Longhorn makes Nigerian polo player connection

WINFIELD, TEXAS – You’d think a Nigerian polo player would be able to find a trailer he liked closer to home than this if you didn’t know that working out shipping details to put a highly-customized polo pony trailer on a boat to Africa is part of the service at Longhorn Trailers on I-30, where delivery is part of the deal.

Longhorn’s honed a reputation for helping with design and delivering custom work to customer specs.

“We have lots of customers who’ve never set foot on the lot,” said Rance McCollum, whose early business ambitions were thwarted by his parents, Jimmy and Connie. Since his grade-school years, when his mom ran her insurance business out of the office on a third of an acre lot where his dad sold trailers, all he wanted was out of school to get into the family business.

Instead, they made him move to Stephenville until it caused a degree from Tarleton State University, the premier cowboy and rodeo school in Texas. As conciliation for studying finance and taking a bachelor’s in economics, he got a job riding horses on weekends for the owner of the stock trailer business where he worked during the week.

There’s not a lot of polo pony trailer business in the four-states “regional” market evolving since the McCollums moved Longhorn Trailers out of the starting gate on a one-time used car lot and out on the interstate.

They sell a lot of trailers with tack and feed rooms on the Show Family Circuit, where they’re innovators. They cater to niche markets. They’ve designed a watering system and fan systems specifically for hogs in transport.

Serious show hog people don’t let their hogs overheat, said Rance, who was welcomed back home after meeting his education pre-requisites.

“I can’t say it didn’t help,” he said, since he does a lot of financing work. He’s also the internet marketing brain who can fill in helping with custom work if the shop gets buried.

Polo pony trailers are most often sent to the fringes of Americas, riders on the west coast, the eastern seaboard. Mexico. South America.

“There’s a lot of rich people with horses in Mexico,” said Rance, whose second-generation stories are built on first-generation stories of times when Jimmy McCollum couldn’t get the time of day from manufacturers. A generation later they’re picking up his lunch checks.

Shucks.

“Trailers don’t buck, bite or get cut up in fences,” said Jimmy McCollum, explaining how life as a welder riding horses at jackpot ropings on weekends turned into a family trip into streams of cash generated where a rodeo circuit cowboy can pick from a selection of in-stock trailers under $200,000 with luxury living quarters.

They’ve built a second 10,000 square foot shop to make better turn-around time on custom work.

Connie and Jimmy married in 1984.

Before this, he welded on pipelines in North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma “long enough to know I didn’t want to do it forever,” he said, so he set up business in Cookville manufacturing oilfield trailers to move sour gas. He worked 15 years in building and maintenance, worked as a contract welder at the refinery and built the Reichert roping arena.

Presently, he’s working on a second landmark windmill that will pump from the pool left after they moved enough dirt to level seven more acres, new room for new inventory.

“We’re going to landscape around the pool like a state park,” said Rance, as they gear up for introduction of new lines specifically targeting the travel trailer and toy hauler recreational market.

It was 2002, and they were still headquartered at the insurance office / trailer lot when World Champion Bull Rider Larry Mahon showed up with a one-time Canadian Olympic team ski queen and a plan to travel America living in a mobile horse palace on a university circuit where she would conduct seminars focusing on “essential life skills involving relationships, stress management, nutrition and conditioning.”

As reported in the April, 2002 Journal account of the Mahan deal, Larry Mahan was the first rough-stock riding cowboy who had to be scheduled to mesh with his network contract as the color commentator in the booth with Howard Cosell on ABC Saturday afternoon’s Wide World of Sports.

The Canadian ski queen was working on her doctorate at Boston University the day they pulled in at Longhorn Trailers, where the McCollums paid $300 a month rent for the location of a one-time miniature golf course that had gone belly up twice as a car lot before they arrived.

“We called it the Little Lot that Never Could,” Connie said, back in the day when instead of the internet, their mass marketing strategy was running trailer ads in the Thrifty Nickle when Jimmy’ s riding and roping connections kept them in used trailer inventory.

There hadn’t been a stream of manufacturers beating the door down just because they rented a lot. He worked back doors, cutting deals with dealers to access new stuff.

Exasperated with an industry closed door, as a woman capable of explaining an insurance policy over the phone, Connie began calling manufacturers.

Putting the King of the Cowboys in a mobile horse palace turned some heads.

Putting their business on the interstate put them on the map.

Putting the business in cyberspace, they’ve out-distanced the pack.

Longhorn Trailers is the showcase dealership for seven manufacturers. They’re the nation’s top dealer for Elite, Sooner and Exiss and the top customer for custom manufacturers known for quality work.

“It’s all about getting exactly what somebody wants,” said Rance. “At the high end, word of mouth is the best advertisement.”