Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/493405
COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 51 sound means that someone has received a good scorecard or solicited and won a load from a customer, among other successes, says Lauren Howard, vice president of customer service. The analysts are not grouped traditionally by geographic region or equipment types such as dry van, refrigerated or fl atbed. Rather, they are organized into specialized teams for freight com- modities such as food and beverage, automotive, manufacturing, home goods and retail. Each team has specialists in customer relationships, freight analysis, service, utilization and more. They frequently engage in team discussions on the fl oor and participate in weekly training meetings to learn how to drive better results. Analysts can advance from junior analysts to senior analysts, and to trainers, assistant managers, managers and directors. This is not how a customer service department in transporta- tion is supposed to work – at least not by conventional wisdom. Celadon broke this mold fi ve years ago by developing new soft- ware tools and changing job responsibilities to achieve its vision for a new culture of service. CCJ selected Celadon as its 2015 Innovator of the Year for these efforts and more. The company has improved its perfor- mance signifi cantly in key areas such as operating ratio, on- time service, utilization and more. Perhaps just as importantly, Celadon is able to recruit and retain talented young workers for trucking careers. History In 1985, Steve Russell, from Brooklyn, invested $30,000 to found a trucking company after a chance encounter at a toll booth. As a mathematician, Russell always carried exact change to travel as effi ciently as possible. This day was different; he had to stop and wait for change and spotted a former colleague in the next lane. The colleague mentioned an opportunity to transport automotive freight into the United States from Mexico. The rest, as they say, is history. Russell got the name for his company from a 1973 study by the University of California, Berkeley, which found celadon to be the prettiest-sounding word in all modern languages. It has a universal meaning. "I picked that and then looked it up in the dic- tionary," says Russell, the company's chairman. "It means ancient Chinese porcelain." Celadon grew quickly with Chrysler as its main customer, but its profi ts were lagging. From 1985 to 2001, the company had negative retained earnings. Paul Will, president and chief executive offi cer, joined Celadon in 1993 as a controller, the year before Celadon became a publicly Steve Russell founded Celadon in 1985 with $30,000. Today the East Indianapolis-based company is valued at more than $600 million.