Fikes Truck Line: an honest ‘partnership’ that’s puts Hope on the trucking map

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

2/1/2008

HOPE — The Associated Press, the world’s largest news gathering organization, has this steadfast rule about datelines: the name of the state in which the city is located must be used unless the city is well known.

Mostly, “well known” means you have a major league sports franchise there, i.e., Miami, St. Louis, Philadelphia, etc.

There are some exceptions, mostly notably Oklahoma City (the reason is obvious) and Little Rock (because of the media attention during the Clinton administration).

Now, we’re ready to add another.

Hope as in Hope, Ark.

You know, that town in southwest Arkansas made famous by former President William Jefferson Clinton, presidential wanna be Mike Huckabee and President Jim Smith.

And just who is Jim Smith?

While you won’t find his picture on a billboard or a campaign sign in front of his home, Jim Smith is probably as well known in the trucking industry as are Misters Clinton and Huckabee in the political arena.

All he’s done over the past 25 years is turn what was essentially a one-man operation into a highly successful trucking company with some 500 independent contractors delivering freight all over the country.

Fikes Truck Line is certainly a dream come true for a man who gave up M & M’s — music and meteorology — for a career in trucking.

Born in Nevada County, Arkansas, not far from Hope, Smith’s father moved his family to Kansas City in the 1950s, where his father built a successful development company.

It was a good place to go and one of the few places in the country mushrooming at the time, he said.

After high school, he enrolled in the Kansas City Conservatory of Music to study theory, harmony and arranging, but as a young man, became somewhat impatient.

“I was 20 and thought ‘well shoot, if I haven’t made it in the music business by now, I’m too old, I’d better get out and try something else,’” he recalled.

He decided to join the Navy.

“I tried to be a pilot. I qualified for the school with one exception,” Smith said in an interview in his office at company headquarters here. “They put me through aviation prep and then they gave me a flight physical and I failed it. So I chose Naval meteorology.”

Which might have been OK if not for the fact that after he got out of the Navy and went to work for the weather bureau, he was asked to man a new observatory in the new state of Alaska.

He declined the assignment and went to work for a paint company where he got his first taste of trucking because he was involved in shipping.

 “I was the liaison with sales and shipping so I guess back in those days I could have been called a shipping clerk or an expeditor. I started noticing these [sales] guys who came around and patted the traffic manager on the back and brought him scratch pads and all that other stuff (ash trays and matches) and they all had on nice suits and ties and drove nice cars,” he said with a chuckle.

He learned about a sales position with Gordon Transport in Kansas City, applied and got the job.

He stayed there 10 years before joining Arkansas Best Freight where he worked at an Ashville, N.C., office and then as director of sales at ABF headquarters in Fort Smith, Ark.

But then Gordon Transport beckoned and he moved to Memphis as vice president.

“Actually, I made a real good mistake,” he says now. “The third generation had just inherited the company and they came over and talked to me and made it sound like I could save the company. So I went over and discovered immediately they didn’t want to save the company. Their goal was to bring it down as far as they could and take the assets and go retire at 31 and 35 years old. They didn’t want a division of independent truckers like we have now at Fikes. So they asked me to head what they called their Lightening Division. So we got it started, but I knew then I wasn’t going to hang around there any longer than I had to and was looking for something to do.”

That something was a desire to own his own company.

He’d gone to Malvern, Ark., trying to strike a deal, but it didn’t work out so he headed back to Memphis.

His journey took him to Pine Bluff, Ark., where he stopped to have lunch with a friend. Smith told him about the failed effort.

His friend told him, “There’s someone I didn’t even think about,” Smith said. “He’s 71 years old and I know him pretty well. I think he might be thinking about selling his authority.’ So he took me over to meet Horace ‘Bullet’ Fikes and we talked about 15 minutes and had a deal. I drove back to Memphis and told my wife we were moving to Pine Bluff. By that time, I’d already resigned at Gordon’s so she knew something had to be done.”

That was in 1981.

Now fast forward to 2008.

Sitting across the desk from Smith is Gary R. Salsbury, the first independent contractor Smith hired when he bought Fikes.

Today, Salsbury is the company’s senior vice president and chief operating officer.

About a month later, Smith hired an independent contractor named Jerry Davis.

He’s now the company’s vice president of safety and insurance.

It’s a testimony to how Smith built his company — from the ground up and from the inside.

Salsbury grew up on a dairy farm.

“All I knew was that I didn’t want to milk cows the rest of my life because that was a 24-hour-a-day job seven days a week,” he said. “I had this foolish dream that trucking wouldn’t be. So I bought my first truck in 1978 when I graduated from high school. All you had to have then to drive was a chauffeur’s license.”

Salsbury hauled rocks, gravel, lumber and rice.

But he was looking for more, especially when the sawmill in Waldo, Ark., shut down.

He was telling an acquaintance about his situation one day when his friend told him about Smith.

“So I called Jim one day on the telephone and talked to him and he pretty much told me the story he told you,” Salsbury said. “He basically put everything he had in this little company in Pine Bluff and he told me his vision for the future. The words that really got me were ‘it’s not a matter of if it’s going to work, it has to. I’ve invested my savings and we have to make it work.’ And I said ‘well if a man believes in his own dream that much, I believe I can, too.’ So I went there on a Saturday in May and leased on. I had a 1973 cabover International.”

Smith and Salsbury quickly found out they had a lot more to learn about the trucking business when Salsbury hauled his second load for Fikes.

“I ended up with a load of telephone poles going to Ash Flat, Ark.,” Salsbury recalled. “I’d never hauled telephone poles before so I pulled up at the Weyerhaeuser plant in DeQueen, Ark. They had metal stakes they would sell you and you’d put four of them in your trailer to keep the poles from falling off. Then they would band it with a two or three inch band around the whole load. I got to Ash Flat early that morning at the local power company and they said ‘pull over on the hill and unload those poles.’ I said ‘OK, who’s going to unload me’ and they said ‘unload yourself.’ I said ‘I don’t know how to do it.’

“They were handing me an ax at the time, and I thought ‘this is not looking good.’ The man told me ‘just get on the uphill side of the trailer and take that ax and cut that metal band and they’ll roll off.’

“I said, ‘hang on a minute, let me use your telephone. I’ve got to call my dispatcher (who was Jim, of course. He was dispatcher, safety director and salesman.)

“I said ‘Jim, I have a situation here I’m not familiar with and I need your help.’ He said ‘what’s that?’ I said ‘what do you think I need to do.’ He said ‘I guess you need to cut that metal band and get out of the way.’”

Smith, laughing as the two recalled the incident, quickly interjected, “I didn’t know as much as he did.”

Salsbury continued: “Jim said ‘I got a load of sheet rock in West Memphis you need to get down there and get. Let’s get this one off and go get it’ I said ‘well if I’m alive, I’ll go get it.’ So about the third swipe, that metal band broke, the poles rolled off and I got in my truck and left. So I was an experienced telephone pole trucker at the time. I’ve hauled many of them since.”

Salsbury breaking that metal band and those poles tumbling off the truck could be considered as a symbol of the way Fikes would grow.

About the only real plan Smith had when he bought Fikes was that he knew he wanted to grow a company of independent contractors.

“I can recall my first goal was to reach 25, then 30,” Smith said. “I remember telling my first boss, Jack Rice in Kansas City, (he’d gone up there to see his parents) about it. He said ‘how many are you going to shoot for?’ and I said ‘oh, maybe 50 or 60 and then we’ll just kind of hold it there.’ Now we have 500 to 510, totally independent contractors. We have a few fleet owners who have more than one truck.’”

Then came 100 independent contractors, a plateau Smith says today he never envisioned.

“I  thought we were big at 100 (which happened in the mid 1980s),” he said. “I felt like when we did [make 100] we were successful and that we could make pretty good living with that. We had six or seven employees. Then really from there it grew rather quickly. I really never had a fear we weren’t going to be successful.”

Smith has no numeric goals in terms of additional contractors, only to continue to grow the company and at sometime pass the torch to Salsbury, Davis and others who’ve been loyal to Smith and Fikes over the years.

Smith and Salsbury point out the benefits of being 100 percent independent contractors.

“There are several, but first and probably most importantly, you are in partnership with independent businessmen,” Smith said. “They make a tremendous investment to get into the business in the first place and we have some pretty tight restrictions for them to qualify. They are screened well and tested: drug tested, road tested and everything else. We take pride in the ones we do accept. They have a lot at stake. So they are going to take care of business. They are going to do the job we need done. Then we don’t have to have regional shops, mechanics and about four times as many employees as we have now to take care of paperwork that comes along with owning your own equipment and having 500 or so employee drivers.”

“You also don’t have 100 trucks sitting on the back fence, which forces you to take drivers you normally wouldn’t take just to get those moving and generate revenue,” Salsbury noted.

Building a company from the ground up and developing a management team from within has led Smith to develop a core set of values that begin with honesty, Smith said.

“We are an honest company. We are honest with our contractors. We do not mistreat them or abuse them in any way and the reason I’m bringing that up is that’s one of the most common things we hear from contractors coming to us. And we have so much, so many options for the people to take advantage of as a group. It makes a good place for an independent businessman to bring his truck and trailer.”

Salsbury noted the company’s tag line: ‘Connecting People With Purpose.” It’s on all the Fikes marketing and communications material.

“We’re purpose driven from the top down,” Salsbury said. “When a contractor comes in here, the first thing we do is treat them with respect. As you walk through the building, you’ll notice we don’t have any glass windows or locked doors. Every door is open, including Jim’s and mine. Sometimes people may not think that is smart in today’s environment of people going off the handle, but we have a good relationship with everyone who leases on. They spend a couple of days with us here and we try to interact with all of them.

“Fikes as a whole is a caring company and that goes back to the fact that most of the management at Fikes are former owner operators or drivers. Two employees in our Safety Department are former Fikes owner-operators. So they understand the value of an owner-operator. In operations, in Hope we have five dispatchers who are ex owner-operators. They know what it’s like to be out there on the road and what it takes to make a living and some of the obstacles you run into.”

Fikes also offers numerous options.

Today, Fikes is a flatbed and heavy-haul specialist with a fleet equipped to haul with flatbed, drop deck, RGN and side kit trailers.

Fikes has terminals in Alabama, Kentucky and Texas and sales offices in Tennessee and Oklahoma. The company is also approved as a Department of Defense carrier and has a former military person heading up that area, Salsbury said.

“And we’ve about tripled our revenue with DOD. We have a former military man who heads up that helped us on regular flatbed freight and helped us to diversify.”

It’s obvious that Smith shares a strong trust relationship with Salsbury, Davis and the company’s other employees.

“Fikes Truck Line is a partnership,” Salsbury said. “We’re not employees and Jim is the boss. It’s what Jim told a guy when I first went to work for him. The first customer I went to see was Weyerhaeuser in Hot Springs. [Smith was with Salsbury]. Ray Montgomery, who’s now passed on, said ‘so Jim’s your boss,’ and Jim said, ‘well hang on Ray, he’s not my employee and I’m not his boss, we’re partners in the business. I don’t like to use those terms.’ That struck me as a kid. I was 21 then and I thought that’s something, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. And through the last 26 years almost 27, Jim in his hiring and relationship with the employees has always held that same line. The upper and middle management hold the same line throughout the company and that also goes through the owner-operator group. They understand that. There are guys who walk in and to say just hello to me. They’ll be telling me something and I’ll say something like ‘we’re you at so and so the other night and is that old truck stop still there and [instead of just saying hello] they’ll just come in and sit down and start talking with me because you’re kind of close partners with them and I think that’s one of our strengths.”

That, and perhaps being from a town called Hope.