These days, the Fehrenkötter Group is celebrating its 90th anniversary. In 1929, Heinrich Fehrenkötter founded a transport company in Sassenberg, Münsterland. Three generations later, 600 employees are working for Fehrenkötter Transport & Logistik and for Fehrenkötter personnel services.
“When my grandfather bought a truck in the midst of the economic crisis and started to offer real long-distance transport to practically every corner of Germany using the 90-hp Krupp L3, this was not only a courageous but also an innovative step and formed the basis for later success.” says today’s Managing Director Joachim Fehrenkötter. For at that time truck transports were still very regional.
And so Heinrich Fehrenkötter occupied a niche early, which gained importance quickly. “Also his persistence when he rebuilt the company from nothing just after the war and accepted great privations, deserves the utmost respect and recognition,” says Joachim Fehrenkötter.
Courage, innovative ideas and perseverance should continue to characterise the company in the following years and are to this day decisive success factors of the Westphalian family business, which today operates throughout Europe as a specialist for vehicle and machine transports. Well-known industry leaders from the agricultural machinery and automotive industries form a loyal customer base, as well as vehicle dealers and individuals who use the company’s innovative online ordering service to commission the transportation of their vehicles.
“My father Robert Fehrenkötter and my grandfather Heinrich Fehrenkötter managed to lead the way in the transport industry at the right time with new ideas and partly with their own vehicle concepts,” reports Joachim Fehrenkötter. “Setting trends and not running after trends – that was always our claim.”
For the past 25 years, the 51-year-old has been leading the company in the interests of his father and grandfather with as much enthusiasm for decision-making and innovation as his predecessors. Whether the introduction of a digital forwarding administration, whether new vehicle concepts for the protected transport of vehicles and machines, the Fehrenkötter comparison test for trucks, which caused a sensation across Europe, or the establishment of an affiliated personnel services company – the list of innovations that Fehrenkötter has successfully introduced in this period, is long.
The anniversary is for Joachim Fehrenkötter an incentive and motivation for the coming years. “What fascinates me when looking back on 90 years of company history is what we can learn from it for the future,” says Joachim Fehrenkötter. This not only means being innovative at the right time, but also letting go at the right time and turning to new, promising goals. Because – as can be read from the Fehrenkötter story – not all new developments stand the test of time.
This is how it was with the Berlin transport – a lucrative niche that contributed significantly to the expansion of the family business in the early 1960s. Bulk transports with specially designed vehicles, refrigerated transports or swap-body logistics are further examples of innovations that have made Fehrenkötter one of the industry’s pioneers, but which, for various reasons, no longer play a role in the company today.
“The decisive basis for the success of our company is always the employees, some of whom have been loyal to us for decades, and whose commitment will continue to make a significant contribution to the successful development of our company,” emphasises Joachim Fehrenkötter.
