An Unorthodox Road To Success

It’s interesting, how an engineer’s mind works.

Custom design and build a specialized equipment package for a complex mining project in one of the world’s harshest climates?

No problem for Alex Ritter.

Find a suitable diesel truck chassis to mount the equipment package on, and then cart the whole thing off to Mongolia?

As good as done.

Translate the truck’s operation, maintenance and repair manuals into Russian?

Uh, … wait a minute.

“Instead of translating the documentation for a domestic truck into Russian,” Ritter reasoned, “why don’t we just get a Russian truck and put our bodies on that?”

OK.

He found the Russian trucks - which, of course, had operation, maintenance and repair manuals already written in Russian - then negotiated a deal that required payment in cash up front to aspiring Russian capitalists who by reputation might have “just decided to take the money and run.”

The trucks were delivered as agreed, though, driven from the manufacturing plant in the Ukraine to the mining site in Mongolia, where a crew from Post Falls mounted the equipment on the Russian trucks.

That’s one way to deal with a language barrier.

It might not be how you or I would do it, but for Ritter these things just seem to work out.

Now, he’s finding quite a bit of interest in his Russian-built Kraz trucks. He is building custom equipment packages to be mounted on three more of them at his company’s Post Falls plant for shipment to a huge mining operation in Indonesia.

And the Indonesians could care less whether the instruction manuals are written in Russian.

They just like the trucks.

Sales leap 500% in six years

Ritter is the owner and founder of ARESCO Inc., a little Post Falls company that is quietly becoming a force in the mining and construction industry worldwide.

The company has its customized equipment operating in 20 countries on all seven continents.

“From the desert of Nevada, to the jungles of Irian Jaya …” says the company brochure.

“We build service and support equipment for mining and construction companies,” Ritter says. “We build upper-end, high dollar equipment. We don’t go after the low dollar stuff. We go after companies that want to do things right.”

And apparently there are enough of those around to keep ARESCO more than busy.

Founded only six years ago with a staff of five, ARESCO now has 60 employees. Ritter says its sales have grown more than 500 percent since 1989.

And, “The potential is unlimited,” he says. “If we continue to take care of our clients properly, and continue to build them a good piece of equipment, I feel we can get much, much larger than we are.”

Ritter is a mining engineer who began his career working underground for various copper, silver and coal operations. When he went to work for an explosives manufacturer that served the mining industry, he found a lot of equipment in the company’s fleet that was poorly designed and built.

“We spent too much of our time getting things repaired, and just getting things to work right,” he recalls, “so I finally talked them into letting me design and build some things.”

When the company wanted him to relocate to the East Coast, Ritter said no. He formed a joint venture partnership with a Spokane truck dealership in order to stay here, and found that his custom designs were welcomed in the mining industry.

“It got to the point where we needed to do some expanding,” he says, “but the trucking company was comfortable in their market and wasn’t looking to be any bigger.”

So he moved ARESCO to Post Falls and struck off on his own.

Ritter custom designs complex and sometimes massive pieces of equipment that mount on trailers of semi truck tractors.

Fuel trucks, explosives handling trucks, crane and material handling units, mechanics service units and welders trucks are among the units listed in company literature.

But Ritter particularly takes pride in ARESCO’s ability to provide literally everything a mining operation might need.

“To my knowledge, we’re the only manufacturer of support equipment that can go to a company starting a mining operation and provide the entire fleet of support equipment for them,” he says. “And we’re doing that for some of the biggest companies in the world right now.”

Russian trucks offer advantages

Ritter’s formula for taking care of customers means knowing what they need to spend their money on, and where they can safely cut some corner to save a buck.

He caters to companies that only want top-of-the-line equipment, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned about the bottom line as well.

And that’s why Ritter is always on the lookout for opportunities like the Russian trucks.

What’s important, he explains, is the equipment that goes on the back of the truck. At a mine site, the truck itself is just a means of making the equipment mobile. And for that very basic task, companies often neither need nor want all the technological bells and whistles that come on domestically manufactured, hightech diesel rigs.

“Basically, I can get two of the Russian trucks for what I’d pay for one domestic truck,” he explains.

Ironically, the advantage the Russian trucks offer is that they aren’t very good.

“In many respects,” says Ritter, “they are very crude. The manufacturer doesn’t pay any attention to aesthetics. A lot of the workmanship is pretty atrocious. They would not pass quality control or environmental standards in North America.

“But they run, they are cheap and they’re simple to work on. So in many applications, they will be the ideal piece of equipment.”

Mining operations in Third World countries are conducted in some brutal conditions.

Ritter pointed to the very basic interior of one of the Kraz trucks and said, “Within one week on a mine site, you’ll have two inches of mud in here. You won’t be able to tell the color on the outside because it’s got mud all over it. In reality, the mining operation is going to destroy it, anyway. So they really don’t need anything more than this.”

He qualified his list of the Kraz’s shortcomings by adding, “There are some design features, though, that are better than anything I’ve seen on North American trucks. When it comes to cold weather operations, for example, these guys really know what they are doing.”

ARESCO best known overseas

The Kraz trucks will never amount to much more than a niche in Ritter’s overall business. But by putting a lot of unique little pieces together, Ritter is able to keep a little company in Post Falls at the top of one of the most competitive world markets.

In his construction yard, he has other trucks shipped there from all over the world, waiting to be fitted with customized equipment, and then shipped back to Europe, Asia or South America.

“We started out here with one building,” Ritter says, surveying his own personal landscape, “and now we have six. We’ve never done a bit of advertising. All of our work comes here by word of mouth.

“What’s really ironic is that we’re probably the second-largest manufacturer of this kind of equipment in the United States, but in Post Falls or Spokane, nobody knows we’re here.”

But they know about ARESCO in the Ukraine, in Mongolia, in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey, in Indonesia …

And the list will keep growing - as long as Ritter can find trucks that are manufactured in all the right languages.