FROED One Government Center Fall River, MA 02722-7700 Tel 508-324-2620 Fax 508-677-2840 info@froed.org		DERECKTOR'S BUSINESS IS RIGHT ON TRACK - TRACRAC The Providence Journal, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Fall River - Like all great ideas, it was a simple one. TracRac founder and president Tom Derecktor wanted a rack for his windsurfer that would fit on the back of his pickup. But he also used the truck for work in the family shipyard in Middletown, so he wanted it to be adjustable. So he adapted the tracks used on yachts to adjust the trim of large sails known as genoas, creating a sliding rack system that he has since turned into a multimillion-dollar company. TracRac now designs, makes and markets patented aluminum rack systems for any make or model of pickup truck. "It seemed like a sensible thing to do if you wanted your rack to adjust," he said during a recent visit to his company. Then friends started asking him to make one for them. "You get asked enough times you think that maybe there's a business here." He said he looked around the industry and found the only available racks were fixed, which made it hard to load large objects around them. "Try loading a refrigerator around (a fixed rack)," he said. "It's a pain in the tail." "I looked at the industry and saw a need," he said. The standard TracRac kit is made up of two track rails, two sliding overhead racks and four sliding crossbar tiedowns and retails for about $750. The track rails are attached by rubber plugs into the truck's stake pockets and then tightened with screws. The overhead racks can be slid all the way forward and out of the way when they are not in use. Everything is powder coated for protection against rust. Accessories include sliding tiedowns, sliding toolboxes, sliding cargo dividers "to separate groceries from paint cans," cantilevered extensions as well as kayak and bike mounts. Separate products include sliding, track-based workstations and tonneaus to cover truck cargo beds. TracRac also designs racks for vans and truck cap tops. Everything is adjustable and interchangeable. "It's a commonality of components," he said. Derecktor said the company had a major breakthrough about 18 months ago when he signed a contract with General Motors to have its system of sliding overhead racks a standard option on GM trucks. He noted that GM makes about 110,000 trucks a year. "It took us to another level and that's (now) 50 percent of our business," he said of the GM contract. "The company grew 70 percent last year," added CEO Scott Moran who joined the company last year. He was formerly in operations at Textron Corp. and said he was attracted by TracRac's growth potential, noting that while the company controls the market in the Northeast, it is looking to expand into the Southeast and West. DERECKTOR SAID the company is also planning to expand its range of products by moving into the car rack market, focusing on the outdoor-recreational market with racks for bicycles, canoes and kayaks. Derecktor, 50, who lives in Barrington and is still an avid sailor, competing in so-called frostbite races during the winter, grew up working in his family's shipyards. His late father Robert founded Derecktor Shipyards in Mamaroneck, N.Y., after leaving the Navy in 1947 and expanded the company to additional boat-building yards in Coddington Cove, Middletown, R.I., Bridgeport, Conn., and Dania, Fla. He said growing up in the shipyards, where he started working at the age of 7 and continued into his mid-20s, gave him an appreciation of the skills involved. "I worked with master craftsmen from Portugal, Germany," he said. At the age of 27, he enrolled in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., which is also Moran's alma mater, graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering with minors in aeronautical engineering — he designed gliders — and business. He returned to work at the family shipyard in Middletown but the family closed the yard in 1992 after naval contracts dried up following the buildup during the Reagan years. "It went from a 600 ship Navy to a 300 ship Navy and we were a Navy yard," he said. Derecktor Shipyards, continued to thrive at its three other locations, and is now run by his brother Paul. Current contracts include a 240-foot motor yacht, one of the largest ever to be built in the U.S. Following the closure of the Middletown yard, Tom Derecktor went to work for Serotta Bicycles in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., but after a year or so "took a leap of faith," and started TracRac in 1994 in a tiny facility in Glen Falls, N.Y. He moved the company within a year to "a tar-paper shack at the north end of Fall River" and then to a slightly larger facility near its current location on the south side of Fall River a few years later. TracRac now operates out of two large, adjacent buildings in the light industrial complex. One building houses two of the company's most important manufacturing components - the welding department, which includes a $300,000 robotic welder for high volume work, and a $1.2-million powder coating machine that electronically sprays the aluminum racks with a coat of powdered metal that is then baked on and a second clear coat that is also baked on. He said the resulting layer has been tested to withstand 2,000 hours of harsh salt spray. The company, which now has 70 full-time employees, only recently took over an adjacent building that was formerly a munitions storage facility. The interior is divided between a shop for building prototypes and light manufacturing work such as cutting and drilling strips of extruded shaped aluminum that it has made elsewhere - as well as storage and engineering, design and administration offices. Work on converting the second building is still under way with the general effect being a mix of high-end industrial design adapted to airy loftlike spaces and the rough and ready. The overall impression is of a company that is growing fast. All the offices are large, and Derecktor sits behind a wall of computer screens in his. Actually, one is connected to one of his laptops, as he said his eyes need the bigger screen. HE IS SURROUNDED by family pictures — he is the divorced father of two daughters, 20-year-old Margo and 14-year-old Emily - and numerous mementos, including a poster of a 74-foot power boat capable of 54 knots that was built by Derecktor Shipyards in Coddington Cove in 1989 and another one of a black 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic Coupe with exposed seams running down the center of the car and its fenders. “Form follows function,” he said admiringly of the Bugatti design. An old half model of a yacht's hull sliced at regular intervals hangs on a wall. Derecktor said shipwrights used the models to determine the shape of a boat's hull. He demonstrated by inserting a piece of paper in one of the slices and tracing the line of the hull. "This was the heart of the whole process of building a boat," he said . "You had to think in three dimensions to lay it out full size." Two small frames contain freehand pencil drawings of sailboats on lined yellow note paper. They are drawings of his father's first boats. "They are two of the last drawings he did before he passed away," he said. For more information, check out: www.tracrac.com Back