John Schollick’s Story — Part 3

John Schollick reflects on the toughest years of his career and the businesses and relationships that followed.

Words by Chris Smith. Images from the ACT archive; no individual photographer is identified in the retained feature.

In this third and final installment of John’s career in transport so far, he opens-up to Australian Custom Trucks magazine about the darkest hours of his life battling his inner demons while operating Road City Transport.

“I had 156 staff plus a heap of casuals that used to work in the warehouse doing picking and de-camping the containers. They were a great bunch of people,” he praises.

“My GM Wayne Kernow, he did a great job running the company and my accountant mate Alec Duke, who I went to school with, did the finances.

They kept the show running, the lady in the office did the administration, she did a fabulous job keeping it all together,” he tells ACT.

With all the success also came responsibility leading to stress on the job.

“My single most regret, I had a major problem years ago, I hit the alcohol pretty bad in the Road City days and I make no excuses, I think it was a bit of depression and a bit of anxiety and stress,” he says frankly.

He says he became an alcoholic at work.

“I hit the bourbon at 9am in the morning in my office in Acacia Ridge, I’d lock the door and have a few bourbons on ice, then I’d go out to a business lunch and I’d get into some more by mid-afternoon I was pretty hairy fairy then I’d come back into the yard I would have a couple more VBs,” he tells ACT.

He reckons he dodged a bullet and never got knocked off for DUI but says he should have been.

It was a Sunday and he came into work with the book keeper and saw the light.

“One day her and I went into the office on a Sunday morning, I just went into my office and went into my cupboard and got two and a half bottles of bourbon and just poured it down the toilet,” he remembers.

“I don’t know why I did it, maybe I thought I am going to lose everything, I’m going to lose it all.”

He says his mind was telling him you are a fool, an absolute idiot. He went into the office and told the book keeper that he had poured the grog down the toilet and wanted her to see it. He went around the depot and cleared all the fridges of booze and through it all into the industrial bin.

“From that time on I wouldn’t let any alcohol onto the property,” John declares.

“We went to all the depots and put in a drug and alcohol policy. I saw what it was doing to me and I didn’t want it happening to any of my staff,” he explains.

With this sobriety he also cleaned up the depots and took all the girly photos off the walls.

“It was as if something from upstairs hit me on the top of my head and said change boy change, and that was for the better at the end of the day, all the staff came around at the end of the day and said it was good what we did.”

He says the focus changed from knock off drinks and booze to a morning BBQ every Friday in every depot first thing in the morning for the local drivers and any interstate drivers that were there. He also started a schedule of lunches.

“Once a month I used to take the staff out for lunch, it fixed the problem of any alcohol on the site,” he says.

Admittedly he says he was cranky for at least a month after his de-tox.

“I was kicking stones on the ground. I didn’t take the frustrations out on anyone else, sometimes I would just go for a drive, see the countryside or invite a couple of clients to have a coffee and a catch-up. I did talk to some of my clients about it, the ones I could trust. They were big people in terms of the business. That was helpful because a couple of them had a problem. We worked through things together. One of them has become a very close friend of mine, we are almost like brothers now.”

“I had some rocky times. But you just write them off as an experience in life, and you just pick it up and you learn from those mistakes,” John remarks.

He lightens the mood by telling me a couple of anecdotes about his days as a rogue truckie before he cleaned up his act and got heavily into compliance. He was one of the first companies to join TruckSafe and the National Heavy Vehicle Accreditation Scheme.

The shenanigans of the past included faking illness to go to the hospital instead of having his logbook checked and other dubious occurrences that are sure to incriminate.

“I was a cowboy back when I was working in the grain industry, I always got overloading tickets, but I didn’t get small ones. I was such a dumb fool, I thought 38 tonnes back in those days was your payload, and that was my story I would tell the dumb officers on the side of the road,” he laughs.

He says he was well known by a prominent VicRoads man in Shepparton.

“He’d be saying here comes 30 tonne,” he recalls.

“ I always had 30 ton plus on it, the legal weight for me in the Western Star was 21.5 ton.”

He pauses and continues, “But that’s just what he thought I had on, because I always had close to 40 ton!”

He explains he used to fill up his convertible trailer up to its six-foot gates and run the gauntlet.

“I was a cowboy,” he admits.

John says he made a lot of money out of flouting the law and didn’t pay a lot of fines.

The game of cat and mouse with the authorities gave him a lot of amusement. He tells me a yarn about a bailiff from Wodonga coming out looking for him at his depot with a wad of fines.

“He’d be talking to me with my blue overalls on and I used to tell him I was a mechanic and just worked here and was just a spare driver, I used to tell him I wasn’t here,” he tells me laughing out loud.

“For months and months, nearly 18 months, I steered this bloke away.

“The bailiff eventually went to a local shop in town and asked some questions and he caught me out. He said, you’ve done it for 18 months, and I have got to applaud you for that but now I have got you. We shook hands and I accepted the fine.”

It wasn’t all rogue cowboy behaviour back then though. He was also part of a group from Wagga that started the iconic Tarcutta Australian Truck Drivers Memorial.

He reckons a few of them used to get together at the Commercial Club in Wagga on a Friday arvo and the conversation of drivers dying on the highway came up many times.

John says a gentleman by the name of Ron Pullen suggested to have a memorial at Tarcutta.

With half a dozen people including Noel Brown from Re-Car, and backed by the Wagga Council, the idea became a reality.

“I had just purchased two new Western Stars from Hartwigs, and Chris the owner of SX Trailers flew former New South Wales Premier the late Neville Wran and iconic cricketer and TV host Mike Whitney down as guests to open it.

“They had my two trucks with a ribbon in between them and Mike Whitney and the Premier Neville Wran officially opened the Memorial Wall in 1994 with the Mayor of Wagga and all the dignitaries there.”

He says the wall was there for a reason and inspired the other memorial walls around the country.

From a rogue operator and cowboy to the success of RCT, he had a gift building his business up.

“I got clean, it was the early nineties and things started to get fair dinkum with compliance,” he remembers.

“I knew those days of flouting the law were over, I knew I had to get professional and clean up my operation.

“I thought I don’t want to be known as a lout and a shonk, or shyster or a gangster, and that’s when we tidied the whole act up. If you try to avoid the compliances you will fail.”

As mentioned in the last story the strategy worked and his company Road City Transport grew. It grew to a point that it was a perfect candidate for a takeover.

“In 1999 my Melbourne manager rang me and said do you want to sell the business? I made the comment to him everything is for sale at a price,” he says.

His manager had a mate in a timber company importing through Carter Holt.

The company interested in RCT was New Zealand based Mainfreight.

He talked to their manager and the Australian director and the owner came from NZ to meet and discuss the purchase. Soon a Heads of Agreement was signed, and the business was sold.

“They wanted the customer base.

Because I had such a big customer base. Some of the other companies like Toll and K & S hounded me like you wouldn’t believe and they did grab a couple of customers but I had a policy that if you take one of my customers, I will take two of yours and I did exactly that,” he says showing his business acumen.

“In the end with Toll through Paul Little we came to a truce because it wasn’t winning for anybody and I know Paul personally, we came to an agreement before I sold RCT at the head office in Sydney that they leave my businesses alone and I don’t touch their cabbage patch.”

The sale, although good on paper, was fraught with detail. The devil was indeed in the detail and what seemed like a logical deal became shrouded in a bitter ordeal.

“I did a bad thing when I sold to Mainfreight,” he exclaims.

“There is a clause NZ companies use, for example when a NZ company bought Ansett six to 12 months after they claimed it wasn’t the right money they were buying the business for,” he explains.

“I had basically the same thing happen to me, we agreed on a price, and when they bought it, I didn’t get my final payment until six months after, and when the six months came up they told me the business wasn’t there.

“What they had done is they had asset stripped it and they had lost a lot of contracts because of the way they operated,” he claims.

He doesn’t seem to hold a grudge though and makes that apparent.

“Nothing against Mainfreight, they did what they believed was the right way, but that wasn’t really the right way in those days,” he says.

“With all due respect to them, look at the size of their business today, they must be doing something right and good luck to them, they are doing it right in every way shape and form with compliance, which is a very important thing today.”

With the sale he kept his container business for a couple more years until selling that off and went into semi-retirement specialising in consultancy work.

That didn’t last too long. “I was sick and tired of wearing a tie a suit every day,” he says.

Talking to a couple of mates in their transport yard they convinced John to head to Cairns to pick up a truck from a repair shop. He ended up running a couple of contracts for his mate running express freight for Northline from Brisbane to Northline Adelaide and return.

“After 18 months I thought I’m too old for this, I used to run out west all the time either in a road train or a b-double express,” he says.

One day he was having my septic tank pumped out and the old bloke that came to pump it out was there in his old K Series Bedford.

“It was $180 cash and I looked at him and I said that wouldn’t be a bad business and he looked up at me with his beard and his old hat with bone and twine in it and said you want to buy my business, and I said yeah, how much do you want for it? He said you couldn’t afford it. I just laughed at him and I said, it’s for real I want to buy it.”

“I could see a real opportunity with liquid waste in the Lockyer Valley with septic tanks, and he was the only one doing it with the expanding growth pattern and people moving out here so I bought it. He was happy to get rid of the business, he had been doing it for twenty odd years. I got it, I upgraded and today we have some major contracts in waste with developers and Queensland Urban Utilities and things like that. We have a very successful business.”

“I did it because I love building businesses, some people like to get a piece of wood and make something, I like to build businesses, make them profitable and then sell them and that’s what I have done,” he says.

The job pumping septic tanks had a not so shitty result, it brought him to his wife Nicole, she was a customer. They have been married close to nine years.

As well as his life in transport John has been a firm member of groups like Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce and Lions Club as well as the Lights on the Hill.

He has had a lifetime in the industry and earned several awards. In the 1990s he was the RTF Professional Driver of the Year. In the last couple of years John has been rewarded for his participation and awarded several acknowledgments for his achievements. He was a founding member of NatRoad as well as a founding member of the RTF which is the Road Transport Federation, now the Australian Trucking Association. He even took around the display trailer promoting the industry visiting schools and shows. He has been inducted into the Transport Hall of Fame based in Alice Springs and at a more local level was awarded by the Lockyer Valley Shire Regional Council the coveted Business of the Year Award. An amazing life for an extraordinary man and I will leave you with a quote to inspire you.

“No was never in my vocabulary and never has been. As I say to young people today, if you get an idea, there are only two things you can do, you can go for the sky or you can fail, if you think fail you will fail but if you think go for it, and have a big goal, you will win. You will have your ups and downs, but you just go for it. I did and I achieved,” he says proudly with knowledge and authority.

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