were raised in the trucking industry. They would work summers driving forklifts and backing trucks into the dock “way before we were legally allowed to,” he said, and they would deliver Sears appliances around town. When a dozen trucks would arrive at the warehouse from Omaha at night, the lead driver would stop by the house with the packet, and their mother, June, would type out the bills to match the freight to be delivered the next day. The industry’s deregulation was a challenging time. It opened up the Lincoln market to the big LTL firms, forcing the smaller ones out of business. Winter Brothers, which had a warehouse, morphed into a moving and storage facility. In 1984, Waldo and Hubert sold the


company to Don Leonard, a transportation attorney, who kept the Winter Brothers name. The idea was for Bob, who was still a little green, to gain experience and move into eventual ownership. He had graduated Peru State College, where he majored in industrial arts, but the plan was always to manage the company, which he bought outright in 1986. “It’s just one of those things,” he said.


“You don’t think about anything else. Diesel and trucking gets in your blood. It’s just, that’s what you do. You just have to find a niche that works.” Waldo and Hubert had built a 64,000-square-foot facility with some partners, which had been sold to the partnership when the company was sold. Bob leased that building from the partnership. The moving business stayed afloat for a while, especially because the company did a lot of business with the military, but Lincoln was not home to many corporate offices, and the number of clients dwindled. By 1988, he had a local household moving authority and was a 48-state agent for Atlas Van Lines. Over the road interstate trucking required him to start a new company, so he started Distribution Inc. For a time, he operated both it and Winter Brothers before getting totally out of household moving. Knowing the company’s future would be in warehousing and production, Bob started dealing with manufacturing facilities in the Lincoln area. His first big customer


was Goodyear, which produced rubber in Beaumont, Texas, stored it in Houston, and then delivered it to Lincoln using a just- in-time model. He encouraged Goodyear to store the material in Lincoln. Weather wouldn’t be so much of a factor, and he could manage the inventory more economically and see that it was available within hours. To service those kind of customers,


Bob would need more space. He leased a 140,000-square-foot distribution center previously owned by a mass merchandiser and then bought it in about 1990. From there, the company moved to managing inventory for other companies, including international ones based in South Korea and Japan, that shipped raw materials from across the globe into Lincoln for their


another, and the next thing you know, I was out running his operation and keeping this operation running at the same time traveling back and forth,” he said. Bob moved the family from Lincoln to


Grand Island, where GICC was located. For the next 12 years, he ran both companies, growing GICC while making his own company more successful with the help of a general manager in Lincoln. Every week, he traveled between the two cities three or four times. Success has come, but not always quickly. Just as Bob’s mother, June, served a vital role with Winter Brothers during its early days, so too has his wife, Lucy, with Distribution Inc. “In the early days when I was trying to struggle around, it was her job at the


manufacturing facilities in the Midwest. Distribution Inc. has the ability to deliver the materials to those facilities’ docks 24-7. Then the finished products are delivered to customers through a third party logistics provider. Running that operation would have been


a full-time job for anyone, but Bob decided to add another one. During a discussion with Bob Eihusen of Chief Industries, he started talking about what he would do if he ran the company’s flatbed division, Grand Island Contract Carriers. “We got involved, and one thing led to


state where she’d worked for 15 years that pretty much kept us afloat until I got my feet underneath me and started growing the business. She worked at the state in HR and she brought some of those tools over to help me learn how to take care of employees,” he said.


Also helping him through those challenges has been the Nebraska Trucking Association, which he currently serves as chairman of the board. The NTA has helped his company deal with changes in


Continues NEBRASKA TRUCKER — ISSUE 5, 2016 — www.nebtrucking.com 17


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