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After rough start, Baltimore small business Kelley’s Trucking now rolling along
Keith Kelley’s big break came in 2019 when he was accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. (Maximilian Franz/The Daily Record)
After rough start, Baltimore small business Kelley’s Trucking now rolling along
Listen to this articleKeith Kelley’s first miscue as an entrepreneur entering the trucking business came the day he bought his first truck.
Tired of working as a UPS driver, which he described as a demanding job with long hours, and born into a family of entrepreneurs, he decided to buy a dump truck and get into the trucking business.
When he went to the lot to pick up the truck, he realized, he didn’t even know how to raise the bed.
“I had to ask the salesman, ‘How do I do this?’,” he recalled. “I had no clue what I was doing.”
Turned out, he soon realized, he had no clue even how the trucking business works, and made, as he put it, mistake after mistake.
But Kelley had a few friends in the business, and he soon got a job with a company in Landover, working on a housing development. Little by little, he learned the business.
“I learned by trial and error,” he recalled. “I worked for the right companies, learned as I went along.”
Kelley said that some of the firm’s early jobs, such as helping to build a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and working on the toll lanes on Interstate 95 near 695, helped open the door to others.
His big break came in 2019 when Kelley was accepted into the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. The website explains that the program “provides business education, support services and pathways to capital for growth-oriented entrepreneurs.”
“They dissect your business, show what you’re doing right and doing wrong,” Kelley said. “They help you learn all about your business.
“I was thinking I was in the dump truck business,” Kelley added. “Turns out I wasn’t – I was in the stone aggregate business.”
Construction aggregate, as it’s sometimes known, is a particulate material used in construction, such as sand, concrete and riprap materials and Kelley’s Trucking sells and hauls a lot of it.
The Goldman Sachs program, Kelley said, broke down his business in ways he had never thought of.
“I always had contracts, but I wasn’t really making any money,” Kelley said. “I was struggling to stay afloat. I didn’t understand the business or the market – it was almost as if I was panhandling.”
In the few years since he participated in the program, things have smoothed out and his business has grown, not dramatically, he said, but enough to alleviate most worries.
Kelley’s now has seven full-time employees and a subcontractor base of at least 20 companies.
“We’ve expanded,” Kelley said. “We’re doing more site work, more excavations.”
Kelley said he has benefited from state’s socioeconomic inclusion programs for minority-owned businesses and his certification as Minority Business Enterprise.
His company’s growth made it possible for Kelley to take another major step: He signed on with LIUNA, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, which provides benefits for his workers. Besides being a boon to workers, the affiliation makes it easier for Kelley to find those workers. Kelley said he wouldn’t have gotten where he is without signing up with LIUNA.
“It was an opportunity to give these guys benefits and to help grow my ability to do other projects,” Kelley said. “Now, if I need laborers, I just contact the labor union.
“I really want to provide opportunities to people, people who want to learn a trade, drive a truck, operate heavy equipment. There are a lot of jobs in this industry, and we need more people.”
Kelly himself is entirely in management now.
“I miss it sometimes,” he said of the physical labor. “But you can’t really run your business if you’re working in your business.”
He has two assistant managers now but is still actively in charge of his Baltimore-based company. At 54, he figures he has another 11 years in the business, after which, he said, he hopes to turn it over to one of his children.
It’s a challenging time in the construction industry, Kelley said, but added, “Things are good in general. I can’t complain.
