Trucking runs in his veins-John 'Zoukie' Marzouca

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John 'Zoukie' Marzouca: trucking runs in his veins
Business Leader Nominee

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

With the Marzouca family name so indelibly etched in Jamaica's retail industry, there is an irresistible temptation to assume that anyone in business bearing that surname would enjoy a hassle-free right of passage to success.

But there is at least one among them, who goes by the appellation "Zoukie", whose journey to the top of the trucking industry flatly debunks this conventional notion.

This man, John Anthony "Zoukie" Marzouca, has lived many lives, and has faced many challenges. His story of single-handedly creating a mega-trucking empire is a compelling tale of thrift, hard work, and the foresight to spot from afar, then quickly grasp, opportunities.

In short, Zoukie Trucking, strategically headquartered in the vicinity of the wharves in Kingston, is a fully-integrated business that boasts hundreds of millions of dollars worth of assets that are deployed wherever there is need for haulage, or heavy lifting.
Among the equipment that, with a staff of 120, make up the company:
. some 46 tractor heads;

. over 500 chassis, low-buoys, and flatbeds;
. various cranes with lifting capacity ranging from 22 to 400 tonnes;
. a range of heavy duty specialty equipment like boom; and
. trucks and yard pickers that are used in the construction and industrial transportation business.

With such an array of assets that have allowed Zoukie Trucking to - at some stage during the past generation - provide service for most large corporations, it is no wonder that the company is such a powerful brand in the Jamaican market.

Behind this respectable household name firm is a semi-reclusive, 55-year-old entrepreneur who not only dropped out of high school, but was later told that he was too stupid to make it as a payroll clerk at GraceKennedy Shipping.

Marzouca, however, didn't really begin to face the challenges of a market that was less than welcoming to the uneducated, until his impetuous decision as a teenager to leave his father's business, and home.

He was one of several children for his father, John Marzouca, a dry goods merchant in Montego Bay, and the only child for his mother, Gwendalyn Dunn, a hairdresser.

He attended Barracks Road Primary School in Montego Bay, and later, Walkers School on Church Street in that western city.

After primary school he headed to Kingston to join his mother who had by then separated from his father and was residing in Vineyard Town.
In Kingston, the teenager attended St George's College, but his education was short-circuited, he claims, when, at his father's prodding, he left at the end of fourth form to provide an extra pair of hands at the dry goods store in Montego Bay.

The New Zealand Properties on Marcus Garvey Drive is home for some of Zoukie Trucking's array of assets.

"I never took Cambridge exams," says Marzouca. "My father wanted me to leave school and come into the business. Those days there was no concentration on education."
Young Marzouca earned £3 per week doing a job, which he now says he hated.

However, he shortly thereafter learnt his first unforgettable lesson: that no matter how bad things are now, they can get worse.
"I had a girlfriend in Falmouth," he recounts. "I remember working in the store especially hard that Saturday, because I wanted to borrow my father's car to go and look for her. But my father said 'no', so I decided to leave his house and business, without any clothes."

A market truck dropped Marzouca at Falmouth where he spent most of that night at a club with his girl.
He also got into a fight with some territorial local youngsters who he said, "did not like the idea of someone from outside coming into the area and getting one of their girls".

As he recalls, it was the beginning of three months of abject misery.
"I had nowhere to go that night," he remembers. "I slept underneath a plaza, and remember about 20 stray dogs coming around me during the night. In the morning I eventually got a drive back to MoBay, but had nowhere to stay."

He called on some friends - the Wong family - who, for three months allowed him to sleep in their car, and fed him during the days.
All this time Marzouca's mother was in Kingston under the impression that her little boy was safe, and was helping his father at the store.
It took one final encounter with his father for him to realise just how hopelessly sour their relationship had become.

That morning, young Marzouca had just finished helping to salvage some of the goods from his father's store that had been gutted by fire.
"My father saw me helping to save the goods and said to me, 'what are you doing here, do not come back here!'."
The dispirited youngster had been hoping for a more welcoming response.

"I was dying to go back to my father," he admits.
Marzouca recalls with remarkable details, how he placed his clothes in a paper bag, bought a train ticket for 14 shilling and two pence, and headed for his mother in Kingston.

In town, it took him a year to find a job - as an insurance salesman with Caribbean Health Insurance on Law Street. His mother bought him a suit, a pair of shoes and a brief case.
That was 1968.
"It's another job I did not like," he remarks.

He eventually quit the job and started walking the streets again.
Here is how Marzouca remembers the day in 1969 - months after quitting the sales job - that permanently changed the course of his life:
"While walking past GraceKennedy at 64 Harbour Street I saw a friend, Wallace Campbell running out of Grace to catch a bus. Wallace told me that they just fired the paymaster for the port workers, and that I should apply. I did."

Un-characteristically, this truant youngster found himself at St Theresa that same evening, praying for the job.
"To my surprise they called me in and I went to see the accountant, Mr Viera."

The accountant explained the job to Marzouca and asked him if he was good at figures. "Yes," the youngster replied, believing that his experience at his father's shop would have qualified him for the position.
But that was not the end of the matter. The accountant was not about to let the claim go untested.

"What is 10 per cent of 100," asked the accountant, almost teasingly. "I said 7.33 or something way out like that," recalls Marzouca. "How about five per cent of 100," the accountant persisted.
Again, the answer by Marzouca's recollection, was equally and frighteningly off-mark.
Here is how Marzouca recounts the rest of the conversation with the accountant:

"He said, 'how comes you say you are good with figures?' and I said, 'I am a bit nervous now Sir, and can't think right now'. He said, 'Ok'."
Marzouca to his surprise landed himself the job as a payroll clerk.
He discovered a few years later that one of his supervisors (not the accountant) had complained to management that the young payroll clerk "will never make it because he has no sense".

In retrospect, Marzouca himself admits that there was nothing unreasonable about that assertion.

"In those days there were no calculators," he explains. "We had to work percentages and during the first few weeks I was lost."
Importantly though, it was a transformational experience because the wayward youngster had finally found himself a job that he truly enjoyed.
He was paid $18 per week.

Having mastered the job, Marzouca was promoted within a year to the operations department, which put him in direct contact with the 50 or so vessels that were each year handled by GraceKennedy Shipping. He also interfaced with the captains.

"My job was to make arrangements to ensure the smooth operation of the ships; to ensure that workers were available, to go on board to meet the captain," he said.

Within three years of joining the shipping company as a payroll clerk, Marzouca was promoted to assistant general manager.
By then - the early 1970s - the industry had begun to move towards palletized cargo.

What caught Marzouca's attention was the fact that in this new era of pallets and forklifts, "we were always short of equipment".
"I saw an opportunity," he lets on. "But Grace Shipping did not allow employees to own forklift and other equipment that were used at the wharf. I had to make a choice."

So the assistant manager, who only a few years before had joined the company as a green and confused youngster who was given no chance at succeeding, was about to move into the ranks of an entrepreneur.
When he resigned from Grace in 1972 to pursue his entrepreneurial ambition, Marzouca used his $8,088 terminal gratuity, plus a $1,000 Scotiabank loan, to buy a specialised forklift.

That year he had bought a brand new VW for $2,800.
At the time, Jamaica was three years into decimation - with the conversion from pounds shilling and pence to dollars and cents. The exchange rate was US$1/J$0.88.

The forklift at $9,100 that was bought from Industrial Equipment Ltd therefore represented a major investment.
The young businessman hired Roy Angus, "the best forklift operator on the wharf" to operate the equipment, while he earned additional income as a ship chandler.

"My mother would go to the market and buy the stuff the ships needed," explains Marzouca. "I remember making up the bills underneath the street lamp at nights in Vineyard Town."
At the same time the forklift was kept busy by clients that included GraceKennedy Shipping, and Lascelles deMercado.
"We were doing 14 hours per day," says Marzouca. "Angus was a well-known forklift operator and we did good business. This was a specialised forklift that went in the ship hole."

The equipment was rented for $4.10 per hour and the driver paid 90 cents per hour. Operational expenses included propane gas, tyres, and general maintenance.

With the combined income from the forklift, and the ship chandler business, Marzouca was able to buy a second forklift "in a matter of weeks and for cash".

From the outset, Marzouca had a simple business ethos: work hard, plow back the money earned into the business, and keep on looking for new opportunities along complementary business lines.
By 1980 he had 12 forklifts working at the ports and wherever there was demand for the service.

That year also heralded the era of container shipment and the slow move away from break bulk cargo. This active-minded businessman interpreted this development as a signal that there were opportunities to be explored close by.

"I though that the containerised cargo would provide another opportunity, so I said to myself, 'why don't I buy a tractor head?'."
This was the beginning of Zoukie Trucking Ltd.

Again, the move into this end of the business was not without drama.
Marzouca, accepting that he knew nothing about trucks, asked Egbert Chang - the truck specialist at Industrial Equipment - to accompany him to Atlanta, USA to look for a good buy.

He paid US$4,000 for a pre-owned, 10-speed Ford tractor head, and set off for Miami, from where he would ship the vehicle to Jamaica.
"I had no experience with trucks," he says, "so I asked my cousin Esau to help me drive it to Miami to save money."

But neither he nor his cousin could find gears two to nine in the truck, to allow for a smooth and efficient journey.
"We could only find first and ten gears," he says. "We did not know how to find the middle gears. When we stopped and shut it off on our way to Miami, it took us an entire day to restart it."

The arrival of his tractor head in Jamaica placed Marzouca at the bottom of an industry that was about to explode with the growing popularity of containerised shipping.

"Zoukie was at the bottom of the stack," he notes.
Other names like PO Polack, Jamaica Transport, Coptick, and Roberts dominated the business.
Jamaica Packaging Company was one of the first firms to signed on to Zoukie Trucking as a customer. Within a year, Zoukie Trucking had a second tractor head.

At that stage, Marzouca calculated that the market could accommodate no more than five tractor heads from his business, and that it would take several years to get there.

But perhaps, as in his earlier years, bad mathematics was at play again.
"I used to say that the maximum I wanted was three," he confesses. "Then four, then no more after five."

By the early 1980s Marzouca was able to hand over to his ex-brother-in-law, the business for the supply of local goods to ships.
The reason: "The truckling business was booming," he notes. "In about 1986 we rented an office at Newport warehousing. We were there until in early 1990s."

A formal, well-structured business was in the making.
Then, this savvy businessman began to explore the possibility of buying land in the Newport area of Kingston to set up a permanent office and give his enterprise a sense of continuity.

He paid $80,000 for the four lots of land on which Zoukie Trucking headquarters is now located. By then, the company had 19 employees, six tractor heads and several chassis.
The formula for success developed several years before was simply being replicated.

"We just kept adding on, just plowing back profits into the business," he explains. "We bought our equipment for cash rather than using bank loans by putting back everything we made into the business."
Marzouca told the Business Observer that one of the good decisions he made in the early days was to select excellent drivers for the tractor heads.

"Most of them are still with us," he boasts. "They are the backbone of the company. Most of them were sidemen or mechanics or tyremen. They are still here after 25 years. We all grew together over the years."

Indeed he recalls having sleepless nights during those early days as he waited at Six Miles in the early hours of the morning for truck and driver to return safely to Kingston. "Those days we did not have radio or cellular service," he reminds us. "There was no way of keeping in contact with the drivers. I remember that I would wait at Six Miles until two o'clock in the mornings, waiting on them to return."

By the end of the 1990s Zoukie Trucking had become a major force in the haulage business.

Around that year, Marzouca handed over the forklift company - New Port Forklift Services Ltd - to his four children, and he and his son and heir apparent Duane Marzouca, began to explore another facet of the business: cranes.

Again Marzouca was simply being the farsighted entrepreneur he had become.
"We were able to see the potential early and acted quickly, and have built up a reputation for service," he says.

The first crane - with the capacity to lift 22 tonnes of load was bought in 2001. Now there are cranes that can lift up to 400 tonnes of load.
This move represented a deepening of the vertical integration of this haulage business, allowing Zoukie Trucking to handle all stages of the process of getting large equipment from ships to their final destination in Jamaica.

"Over time as we saw the possibility of different types of equipment that would be needed based on the market, we went into them," says Marzouca.

The business has had to invest in large acreage of real estate to store the equipment, with the latest acquisition - New Zealand Properties - land and warehousing facility, on Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston.
The company has also developed a major repair centre at its headquarters, where all repairs - from electrical welding, to tire and mechanical repairs are undertaken.

Marzouca's half-brother, Mario Mazouca is in charge of this operation.
This vertical integration undertaken by Zoukie Trucking over the years has been in part motivated by the need to remain at the competitive edge of this ever-changing business.

"Competition is very fierce in the haulage business," remarks Marzouca. "We have to be on our pees and queues at every stage of the business."
One of the challenges now facing the industry is the low turnaround time for containers, due, according to Marzouca, to the congestion at the ports, and the high level of paperwork involved in clearing Jamaica Customs.

"If one tractor head does four containers for the day you are doing well," he says. Traffic congestion is also breeding inefficiency in the operation.
But this incurable optimist who says retirement is never on the agenda, is confident that for these challenges, he will one day find a solution.
John 'Zoukie' Marzouca: trucking runs in his veins