Arkansas Trucking Report

Award-Winning Regional Journal of the Arkansas Trucking Association Vol. 13, No. 3 • June 2008 • $4.95
COVERSTORY
20
Arkansas Trucking Report, June 2008
By Lane Kidd
Executive Editor
Photography by Jon D. Kennedy
“I always wanted to be a trucker,” said
Michael Barr, as we rode in his pickup on a
recent warm afternoon in early June. “I used
to get on my bicycle when I was 10 or 11,” he
says, slowly tapping his steering wheel, “and I
would ride, sometimes with a buddy but usually by myself, the two or three miles down
this country road from my house to Interstate
40 and I would just sit there on a hill and
watch all those trucks go by.
“I would just sit there,” he repeats for
emphasis with a smile, “and watch, wondering
where those trucks had been and where they
were going and which ones looked good and
which ones didn’t.
“My buddies would always want to head
on back after a few minutes and I would stay
and just watch those trucks go by.”
Business executives don’t usually talk like
that. Not too many with whom I have visited
talk about their childhood in such vivid detail
as Barr does, or tell a story about riding a
bicycle to prove a point.
It is written somewhere that a person
who can do as an adult what he dreamed
about as a child will live a satisfied life. If true,
Barr, who is approaching his 40th birthday,
is one happy guy; not completely satisfied by
any stretch, but definitely enjoying the ride.
We’re sitting in Michael’s second story
office at Transco Lines, or TLI, in Russellville,
Ark. Harold Barr, Michael’s dad, had stopped
by. He has a nicely appointed office as president of the trucking company but one that
feels a little cramped because it has no windows. I joked that most presidents of a trucking company would have an office with at
least one window.
He gets up out of his chair and walks to
a back door that opens out onto a stairway. “I
can open this door,” he says, demonstrating as
he steps out on the metal platform, “and stand
Arkansas Trucking Report, JUne 2008
COVERSTORY
Michael Barr drew on his first job experience
to lead a dramatic corporate turnaround.
out here and breathe fresh air and see what’s
going on anytime I want,” he says laughing.
To get a sense of Barr and his love for
trucking, simply listen to him and his father
talk about his obsession with trucks from
the time he was young. “I could tell the difference between a Peterbilt and a Kenworth
when I was what,” looking at his dad Harold,
“four or five years old?” “Trucks were the only
thing you wanted to talk about,” his father
responds.
The banter between Michael and his
father is natural and good natured, the father
a little shy and reserved, the son respectful,
deferring to him whenever he spoke.
The elder Barr was a little vague when I
asked what the most foolish thing his son did
growing up, a question that had Michael grinning and covering his eyes. The father waved
that one off, saying that his son did most of
“... I would just sit
there on a hill and
watch all those
trucks go by .”
the things that sons growing up do. “You
would be surprised if you asked me to leave
the room what he might say,” Michael offered.
“One thing for which I have always been
proud of him,” his father adds, “is how he has
remained focused on his goals, certainly much
better than I ever could.
His father remembers that Michael
always had a strong work ethic but one trait
he tried to instill in his son was to be flexible. Stand on principles but in dealing with
people, flexibility can be an asset he said. “You
Continues
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COVERSTORY
know, in a storm the rigid hardwoods are
usually the first to go down while a pine
tree will sway back and forth,” Harold
said. “Treat others with respect and treat
them as you would want to be treated.”
“Be willing to adjust,” Michael
added, “rather than expecting others to
always adjust to your ways.”
After visiting with Transco’s owner,
Zella Harrell (see sidebar), we climbed
into Barr’s Ford pickup for the short
drive west on I-40 to Clarksville, Barr’s
hometown and where he has put down
roots with his wife, Liz, and their three
children.
“I have only had two real jobs in
my business career,” Barr says, “well,
three really,” referring to a brief eight
month stint with a distribution company.
His success so far is due he believes to
the experience he gained at American
Freightways (AF), now FedEx Freight, in
Harrison, Arkansas.
Michael Barr’s mentor is the person
who offered him that first job – the late
Sheridan Garrison, the company’s founder. “Sheridan Garrison is my hero,” Barr
says, his voice trailing off and glancing
out his side window as we drive toward
Clarksville.
Child spy
all those things little boys do out in the
country but I saw those cowboys rounding up cattle and riding horses and those
big trailers coming in and out and I
wanted to be in the action,” he says, smiling.
“Anyway, I came up with this idea
that what I was going to do was spy on
Walt and his ranch. I asked my parents
for a pair of binoculars and I never told
[them] why. Every morning I would set
out on my mission and crawl around on
those hills and bury myself in the grass
and lay there and look at them with my
binoculars.
“For whatever reason I was just fascinated with that cattle ranch and Walt and
all those cowboys,” Barr says, shaking his
head, at the memory as we drove on past
the farm. “One day I was all set up on
the side of a hill and watching and all of
a sudden I heard some footsteps come up
behind me and it was Walt and he said,
‘Well, I finally caught you, boy. What are
you doing up here?’
“I hemmed and hawed and tried to
make up some story but of course Walt
knew exactly what I was doing. He said,
‘you know, I think if you are so interested
in what we are doing, you should just
come on over and work for me.’
“I was so excited,” he said. Barr
started out mowing lawns and wound up
working for him full time in the summers.
“I remember getting my first check
for like $7.00 and I thought that I had
made the big time,” says Barr. “I learned
a lot of things from him over the next
few years because he would let me ride
into town with him and he always met
with local politicians, met the county
judges and people around town. I loved
to hear him talk to those people.
Barr with his wife, Liz
I hit a little piece of a cattle guard and
bent the fender on the truck and I was
scared to death to tell him. He said, ‘you
know you’re going to have accidents like
that when you’re only 16 years old’ and I
said, ‘Mr. Looper, I’m only 12 years old.’”
“He once told me that there was
nothing like having a good wife, a good
dog, or a good horse and if you could
ever have all three at the same time, you
have it made.”
As we exited I-40 and took a small
state highway to the west of Clarksville,
Barr shared a story about his next door
The family
neighbor when he was growing up. “One
We arrived at Barr’s home a few
thing that I cherish is an influence that
miles outside Clarksville and were greeted
Walter Looper had on me,” said Barr. “I
by Barr’s wife, the former Elizabeth Ann
grew up next to the largest cattle ranch in
Killane. Liz was born on Long Island,
the county and he owned it.”
New York. Outgoing and always smiling,
“Walt was a character to say the
she moved with her family to Clarksville
least,” he said. “He was county sheriff
when she was 10 years old. Her thick
for several years, he knew everybody, and
Long Island accent, however,
was one of the more colorful
hung around.
characters we have ever had
“Some people around
here in Johnson County. We
here ask what country I’m
moved into a house next to
“W e decide we were going
from,” she says laughing, “and
his cattle ranch. I was in the
yet I have lived here almost
to
ha
ve
to
fix
the
company
second grade and my dad had
thirty years. It’s a small town
become superintendent of the
or give up .”
and I know just about everyschool.
one but I always get asked
“I was always interested
by somebody so I sometimes
in trucks, and trailers and
make up a story and tell them
tractors and my backyard was
I’m part of a witness relocation program
“He would ask me to drive all kinds
right there next to his farm” and Barr said
and I can’t really talk about it.”
of stuff and I used to tear up his farm
the activity on that ranch was more than
She recalls that Michael was less than
equipment and he never yelled at me one
intriguing to a kid.
enthusiastic about her accent. “When
time,” he said. “I remember one day he
“I was probably 10 or 11 years old,”
had me driving one of his farm trucks and our daughter was born we lived in Fort
Barr recalls, “I would fish and hunt and
22
Arkansas Trucking Report, June 2008
“It was magical”
After a visit out to their farm, we
returned to his home and sat at the
kitchen table. Barr turned to sharing how
his first job at American Freightways set a
foundation that continues to help him in
his role as president of Transco Lines.
“I had mentioned to my college
professors, one of whom was David
Broach,” he said, “that I had always wanted to work in the trucking industry and
he had some contacts in trucking and
lined up some interviews.”
His first interview at an Arkansas
trucking company was not pleasant. Barr
remembers that “this person gave me
every reason why I should not work in
the industry and I didn’t need to waste
my time, and I thought well, maybe,
trucking is not right for me after all.”
“The next week somebody suggested
Arkansas Freightways, which it was called
at the time, and I lined up an interview,”
said Barr. He drove to Harrison and “my
first interview was with [the late] Carl
Thomas, vice president of safety and
security.”
Barr smiles and crosses his arms for
effect and said, “Carl leaned back and
put his feet up on the desk, got a big
COVERSTORY
Wayne, Indiana, and Michael was working at AF and he used to say, ‘when I’m
gone to work during the day, try not
to talk to Mattie too much’ and he had
these old tapes of The Andy Griffith Show
and he would say ‘now just play those
tapes during the day so that she can hear
how we are supposed to talk.’”
The Barrs were married on the 4th
of July in 1992, and they have three kids,
a daughter Madison, “our cheerleader
in the family,” and twin sons Jack, “our
straight A student, reads a lot and tries
every sport at least once,” and Casey,
“always a doer who loves trucking,’ a kid
who Barr says will drive the truck and
trailer in the fields while he bales the hay.
“We don’t even have to tell him [Casey]
to mow the lawn,” Liz says.
The Barrs have purchased property
where they are raising cattle, about four
miles from their home. That’s where they
hope to eventually build on a spot that
will afford them a beautiful westward
vista of rolling hills. Liz Barr keeps the
farm running while her husband manages Transco Lines. “The farm can’t wait
till he gets home,” she explains, so she
makes the daily trips to feed and watch
the cattle.
dip of Skoal, offered me some and said,
‘so you’re from Clarksville. I know some
people over there and that’s a pretty nice
town. You know, Michael, we’re nothing
but good ol’ country boys here but we
love trucking’ and I thought ‘I belong
here!’”
Tom Doty, now president of Glory
Transportation, Inc. in Fayetteville,
Arkansas, but also at AF at the time,
interviewed Barr next. “I didn’t think it
went well,” Barr laughs. “He asked me
some of the most off the wall questions
and I didn’t catch his meaning half the
time. I remember he asked ‘what did I
see in a freight salesman?’ and I took him
literally and I said, ‘I don’t know, they
could be big, fat, old, young’ and then
it hit me what he meant and I thought
well, I have definitely failed this one.”
Barr wound up in the office of T.
J. Jones, executive vice president of AF
at the time. “He said ‘you have done
so well today that the next person who
comes through that door will be Sheridan
Garrison. Do you know who that is?’ and
I said, ‘yes sir.’ In a couple minutes, in
walked Sheridan and he shook my hand
and sat down and he said, ‘Michael, I
Continues
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Arkansas Trucking Report, JUne 2008
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COVERSTORY
believe you are exactly what we are looking for. You’re a good old farm country
boy like we are. Now, Doty sort of questions how smart you are’ and Sheridan
laughed, ‘but you have to understand,
Tom Doty is kind of up there on another
level than the rest of us here and we think
you are exactly what we want, a good
Arkansas boy raised by a good family. We
want you to work for us.”
“But, Sheridan said he had one
condition, that I had another school year
left and I had to maintain at least a 3.2
grade point average and that I was to
send him the report card when I finished.
I did not want to let him down. I hit the
books and made nothing but all “A’s” and
could not wait to send that report card to
Harrison.
He worked eight years at AF, progressing and moving along the corporate ladder before he was lured away to
join some friends who were working at
the Target Distribution Center in Little
Rock. “It is kind of complicated looking
back to explain why I left AF but I did
and there were many times after that I
thought it might have been the worst
mistake I ever made. However, it has
turned out great and I am really glad
for that.”
Barr says that he caught up with
Garrison a couple times in the late 1990s,
at meetings of the Arkansas Trucking
Association. “He seemed happy for me.
He said ‘if and when you ever want to
come back, don’t even call, just drive to
Harrison and we’ll put you to work.’”
“All the great people I worked
with and friendships and relationships I
formed at AF really defined my career.
The culture and the enthusiasm there
were so contagious. You knew you were
winning, and growing and working for a
great man. It was magical.”
Fall and rebound
Only eight months after leaving
AF, his worst fears were realized. He
had made a mistake. He quit his job at
Target’s distribution center in Little Rock;
not a difficult decision because he says
that he “belonged on the other side of the
fence, the trucking side.”
However, his young family needed to
settle down so he did what many young
men do – he headed home. Little did he
realize then he would soon be given a tremendous opportunity in which he would
rely on the experiences he gained at AF.
“Zella actually hired me in October
of 1998,” says Barr. Harrell offered him
a job at TLI in nearby Russellville, a
small trucking company with fewer than
100 trucks, and he worked in operations
where he did a little bit of everything
– soliciting freight, coordinating and dispatching loads, handling customer relations and complaints. He was essentially
starting over and he loved it.
“I had been there about a year,” he
says, “when Zella walked in one Friday
afternoon. She mentioned that she would
like to talk to me. I was in a mood to
go home but thought I must have done
something wrong but that wasn’t it. She
said that she had been watching me and
was impressed and that she wanted me to
help her run this company.
“I was a little doubtful that I could
do the job but she was persistent and in
fact, she was more confident in me than
maybe I was,” he said.
“I started out as the general manager
and I became president in 2000,” he
says. Barr recalls that the operating environment was really slipping in 1999, but
by 2000, things were tough all around,
including at Transco Lines, and more
trucking companies were closing their
Continues
Born: December 3, 1969 in Fayetteville, Arkansas
High School: Graduated from Clarksville H.S.
College: Bachelors degree in business management from
Arkansas Tech University
“I went to Arkansas State University for one semester to try
and walk on there and play football. I don’t know what ever
made me try to do that. I realized quickly that speed was
the name of the game and I wasn’t going to do well.”
Married Elizabeth Ann Killane on July 4, 1992 and they
have three children: Madison, Casey, and Jack.
Current Position: President, Transco Lines, Inc.
Business Career:
1992 – 1998
American Freightways
1998 – present Transco Lines, Inc.
Favorite Meal: “Grilled steak with fried squash and garden ripe tomatoes with a baked potato.”
First Car: 1981 Silver Mustang
Favorite Music: “I like old country like Merle Haggard and
George Jones but it is really hard to beat Johnny Cash.”
24
Arkansas Trucking Report, June 2008
COVERSTORY
doors than at anytime since deregulation. Many companies were teetering on
the edge.
“She turned the reins over to me in
the middle of these really tough times
and I called a meeting,” he says. “Gene
Carter had joined our company as our
chief financial officer and we decided that
we were going to have to fix the company
or give up.”
Restructuring the company required
a combination of operational and cultural
changes. Barr drew on his experience at
AF. He decided to try and apply some
of the same principles at Transco that he
had learned at the burgeoning LTL carrier, a risky decision.
Interregional LTL carriers are structured both operationally and culturally
much different than small long-haul dry
van trucking companies. However, Barr
believed that much of what he learned
within the AF corporate culture were
highly applicable.
“One thing that AF always stressed
was that we were not in the trucking
business, Barr explains. “We were in the
business of satisfying customers – a philosophy that I knew worked and that was
the first thing I wanted to create in the
employees here at TLI. We shifted some
corporate attitudes and that began to pay
dividends quickly.”
Barr designed a business model that
he believed could reduce irregular route
miles. He was aware that LTL carriers
occasionally contract to third party carriers in unbalanced freight lanes. Securing
purchased transportation contracts would
be no easy task but if successful, it could
give the company a secure niche. In order
to get the business though, he would
have to mold a corporate culture at TLI
that could maintain a standard of quality
that contractor customers would demand.
Barr stopped promising his customers the moon, only what the company
could realistically deliver and at a fair
price. He implemented the plan and
Transco not only survived, it thrived.
“We now have about 345 employees
here,” Barr says, proudly. He says that the
transition wasn’t always easy. He has an
experienced management team however,
and “they helped us get the job done, to
do things that needed to be improved.”
Nothing gives me more pride than to know that the outstanding award-winning
Arkansas Trucking Report is produced here in our own state by the Arkansas
Trucking Association. ATR is a quality, timely magazine that confronts the
issues and researches the topics important to me and my industry. It’s one of
the few magazines I am always sure to read thoroughly and the only one I can
recommend and support with my own name.
Gary Salisbury
President
Fikes Truck Line
For advertising information, contact
Jennifer Matthews Kidd, publisher, at 501.907.6776.
26
Arkansas Trucking Report, June 2008
Miss Zella
Zella Harrell, ‘Miss Zella’ or ‘Momma’ as some of her employees refer
to her, owns TLI and is not bashful about taking credit for making the hiring decisions, at least a few years ago. “I was looking for someone and having
known his father and Michael’s background with American Freightways I
thought he could do the job.”
Miss Zella is not active in the company these days but her story could
easily be an executive profile in her own right. She and her late husband, Jim
Harrell, started the trucking company. “He was from Camden and we met in
college. Jim was a dreamer and he taught me how to dream,” she says fondly.
“We did a lot of things that were struggles and we didn’t know some days if
we would be here the next. Things just happened.”
Jim and Zella Harrell bought a car dealership in nearby Atkins, Arkansas,
before purchasing the Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Russellville. “I was
actively engaged in every business we owned, always have been,” she says.
They also dabbled in real estate and her husband loved politics. He ran for
and won a seat in the Arkansas General Assembly, “the youngest state legislator ever elected at the time,” says Harrell proudly.
A widow for the last 15 years, Miss Zella is attractive and energetic, busy
all the time, a “workaholic” she says, but finds time to travel occasionally with
friends. Her favorite country is Italy.
The beginnings of TLI can actually be traced to an International truck
dealership the Harrells owned. They also had a small truck brokerage even
though “we discovered not long after that if you are going to move freight,
you have to have trucks,” so when they sold the truck dealership in 1986, “we
simply kept the used trucks that were on our lot and started Transco Leasing
Company and we started the trucking company.”
Miss Zella handed the management reins to Barr a few years ago. She
stays in touch but is not at the office every day. “I have a lot of faith and
confidence in him,” she says. Harrell is savvy. She knows sharp executives do
not come along every day. ““If you don’t develop a niche in trucking you can’t
make it and Michael had a vision about how to do that. Like I tell Michael,
you win a few and you lose a few. Losses are only experiences. We have always
come to agreement because we look at problems as simply opportunities and
learning experiences.”
Barr is equally complimentary. “She’s been through a whole lot of experiences in her life and a lot of times I need that voice of experience to reaffirm
what I am thinking or to change what I am thinking,” he says. “Everything I
have brought to her she is always great to always give me a similar example in
her life.”
Arkansas Trucking Report, JUne 2008
As our conversation wound down,
Barr returned to talking about Sheridan
Garrison.
“The thing I really appreciated
the most about him, other than his talent for growing a company, was his
genuine nature. He was always willing to
start with a smile and a laugh and you
just don’t meet too many people who
achieved the success he had or earned the
positions that he had who would be as
genuine as he was.”
“When I decided to leave American
Freightways I requested a meeting with
him because I felt so bad about leaving the company and was really having
second thoughts but a commitment had
been made. We met but Sheridan didn’t
want to talk to me about me leaving.
He said ‘well Michael, you do what
you need to do’ and he told me the story
about how he and his brother managed
Garrison Motor Freight and how badly he
felt when he decided to sell the company
and the regrets he had but that he had
made a commitment to sell so he did.
Of course, the Garrison brothers opened
Arkansas Freightways two years later.
Before the meeting ended, Barr says
that Garrison told him to wait a second,
that he had something for him. “He
fumbled around in his desk and said that
he only had three or so of them left after
all these years but he wanted me to have
one and he pulled out this red and white
patch like you would wear on a uniform
and it had ‘GMF’ on it, a Garrison
Motor Freight patch.”
Barr pulled his truck over to the side
of the road. He reached into the back and
grabbed his black leather satchel. Looking
inside, he pulled out the GMF patch. “I
carry it everywhere I go.”
TRADESECRETS
The patch
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