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The tan, 59-year-old Cushman is a


native of Chicago Heights, Ill. He grew up with two brothers and a sister; his parents are gone now. All the kids had dark complexions that screamed of Italian heritage, he said, and dark hair, except for Dan. “I used to be a tow- head,” he said. “Everybody used to tease me, ‘Where did the blonde hair come from?’” Tontitown in Washington County,


just a short distance west of Springdale on U.S. Highway 412, was settled by Italians who grew grapes for wine and opened a few Italian food restaurants that grew to be favorites for Arkansans. Cushman, though, recalls arriving in Tontitown in 2009 and being taken to legendary Mary Maestri’s, ready to sample some of the food he’d heard so much about and compare it to what he’d grown up with back home. Right off the bat, the dining party was informed that the restaurant had lost its liquor license, so a highly anticipated glass of red wine was out. That welcome may have seemed


unpromising, but it was not an omen of what was to come for PAM Transport.


TURNING IT AROUND “When I was contacted about the


job [at PAM], the economy had suf- fered,” he said. “I can’t speak for the entire industry, but a lot of trucking companies had taken a hit. PAM was hit particularly hard.” “When I was being talked to about


the position, the company was described to me as very automotive dependent. It was only true in part; it was really dependent on one automotive cus- tomer.” A significant portion of PAM’s busi-


ness was with General Motors, which was rocked in 2008-09 by big losses that forced it to declare bankruptcy and the federal government to step in with a bailout. GM’s struggles hit PAM at its core. It was obvious to Cushman that the company had to grow its customer base and diversify. “We did that successfully,” he said. “Over the next year, we brought in


28


300 new customers, customers that we never had done business with before, all that in a year. That’s a huge number.” Cushman was very confident about


the opportunity at PAM. He said, “I had people I know, when I was thinking about taking the job, telling me ‘That


Northeast who had worked with a com- pany we had bought, called Decker. The first thing he did when we went in to a customer was lay down a card that said ‘Decker.’ So, we talked to the customer, and he didn’t understand what the broad company PAM Transport was.”


“EVEN THOUGH THE CIRCUMSTANCES WERE DIRE, HE HAD A VISION FOR A TRANSFORMED PAM TRANSPORT FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. HE SET OUT ON THE JOURNEY TO RESHAPE THE BUSINESS


AND COMPANY CULTURE, AND METHODICALLY BEGIN TO IMPLEMENT HIS STRATEGIC PLAN.”


—MARK BROCKINTON, MANAGING DIRECTOR, AON RISK SERVICES


company will never make money again.’ But I hadn’t met any of the people here yet. One of the things wrong was the lack of revenue because of lack of diver- sification. That was one of my strong suits, and once I met some of my team- mates, I was confident we could and would turn it around.” Last year was the long-awaited


breakthrough. The stock price has hit an all-time high of $41 in the past 12 months. “We’ve been experiencing a lot of


all-time highs,” he said. There was still the matter of all


those flags signifying the companies that belonged to PAM, yet operated under their own banner — companies such as Decker in the Northeast and Choctaw in Oklahoma. Cushman believed business would be better served if those subsidiaries were put under the PAM flag. “Before I got here, I looked at our


website and said, ‘What are you looking for me to be head of, PAM Transport or all these individual companies?’” Cushman recalls the individual


companies under PAM Transport, “What scared the heck out of me was I made a sales call with a salesman in the


The customer had loved Decker,


so Cushman explained that PAM Transport was a 1500 truck company. He realized that’s not what customer saw.


Cushman knew then and there, he


had to roll all of PTSI’s holdings into one.


“I didn’t want anybody looking at


us in a limited scope,” said Cushman, who has endeavored to stay active with PAM’s customer base himself, getting a better feel for how those customers per- ceived PAM within the industry. He found over the past five years


that he had to change the view that PAM’s customer base was mostly mov- ing automotive parts across the country, but yet maintain a strong position in that arena it knew so well. “We do that and we do that very


well,” he said of PAM’s work with the automotive industry. “But we do a lot more than just that.” Cushman said his goal was to do


less with GM and more with others. “It’s still our top automotive cus-


tomer, but one of the things I made sure of, I never apologize for being great at something. But let’s be great at it with several customers.”


ARKANSAS TRUCKING REPORT | Issue 4 2014


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