A GREAT SEASON Cushman says he’s quite comfort-
able in Northwest Arkansas. He lives in Rogers near Pinnacle Country Club, and his 26-year-old son now works for the company as well. Cushman is single. He enjoys the occasional free weekend when he’s not traveling for PAM, spend- ing it on Beaver Lake. “I had heard about how great
Beaver Lake was,” Cushman said. “I have had a great time fishing up there. I love catching wall-eye.” “I like to eat what I catch. This is
such a big bass fishing area. Not that you can’t eat the bass, it’s just not my kind of fish. I prefer wall-eye and crappie.” “I moved there [to the Pinnacle
“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A STRONG BELIEVER THAT YOU
LEARN MORE DURING THE DIFFICULT TIMES BECAUSE YOU LEARN WHAT NOT TO DO.”
neighborhood] with the intentions of playing more golf … Last year my back flared up. I probably realized I was a little better fisherman than golfer.” It’s been good fishing on the lake
this year, particularly during a three- week stretch in May, Cushman said, until temperatures picked up. It’s been a great season for PAM
the firm in the late 1980s and then returned in 1989 when the Moroun family of Detroit — whose vast holdings include the only bridge between Detroit and Canada, as well as other trucking companies — bought a major stake in the company. Weaver, whose courting of the Morouns saved the company from bankruptcy in the late 1980s, then led PAM Transportation for the next 20 years.
Meanwhile, a towering former
college basketball player — Cushman spent two years at NAIA-level Wingate College in North Carolina and his last two at NCAA Division III power Beloit (Wis.) College — was beginning to make his way up the corporate ladder in the trucking industry in the 1980s. He didn’t see himself entering the
trucking business while wrapping up an economics degree, but a first job with Roadway Express offered “a tremendous training and development company. I learned so much on the entry level,” he said.
30 Next stop: Triple Crown Services,
and “I was privileged to have that Norfolk Southern-influenced education at Triple Crown.” From there, he moved to Omaha,
Neb., to work with the highly successful Werner Enterprises freight company. In each of those jobs, Cushman
said, he would have been happy to have stayed for his entire career, but something pushed him on, and he soon landed in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at CRST. “That was a great company, but
I also felt confident I wouldn’t retire there,” he said. “They are very, very ably run. I had an executive position there, but I aspired for more.” No, he wouldn’t stay in Iowa,
because the siren song of PAM was call- ing. Cushman would learn that PAM’s owners, in fact, were calling Heartland Express for help finding the right CEO in 2009 with the company struggling. Heartland’s suggestion, Cushman would later find out: Call Dan Cushman. “I thank them for that,” he said.
Transport, too. The company totaled $402 million
in sales in 2013 — for contrast, PAM’s high-water mark in 1999, a big year for the industry as a whole, was about $200 million. Gross profit in 2013 was nearly $250 million. Net income in 2013 was $5.9 million, a bump of almost 200 per- cent over 2012’s $2.2 million, the first year in some time that PAM saw the black in net profit. For the stock investor, PAM has
been one of those “I sure wish I had gotten in on this” investments. PAM was selling at $4.75 in 2009 and in mid-August of this year was floating around the $38 mark. Earnings per share are $1, according to Wall Street analysts, with the expectation of reach- ing $1.46 per share in 2015. When the second quarter report
came out on June 30 of this year, Cushman could confidently say the company was strategically on the right track, having already exceeded net
ARKANSAS TRUCKING REPORT | Issue 4 2014
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