Glenn Brown
From truck driver to the top of pike's peak and company chairman.
CFI was a pioneer in operations south of the border, and today Mexico represents about half of its business.
When Glenn Brown started driving a truck at Contract Freighters Inc. back in 1976, he never dreamed he'd be the first person to drive a tandem-axle truck up Colorado's Pikes Peak in the annual Pikes Peak Hill Climb.
Or that he would set a new world land speed record for a heavy duty truck at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, averaging 162.579 mph over two runs in 1999 with a 2,200-horsepower Kenworth.
Or that he would do this as president and chairman of a company that had grown from 33 trucks to more than 2,000.
"Everybody does wild things when they're young," Brown says with a chuckle when asked about his adventures behind the wheel. "It was an absolute blast."
Brown got the idea of a race truck while looking for a new way to recruit drivers. "I was trying to think of some way to create some attention to CFI and differentiate ourselves from the pack," he says. "I looked at sponsoring NASCAR and found it to be much too expensive, so the idea of a race truck kind of came to mind, and so I just built one."
One truck turned into a whole family, with the help of Kenworth engineers - the original Red Racer, the Red Racer Peak Performer (designed for the Pikes Peak Hill Climb), the Red Racer Flat Out (designed to set the Bonneville Salt Flats speed record), plus a chase truck, a pull truck, and a miniature version.
Although the racing program is over, its legacy at CFI continues.
"It was a good tool for us," Brown says. In addition to his original goal of attracting the attention of potential drivers, he was able to test a number of components for his trucks in extreme conditions. In fact, some of the things he learned resulted in equipment changes on company trucks.
"For example, we currently spec all our trucks with disc brakes on the front - one of the first in the industry to do so," Brown says. "Through the racing program we learned they're much more effective in stopping a truck than the traditional drum brakes."
Last year, the company announced it was going to make disc brakes standard on all its new Kenworths. Bruce Stockton, vice president of operations, says, "We have been testing disc brakes on a Kenworth T2000 for over three years now. I've driven that truck, Glenn Brown has driven it. That convinced us that we needed to spec disc brakes on all our trucks as soon as possible. It's an additional cost, but we believe it will save us money in the end."
Such thinking has helped Joplin, Mo.-based CFI grow to become what Brown says is the 11th largest carrier in the industry.
Brown learned the industry from the ground up, starting as a driver.
"I quit college after one year and worked in an office for a couple of years - long enough to learn that I wasn't cut out to do the 8 to 5, Monday through Friday repetitious routine," Brown recalls. His father arranged for him to work for Enid, Okla.-based Groendyke Transport, which trained him to be a driver hauling crude oil to a refinery in Wichita, Kan.
From there, he went to Tri State Motor Transit, where he worked for 10 years as an OTR driver as well as in operations and safety.
In 1976, CFI's Dave Sitton, who would soon go on to establish his own Sitton Motor Lines, hired Brown to drive one of CFI's 33 trucks. Brown was soon promoted to dispatcher, and worked his way up the ladder until he was named president in 1986.
The company, which remains privately held, was founded by Ursel Lewellen with two trucks in 1951. Today, it boasts 2,500 power units and 7,500 trailers, operated by both company drivers and owner-operators. CFI was a pioneer in operations south of the border, and today Mexico represents about half of its business.
But back when the nation was celebrating its bicentennial, CFI was a small regional truckload carrier, constrained by the limits of government regulation.
"We had very limited [operating] authority with regard to the commodities we hauled and the geographic area we covered," Brown says. Glass containers, such as those used for soft drinks and condiments, as well as fertilizer and insulation, were the commodities making up much of its business, along with a lot of beer backhauls.
By the time deregulation came along a few years later, Brown says the company had grown to around 100 trucks, and viewed the new playing field with optimism.
"I think all the major carriers had a great fear of it - they didn't want deregulation," he says. "But for CFI, at that point we were very constrained in the authority we had to serve our customers, so we viewed it as an opportunity. It gave us the ability to serve our customers in a greater geographic area, to serve our customers with any commodity they wanted to ship. It gave us the ability to develop new customers that we weren't able to serve under a regulated environment. So we viewed it as a great opportunity, which it truly was for CFI."
With its new nationwide general commodities authority, CFI went to existing customers that it knew had freight going to geographic areas that CFI hadn't been able to serve before. For instance, it was now able to haul glass containers from Missouri to Michigan.
And then, in Michigan, CFI ran into the automotive industry.
"That's what really gave us the opportunity to grow," Brown says. "We discovered the automotive industry and all the freight they had going all over the country. The automotive industry was also responsible for us getting into international traffic into Mexico and Canada. Just like stepping stones, it allowed us to go from one thing to another. Prior to deregulation, we couldn't go to Michigan, and we couldn't haul automotive products. So we really started growing prolifically with the automotive industry."
In fact, Brown says, things got a little too prolific.
"I recall a time when we had annual growth of 68%, and I learned from experience that's way too fast a growth rate," he says. "I believe if you want to be successful and have the best quality service that's available, you absolutely have to allow your people a sufficient amount of time to be properly trained and educated to do the job. You can't just have unbridled growth. If you do, your service quality will suffer. Maintaining the quality of our service - that's been paramount to me."
Brown remembers watching J.B. Hunt and many other public carriers grow extremely rapidly. Because they were publicly traded, he says, there was pressure from Wall Street to maintain rapid growth. CFI, being privately held, hasn't had to deal with that kind of pressure, he says.
It was trying to provide the service that customers wanted that led CFI south of the border. After deregulation, CFI's customers wanted to know if the company could provide service to Mexico.
"At that point in time, I viewed Mexico - like I think everyone did - as being a big black hole," Brown recalls. But when shippers started asking about service there, "I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks and just observed and talked to people, and I began to understand it was possible to provide service to Mexico."
This was in the mid '80s, long before the North American Free Trade Agreement came on the scene. Brown found a way to make it work, interlining with Mexican carriers to provide through-trailer service across the border.
Today, CFI focuses heavily on Mexico - it's about half the company's business, Brown says. "It's not just automotive, it's all commodities," he says. "Automotive, electronics, anything from cookies to computers."
Not in his wildest dreams, he says, would he have imagined all this back before deregulation.
"The thing that's always kept me fascinated about the trucking industry is, I can't master it. It's been an ongoing challenge for me every day of my career, whether it was as a driver, dispatcher, president or chairman/CEO. Today I still can't wait to get to the office every morning to see how things have gone since I left the day before, and to see what challenges we face today."
Although some of those challenges can be frustrating, Brown keeps in mind the importance of the trucking industry.
"It's probably the most essential - other than food production - service in our country. The trucking industry is what makes it possible for you to know you can go to the convenience store and buy a gallon of gas or a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread. I take a lot of pride in that."
— Deborah Lockridge
