The Emporia Gazette

February 13, 2012

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Opportunity didn’t just knock on Rex Williams’ door this year, it pounded.

Williams, who with his wife, Debbie, owns Williams Automotive, on Jan. 29 bought the former Absolute Transport building that had been under construction about four miles west of Emporia on U.S. Highway 50.

“It’s a nice building, for the purpose that it’s built for,” Williams said. “It’s a really nice setup.”

Only the shell had been constructed, however, and the past two months have been spent framing in the walls and installing insulation, electrical and telephone lines, and other work to get the building ready for the hoped-for June 1 opening.

“There’s quite a lot of work left to do, actually, so it’s been a major project,” Williams said.

The Williamses had intended to operate a repair shop for semi-tractor trailers when they bought the building. Location was a prime factor in the purchase because the highway is a major corridor across the state.

“There is a lot of traffic out there,” said Williams, who serves on the board of directors for the Kansas Motor Carriers Association. “We had some information on a study showing that 10,000 vehicles a day go by there and the bulk of it appears to be trucks.”

The opening of the Intermodal railway center in Gardner will eventually put an additional 10,000 trucks on the road, as they haul the Intermodal freight in semis to their destinations.

“They predicted half of them will come southbound on I-35. And if you add another 5,000 trucks a day coming through Lyon County, then there’s potential that some of them will need some service.

“I certainly hope that it brings a lot of traffic and movement. It boosts the economy of Emporia,” he said.

With only two other truck repair shops in town, adding a third seemed to be a good idea.

“There’s only two other shops that try to provide repair work for the road trucks, and they’re just busy all the time,” Williams said. “We tow a lot of trucks, and we do a lot of truck repair at our (existing) shop.”

If local truck shops are busy, many times trucks have to be towed out of town for repair; time lost on the road is money lost for the truckers who rely on the rigs to earn a living, he said.

Williams anticipates hiring about six mechanics for the semi-repair business, and expects that number to double within a year.

After word got out about the new repair shop, however, opportunity tapped on the door a second time.

“We’ve been contacted by some insurance companies that would really like to see us do a big truck body shop service,” he said. “There aren’t any shops in town now other than ours that you can actually get a big truck in to do body work.

“This building’s so big and laid out so nice for body work, we intend to do some of that.”

Then opportunity returned to the door again and, by that time, Williams was beginning to lose sleep as he considered the other possibilities that could be incorporated into business at the new building.

Repairing refrigeration units seemed like a good fit and, if the Tyson refrigeration-unit repair shop shuts down as slaughter and second-shift processing did, it could be an opportunity to provide jobs for displaced mechanics.

“They have some very good people there and, like I said, I’d hate to see them have to leave town or move. If their jobs aren’t available there, we’d like to at least give everybody a job that we can,” Williams said.

Applicants now are being interviewed for jobs currently open at Williams Automotive — truck and automotive mechanics, body technicians and lube techs, as well as office help, he said.

Williams also answered the door for another opportunity — providing industrial equipment, like backhoes and skid loaders.

“There’s a lot of services that we think we’d be interested in providing that are either extremely limited or not available at all,” he said.