DOING IT RIGHT - Knight Transportation

Getting It Right the First Time
Attention to detail sets Maintenance Technician of the Year apart
By Jennifer Barnett Reed
Contributing Writer
 Frank Garcia, Empire Transport
Frank Garcia’s official title may be
maintenance technician, but what he really
is — what he really enjoys being — is a
puzzle solver. After more than 13 years at
Empire Transport’s Fleet Center in Mesa,
the Arizona Trucking Association 2011
Maintenance Technician of the Year said he
still finds new challenges on the job every
day.
“I just enjoy repairing them,” Garcia
said of the Empire Machinery fleet trucks
54
he works on. “Sometimes they come in on
a tow truck, and I just enjoy getting them
back running. Some are simple to work
on, and some you have to troubleshoot. …
I’m always learning something — every
single day something else comes up that’s
different.”
Empire Transport’s service shop
supervisor, Rick Pruitt, said he nominated
Garcia for Maintenance Technician of
the Year because of his outstanding
performance and his dedication to the
company. One quality that sets Garcia apart
is the amount of time and effort he puts in
to stay current with changes in engines and
technology, Pruitt said.
“He does a lot of reading and studying
on his own time to keep up with the new
things,” he said.
And plenty has changed since Garcia,
49, talked his boss at a tire dealership into
giving him a shot at a mechanic’s position.
He was about 18 then, and was working as
a tire mounter, but had previously worked
as a mechanic’s helper for the Arizona
Department of Transportation and had
grown up watching his mechanic father at
work.
“He was kind of hesitant,” Garcia said
of his then-boss. “I said he could try me
out, and if I don’t work out, put me back
mounting tires. That’s where I started.”
It did work out, and Garcia went to the
Arizona Automotive Institute in Glendale
for formal training as well. Since then he
has continued to take classes and seminars
to keep his skills up to date.
“With the newer engines, you’ve got to
keep going to school to keep up with all the
changes,” Garcia said.
Pruitt also praised Garcia’s work ethic.
“He is constantly checking to see that
every little detail you can go through to
make it as right as possible is done,” Pruitt
said. “I call it very meticulous about his
work. After he’s completed a job he will test
it and wait and test it again to make sure it
is completed.”
Garcia said he just doesn’t like to have
to do a job twice.
“When I work on something, I try to
fix it where I don’t have to come back to it a
second time,” he said.
He also tries to save other mechanics
extra work by sharing what he’s learned
after he figures out a particularly sticky
repair.
“If I come up with a problem and I
solve it, I’ll go up to other mechanics and
let them know what I found, what I did to
correct the problem,” he said. “Most people,
when they repair something, they don’t go
around telling anyone. I go to that extra
effort to let them know what I’ve found so
when they come up with that problem they
can fix it.”
Pruitt said this makes Garcia —
whose coworkers have elected him the
Empire fleet center’s technician of the year
three times — a great mentor to younger
mechanics. He not only has the knowledge,
Pruitt said, but he’s able to coach rather
than correct.
“He’s very diplomatic about it,” Pruitt
said. “He will explain to them why they’re
looking at it in the wrong way, and explain
that this is the way it actually operates, not
the way you’re thinking. He’s a very calm,
level-headed person.”
Arizona Trucking Association 2012 Yearbook
Doing It Right
Through mentoring program, Driver of the Year Jules Amo teaches new drivers his approach
to safety and life on the road
By Jennifer Barnett Reed
Contributing Writer
With only six years of long-haul
trucking under his belt, you might think
2012 Driver of the Year Jules Amo of Knight
Refrigerated would need a little more
experience himself before he took on the
job of training his company’s fresh-fromtrucking-school hires. But what the 52-yearold Amo has to offer his new co-workers
goes well beyond what’s on his resume.
Amo lives in Springfield, Mo., but
is based out of Knight’s Phoenix terminal
and drives primarily in the Southwest. He
was nominated by his supervisor at Knight,
Chris Brown, for both his tireless attention
to safety — his six years have been accidentfree — and the results he produces through
his involvement in the company’s Squire
program, which pairs inexperienced new
drivers with veterans for a month before
they can go out on their own.
“The drivers he trains are the safest,
and they stay with the company,” said
Brown, division manager for the Squire
program. “He’s very thorough — he doesn’t
shortchange anything.”
Brown said she recruited Amo to be a
Squire trainer after just a couple of years on
the job because of the initiative he showed
with the company’s dispatchers, calling to let
them know when he was free to take a load
rather than waiting for them to call him. He
shows the same kind of work ethic training
new employees, she said, using downtime
on the road to help them practice driving
skills or get up to par on the administrative
side of the job.
Amo’s route to becoming a truck driver
was a meandering one. He joined the Air
Force out of high school and spent 10 years
working as an air transportation supervisor.
Arizona Trucking Association 2012 Yearbook
(Left to right) ATA Chairman George Cravens, Driver of the Year Jules Amo, Knight Refrigerated, Assistant ADOT
Director Terry Conner and Kenny Palmer, Transtar Insurance Brokers
Then he spent another 10 years driving a
small delivery truck. After that came several
years of “floating,” which included a job
teaching driver’s education to 15-year-olds.
When he lost his final “floating” job, he said,
he realized that what he had loved most
about it was the driving. So even though he
was in his mid-40s by then, he decided it
was finally time to do what he really wanted
to do. After a stint with a trucking company
in Salt Lake City, he joined Knight about five
years ago.
As a Squire trainer, Amo offers advice
on adjusting to the lifestyle the job requires.
He speaks from experience: He and his longterm girlfriend make their relationship work
by talking face-to-face through phones or
computers, and they always make plans for
the next time they’ll be together, even if they
don’t know exactly when that will be.
“I have to be upfront about what the
challenges are,” he said. “You could be gone
three to six weeks without seeing your
family. For some people, that’s really difficult,
especially if they’ve never been away before.”
There might be more practical
adjustments as well, Amo said. “You might
have a guy who’s never had to do his own
laundry before. Or he has to maintain his
own finances for the first time, and there’s
nobody to pick them up if they screw up.”
Still, he said, the lifestyle changes aren’t
the biggest challenge facing new drivers.
“The biggest roadblock is that people
just can’t operate the truck safely for a long
period of time,” he said.
Amo credits education, experience,
and “plain old luck” with helping him stay
accident free, and he says his decade in the
Air Force taught him the value of doing
things the right way, even when the boss is a
thousand miles away.
“Just because the company’s not
scrutinizing me out here,” he said, “everyone
else is.”
55