BELLE FOURCHE—Family, friends, employees, and even past employees gathered at Habeck Trucking Company’s truck shop a few miles outside of Belle Fourche on May 15 to celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary.
The truck shop was transformed into a celebratory space decked out with gold and black balloons, black and gold tablecloths, fancy hors d’oeuvres, a variety of drinks, and a 30th anniversary cake. One of the newer Habeck trucks, freshly washed and polished, was also on display.
Thirty years in business is quite a milestone for any company, but owner Mike Habeck started his trucking business all on his own. “Well, we’ve done this for 30 years since I went and started on my own in the trucking business—so that was actually in February of 1996,” he said. “Of course this isn’t like a second generation or anything, we just started from scratch—sometimes you know, you hear about trucking companies that have been around longer, but it might have been passed down, and my dad was a rancher…but he didn’t like trucks, he wasn’t a trucker.”
Habeck started his business with one truck and was all the way up to 35 trucks at one time. He has since downsized. “Now we’re back down to nine…I just decided it was more headache than I wanted, and so we kind of put it back down to this size—I’m kind of a micro manager, so it’s a lot easier for me to sleep at night when I feel like I get a little better control,” he explained.
The company makes long hauls and local hauls. Some of his trucks go from one end of the country to the other. Belle Fourche has been the perfect central location for his trucks that make those long hauls because it is just about in the middle of the runs. When needed, drivers can swap out and finish the run. “Most of our trailers, our primary lanes will go out to Oregon and Washington and back to states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio,” said Habeck. “So it’s a lot of back and forth—most of the time when these guys are coming through here, they’re loaded, and occasionally, if they want to be home for a few days and they live here, we just swap a guy that’s already been home, he takes the load on, that’s kind of how we keep that food flowing.”
The trucking company also does short hauls around the local area. “This customer we have now, Solmax over in Spearfish…we’re on contract with those guys, and it makes you feel a little more secure,” Habeck explained. “We also got a couple of pneumatic tanks, three of them, so we haul a lot of bulk bentonite.”
A few refrigerated trailers are part of the fleet as well. “All the shiny trailers that you see are all refrigerated trailers. They’re insulated and they got diesel units on the front that run the cooling. We do a lot of food grade, perishable foods and frozen. We haul a lot of ice cream, meat, frozen fruits—anything that’s perishable goes in those, and we go all over the country.”
The different types of trucks and lengths of hauls have been a carefully curated plan for Habeck. “One thing you learn when you’re in the trucking business is all good things come to an end sooner or later, so you just kind of got to be ready for the next good thing,” he shared. “You have to adapt. I learned early on, don’t throw all your eggs in one basket because then if something goes wrong, you’re in trouble. So we diversified a little bit.”
Habeck Trucking currently has 13 employees. As of right now, Mike has no plans on retiring. He says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. “I’ve slowed down a lot compared to the way I used to go, and as long as we could still have a few trucks and I’ve got some control over what’s going on—I don’t really plan to retire,” he said.
Habeck has two daughters. One of them, Sam, works in the office at his trucking company. His other daughter, Mikayla, worked for him in the past but wasn’t super fond of the work and has since gone on to own her own business in Belle Fourche. His wife is musician Ja’net Eastman, and he gushes a little bit when he talks about her and the albums she has made. He is definitely a proud husband and father.
He shared that it wasn’t his idea to have the 30th anniversary celebration. “I didn’t really do this, you know, it was more my daughter and my wife that said we should do something…I didn’t know how it would go or anything, so they kind of instigated having a little 30-year celebration just for that reason.” It seems as though his wife and daughters are just as proud of him as he is of them.
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