A knack for finding work keeps her business trucking

WAITE PARK, MINN. - I'm not usually an envious sort, but Krystal Vierkant's saga is enough to make a geezer choke on his Metamucil.

Consider this: The woman is 32 and a college dropout with a résumé that includes stints as a bookkeeper and an office manager with two trucking companies and as a teller at a St. Cloud Bank.

And she was only trying to add a few bucks to her meager income when she bought a semitrailer truck in 2001 and hired a friend to drive it.

Six years later, her Rock On Companies grossed more than $11 million in 2007 from a business that now operates nine semis of its own, brokers loads and repairs rigs for independent truckers, leases trailers to them, runs a waste disposal operation and wholesales decorative rock to landscapers.

Did I mention she's only 32? Can you feel my pain?

The proprietor of all this commerce and industry is a soft-spoken young mother of two toddlers who might still be working as an office manager for a Twin Cities-area trucking company if the work had been a tad more stimulating.

"I got bored," Vierkant said.

That's when she heard about a trucking company in bankruptcy and negotiated a deal to take over payments on a semi. Her market focus, then and now: supplying sand, dirt, gravel and rock to construction sites in and around the Twin Cities, a specialty at one of the trucking companies for which she once worked.

Vierkant kept her bank job for nearly two years, using her lunch hours and break times to hustle loads for her truck. Evenings were spent handling billings and other paperwork. She was getting about four hours of sleep a night.

"It was good training for when my kids came along," she said.

The task became even more wearing as the business quickly grew beyond her modest goal of supplementing her bank wages. As word of her skill in finding business for her own rig spread, several independent truckers asked her to act as broker for them.

By the end of 2001 she had six "dedicated" truckers working solely with her brokerage, which she named Rock On Trucks. That division, which today accounts for 90 percent of her revenue, now has 50 dedicated drivers.

Next came the trailer leasing business, which she added to her original Rock On Enterprises operation after several area haulers expressed interest. With some savings and a loan from her bank, she began accumulating an inventory that now totals 30 trailers.

Then, as the need to keep her owner-operators on the road became apparent, she added a third division, called Rock On Repair, to offer repair services to the independent truckers.

By March of 2003, Vierkant was exhausted. She was still working full time at the bank, had a dozen trailers under lease and was brokering business for 30 dedicated truckers. She decided to quit the bank job and devote her full attention to her business, a move that "added three hours of sleep to my schedule."

Since then, she has added three more divisions to her business.

In a move to provide backhauls for her St. Cloud-area truckers, Vierkant started Rock on Rock in 2006 to supply area landscapers with granite, quartz, limestone and river rock hauled on return trips from the Twin Cities.

The most recent addition is Minnesota Tarp and Liners, an offshoot of the repair service that sells and installs the tarps that cover a load and the liners that smooth the load-dumping process.

She didn't use the Rock On name this time, because she wanted to attract as customers her competitors who might otherwise bridle at the Rock On reference.

The growth of her business in a male-dominated industry has accompanied her growing credibility.

"When we need something, and she says she'll get it, it's there," said Tom Evans, a supervisor with big Maple Grove contractor C.S. McCrossan. "Even when it's short notice, she delivers."

Added Steve Capron, dispatch coordinator for Barton Sand & Gravel in Maple Grove: "In an industry that's sometimes not too dependable, she has a reputation for getting the job done."

So what's next? Fewer business start-ups, Vierkant said: "We'll be growing the businesses we have for a while."