CTV adds jobs during recession

Published 11:30 pm Saturday, February 25, 2012

The current economic doldrums leave some businesses struggling as consumers hold off buying new merchandise and limp along with what they already have.

Other businesses, though, cater to those very consumers with the parts and equipment they need to make do until things get better.

Cox Truck and Van, a Moultrie company that sells used vehicle parts, is thriving in the current environment, according to Jason Cox, who founded the business along with his father and brother in 1997.

The tough economy “has actually helped our business to grow,” Cox said. People who can’t afford a new car are having to fix the one they’re driving now, and Cox is one place they can get parts for older vehicles.

Since 2006, Cox said, the business has added about 20 jobs. It now employs 48 full-time people, plus some part-timers, in the four branches of the business.

CTV split from another family business, Cox Auto Parts, in 1997. The original lot, located on Industrial Road, caters to relatively new trucks and vans — vehicles made in the last 10 years or so. It also offers new truck accessories — the only new parts it stocks.

The company started with two roll-back wreckers, Cox said. Now towing is a significant part of its business. CTV has three heavy-duty wreckers, four roll-backs, and a massive rotating wrecker that’s unique in south Georgia.

“There’s not another in Georgia except around Atlanta,” Cox said.

Cox described the operation as one of the biggest towing services in the region outside of Albany. They can even assist with hazardous spills.

Some time back, the business added a U-Pull It lot where mechanics can go to get parts off vehicles older than the 10-year limit at the main lot. They do the work themselves and save money.

“Everything down there is about a third of what it is here,” said Cox, sitting in the office at the original lot. “It’s mainly for your backyard mechanics, your do-it-yourselfers.”

The U-Pull It lot may also be helping others in the local economy, Cox said. About a hundred people per day visit that lot, and 250 or more on a Saturday.

“I’d say a good 60 percent of those people are from out of town,” he said.

While those are generally short trips — from Adel, Sylvester or Fitzgerald, for instance — some of those people will eat lunch while they’re here, or buy gas for the trip home.

“There’s people who drive up from Florida,” he said.

The U-Pull It lot has already outgrown the land Cox Truck and Van had set aside for it, Cox said. Last year, the business bought the former Rogers Gardens Golf Course to expand the U-Pull It lot. The new site opened in January.

The latest venture for Cox Truck and Van is the purchase of scrap metal, which started in 2010.

“We buy anything from your cans up to something as big as a cotton picker or semi,” Cox said.

The tough economy has made that venture an overnight success. Cox said some people who don’t have a job have become repeat sellers of scrap metal.

“They’ve made that their full-time job,” he said.

The natural concern, then, is preventing metal thieves from using Cox Truck and Van to dispose of their loot — and Cox admitted that happens — but he said the business works closely with a joint task force of local law enforcement that’s fighting the problem of metal theft. CTV has video cameras that monitor the sale at several points, and the business fills out detaled paperwork and gets a copy of a driver’s license of everyone who sells them metal.

“If something comes up, we have a name, a videotape and a driver’s license on file to give to the police,” he said.

Cox said CTV’s videotapes have been used in five prosecutions.

The next plan for Cox Truck and Van is an expansion of the scrap metal yard. So many people have been selling scrap that the business is running out of room to put it. Cox didn’t estimate when that expansion would take place.