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,<