Maverick

From the desk of Capillya Uptergrove, Digital Media Specialist During Maverick's October Town Hall meeting, it was announced that President and COO Stephen Selig would be retiring effective January 1, 2016. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Stephen to reflect on his 32 years of service to Maverick. Tell me about your personal and professional journey before you came to work at Maverick. I grew up in a small town in Northeast Arkansas, the fifth of seven children. I graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in Business and moved to Little Rock in 1973. My first and only other job of my professional career was with a company that fabricated aluminum and steel for the manufactured housing industry. I started as a customer service representative, and within a couple of years, became a sales representative. When I married Linda in 1975, I was living the life of a traveling salesman. How did coming to work for Maverick come about? In 1981, Steve Williams moved to Little Rock, after starting Maverick a year earlier in Texarkana. We lived on the same street and were neighbors—only living three houses down from each other. We discovered we were both joggers, ran in a few 5k's and 10k's together; we had kids around the same age and we became fast friends. When Steve bought his partner out, he decided after a year he needed some help and approached me to see if I was interested in coming to work for him. Little did he know that I was actually looking for a job as my current employer wanted me to relocate, and I didn't feel that it was best for my family. (By the way, one of my options was to move to Los Angeles to the corporate office, not a good option for a country boy!) Steve's offer to work for him was promising – it was a great opportunity to get into the trucking industry on the ground floor with a startup company. Deregulation of the trucking industry occurred in 1980, so the door was wide open. It was a big decision for me, going to work in an industry I knew nothing about, but Steve was the game changer. He was the first one on our block to go to work in the morning and the last one home. He was passionate about his work, knowledgeable, ambitious, and willing to do what it took to grow Maverick. You've worn many hats throughout the years here. What are some of the roles that you've filled? When I started in 1984, I believe my title was Sales Manager. However, for the most part, I was a customer service guy looking for freight every day trying to keep our Owner Operators busy. At the same time, I was trying to add customers to enable us to grow. By the end of the year, I was making sales calls on lumber and steel companies. I later became the EVP of Sales and then added Operations in the mid '90s before becoming President in 2001. Any fun anecdotes about those sales calls? In those early years, Steve and I were making a lot of sales calls while we were growing the business. We were young, ambitious, and I admit that we probably embellished a little bit to get the business we needed. We were a team, and really good at playing off of one another. We had a lot of fun going out on the road. For us, selling is competitive. You're trying to win a customer's business. I'm a competitor, and so is Steve, so we really loved tallying up those wins. My heart has always been in sales. I love interacting with customers, learning their business, and the competitive nature of selling. What are some of the most memorable changes you've seen in the trucking industry over the years? What about here at Maverick? The very first thing that comes to mind was when Rand McNally came out with their MileMaker software, which was the first of its kind. It was amazing at the time. It was the first time you were able to query the mileage between point A and point B without having to look at a map to make the calculation.

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