Tim Burke is more than happy his career path led him to Missoula, Montana

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

11/16/2007

MISSOULA, Mont. — Tim Burke thought he was all set for life.

Armed with his degree from Eastern Illinois University, he was ready for a lifelong career in education.

He’d head straight back down the road to where he’d been taught as a youngster and impart all his new-found knowledge on those young folks, he decided.

But the road had a few bumps and curves along the way.

“I figured I’ll graduate college and become a school teacher and my life will be set,” Burke recalled. “The disappointing thing about teaching was I went back to where I graduated from and the atmosphere had changed so much.”

Today, Burke is far removed from a career in teaching, but he’s still dealing with roads.

He’s president of Sammons Trucking, headquartered in Missoula, Mont., and how he got all the way from Illinois to Montana is a road story in itself.

After he decided teaching wasn’t for him, he went looking for something else to do and ended up with a job as a second-shift dispatcher for a regional trucking company [his only previous experience in trucking had been summer work driving from Rhode Island to Kansas City for a swimming pool manufacturing company].

His first job ended when the company went out of business and he moved to Davenport, Iowa, where he worked for a company owned by CRST.

After a couple of years, he moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, home office for CRST and when CRST bought Malone and renamed it CRST Malone, Burke moved to Birmingham, Ala., where that division is headquartered.

He moved north to St. Cloud, Minn., for a job and then back home to Illinois to help care for his mother, who’d fallen ill and then worked three years for Lone Star in Fort Worth, Texas.

That’s when Sammons came calling in 2003 and Burke pulled out his well-worn Rand McNally U.S. Atlas one more time to find out how exactly to get to Missoula [it’s on the state’s western border near Idaho, 111 road miles west of Helena, the state capital].

Talk to him today and you get the impression the Atlas is in the trash and he’s in Missoula for the duration, especially with the current direction of the company, whose drivers are virtually all owner-operators.

“I just looked around a saw a wonderful opportunity out here with Sammons,” he said during an interview earlier this month. “I fell in love with the climate up in Minnesota when I lived there and when I flew out here to meet the owners, the climate, the size of the town, the town’s beliefs, things along that line just sold me on it. And I was lucky enough and skilled enough that the owners believed in me, and I started doing some things to help maximize profit and turn the company around on a decent curve and help polish it up for them to maximize the company’s sales potential to another company.”

Sammons was privately owned by three individuals when Burke took over. They’d bought it in 1975 from the founder, Pete Sammons.

Burke joined at a time when the company was in what you might call the tail end of a regressive situation, something that soon would change for the better.

As he looks back, he sort of shakes his head.

When the three owners bought the company in 1975, it boasted 400 owner-operators.

While other companies grew substantially in the years of deregulation, the three owners of Sammons actually sold the company to Market Industries in 2006 with only 350 owner-operators.

Six months after Market Industries bought the company, Union Transport Inc. (UTI) bought Market Industries, which meant in less than five years, Burke has worked for three different owners.

But that’s OK with him because the company now has solid direction.

“So we went from a $70 million-a-year trucking company to a $350 million-a-year pretty decent sized trucking entity, and now we’re part of a little over $4 billion-a-year, publicly held company,” he said with obvious pride in his voice. “We’ve learned a whole lot in a small amount of time.”

He calls Sammons on of UTI’s “jewels.”

“We don’t create a lot of havoc, we create a decent return for them; therefore, the stockholders take note that UTI has made another good acquisition.”

When Burke went to Montana, he found a company with a good reputation, albeit one built primarily through one commodity.

Pete Sammons had done such a good job of hauling lumber throughout the Northwest that a lot of folks couldn’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak.

“That [the reputation as a lumber hauler] stuck with Sammons for years,” Burke said. “The clients we’ve been doing business with for 30 to 35 years out here in the northwest will testify that years ago if you needed something done and it was in wood products, you just called Sammons and it was taken care of. And we still have that today. But competition and deregulation have certainly put a lot of great entrepreneurs in the business and they’ve been successful at it and we’ve had to find our own balance in other commodities to please our owner-operator group.”

Today, about 40 percent of the company’s loads are flatbed and 60 percent is step deck or multi axle equipment machinery hauling.

“Our commodity breaks down that we are probably today 50 percent into plant or agricultural machinery, another 20 percent is iron and steel and the other 30 percent building products,” Burke said, noting that the company’s clients include argi equipment giants John Deere and Caterpillar.

The company is far, far from just a carrier in the Northwest, too, with either terminals or agents in seven locations throughout the U.S.

That quickly puts an end to one of the main concerns owner-operators have when they contact Sammons about a job.

“When an owner-operator calls about leasing and they hear you are Sammons out of Montana they say ‘oh, I don’t like to drive in the snow, I don’t like the mountains, so there is six months out of the year I can drive for Sammons and there are six months I can’t.’”

That quickly changes when they learn of Sammons’ national outreach and Burke’s philosophy about how he wants his drivers to feel.

“The most important aspect that an owner-operator needs to feel here is that he is an independent,” Burke said. “We provide a service for them, such as providing an insurance authority, the way we purchase tires and other services out there. We need to make sure they are aware they are a partner with us much like we do our shipper clients. Our turnover is not great [large but] we are in a process of constant improvement.”

Sammons has a low turnover rate, so much so that it caused a problem when Burke decided to do a survey with departed drivers.

He employed Strategic Programs from Denver.

“I must admit, I certainly was sitting on the edge of my chair not knowing what to expect,” Burke said.

What he heard was that his company’s turnover rate was so small, the research company couldn’t get a large enough group of former drivers to find out what was going on in the company.

“So they recommended reaching out to our current owner-operators and find out what they say,” he said. “It was a different twist for them. The folks at Strategic Programs were blown away by seeing over 75 percent participation. When they do something like this, they say there are lucky to see 50 percent participation rate.”

Burke said right away the researchers learned that the culture at Sammons is one of openness.

“Our culture is very open. It’s a very open-door company. If there is an issue, drivers know they can pick up the phone and reach me direct or they can reach any of our employees and know they’ll get an answer. It might not be the answer they want, but they will get an answer right away.”

One a scale of one to five, the company scored a 3.2 on the survey.

“The research company had never seen that before,” Burke said. “The survey showed the owner-operators who are with us today pride themselves on them having the independence they want and require and need to be successful in business today. Also high ranked was the support that they get. The truth and honesty of what they were told they were going to get ranked very high. Settlements scored high, which is to say we’re not messing with their checks. What they contract for is what they get and with no forced dispatch, they get to pick and choose what they want to haul.”

It’s important to maintain that culture, Burke says, because the age of the owner-operator is not getting any younger.

“It’s certainly a chore for all of us in the business to try making sure that we create a solid home for an owner-operator out there,” he said. “We have some contractors who’ve been in business for 40 to 45-plus years. We have a couple of drivers who’ve been with us for 30 plus years and a handful who’ve been with us for 20-plus years. Our contracts are an incentive for them to stay. They get a particular percentage increase every five years throughout the term of their lease with us. So we try to give incentives … and it sure is good to have an old hand out there, especially when you are trying to grow and do good things with a new client base we have.”

It’s that relationship with his owner-operators and his employees that gives Burke the greatest satisfaction in what he’s doing.

“What probably gets me to ticking every day is when I walk into this office, when someone calls here or calls our office in Iowa or they call our office in Portland, I know that our employees have a true sense of wanting to make sure that all the t’s are crossed and all the i’s are dotted and that our contractors are being told accurate up-front information in regard to what they can pick and choose from,” Burke said.

“I look and see I have employees who’ve been with Sammons 30-plus years right outside my door. And I want to tell you, after being bought and sold twice in one year that I am more proud of our employees in Missoula or anywhere throughout the country, and our agents who have stuck with us and our owner-operators who have stuck with us because you know what that can do over time, that can create some tumultuous feelings of ‘oh my.’”

Those feelings don’t exist at Sammons, however, and Burke said everyone has bought into the company’s vision for the next five years.

“We have a very aggressive plan for the next five years to the year 2012. We are going to grow a minimum of 20 percent per year,” he said. “That comes from corporate, of course, and we’ve bought into that 100 percent here. For sure, we have to be very aggressive in making sure our owner-operator group is taken care of. Our best recruiters are our owner-operators. We certainly do advertise, but I think we do that to keep up with the Joneses and let everybody know we are there. Two out of three owner-operators who come to us come to us by word of mouth of our present owner-operator group.”

The realization has set in with employees and owner-operators alike that Sammons has moved far, far away from being just a lumber hauler.

“It was interesting to see the faces when we had a meeting and got everybody together and said ‘we’re now owned by Market Industries,’” Burke said. “They responded ‘oh, well, we’re going to be part of a more West Coast type environment and that’s all good.’ And then you had a meeting with the same people six months later and said, ‘okay, we’re now owned by a company that does business in 64 countries.’ And then somebody says, ‘we’re now global.’ And believe it or not, we are global.”

Maybe Burke would do well to dig that old U.S. Atlas out of the trash and trade it in for a Rand McNally World Atlas. 8