Each year, we publish our ranking of the 100 largest for-hire truck fleets in Canada. People get a kick out of seeing where the big guys stand, but let’s put things in perspective: roughly 75% of Today’s Trucking subscribers are ambitious operators of fewer than 25 trucks. We’re read by owners, fleet managers, shop supervisors, financial officers, and sales directors, but frequently, these are jobs held by the same guy.

Bud McCaig remembers what that’s like. In 1940, when most 10-year-old boys in Moose Jaw, Sask., were riding horses and bikes around the town’s dusty streets, McCaig was sneaking rides with drivers for his father’s small tank-truck company. At 15, he had convinced the local police chief to let him apply for a driver’s licence a year before the law allowed. And by 18, he owned three trucks and leased them to the family business, Maccam Transport Ltd. The arrangement lasted until the elder McCaig looked out the window one morning and saw company trucks sitting in the yard while Bud’s were out on runs. Turns out Bud was working the dispatch desk.

The pair struck a deal: Bud traded the trucks for a 20% stake in Maccam and went to work full-time for his father.

By 1960, the company had a new name-Trimac Corp.-and had engineered an acquisition that more than doubled its size. Over the next 25 years, McCaig’s just-do-it style of running and building a business propelled the family enterprise into one of North America’s largest industrial transportation companies. Much of its growth has come by way of gobbling up other businesses: before McCaig retired as Trimac’s CEO in 1994, giving way to his son, Jeff, he was involved with more than two dozen acquisitions involving transportation, oilfield services, and waste management companies.

Trimac still specializes in bulk haulage, and, McCaig says, it continues to build on a heritage of safety and service established by his father nearly 60 years ago. During an interview last month, editor Stephen Petit talked with McCaig not so much about the growth and success of Trimac, but about the growth and success of Bud McCaig as a corporate leader. As we suspected, the two are very much tied together.

Q: Having been involved with so many different deals, what can you tell us about how to successfully bring together people from different companies (more to the point, from different corporate cultures)?

McCaig: Many factors have to come together to make a company an attractive fit: its position in the marketplace, its financial position, a key customer or group of customers, capacity issues. But it’s important to recognize that, as you’re analyzing the operational and financial issues involved, you’re also bringing human beings into your organization. These may be people who have been able to really flourish and succeed in a corporate environment that’s very different from your own. The way you’re able to manage these cultures coming together will determine whether a deal truly works in the long run.

Q: What approach can an owner or manager take?

McCaig: One philosophy is to look at acquiring companies that very much mirror your own. My dad believed that was the right path, and it’s one we for the most part have followed to this day. We have folded some very large organizations into Trimac-Ryder Bulk Transportation Services in the United States and CP Bulk Transport, the old Canadian Pacific subsidiary, are two. In the middle of January, we completed our acquisition of DSI Transports Inc., which is a $150-million US a year chemical hauler in the southeastern United States. It has 1600 employees. The existing terminal networks at DSI and Trimac complement one another. A fine management team is in place. There is an interline agreement with a Mexican carrier. It’s a beautiful fit, right down to the corporate culture.

Contrast that with a purchase we made two weeks later: we bought V. A. Ross Trucking Ltd., a woodchip hauler based in Boiestown, N.B. It has 18 trucks and turns about $3.7 million in annual revenue. But that deal works, too, because it strengthens Trimac in both the forestry products industry and the Maritimes, two markets that are important. And it’s more in keeping with our tendency to look for reputable, medium-sized, family-run businesses to acquire.

Q: How can you say that? Trimac is a big, public company, not a medium-sized, family-run trucking operation.

McCaig: That’s true. But I’d like to think that our corporate values are still very much rooted in the same sort of ethic you’d find at a smaller family business. Let me give you two examples.

First, we encourage families to be involved at Trimac, and if you look throughout our ranks, we have employees who are the second or even third generation of their family to be contributing to the success and growth of the company. A lot of companies don’t hire relatives. We promote it. When an employee’s son or daughter wants to be part of your company, it’s gratifying to see, because our goal right back to when my father ran the company was to make Trimac a good place to work.

Second, we were talking earlier about how to best manage the coming together of company cultures. One sure way to alienate people is to swagger in and impose your procedures and policies on the company you’re acquiring. When we purchase a company, we have a formal process of looking at how that business works on a day-to-day basis. What it amounts to is a best-practices examination that cuts across the entire organization, from maintenance to dispatch to accounting to information systems. We convene a group of people from our company and from the new company, and it evaluates which procedures are best.

Everyone gets his hands dirty. Everyone learns something. A dialog begins. People get to know one another and start to work together. We try to make it a very positive, collaborative process. And we run through the same basic exercise regardless of the size or scope of the company we’re acquiring.

Q: There are things your company can learn from a 25-truck bulk hauler? I think there would be a perception that a big company would just come in and issue an edict: “This is how it’s going to be.”

McCaig: I can honestly say that we have learned something from every company that we have been fortunate to acquire, no matter how small that company. You can always learn something unique and innovative that an operation may be doing. As you expand and grow-and diversify-this collection of best practices grows, too.

Let’s take it a step further. Sometimes the result of the evaluation is not to say that one company’s procedure is best and should be imposed upon the other, but that there is a better way than either company has determined so far.

Q: One reason there have been so many family businesses for Trimac to buy up is that owners see a sale as their exit strategy if there’s no one who’s enthusiastic about inheriting the business.

McCaig: You’re right. One of the things about the trucking business is that there is a great entrepreneurial tradition and spirit. A guy like my dad 70 years ago in Saskatchewan sees an opportunity, gets himself a truck, and soon finds that he needs another. And another. Now he’s beginning to build a company, and with a lot of energy and good decisions and good luck, that company brings him prosperity. But when there is no family member who is critically interested in continuing the business, he has to look at selling the company if it is to grow.

Q: The rank and file feels that void probably more acutely than anyone. When a leader leaves, how do you fill that vacuum? Do you parachute in a team of managers you trust, or is it better to develop new leaders from within the company you’ve acquired?

McCaig: It depends on where the void is felt in the organization. In the trucking business, the managers who set the example and tone for the so-called rank and file are the guys who are in charge of the branch or terminal. These branches are self-contained units-where a driver arrives at a terminal and picks up his truck and load, makes his delivery, and then returns at night.

At a small company, the guy at the branch level might be the owner who’s on his way out the door. But in most cases, you’d like to think there are people at the acquired company who can continue to manage each branch after you’ve taken over.

As a senior manager, it’s your job to ensure that each branch manager clearly understands your corporate principles and objectives, and that each branch is receiving the support it needs to function efficiently during the transition into, in our case, a Trimac company.

Q: What kind of support are you talking about?

McCaig: For us, usually that means bringing in four types of people. One would be a financial manager who can integrate the company’s accounting systems with ours and ensure that we have good financial controls in place. We also like to bring in our own safety people. We want to make sure that operational, maintenance, and training programs comply with our own corporate safety programs. Third, we’ll bring in an information technology team that can go in and make sure we can collect, share, and manage data from dispatch, billing, and other administrative functions. Fourth, there would be a senior marketing person coming in from time to time, talking to the branch managers about their opportunities and giving them guidance.

In terms of basic management skills the branch managers might need, we would hope that we could provide some training.

Q: When I ask leaders at growing trucking companies about difficult transitions they’ve made, often they talk about their struggle to become good managers. How did you make that transition?

McCaig: So many people in this business start out behind the wheel of a truck. I did. My father did. From the seat of a truck, you gain experiences and insights that will color decisions you make about your trucking operation and about your life, really, for the rest of your career. You develop a healthy respect for what hard work driving a truck can be. You understand the level of diligence necessary to keep a truck operating safely. You come to appreciate your responsibility to the people you share the highways and environment with. And you see the value of face-to-face contact with your customer. The fact is, the principles that guide Trimac to this day originated from what we learned during our time behind the wheel: an emphasis on safety and customer service.

But as we’re seeing today, at a time of high diesel prices and greater regulatory scrutiny, it’s vital to have financial controls in place. The margins are too thin to allow room for error.

Sometimes you need outside help. Until the early 1980s, the senior management at Trimac was comprised of very capable, very qualified career trucking company executives. In 1984, Andrew Zalesky was named president of Trimac Transportation Services not because he had an extensive background in trucking-he didn’t-but because the North American economy was in recession and we needed someone with the management expertise and focus to guide us through it.

For a while we did actually hire at the business schools, and that program worked reasonably well. But over time, we’ve found that there is still something very valuable about having managers who have experienced as many facets of the trucking operation as possible.

Q: What did you learn from your father?

McCaig: The main thing was the emphasis on safety and on creating a very good place to work. He also had a saying I liked: If you can’t make money at a particular service, then you should go fishing. We’re in business to make a profit. We can talk about managing growth and change all day, but if you’re giving away money on every run, you’re bleeding the value out of the company you’ve worked so hard to make succeed. That’s a lesson I can assure you is on the minds of every manager here. And it should be on the minds of anyone operating a truck these days.