Christenson Transportation: where family culture and business opportunities grow

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

5/9/2008

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — By now, no doubt, most everyone has heard the radio commercial where the CEO of an identity theft protection company proudly announces his own Social Security number for all the world to hear and virtually defies anyone to try and steal his personal information.

Don Christenson will do you one better than that.

Lease on at Christenson Transportation and you’ll probably get his personal cell phone number.

It’s all part of — and just one aspect of — his plan to keep a true feeling of family around his company.

“We’re a very, very family-oriented culture,” Christenson, the company president, said. “My father is the founder of the business. We not only treat our team members in-house like family and foster their personal growth, we look to treat our drivers like family. I have an open door policy. A lot of the drivers have my personal cell phone number. I give out contact information at every orientation. The drivers know if they call me and I don’t answer the phone, it’s because I’m in a meeting or something else is going on. But we will return their phone calls. Being a small carrier like we are, that’s one of the things we have to offer that a lot of the larger carriers can’t provide, and that is that family oriented, know-the-owners type business.”

When Christenson speaks of family, he’s talking about several generations of family.

“I grew up in a trucking family,” he said during an interview with The Trucker. “My grandfather owned a feed store and my father grew up hauling feed out of Iowa, Kansas and other places into Oklahoma.”

In fact, his father went into trucking fulltime right out of high school and stayed in the business his entire life. His first stop was with Tom Inman Trucking in Tulsa, Okla., a small independent carrier that later would give the younger Christenson his first real taste of the road.

“They went from running seven trucks when my dad started driving there to around 500 to 600 trucks by the time I graduated from high school,” Christenson said.

His father’s job provided both a taste of the business and some good memories.

“As a young boy I can remember going on summer trips with my dad to haul chickens over to Springdale, Ark., and maybe twice a year I’d be fortunate enough to get to go to California and back with him.”

He went to three years of college, but left when he realized a lot of his friends who were graduating were taking jobs at a lot less pay than he could make driving a big rig, which he had done for Tom Inman and Inman’s nephew Jerry Inman during the summer.

During the next few years, Christenson was involved in the industry in a variety of venues, which provided him a lot of experience, and surely fashioned his philosophy on which he runs his company today.

After driving for three different companies over a two-year span after college, Christenson married and went to work for his father, who was running his own exempt brokerage business with about 25 owner-operators carrying mostly potatoes out of Idaho back to Cincinnati.

Christenson drove a truck his father bought for him for about 18 months, then bought his own truck and went into business with another man from Kansas six months later.

The two were running about 15 trucks in the early 1980s.

“We talk about the high price of fuel now. Well, in the early 1980s we had high fuel prices and high interest rates,” he recalled. “Interest rates were running 21 to 23 percent. We were fortunate. We got in and out of that business without hurting ourselves too much and eventually we left with each other owning a truck outright. I ran that truck for a year and a half or so, and then I had a bad truck wreck in Ray, Colo.

He took 18 months off, during which his first child was born and he decided it was time to get off the road.

A friend who had five trucks leased to a company in Arkansas hired him to dispatch.

Eighteen months later came his first opportunity to run a trucking company.

It started with a call from a friend. John Christner.

“He’d met a guy who owned a pharmaceutical collection business and a small trucking company and John was looking at taking over the trucking company for the guy,” Christenson said. “I remember the man was pretty dynamic, but he was struggling with his trucking company. He was running about 25 trucks and he’d lost several million dollars a year over the last few years in a market that was pretty good at the time.”

Christenson took the job at Rockwall, Texas, just outside Dallas, and turned the company into a profit-making business.

“I remember going to him about two years into this deal and saying, ‘you know, we’re making a profit every month, we’re running 15 trucks, we doing it real efficiently, we getting all your goods to market well, but there’s no place for me to go,” Christenson said. “So he offered me the opportunity to run his pet food business.”

Little did he know at the time that pet food would play an important role in his later success.

“I’d never done anything outside of trucking,” Christenson said. “It was a great opportunity and challenge for me at the time, and I took that on.”

He grew that business for a few years, then the call to return to his family roots came.

“My dad was wanting to retire. He’d built up his brokerage business that he’d started up in 1978 and moved it to Springfield in 1979,” Christenson said. “This was in the late 1980s and he’d bought himself a little place in Central America and was living down there and didn’t want to have to worry about his business.”

Timing worked out well.

Christenson had some ownership in the Texas business. He was able to both return to the family business and maintain a small part of the business he’d built.

So he moved to Springfield in 1990 and took over the family brokerage business, which at the time was a $2 to 2.5 million a year business. He became president in 1991.

“We put in incentive type pay and grew the business over the next five years to a $6.5 million business,” Christenson said

But times were changing in the trucking industry, and Christenson determined he couldn’t operate any longer as merely a brokerage business.

“Since deregulation when he’d gotten his authority as a regulated broker instead of an exempt broker, I’d seen my father build up these really big customers, including Fortune 500 customers such as Mead Johnson and Proctor & Gamble. A couple of years would go by, and they’d [his customers] get a new traffic manager, who would tell him he’d only deal with asset-based companies. Seeing that happen to him we felt like if we were going to head this off [with their own customers], we’d have to run at least a handful of trucks.”

So Christenson Transportation as an asset-based company was formed and things really took off.

“The thought was we’d run 10 to 15 trucks,” Christenson said. “We could tell people we had trucks, but we’d still broker the freight. Well, we got to trucking, and that was kind of what was in our blood all along. My dad got excited about it again. He moved back from Central America to get back involved in the business, taking on a fleet manager’s role and dispatching a fleet of trucks.

“We went from running 15 trucks to 35 trucks to 160 trucks pretty quickly.”

The company was running a mixture of owner-operator and company trucks, but then the industry downturn hit in 2001 and 2002.

“So we re-looked at our business model and decided what we were doing wrong was trying to run company vehicles. We looked at how we could grow our owner-operator base and looked at different models of lease to own, lease to purchase, and decided to go a combination of those two, and that’s what we’ve been since 2002,” Christenson said.

And done very well at that, he added, noting that the company now has 100 trucks and about 230 trailers.

Ironically, or perhaps not ironically, his largest customer is a pet food company, Nutro Products.

“They are a high premium pet food sold in specialty stores, and their advertising is by samples and word of mouth,” he said. “They have a really, really good product. And then we haul a lot of electronics. We do really well on high value, time-sensitive freight so we look for customers who have some element of time involved in it. It doesn’t always have to be the element of expedited delivery. It could be that we have a customer that needs to load two, three four days ahead of schedule for delivery and we have to have the ability to sit on this product. Or it may be a customer who wants delivery, but has to have “x” number of days in the parking lot. So they have four days of inbound sitting in their parking lot. Or it may be pick up by appointment only or it may be delivery by appointment only. But we always look for some type of time element because we specialize in managing time.”

Christenson is looking for customers for whom the company can drop and hook on at least one part of the movement so his company can increase its productivity over the weekends to benefit both the company and the owner-operators.

“Our philosophy is that we are creating business opportunities,” Christenson said. “We want people to have equity in their equipment as quickly as possible. We have guys who went through our program and built their credit and have been able to purchase on their own and we have guys who are on their third truck with us and put a lot of equity in it and got their payments down really, really low. We provide a lot of business training and back office support for our owner-operator base. It’s a business model that works really well for us. We’ve been able to sustain—it’s been really difficult to grow these past two years — but we’ve been able to sustain and actually grow our facilities.”

There is a facility in Lebanon, Tenn., that sits on five acres with all concrete parking, driver’s lounge, cross dock facility and a two-bay shop. There is also a 10,000-square-foot office building at Springfield with five-and-a-half acres of concrete parking.

“It’s the people I work with here in the office and the customers I’ve worked with over the years, knowing that we provide a good service by some really good people,” he says when asked what motivates him to come to work every day. “I have people who work for me that are just like family, and to be able to watch their families grow, their kids grow up, watch them mature into young adults over the years, I think that’s what gets me in here everyday. In 1990 when I came here, I had some young people with young families and now I’m watching them go off to college and play sports. Some of them coming back into the workforce.”

In addition, there’s his own family.

“I have a 24-year-old daughter who worked in the business through high school and college and went on to Oral Roberts and played soccer down there for four years and captained her team to an NCAA berth her senior year. It was the only time the soccer team had been to the NCAA tournament,” he said. “She got married in February and to see my employees so excited and wanting to be part of that and asking me daily how she was doing was motivating.

“Then, I have a 14-year-old son who’ll be 15 soon. He’s started asking questions about the business. Of course, we hope he goes on to be a professional golfer. He’s a real focused young man who spends a lot of his time as his trade, already. He has a real strong work ethic. We spend our weekends getting him around to different golf tournaments throughout the year.”

His wife has been involved in the company over the years and today works in recruiting.

“The driver’s know who we are. They know we are accessible. Once a month we do family cookouts on the back patio,” Christenson said. “We put a lot of infrastructure into our people and a lot of our profits go back to them, too.”

As for the future? There’s that word family again.

“We would like to keep in family oriented, but we would like to grow just a little bit because we’ve put the infrastructure in place for that,” Christenson said. “We have some personnel within the organization who have expressed their desire to grow individually. As I said, that’s one of the things that we’ve always tried to do — provide an opportunity for people who want to come here and earn a living for their families, and to be able to do it on the level that they want to achieve. So we’d like to grow 20 to 25 units over the next 18 months and over the next three to four years we’d like to be running 140 to 150 units again. That would allow us to maintain our family-oriented culture and that’s the size we’d like to stay at. We would be comfortable at that.

And, it keeps it where I’m not going to have to start looking at drivers as truck numbers. I’d still know them by name. In fact, when we talk about drivers, we seldom use truck numbers, we use names. If someone throws a truck number at me, the first thing I ask is, “what’s his name?”

One thing’s for sure.

The driver’s know his name … and his number.