Celebrating 75 Years
No business survives, let alone prospers for 75 years, without successfully riding the winds of change. But it’s something that Gaston-based G&P Trucking, founded during the depths of the Great Depression, has done with a style and vision that’s truly worthy of a diamond anniversary.
When it was started by H.P. Mabry and Arthur Rush in Greenwood in 1936, the original business plan was to haul cotton from the Charleston area to the Grendal and Panola Mills (hence the “G” and “P” in the firm’s name, the first initials of the mill owner’s two daughters).
Today, that company boasts four divisions, 524 trucks and more than $100 million in annual revenue. Its current strategic plan calls for growing that revenue to $250 million by 2016.
Just how has the company weathered all the changes that have occurred in the South Carolina and U.S. economy in the intervening years?
“Well, you know, my first answer to that would be: through answered prayers,” says Clifton Parker, president and general manager of the trucking firm for which he’s worked for 25 years.
By the time he was brought into the fold, Parker had several years in trucking under his belt, having gotten into the business while still in high school. In fact, his father drove trucks for 44 years.
“At the time, I wasn’t sure this was the path my life would follow,” he admits.
“If you’d asked me what I planned to do when I was young, I’d have probably said, ‘Anything but trucking,’” he laughs.
But his thinking began to change by the mid-1980s.
Already in its fiftieth year at the time, G&P Trucking was also in the midst of a significant transition. By then, Michelin had supplanted textile factories as its largest customer, but the tire company was mulling changes of its own. In 1987, it decided to bring its transportation functions in-house, and about 50 percent of G&P’s business went away over night.
“Fortunately, Celanese, the textile firm, had a big plant in Rock Hill (the Celriver Acetate Plant), and we were able to shift the bulk of our assets, almost overnight, back into the textile industry,” Parker says.
“We rode that horse until the mid-1990s, when the speed at which the textile industry moved offshore increased dramatically,” he adds.
The stability that reigned within the company ever since came as a direct result of its deciding to diversify its portfolio.
Effectively cutting itself into four interrelated pieces, G&P Trucking now has a substitute carrier group — essentially a green initiative through which it serves as the sales arm for a network of smaller trucking firms. Last year, that division alone did $10 million worth of business.
The second significant piece of G&P’s business is the intermodal drayage service it provides to the ports of Charleston, Savannah and Norfolk, Virginia. The service, which is strictly concerned with moving containers for either import or export, currently brings in about $20 million a year.
The company’s core business is its domestic, irregular route, dry van business — a part of the company anchored by 53-foot trailer trucks.
Finally, the fourth segment is its “dedicated” business, through which customers contract to use a portion of its fleet of trucks, trailers and drivers for a specified period.
“Basically, survival for any business comes down to strategic planning,” Parker says. “During my time here, we’ve always looked at potential threats to our business.
“For instance, it could be that we get a sense that an industry we serve is no longer going to be here — and we have to decide how we’re going to deal with that; other threats might arise simply from changes within our client’s business,” he explains.
Parker points out that as a result of such planning, G&P decided several years ago that it needed to have a bigger presence in the food and beverage industry, which he describes as a huge segment of the truck-load world and one that’s always been somewhat impervious to dramatic upheavals in the economy.
“People still have to eat and people still need to drink at such times,” he says.
“So you just go through that analysis during your strategic planning and set your direction and set your sales and marketing efforts toward that segment and get after it,” Parker adds.
Driver Shortage
Of course, anyone familiar with the trucking industry knows that concerns about the business extend far beyond clients and market served. Many believe the sector’s biggest challenge is overcoming a perceived shortage in the number of qualified — or willing — truck drivers.
Parker takes a different view.
“I would tell you we really don’t have a truck driver shortage, we have a truck driving job problem,” he says. “We need, as an industry, to work on improving the truck driving job.
“I hear it said all the time by truck drivers, and even people in manufacturing and construction, that if we could get them home, or give them a predictable schedule where they could spend time with their families, then trucking would be something they’d desire to do,” he adds.
According to Parker, the “job problem” is a byproduct of industry deregulation during the 1980s. With it, trucking became a pursuit that required drivers to spend days or weeks on the road at a time, and tremendous amounts of time away from their homes and families.
“Going forward, we have to work to improve these job conditions,” he says.
But, he quickly adds, that won’t be easy.
Over the course of the past few years, he says, more regulations governing the trucking industry have been imposed than during any period he can remember in his total 33 years in the industry.
“In a sense, we have to deal with the job situation that I’ve described at the same time that our industry is being hit with a huge tsunami,” Parker explains.
“Now, thankfully, I’ve never been in a tsunami, but from what I understand, before they strike there’s this huge retraction, where the ocean is sucked back from the shoreline, and then all of a sudden you have a 50-foot wave coming back at you,” he says. “In our industry, the retraction was the Great Recession of 2008, the dramatic collapse in freight volumes that resulted from it, and a dramatic increase in regulations that brought huge changes to our industry.
“Now the economy is rebounding and we’re seeing huge capacity constraint problems and large rate increases for shippers — that’s the tsunami coming ashore, and doesn’t just make things difficult for our industry, it creates inflationary pressures as well,” Parker says.
And then, of course, the other thing that’s killing us right now is the cost of fuel,” he adds.
The Importance of Ports
There may, however, be a silver lining on the horizon — the 2014 opening of widened locks along the Panama Canal. Over the past several years, ports all long the Gulf and East Coasts of the United States have been expanding terminals and improving road and rail connections in an effort to lure the huge, new generation of cargo ships that will soon be able to call on them directly from Asia — previously something that was only possible on the U.S. West Coast.
According to Parker, G&P’s presence in several port communities bodes very well for the trucking firm’s future, pointing out that at least one port it already serves — Norfolk — can already handle the large, Post-Panamax ships.
“But geographically, the rule of thumb is that 80 percent of a port’s business is within 350 miles of its berths. That’s why the Port of Charleston absolutely needs to get the harbor deepening project done, so that we can directly benefit from the Panama Canal widening here in South Carolina,” he says.
“I mean, we have an absolutely, geographically wonderful port location, with direct or fast access to the Interstate 26 and 77 corridor, Interstate 95, and Interstates 40 and 85 as well,” he continues. “As a result, you can serve anywhere east of the Mississippi River within 24 hours with a team operation from Charleston.”
As a result, Parker says, Charleston is a perfect place for an importer or exporter to want to do business.
“We’ve just got to get through the red tape and get the funding we need, so that those containers and that work can come to our state,” he says.
But that’s not to say things are stagnant in the South Carolina port drayage market. A weak U.S. dollar has led to an increase in exports from the U.S., something that’s made for a “huge improvement” in the total number of containers passing through Charleston and heading out on the state’s highways.
“Going forward, with the addition of the widened Panama Canal to the mix, I think we might see a total change in the way the supply chain is handled, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the railroads adapt to the larger ships calling on the East Coast,” he says.
“Today, you have a lot of ships coming into the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the cargo being put on trains bound for Memphis, and then either continuing on by rail to Atlanta or Charlotte, or being put on trucks to go to those or other locations. So it’s really going to be interesting to see how the supply chain design adapts to the Post-Panamax to the East Coast and how many Midwest-based shippers will benefit because of lower logistics prices.”
One of the most important changes over the past 25 years has been the significant investment in technology that has kept G&P Trucking at the forefront of the transportation industry and made it a regional leader in the shipping business.
The management team embraced new technology as it was introduced, employing real-time, satellite-based communications which allows customers to stay in touch with their freight from their desktop. Back in the 1960s, manual typewriters were used to crank out individual freight bills, which then had to be forwarded to the company’s former corporate offices in Greenwood.
Today, the latest computers do virtually all of the clerical functions in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take, with greatly increased efficiency and significantly reduced paperwork.
“I guess the best way to describe our operation is to say that it’s the brains of the organization,” Parker says. “It allows us to have real-time satellite tracking of our trucks and to always know where our assets are.
“It’s also greatly enhanced our ability to have visibility throughout our North American operations, allowing us to place a major emphasis on shipping to and from Mexico,” he says.
“We’re also taking advantage of advances in artificial intelligence, which is helping us optimize our efficiency and productivity in real time,” he adds.
The software has also helped the company to meet goals not even imagined 75 years ago — goals related to “green” business practices and doing business in a sustainable, Earth-friendly fashion.
With its satellite tracking software, G&P not only knows where its trucks are but when they’ve varied from the most direct route to their destination.
“That’s really invaluable,” Parker says. “After all, when a driver varies from the most direct route, they are not only being less productive and less efficient, they’re also using a lot more fuel.”
A Green Future
But tracking its trucks isn’t the only way G&P Trucking is being green in its 75th year.
The company recently bought 30 new trucks to bolster its fleet with vehicles that meet the latest emissions standards promulgated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and it has also taken several steps to reduce its overall fuel consumption.
These measures include imposing a maximum, 65-mile-per-hour speed limit for drivers and conversion from double tires to “super single” tires that greatly reduce the rolling resistance of the tires on the road and greatly enhance each truck’s fuel efficiency.
“We’re also doing some fuel hedging, and we’re also using software and contracts to try to ensure that we match loads — in other words, making sure we leave our facilities full of goods and make the return trip with an equally full load,” Parker says.
“We’ve also started multimodal operations, so that if we find a delivery will put our system out of balance and it would be better for it to go by rail at some point, we can get it on a train,” he adds.
Parker admits that much of the impetus for these initiatives has been driven by customers, including the Lowe’s home improvement chain, which is currently one of G&P Trucking’s largest customers and which has adopted a corporate policy to be more environmentally pro-active.
“So there is some suggestion from our customers that we do the right thing, but at same time, of course, I have a daughter and hopefully someday I’ll have grandkids and I want them to have clean air and clean water like I had,” Parker says.
Corporate Citizenship
G&P Trucking’s good corporate citizenship also manifests itself in other ways.
Presently the company is actively involved in helping a competitor get back on its feet after being devastated by the April tornados in Alabama.
The company is also actively participating in Wreaths across America, which transports wreaths to cemeteries across the country to honor fallen servicemen and women.
“We got involved [with Wreaths across America] after a friend who runs a trucking company in Maine asked if I could haul a load of wreaths he was responsible for here to South Carolina,” Parker says.
“We donated a truck and a driver, and I must say it was an amazing experience,” he continues. “You know, when you get involved with something like this, you know that you are doing something good and something that has meaning, but I was really overwhelmed by the response of my driver, a Viet Nam vet, when I accompanied him to the Fort Jackson National Cemetery. It was really quite moving and I’m thankful that we could be involved.”
G&P Trucking also routinely volunteers its trucks to deliver goods to food banks.
“Our owners deeply believe in community services, and we try to reflect that, operationally, in every way that we can,” Parker says. “I know it sounds corny, but it’s a way for us to give back to the community that allows us to come to work every day.”
Growing reflective, he adds that “way too much publicity is negative in our industry.”
“You see one bad apple, and it paints the whole industry with a broad, bad brush,” says, “But, you know, we’re just everyday people living in the same neighborhoods with everybody else.”
In fact, if there’s ultimately a secret to G&P Trucking’s 75 years of success, it likely has something to do with this overriding sense of neighborliness, a sense of serving people rather than corporations.
“That really is what this business is about, and it’s why I hope I can be here another 25 years,” Parker says. “This business is a people business. You’re dealing with customers, you’re dealing with vendors, and you’re dealing with employees, and I really enjoy working with people.”
In fact, Parker has even gone so far as partnering with Raleigh-based Corporate Chaplains of America, so that he can minister to those he comes in contact with that have bigger worries or issues than typical, word-a-day concerns.
“Corporate Chaplains, in their literature, talk about the fact that 68 percent to 70 percent of employees are unchurched, and we feel like not only are we in the business to haul freight, we’re also in the business of changing lives,” he says.