TORONTO, (Feb. 28, 2005) — Rick Gaetz is a perfect example of how nice guys can still finish first.

Gaetz — CEO of LTL giant Vitran Corp., and golden boy of Canadian trucking — was recently talking to Today’s Trucking via cellphone about his plans for 2005.

“We’re on record that we want to expand our American geography,” he says. The company that’ll get the nod will be an LTL carrier operating somewhere in the American southeast, southwest, or along the west coast. It will have to be a profitable operation, Gaetz says, and if it meets the other criteria Vitran has set out, it can become part of his amazingly successful company. His top bidding price? Depends on the company’s results, but it could be somewhere in the $40 million range, which is money raised last year through an equity offering.

Gaetz says the key to success is to perform financially. Once his company began trading successfully in the United States — which means once analysts started tracking the stock — Vitran could grow the way Gaetz really wanted it to.

When the Nova Scotia-born father of five joined burgeoning Vitran a decade and a half ago as COO, the regional LTL outfit was doing about $20 million a year. In 2003, a year after he was named CEO, revenues topped $460 million, with the lion’s share coming from the U.S. Vitran has 15 terminals in Canada and about 55 in the U.S.

In November of last year, Gaetz, who everyone agrees is first and foremost “a nice guy,” was named Canada’s top-performing CEO by National Post Business magazine, in its annual ranking of Canadian chief executive officers.

Brian Banks, who edits the magazine, says that Gaetz is a “classic reminder that big-name CEO’s aren’t necessarily better.”

After measuring stock performance against compensation as well as corporate governance, Banks says “Gaetz came in as the most underpaid CEO of the 200 on our list. By our measure, he could increase his annual salary by eight-fold and still be full value for his pay.”

To determine whether a CEO was earning his or her keep, the editors took into account three factors: the person’s salary over the past three years (the average: $3.7 million. Gaetz’s? $533K); the company’s three-year average revenue; and the company’s three-year share-price return relative to its peers in the S&P/TSX sub-index.

According to the magazine’s calculations, Rick Gaetz could have been earning upwards of $6.5 million more and still deserving of every loonie.