Our Family's Trucking Roots & The Story of Knight Transportation w/ Kevin & Keith Knight #BTR18

Plain City was wonderful for us. Back then it was a town of maybe 800 people. Keith and I, both of our grandfathers were farmers to one degree or another, and we were blessed with the opportunity to always have something to do. In Plain City, you learn to work at a very young age. Even before you had a driver's license, you drove a tractor. You had to get to work. You had to do things out on those country roads that wouldn't be acceptable today.

No, no. You had to get there yourself because that's just how it was in a small farming community. But it was great. We had a somewhat normal childhood. We had two parents, a mom and a dad, and they were both from Plain City. Our grandparents were from Plain City their whole lives.

Plain City is just west of Ogden. If you're on Interstate 15 headed towards Brigham City, after you've passed Ogden, north of Salt Lake about 20-30 minutes, then west of Ogden 10-15 minutes.

Yeah, and when Keith and I were kids, I don't think I-15 was even there.

Sports and work. Sports: baseball, basketball, football, anything with a ball, anything outside. We had no video games. We didn't have color TV; we had black and white TV. Except when we did get a color TV, I remember that day, it was a special day. Sports and school. We went to Plain City Elementary, Wahlquist Junior High, and Weber High, which we had to go all the way to Ogden. It was just the way it was. Great friends, great neighbors. You knew most everybody in the town.

Our dad was 'Tarzan.' That was our dad's nickname from the Tarzan and Jane era. Supposedly he used to climb lots of trees. That's where he got that. Our grandpa, his nickname was 'Skinner.' We'll just leave it at that. Sounds like a grandfather to me. My nickname was 'Lefty' because I threw with my left hand. And they called Keith 'Thane,' after my dad's name. It was a unique name, so they were kind of ribbing him. We had other friends like Kirk Williams, who was 'Willie,' and his dad was also 'Willie.' We'll leave it at that.

I wanted to be a baseball player. That's what everybody in Plain City wanted to be: a big leaguer. But it doesn't happen for many. As I got a little older, I had a really close friend named Randy Marriott. His family got separated, and he had to go to work at a very young age just to help support the family, even while he was in elementary school. He had a big influence on me because he was so industrious. He figured out ways to make it happen. He was a very smart guy with good common sense. He was really influential for me from a business perspective. And then our dad. Our dad was always buying and selling things his entire career: construction equipment, retail goods. I wish everybody could have had the experience of buying a car with our dad. It was an all-day experience. By the time we finished, the poor sales guy was so worn down that to get rid of us, they finally made a deal. We got there when it opened, and it was probably five or six in the afternoon when the sales guy finally comes back and says, 'Okay, Mr. Knight, we've got a deal.' And my dad goes, 'Need one more thing.' Keith and I loved the car. It was a Buick Riviera. And Dad goes, 'You got to throw in an undercoating.' Because of the salt up there, it would rust. And the guy goes back, asks his general manager, and says, 'Okay, we'll throw in an undercoating.' Probably cost $10 back then. But you never bought anything that you didn't negotiate. Most people would pay whatever the sticker says. With four boys, my dad would get the stack there and then guess what? He wanted to negotiate. He wanted to get a volume discount. He enjoyed it. He lived for it. That explained so much to me watching you guys over the years. And then we had Uncle Ken. Uncle Ken was my mom's older brother. He lived in Bountiful, which was like a big city compared to Plain City. He lived up on the hill, always drove really nice cars, and was always traveling for business. He was in the insurance business, had left Plain City, gone to San Francisco, and he would come and hunt with us. He was also an influence. It was interesting to listen to his stories. But then we've got to go to our grandpa, Horus Knight. Horus was a unique individual. I don't know how else to describe our grandpa. If you think my dad was a negotiator, oh my gosh, he got it from him. He was so close to Grandpa. It was really probably Grandpa Knight that kind of started the whole business thing. Most farmers would trade their produce through an association. Not our grandpa. He pulled it out of the field, stored it, prepared it, hauled it straight to the market, and sold it. He cut out all the middlemen so he could make the most. He had a term for his best potatoes and onions: 'The show babies always go on the top.' At the produce market, you'd take your sacks of potatoes and onions, open them up, and there were the show babies, the best produce. Another thing I learned from grandpa: the Plain City Asparagus Association would take your asparagus there, and then they'd stick it in ponds and it would gain weight and get sold by the pound. Well, Grandpa Knight built his own ponds. So he would gain the weight, pull it out of the pond, and take it to Salt Lake. He was really something. A lot of people probably didn't like him, but he had so many good characteristics that sometimes people didn't see because he was a little bit tough and gruff. Our great-grandpa would say, 'Isn't it terrible to be afraid of your own son?' My dad and Randy and Gary's dad would all help Grandpa Knight. But with farm work, the only way you get through it is to have some fun. So they'd be having fun, and then they'd hear Grandpa Knight pulling up, and they'd have to act like it wasn't fun. But he was a great man. I think he cooked every evening meal because he would leave early, get up at four in the morning, get the truck loaded, drive to Salt Lake, which was probably an hour and 15-minute drive, sell the produce, come home in the afternoon, go to work, and then cook dinner. I'm sure my grandma loved it.

Keith was on his mission, and Randy had already joined the Moyes family and was part of what would become Swift. I needed a job. The Moyes family was close to the Knight family. Gary and Randy's dad Uncle Lloyd, and our dad Thane, and Carl and Vernal Moyes were best of friends. Jerry was about a decade older than us, and he and his brother Ronald were in Phoenix, and Randy was in California. They were in the trucking business. We needed a job, and they needed help. We asked for a job, and they said come to Phoenix.

When I first went to Phoenix, it was just me. I couldn't believe it. It was in August of probably '74 or '75. When I got off the airplane, there were no jetways, and it was like 110 degrees. I remember my turn came to get off the airplane, and I had never experienced heat like that in my life. I didn't think I could learn to love it, but I started working in the yard. Then they needed help checking in drivers. Back then, drivers would hand in all their paperwork, and we'd make sure it was copacetic with all the regulations. That's how I got more involved in the industry.

We ended up making an agreement to manage the fleet of Farmers Grain, a cooperative up in Ogden. They were really good at the grain business but terrible at hauling. With a co-op, you could haul your co-op product anywhere without having authority, which was important because this was back during the time of regulation. Having access to that co-op gave us the ability to haul all kinds of commodities. It was a dream come true for Jerry. Of all of us, Jerry was the best educated; he had a degree from Weber State College. He was at the front edge when it came to figuring stuff out, maybe even in ways that wouldn't be socially acceptable today, but that's how you survived back then. Randy was already here, and then Keith finished his mission and needed a job.

So now you're all here: Randy, Gary, and Corey. In the early days, we would drive to Utah all the time like it was nothing. We'd drive home several times a year.

Those were some of our owner operators: Everett Epperson, Greg Price. I wonder if any of those guys are still around. Of all those guys, Rowley Shaw was so influential on all of us. He was a guy who God created to drive. He drove a company truck and then became an owner operator. I have never seen a human being manage his time like Rowley Shaw. The hours of service were more flexible then. You could sleep for a couple hours, drive, sleep for six hours, and combine those periods for your eight-hour break. Rowley could sleep anywhere. He could fall asleep in our little dumpy office on Elwood on the couch for an hour and be good to go. He'd get his tires changed, and he could sleep in his bunk while they were working. He took advantage of every time the truck stopped. Back then, it wasn't vans; it was flatbeds. Every load he hauled needed to be tied down, which is a lot of work. To watch him chain a load or tarp it was a work of art. He didn't waste one minute. My dad asked him one time, 'Hey, Rowley, what can I do to help?' He said, 'Stay the heck out of the way because I got a system.' Rowley and my dad had one thing in common: they both could only see out of one eye. You never really knew where they were looking or who they were talking to. Rowley was the first guy that trained me when I came to Phoenix because he had been in an accident and broke his leg. He taught me a bunch of stuff about the industry, about logs, and everything. We were all very close with him.

Our culture is that our driving associates are our team members. When I was in California, we would load coils or containers on these flatbeds in the yard and then go out and help them tie down or tarp. In the early days of Knight, on the weekend, we hooked every truck. We'd have them all ready so when they came in, they were ready to go. We'd get the loads and have the trucks run through the shop on the weekend. We didn't believe in slowing those trucks down during the week. We learned that at Swift. We just said, 'You get all the trucks hooked up and ready to go. If you go to church on Sunday, you come after church. If you don't go to church on Sunday, then we expect you to leave a little earlier.'

I want to talk a little bit before that because it was so important. Of our entire group, Jerry was what I would call thrust. You were not going to slow him down. We were blessed to watch him operate. Ronald and Randy too, but Jerry was the thrust, the guy you just couldn't slow down. That was a blessing in our lives to really see how as a business person in America you could grow. We were 100% blessed just by being part of that. People would say we were an important part, but not as important as Jerry. He's an expert deal maker. A few trucking companies had gone public, and you could understand how other trucking companies operated. There was one up in Coralville, Iowa, called Heartland. Every quarter when they released their numbers, it would hit me in the heart that they were better than we were at Swift. It bugged me that they could operate so efficiently compared to us. Our vision at Swift was more about growth, with Jerry being the leader, than efficiency. Heartland was growing and extremely efficient. That was kind of in one ear and the other ear of how we were beginning to see the world. So we decided to start Knight. Randy had left Swift; he had sold his interest to Jerry a few years before. We weren't 100% certain we were going to start Knight, but as things ended up working out, we had an opportunity to do that. It was very difficult. We were closer to the Moyes family than some people can even imagine. It goes all the way back to Plain City. Plain City is the home of CR England and Sons, long before Swift and Knight. CR decided people needed produce hauled, and he wanted to be the guy to do it. His wife was Moad Knight, and one of their first employees was Carl Moyes. That's going back two generations. The Englands were close to the Moyes and Knights. This is foundational. So it was very tough, especially difficult on Jerry. It was difficult on us, on Plain City, on our parents.

We had good jobs, but I go back to the efficiency of Heartland. It nudged me because I'm very competitive. To me, trucking's like a game. Whoever has the best coach, players, and strategy is going to win. It's like watching John Wooden back in the day with UCLA basketball. That had left a burning impression on me. I really believed, in my naivety, that you could grow like Jerry and operate like Ross.

I read every sentence of anything published on Heartland, JB Hunt, Werner, MS Carriers. Every one of them. Eventually Swift went public and continued to grow. When we were starting Knight, I read every sentence. I probably knew what they were doing part of the time better than they did. We wanted to have a good trucking company. We wanted to grow and be efficient, but we had no pre-thought about being the biggest. We just wanted to be a good trucking company.

Things happen in your career. I could have stayed at Swift and found joy. I have a little insight into that question because I had gone to work with Randy Knight after he left Swift. He had signed a non-compete for five years. He was in the warehousing business doing local deliveries. I remember when he said, 'My non-compete is up. I'd love to get interstate authority.' That's where it started. He wanted to be able to haul to LA and back. That planted the seed.

A little bit, but there was a lot of hard work. We had already started to be big at Swift. When we left, Swift was probably a thousand trucks. You've got to understand that when we started in the trucking business, if you had a hundred trucks, you were massive, and you couldn't manage much more than 200 because we had no systems, no technology. Everything was by hand. Drivers would have to call you and tell you where they were. It was archaic. But when we left Swift, we were of size. So let's forget about the pressure of making payments, making payroll, and defending yourself through a difficult period. If you separate all that, it was the best time in our life. We were back on the ground floor. We were working with our drivers, ordering trucks and trailers, getting loads. Some customers said, 'You don't even have trucks yet. Why are you here calling on me?' We said, 'They're coming. You just gotta trust us.' We put a business plan together that needed $10 million. Back then, that was a monumental achievement to get $10 million. But we knew the business. I thought we would be extremely efficient, but I didn't know until we got our first financial statement. When we got our financial statement in August of 1990, which was our first full month, I knew we nailed it. But I did orientation every week for the drivers. My goal was to prepare our drivers to be the very best they could be. We talked about when you're leaving, what you're going to do when you get into LA. You can't not be safe because that's the one thing that will really hurt us. So we followed the Rowley Shaw philosophy of being productive. It was so fun. We had team members. You, Corey, had been in the warehousing business, not trucking. We had all these great people: our brother Larry, Mitch, Carl, and Dad. A couple of people from Swift came: Joel Marshall, Linda Daniels helping hire drivers. Dad and I set up our shop. Keith was over here, and Randy and I were trying to get loads. It was spectacular. We worked together unbelievably well.

We do a really good job of making sure that our egos get checked at the door. I would be the one most susceptible to not doing that. Gary and Keith are extremely humble people. But I kept it in check for the most part.

You need somebody like that. I knew the best way I could serve. Gary, Randy, and others throughout the organization helped balance things out and were mentors to me. It just seemed to work.

We appreciate our drivers. They don't get told 'thanks' very often, especially back then. Anytime you could say thanks, you wanted to do that.

In the early days in Phoenix, when we had 40 or 50 trucks, you'd see as many drivers walking through our office as employees. They were our team. We were so hands-on. It was just the best. We started this at Swift, with lots of terminals. We always want it to feel that way for our driving associates. If you're in Indy, you're part of a team. We want all our employees to feel at home. People have asked me when I was CEO, 'How do you run a company with that many trucks?' I don't know, but I can tell you how to run a company with 100 or 150 trucks. If you have enough of those, you end up with a large company. We've always encouraged our service centers to treat a truck from another service center and its driver better than you do your own. It probably doesn't get executed to perfection, but I hope our people understand that's our secret sauce: small teams that feel like a family.

Our drivers are away from home. They shower at truck stops, sleep in their sleepers. Their family activities keep the whole system going. It wouldn't take long for the shelves to be empty. What we do is so important. It pains me when people take that for granted. The supply chain is disrupted now, making the news. If all the people that rely on the supply chain would just have a meeting and say, 'We need this to be more fluent,' it could be solved in one hour. Just say, 'When a truck pulls in, get them loaded or unloaded and get them back on the road.' That's how they make money. The problem would be solved tomorrow. We've continued to carry that message when we talk to everyone we do business with. Our driving associates can drive more, but there are efficiencies that you guys need to address. You need to value our driver's time. The port of LA and Long Beach have never been efficient, and it's probably gotten less efficient. If people would value the time of those trucks, we wouldn't have this issue. I love the president trying to help by telling the port to stay open 24 hours. We're around the clock. Truckers work around the clock. We deliver over two or three thousand stops to a grocery store every single day. Those orders were loaded at 10 o'clock last night. We run around the clock. Now it would be nice if somebody else would. Generators want everything out, then they take a break. But the drivers are running through the holidays. There's never been a bigger backlog of ships waiting to be unloaded. There are lots of goods that can still come through if we could figure it out. We've got drivers waiting for them. When you think of an IndyCar race, the car pulls into the pit and is gone in six or seven seconds. Wouldn't it be nice if our trucks had that same energy? If we had that culture everywhere in the supply chain, there probably wouldn't be a hundred ships waiting to be unloaded.

The computer. Deregulation. Electronic logs. In-cab communication. The ability to scan paperwork. Lots of things driven by technology. It hasn't made things better, trust me. Some has, but the systems we run our business on, email — I'm still trying to figure out if that's a time sucker. Electronic logs is huge. A lot of driving associates probably weren't excited at first, but now we have a record. We know what our driving associates' time is worth, and how much of it is being used efficiently. Electric vehicles and autonomy are at the forefront, but it will not replace our drivers. It's not going to replace the importance of what we do with our drivers. Their job might change a little bit, but it's interesting to me that some people just go all in on technology unconsciously. The perfect balance is technology with the brains and common sense of human beings. The greatest thing is just the capabilities of the people we get to work with every day.

Forever. I'll stand on that statement till I die.

I said we check our ego at the door, so it's hard to be overly proud. Maybe satisfying moments. I'm going to throw one out that people won't think about. The Knight family and our long-term employees have done an amazing job of developing our next generation. It's a hard thing to do when you put your entire life into a business. You look at your wife, your children, and your grandchildren and say they're number one, but your mind is always thinking about the business. It's hard to separate. We have intentionally, over the last 10 years, said, 'It isn't about us. It's about keeping this thing going because so many people rely on it: our customers, our employees, our shareholders.' We have painstakingly prepared our next generation. You can look at businesses that reach the cycle where we are, and if you don't do that well, it's hard. Keith, as an example, hasn't had anybody report to him for how many years? We need that next generation. I'm the youngest of the group at 65. That's the thing I'm most proud of: we really haven't missed a beat. Things are different, and I would do some things a little different, but at the end of the day, the company is sound, solid, productive, growing, and efficient.

Kevin's more visionary. Part of that satisfying moment was coming full circle, having spent many years at Swift learning lessons, and then the opportunity to merge. I am so grateful for Swift. When we merged, Swift was in a position where we had some really good opportunities to make it better, but the bones were good. I remember telling our people at Swift not to let the noise in that Swift was going to be the next Knight. We wanted to be the best version of Swift. Knight is a special company. Swift is a special company. We are so grateful for Knight because a lot of good folks came with us to intermesh with all the good Swift folks. Jerry and team had amassed a massive amount of freight and people, and we were able to merge and help Swift become the best it can be. As a result, we have very powerful brands: Swift, Knight, Bar None, Abilene, and now AAA Cooper, and some other brands behind the scenes. We can do so many things for our customers: dry van, full truckload, refrigerated, dedicated, flatbed, an outstanding Mexico franchise and trans-Mex, an outstanding intermodal franchise, and an LTL franchise in AAA Cooper. Bar None and Abilene are amazing. Knight and Swift go without saying. With that and a culture of working together, we can do so many things for our customers. And our logistics business, with third-party carriers through our IRON services, is outstanding. The future is outstanding. I truly believe any of our employees or independent contractors can be successful and achieve anything they want. The sky's the limit. We're financially strong. It's a necessary business. Over time they'll reward us. We'll incorporate electric vehicles as it makes sense, and use parts of autonomy that help our drivers do their job better. The way all those businesses work together is unbelievable. Our logistics people are understanding how to think like a trucker, and we truckers are understanding how to think like a logistician. We have a very experienced next generation that leads us. Nobody reports to me anymore. It's wonderful to spend time with the grandkids.

I would add to what Keith said. I want all of our driving associates and other employees to know that there are really two things you do in our organization. You're either out there delivering the freight, or you're working in our organization to make sure we can assist in that effort. The reason the rest of our jobs exist is to keep all those trucks and driving associates running and moving safely. That's why we come to work. Don't ever lose sight of that purpose. We can get off track with all the stuff at our desk, but we have to remember the reason the rest of us come here is to support our frontline folks. I want to re-emphasize the gratitude and love for our people.