on-site -- a knowledgeable, helpful, presentable man, accountable only to Wieland Furniture -- to deal with them.
One truck, one driver, performing a valuable service for Wieland Furniture and its customers. "Saying, 'Hmm, the normal service we can get outside doesn't understand our problems; therefore, we can do it more efficiently ourselves,' is probably a rational analysis," says Howard Stevenson, a professor at Harvard Business School. "The problem is when you carry it forward from there."
For Wieland Furniture, carrying the idea forward involved two steps. Step one, a baby step, was a matter of making better use of available resources. Since the company already had a truck, and the truck had to come home after every delivery, better it should come home full than empty. That's how Wieland Furniture got into the business of back-hauling third-party freight. It was good business. The added costs were insignificant, and the extra revenues went straight to the bottom line.
Step two, however, was a leap: adding capacity. The brothers still knew next to nothing about the trucking business, but already they knew enough to be intrigued by its potential. Blaine Wieland was drawn to the beauty of selling the same service over and over again to the same customer -- so unlike the contract-furniture business, in which big sales invariably precede long droughts. "They need you again next week," he says. "I really liked that. It seemed in some way easier."
Within a year Blaine Wieland had signed long-term leases on five more tractor-trailer combos. Allen Fischer, the original driver, was behind a desk now, managing operations and dispatching. Like anybody running long-distance freight, Fischer measured his success by how close he could come to an impossible goal: having every truck always full and always moving, exchanging drop-offs for pickups in a never-ending ballet. Wieland Furniture, with its steady flow of shipments, gave Fischer a nice base -- but that's all it was, a base. Just to cover his fixed costs, Fischer had to scramble -- not only for back hauls, but for outgoing freight as well.
In those days Wieland Transportation was a division and not yet a separate corporation. Fischer did his own tracking, though, and the numbers he was showing Blaine Wieland were impressive, although not as impressive in reality as on paper. For one, Fischer wasn't allocating any general and administrative or legal expenses. But, says Blaine Wieland of his rationale then, "at the very least I'm seeing some of the positive side of things. Customers are liking it. I'm loving this repeat-business stuff. Let's add a few more! So we went up to eight trucks."
Somewhere along the way, the Wieland brothers had crossed the line. They were in two businesses now, one unlike the other in a thousand ways. Wieland Furniture had started in the usual way: the idea came first, and then the means. "I want to make furniture -- now what do I need?" is how Professor Stevenson illustrates the standard progression. "Not 'I have a saw and a planer and a glue clamp -- now what can I make?" But, adds Stevenson, when those people got into trucking, "they went the opposite way. They said, 'I have a truck, now what can I do?' "
Just because you go about things backward doesn't mean you can't make the business work, says Stevenson. But "you usually do that by saying, 'For what opportunity do my resources provide an unfair advantage?' That's what Du Pont did. They were already experts in chemicals. Wieland had an unfair advantage as long as all they were doing was covering their back haul, because they had almost no marginal cost. But by the time they got to the second conception of the business, they had actually blown their advantage."
* * *
In 1993 the trucking operation was not yet a burden to Wieland Furniture. The brothers were still under its spell. The romance of owning and operating a whole fleet of teal blue semis with "Wieland Transportation" on the side of every cab appealed to them. The brothers can admit that now. There's a family story about when they were kids on vacation with their mom and dad, standing mesmerized at a truck stop before a big shiny rig, one of them bravely putting a finger on the paint. The door to the cab suddenly swung open, and the driver barked, "Don't touch!" The object of their awe, it happens, was a Steelcase truck. Steelcase and Herman Miller, besides being the giants of the contract-furniture business, have their own trucking divisions. "We have our own trucking company, too," says Blair Wieland. "Beat that!"
Moreover, Wieland's trucking business was more than covering its own expenses. At the height of its glory, during the fiscal year that ended April 30, 1993, Wieland Transportation made a pretax profit of $176,000 on revenues of $2,368,000. At 7%, the trucking business's margin fell short of what the brothers expected in the furniture business, but it was acceptable, absolutely, considering the side benefits.
But then, like visitors and fish in Ben Franklin's aphorism, the beguiling business of trucking started to stink. Exactly when and how are hard to say. Weather was a factor -- snow idled the fleet for an extended period, freezing revenues but not expenses. Insurance costs rose unexpectedly. Problems with drivers accumulated. Fischer, the head of the trucking division, left to start his own outfit and took Wieland's biggest customer with him.
