In the early days of Bulldog Hot Shot Service, owner Jesse Solberg made it through some days on old crackers and Ramen noodles. Today, the company operates a fleet of six trucks and three semis, with a solid customer base and plans for expansion.
“You have to do what you have to do to get started,” he says.
Solberg, now 26, started Bulldog in Rifle, Colo., in 2009 after investing in a gooseneck trailer and some business cards. He was working in the construction field when he started driving part time for a hot shot service to make some extra money. After making several runs, he decided to buy his own trailer and go into business for himself.
Solberg handed out business cards to everyone he met, but business was limited in that first year. As the year drew to a close, he was broke, he had very little business and it was time to make some tough decisions.
“It was time to figure out another trade or try to make this one work,” Solberg says.
Dressing the part
Solberg returned home to Minnesota for Christmas with a lot on his mind. He used his time away to formulate a new plan. He put together a spreadsheet of potential clients, pulling every name and number he could find from the Internet, and redesigned his logo and business cards to reflect a more polished and professional look.
Back in Colorado, Solberg started dressing more professionally and handing out his new business cards as he made his rounds introducing himself to potential clients.
“All of a sudden I started getting different reactions when I stopped to talk to people,” he says.
He soon made an important contact with Jeremiah Belk at Great White Tubular Repair in Rifle. They hit it off, and Belk connected him with a large oilfield services company. “He wanted to see my business succeed,” Solberg says. “He knew I didn’t know a whole lot about the oilfields and that I definitely didn’t have any contacts in it. He would get me a meeting or a run and I would go up to the rig and talk to the company man and that kind of thing.”
Bulldog was one of many companies providing hot shot services in the area, and most were better established. Solberg wanted the work so bad he decided to run at considerably lower rates than his competitors, almost down to half price. “We were running for $65 an hour plus $1.40 a mile with no surcharge,” he says. “It put a little food on the table but that was about it.
“We got a really bad rap from a lot of the companies in the area, but I didn’t have a choice,” he adds.
So, with his first oilfield delivery under his belt, Solberg pressed forward. Great White hired him to make some regular runs to Williston, N.D., shortly thereafter, and at the end of March, Solberg hired his first employee. They quickly picked up two local accounts and started establishing a solid reputation.
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“All of a sudden we were getting calls from people we’d never marketed to,” Solberg says.
Building a foundation
The next step for Bulldog was establishing a proper shop, another move that would pay unexpected dividends. With a growing client list, and after more than a year of operating out of his small apartment and doing the company’s paperwork on his bed, Solberg was looking for a space to set up a shop for operations.
Money was tight, but he found a place in a local industrial park and worked out a deal where he paid a security deposit but got his first two months free in exchange for doing maintenance work on some of the buildings in the park.
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“I got a really good reputation from that as well because it actually worked out that Great White Tubular Repair and Wilson Supply were both in that commercial park. So they got to see me sweating in the hot sun trying to make rent and they saw the hardworking side of what I was doing with the trucks and whatnot,” Solberg says. “It was a really great way to get my name out in the beginning.”
Bulldog quickly built a reputation as a reliable company, and more business followed, but there were more roadblocks ahead. The weak economy eventually took its toll. At the beginning of 2012, Solberg said he noticed a shift from people telling him they’d have jobs coming up to people saying they weren’t sure what they’d have.
It wasn’t sitting real well with Solberg, so he began looking for somewhere to establish a new location. After traveling to California, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Utah and everywhere in between, he heard from a client who was opening a new location in Casper, Wyo., and wanted Bulldog’s services. The only guarantee was that Bulldog would get a little work, but Casper was a less expensive area to get established in, and it’s a hub for the movement of oilfield equipment, so the promise of some immediate work was enough to make the decision.
“I sent one of my best guys up there, bought him some equipment to go up there with, and we ended up getting lucky,” Solberg says. “I met a real estate investor up there that I hit it off with and he let me use a yard up there for free for almost a year. We just rented this little two bedroom apartment and got going and we’ve been rockin’ and rollin’ up there for about eight months.”
Endless opportunities
And then Solberg and Bulldog ran into another roadblock. The driver Solberg had sent to Casper left the company to pursue another opportunity. “I ended up just basically shutting down that location for two and a half months while we worked on our contract with Halliburton,” he says. “As soon as the contract with Halliburton got going we went back up there. By this time Rifle had basically completely shut down on me. We had a run down there maybe once a week. I was completely reliant on the Halliburton contract and I seriously considered filing for bankruptcy. It was so dismal. I didn’t really know how I was going to get out of the hole and we had really significant overhead at that time.”
Luckily for Solberg and Bulldog, he got the contract and returned to Casper. It was down to just him and the first driver he originally hired, with one truck still running occasionally back in Colorado. That was November of 2012, and since then the company has added six employees and six trucks, and recently moved into a 5,000-square-foot building on two acres.
“We’re seeing more work than we’ve ever seen and it kind of looks like patience is going to be the biggest thing, but the faster we can buy trucks, the larger we’re going to get,” Solberg says. “It’s not going to be one of those deals like it was in Colorado where you buy a unit and hope to God you can get it on the road. I’ve got customers all the time asking me why I don’t have more trucks already. It’s definitely a different feel up there. It’s a lot more fun.”
Bulldog moved out and closed down its Colorado shop at the end of January. The company still services that area, but from Casper, which Solberg says has worked well because more of the tools and equipment going to Rifle were coming out of Casper anyway. And since the Bulldog crew is always hauling from one point to another, picking up or dropping off a load in Rifle is fairly routine.
“We go anywhere in the United States,” Solberg says. “We haven’t gone across borders or anything yet but we’ve been looking at going into Canada, but anywhere from South Texas to the far east, Pennsylvania to the Bakken to California. I mean, it doesn’t matter where you want us to go, we go.
“All of my drivers are Class A CDL drivers,” he adds. “All of them can drive either a hot shot or a semi – a hot shot being a 1-ton dually. But we have to honor everything that is required by the FMCSA, so any hours, service logs, anything of that nature, we are regulated by and we do everything we can to stay legal at all times.”
Don’t talk back
As of July, Bulldog was operating with five Dodge 3500 1-ton duallies. There are also three Peterbilt semis in the fleet, which the company added just over a year ago.
“That has probably been the area requiring the most rapid growth right now for us,” Solberg says. “Unfortunately, it’s also the area requiring the most capital, but we’re building up a fleet and we like the 379 ’Bilts. We have to have big Cat motors in them with lots of horsepower and we run either a 48-foot float trailer or a 48-foot step-deck trailer behind them.”
The 1-tons pull standard 30- to 40-foot gooseneck trailers. Solberg isn’t too particular about the brand of trailer, so long as it’s built with good components, like Dexter axles.
With business in Casper growing quickly, Solberg says adding to the fleet is an important step. At this point, with good contacts and a strong reputation, he says the biggest impediment to growth is not having enough trucks.
“I’d like to add four more semis,” he says. “The demand for semis is high right now. I’m either going to split it down the middle and do three and three or I’m going to do four semis and two 1-tons. That will put us around 13 to 14 rigs split pretty evenly between the two.”
Solberg grew up on a farm in Minnesota before getting a degree in construction management from the University of Minnesota – Mankato, so he’s been around the big rigs, but it’s not necessarily where his expertise lies. “I’m still trying to hire guys who have a fair amount of oilfield experience in a semi simply because I’m not necessarily a pro at it,” he says. “When it comes down to a 1-ton dually, you’d better not backtalk me, but when it comes to a semi I’ll probably listen.”
A special breed
There is no typical day for a Bulldog driver. One day he may take a 1-ton dually up to North Dakota without a trailer or anything, and then the next day he is hooked to a 40-foot trailer hauling a 14-foot-wide skid. And even if certain types of loads are common, drivers never know if they’ll be making a routine trip to North Dakota or if they’ll be heading to Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma
or Texas.
“It just changes so much and keeps us all on our toes and keeps you getting up in the morning. You kind of get excited when you hear that phone ringing because you don’t really know what the heck’s on the other end,” Solberg says.
These days, Solberg spends most of his time in the shop, handling dispatch and the business end of operations. With new clients or drivers, he’ll often accompany the driver to the yard to make sure everything is handled properly before seeing him off on his way. He says he’s not a micromanager but he likes to know where the guys are, what’s going on and that his customers are satisfied. Drivers check in with a phone call or text message every 100 to 200 miles, so Solberg always knows where they are and can provide quick, accurate updates to clients.
His drivers know the importance of delivering their loads on time and in the same condition they were picked up. They can usually handle their own roadside truck repairs when necessary, and always get the job done.
“We say it takes a special breed to be a part of Bulldog,” Solberg says. “We’ve got some guys that have been with us for a long time and we’ve got some guys that are really good and they’re all 24 hours a day. Doesn’t matter when you call them, they’ll jump.”
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