ATLANTA — Tim Haitz will never forget March 1, 1993.
Haitz was working at Roadway Express on the day when the carrier and now-bankrupt Yellow Corp. combined their tech stacks — and immediately lost track of 200,000 shipments across both networks.
“We flipped the switch. Literally, the lights went out,” Haitz, now Standard Forwarding Freight’s chief commercial officer, recalled Monday at SMC3 Jump Start 2025.
Mergers and acquisitions offer plenty of challenges for LTL carriers, but the incident laid bare the most critical one, even 30-plus years ago: “By far, it’s technology,” Haitz said.
Culture is the other key factor in the success of M&A, especially in LTL, said Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings CFO Andrew Hess and AAA Cooper Transportation CEO Charlie Prickett. They joined Haitz on a panel moderated by Journal of Commerce Senior Editor Bill Cassidy at the conference.
Tech and culture have been priorities in Knight-Swift’s ongoing development of a national LTL network, Hess and Prickett said. The nation’s largest truckload carrier acquired AAA Cooper and Midwest Motor Express in 2021 and added Dependable Highway Express to its holdings last year.
Knight-Swift decided not to rebrand each acquired LTL carrier, out of respect for their separate histories, cultures and customer relationships. But it has been investing in those cultures, as well as rolling out AAA Cooper’s technology to bring the separate carriers onto the same technology network.
“It is about people, and it's about making available to them mentors and experts,” Prickett said. “The greatest value is once you turn that creativity on and that commitment on. It’s phenomenal.”
Culture is often the chief concern of company owners weighing acquisition offers. The DHE deal took two years of conversations with Knight-Swift and AAA Cooper leaders, Hess said, culminating in a three-month integration process.
“Fundamentally, to be successful, you have to have a strong relationship,” he said.
The LTL sector’s durability and stability compared to the more cyclical nature of the truckload market underpin LTL carriers’ higher valuations than their TL counterparts, Hess said.
“Our obvious gap in our network is the Northeast, and we're optimistic about our path to build into the Northeast,” the Knight-Swift CFO said. “That could be inorganic through another acquisition, it could be organic, or it could be a mix of both.”
