The impact and history of autos in Detroit, The Motor City
Here are some facts about Detroit’s auto industry.
- McKinley Archie and three business partners started Squirrelly LLC in February.
- Squirrelly hauled its first load of Ford Expeditions and F-Series trucks on April 22.
- Squirrelly is looking to get a direct contract with Ford or General Motors to haul more vehicles.
Four months ago, McKinley Archie was blindsided by the reality that his six-figure job with a trucking company where he’d worked for about 20 years was coming to a screeching halt.
Archie, 46, had been working at the now-defunct car hauling company Jack Cooper since 2004. He started there as a driver. He drove big rigs loaded with new Ford Motor Co. vehicles out of the automaker’s Louisville Assembly Plant and Kentucky Truck Plant to dealerships across the nation. He had worked his way up to steward at the Jack Cooper facility that served Louisville Assembly.
Life was good. Then came Jan. 2, the day that Ford — Jack Cooper’s second-largest customer behind General Motors — gave a 30-day notice to Jack Cooper that it was terminating its decades-long business with the hauler. Ford did not provide a reason. Archie and about 105 colleagues in Louisville suddenly knew they’d be losing what had been lucrative jobs.
“It wasn’t McDonald’s wage jobs — those were good jobs,” Archie said, noting most of the drivers were earning more than $100,000 a year.
Then, one month later, GM ended its relationship with Jack Cooper after failing to reach a new contract. That put the nearly 100-year-old vehicle hauling company out of business, eliminating about 2,500 jobs nationally. In Michigan, more than 350 jobs ended when Ford and GM severed their contracts with Jack Cooper.
Through it all, Archie put on a brave face to mask his fear about how he’d provide for his family.
“As the steward, my coworkers looked to me for leadership and guidance, so I had to be strong for them on the outside. But internally, I didn’t know what I was going to do either,” Archie said. “Then, when I saw my mom, she said, ‘What’s wrong? Your face looks heavy?’ I broke a couple tears and said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll have a job.’ She reminded me that I’m a child of God. He will take care of me. She said to suck it up, keep moving and it will all work out.”
Digging up the seed cash
Archie said he listened to his mother’s advice, drew on his faith and started mulling over a plan to survive this setback.
He knew that on Jan. 31, the Jack Cooper trucks had to be empty, so he wasted no time. In early February, he gathered together his lifelong band of “brothers from another mother” and proposed an idea.
“We’ve been doing business for years, and we sat down and had a roundtable on how we can mitigate these losses,” Archie said. “We decided to launch into the car hauling business.”
The group has launched other business endeavors, such as in 2020, when they started bourbon-maker Black Bred Distillery in Louisville. They also run a home renovation business, Knox Construction, in Atlanta.
In February, the group launched Squirrelly LLC. The goal is to haul Ford vehicles from the Kentucky Truck Plant to dealerships anywhere in the nation. Archie is the company’s cofounder and chief compliance officer. The newly established hauler is based in Stone Mountain, Georgia, where some of the group live.
The business group consists of Archie, two other men and a woman. The three men grew up together and have known each other “from the cradle,” Archie said. They went on first dates together and Archie even taught one of them how to drive. They met the woman later through friends. She brings with her an expertise on logistics, he said.
Archie describes the group as “multi-preneurs,” meaning that they try to find opportunities across a range of fields. His two male partners have degrees in finance and one is a youth pastor with a master’s degree in divinity, Archie said.
They decided on the name Squirrelly “because we are all over the place. That’s our slogan,” Archie said.
But they knew it would be no easy feat to start their own car hauling business. Archie said the plan has been to buy lightly used rigs from Jack Cooper. But each one carried a whopping price tag of $260,000. Then there is the cost for insurance on the rigs and for employees. He said they were able to lease some of the trucks to start, which helped get them going. So far, Squirrelly has bought 10 trucks and is scheduled to buy 25 more, he said.
“So it was quite a lot we had to raise, an arduous task for us,” Archie said, saying all the capital came from the group’s own resources, no outside funding. “We had go into my backyard and dig up all my savings. It’s hard to go even to a bank and say give me $3 million to start a dream. Now that we’re actually moving cars, maybe we can go back to them and show them proof of concept. But we bootstrapped all of it.”
Looking to make his own deal
Squirrelly moved its first load of Ford vehicles April 22 from Kentucky to Texas. Since then, it has hauled nine loads of the Ford Expedition SUV and F-Series Super Duty pickups from Kentucky Truck Plant to dealerships in Texas and 17 loads to dealerships in Michigan. Archie said that’s about 120 vehicles.
“It’s a great start for us,” Archie said. “Of course, we want to get to the point where we’re moving 36 loads a day or better. Once we get our own inventory straight from the (automakers), that’ll be better.”
Ford spokeswoman Ursula Muller declined to comment about Squirrelly hauling Ford vehicles because the automaker has a policy to not comment on supplier contracts.
But Squirrelly is currently transporting the overflow work from other hauling companies because under the Teamsters union contract, haulers must give overflow work to other unionized carriers, Archie said. Late last month, Squirrelly employees voted to join the Teamsters, the union confirmed.
A week later, a second unit of former Jack Cooper haulers rejoined the Teamsters Union. In a media release, Teamsters Local 964 in Ohio said a group of carhaulers in Avon Lake, employed by Fleet Transport Corp., unionized with Local 964. Fleet Transport was launched last month to fill the void in that market left by Jack Cooper’s bankruptcy, the release said. Ford’s Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake builds the F-Series Medium Duty and Super Duty pickups.
Squirrelly has six employees beyond the 10 former Jack Cooper drivers Squirrelly has hired, Archie said.
“My goal is get most of those (drivers) back to work. Cassens Transport took a few of them,” Archie said, noting that besides Cassens, other haulers for the Louisville plants include Precision Hauling and RCS Transportation.
“We’re the new kid on the block,” Archie said. “Before Jack Cooper went out, those carriers were already there.”
Archie said Squirrelly is looking to negotiate a direct contract with the Detroit automakers. In the meantime, he said it feels satisfying to be working again and able to employ others.
“It’s a lot of pride to me personally to help my fellow brothers get back to work,” Archie said. “I just thank God that He put me in a position to be able to do it. When it was happening and we were losing our jobs, I thought, ‘I’ll be all right because I’ll start my own car hauling company.’ Four months later, here we are actually moving vehicles.”
Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer who covers Ford Motor Co. for the Detroit Free Press. Contact Jamie at jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. To sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
