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<