them to ever feel obligated.” However, once they joined the firm,
they excelled. “My sons are, for (lack of a) better word, they’re brilliant. I mean, they’re just, when it comes to spreadsheets and forward thinking, they’re just way out, way out in front of the pack on that kind of stuff,” he said. Walker said being a family-owned
business is an advantage. In fact, he said he knows of no other industry that is more family-centered than trucking. “By and large, trucking is a family-
run business, and every time the invest- ment bankers have tried to get into this business and done roll-ups of multiple companies, they’ve pretty much been a fail- ure,” he said. “And the reason they’re fail- ures is because it’s an entrepreneurial busi- ness run by family entrepreneurs, and they’re capable of doing the same thing you just mentioned that I do where they have fingers on their business, and they know what they’re doing on a minute by minute basis. And the biggest factor is, it’s a low margin business, and when you have low margins, you can’t afford a lot of mistakes,
and you can’t have a lot of fat overhead that big corporations can have to manage it. So when you don’t have those, it gets back to being run by small families that can suc- ceed and keep a finger on everything.” Walker has built his business amidst a
challenging trucking landscape that has forced him to react. Customers are looking at key performance indicators – goals met, on-time percentages, accidents. They’re looking at carriers’ CSA scores and using those to decide who gets their business. “Trucking has changed a lot since I
got in the industry,” he said. “The custom- er’s changed. Used to be, so much was done on a handshake. My task was to get it from point A to point B, and if I got it from here to there in one piece without damaging it, I did my job. Today, it’s not like that any- more. … “We have meetings monthly with all
of our large customers where we’re going over all kinds of parameters of expectations and goals, and our customers expect today 95 percent on-time delivery, 95 percent on- time to pick it up when they want us there. … They’re evaluating our performance
Madison Grace and Annie Elaine Walker with their granddaddy Johnny Walker, JH Walker Trucking
against our peer group and saying, ‘These guys are 92 percent on time. You’re 91 per- cent, or you’re 95.” J.H. Walker Trucking installed elec-
tronic logging devices about three years ago. Since then, the company has had very few hours of service violations. Dispatchers have immediate access to information
Continues
Summer 2016
31
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