Visit to Carry-On Trailer
22 September 2008
We have all seen them along the roads of the Northern Neck and beyond: the sleek trailers—white, red, black, silver—of various shapes and sizes, manufactured by Carry-On Trailer, a company that began in Northumberland County in 1996 and has experienced 30% growth every year since.
The Northern Neck-Chesapeake Bay Region Partnership’s visit to Carry-On Trailer (COT), on 22 September 2008, coincided with the company’s celebration for delivering its one-millionth trailer.
Speaking at the event, Jay Pearson, COT’s president and CEO, thanked Northumberland and Westmoreland counties, the Enterprise Zone Program, the Northern Neck Planning District Commission, and Virginia’s Economic Development Partnership for the support and technical assistance he received during his company’s seminal years.
“It was also very helpful,” he said, “to have great clients like Lowe’s and Home Depot.” These large retailers are a good reason why the company has been able to set up an incredibly efficient distribution channel, to a point that not a single trailer is manufactured until an order for it has been placed.
The process begins at one end of the plant in Montross (the company’s largest plant, with about 300 employees), where the steel-cutting section provides a ready stock for several welding stations on both sides of a conveyor system that transports the trailers as they are built.
Each welder sets the parts needed on a “jig” and welds a frame in approximately 25 minutes. The frame then joins the assembly line, along which excessive solder is removed before the frame is dipped in a state-of-the-art painting booth. From there, the trailer’s bed travels to another section of the plant to acquire wheels, suspension and other hardware, wiring, lights, and safety stickers.
The plant runs on two ten-hour shifts, six days a week. The goal for each shift is to manufacture about 150 trailers, so the plant has a capacity of approximately 300 trailers completed each day.
Carry-On Trailer is not content with depending on its past success to guarantee the company’s future. It diversified into enclosed trailers, made of plywood lined with shiny metal panels that arrive in large rolls and are cut to measure on-site. The plywood comes from Potomac Supply (another successful Northern Neck business visited by the Partnership last year). Other products manufactured by COT: livestock trailers, motorcycle trailers, ATV trailers, car haulers, landscape trailers, dump trailers, and a series of accessories—from roof vents to ramps to ladder racks and more.
To manufacture all of the above, the company employs 1,100 workers, distributed among eight plants nationwide. For a company that started with a gooseneck trailer in Callao, Virginia, only twelve years ago, its payroll “is nothing short of marvelous,” said Bill Carden, president of Potomac Supply. That payroll includes 60 employees who work in Callao, where COT now has a facility that manufactures parts.
Virginia Deputy of Commerce and Trade David Smith attended the celebration and presented Bernice Pearson, the company’s Director (and proud mother of Jay Pearson), a state flag that had flown at the state capitol, in Richmond. To see mother and son on the stage, celebrating Carry-On’s success, gave those present a tremendous sense of pride—that a local company had gone so far so quickly. That pride was also on display by the participation of many of COT’s employees on that day’s events, and by the memorabilia proudly arranged around the audience: Carry-On’s first orders, invoices, checks received, and, of course, that first gooseneck trailer that started it all.
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About the Program: Studies have shown that three out of four new jobs are usually created by existing local businesses. For that reason, the Northern Neck Business Visitation Program was launched in 2006 to assist established local firms with their growth efforts, expansion plans, workforce-training needs, and general day-to-day operations.