Harry McDonald: Carlile Transportation Systems.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: 2011 Junior Achievement Alaska Business Hall of Fame - Occupation overview

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Harry McDonald, chief executive officer of Carlile Transportation Systems and a member of the 2011 class of Junior Achievement of Alaska Business Hall of Fame laureates, credits an old-fashioned formula of hard work and perseverance with keeping his career wheels turning. The company celebrated 30 years in business last summer, and yet there are many signs that the business has fresh appeal.

McDonald is known for being straightforward. Listening to him talk frankly about his work, one surmises he hasn't fully shaken off the sense of creative tension from when he was a young man and just starting out in business with a few hundred dollars in his pockets.

With growth and success, "people have the impression that somehow you get over the bump," he reflects, mulling this new Junior Achievement career honor. In reality, he added, success, as a destination, has never seemed clearly delineated to him from the road leading up to it.

EARLY TRANSITIONS

For McDonald, the firm's growth has been paved with hard work. That's something he wants young people to know. And while, to hear him talk, it would seem he hasn't slowed down much with age, even as a young man, he felt nothing could be as hard as the tugboat work he grew up doing with his dad.

McDonald grew up in Seward and bought his first tug, which was 65 feet long, after high school. Then, in 1974, he brought on three trucks to haul logs and chips out of the Anchor Point and Homer areas of the Kenai Peninsula for Louisiana Pacific Sawmill. That was the year the ice didn't break up on the North Slope, and trucking was the only option.

Flotillas of barges had to be brought back and unloaded in Seward, and their cargo trucked out to the North Slope from Seward. McDonald then started driving for Lynden Transportation, and found that he like the change.

His earlier experience running tugs had exposed him to "a hair-raising business." He never forgot what it was like. It always has been challenging, but back in those days, there weren't the electronic communications that tug owners use today.

"As soon as I found out how easy trucks were," McDonald said, "I never looked back."

SEIZING AN OPPORTUNITY

He was down to a truck and a couple of trailers hauling milk from the Matanuska Valley when he had the notion to start Carlile in 1980 with his brother, John. His idea, really more of an impulse, was in response to a trucking opportunity he'd learned about--one that would require adding...