KJM Capital

they’re on the road; asking how they’re doing, how the team is doing, and what the company can do differently. According to Meister, “It’s something that small family businesses do well. They know their drivers and families, intimately. It’s harder when you get to our size, but we actively push ourselves to reach out to those drivers, especially on holidays when they’re out there working. Each business we acquired was family owned, so we tried to retain that part of it while we get larger and put more tech systems and structure in place. We don’t have one big central dispatch room, we’ve kept all the employees local, so the drivers see a familiar face when they come to the shop or the office and keep that bond.” Technology is Shahin Sazej’s wheelhouse. One of the three founding KJM partners, Sazej did a great deal of research on software manufacturer providers when the company first decided to in- vest in the transportation sector. He was looking for proven technology as a core foundation for their mergers and acquisitions because it would be easier to convert all the companies and merge them together using the same software products. “Eventually, we selected a software solution made by McCloud Software,” says Sazej. “It has a very decent market share and most mid-tier companies are using it. That software became our core, back-office operation for bidding, tracking, dispatch, and then we worked on expanding the solutions for our customers.We also use telemat- ics – a device put on the tractor to send orders, dispatch, communicate with the drivers, and get their GPS location. Over the past 18 months, we KJM CAPITAL PREFERRED VENDOR n Excel Truck Group www.exceltruckgroup.com put all our companies on the same operating platform and all the core businesses on the same system, so we can analyze and generate reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. From that point of view everything is in place for growth both by acquisition and organically. The sky’s the limit as long as we are running a good solid busi- ness that continues to improve.” Savoy shares an interesting perspective on the future of the industry. “If you consider where the trucking industry was 30 years ago, today, we have some giant companies, but the majority are less than 200 trucks.With all the competition for drivers, I don’t think that will continue.We’re exploring a number of different options, as an in- dustry, to grow the driver base, including lowering the legal commercial driver license age from 21. I think trucking companies that can be successful at recruiting and retaining drivers are going to win.We want to give drivers that work for us in this industry a better quality of life.” As for KJM’s goals for the next five years, Meister says, “We don’t want to be all things to all shippers. To succeed in this space, carriers need to be matched up with the right shippers. We believe that the secret of successful fami- ly-owned businesses is that they do one thing very well. Part of our strategy is to be in the right location around the country, so you can get to each operation in one day, two at the most. We want to keep that local feel, while making at least another two or three acquisitions to complete the map. Then we’ll see how big we want to get after that.”