Bob Heniff isn’t out to build the biggest bulk transportation company on the continent.
Rather, his goal is to be the industry’s best organization—with an exhaustive array of solutions, the greatest ability to assist partners and employees, and the firmest commitment to safe, consistent bulk services.
But at this point, Heniff Transportation Systems is well on its way to meeting both measures.
The business Heniff started in 1998—instead of going to graduate school—with four owner-operators and five leased trailers, now boasts nearly 2,000 trucks and 5,000-plus trailers, with growth both organic and through nine strategic trucking acquisitions. The 2018 purchase of Miller Transporters doubled Heniff’s size, and the 2019 addition of Superior Bulk Logistics, which included Superior Carriers and Carry Transit, doubled it again.
The Heniff family of companies now includes more than 100 properties—and generates $600 million in annual revenues.
“I knew Bob had a vision, and we could go places, and continue to grow, and we were growing at a pretty good clip prior to acquiring Miller and Superior,” said Heniff president Scott Templeman, who joined Heniff in 2002, one year after Heniff’s first acquisition. “Did I imagine we’d be this big 19 years later? Maybe not. But knowing that Bob is aggressive and really wants to grow, I can’t say I’m surprised.”
Most of Heniff’s acquisitions have come within the last seven years, with the largest aided by private equity. And the goal with each one—including those yet to come—is to further develop a premier liquid and dry bulk services provider, in terms of the group’s combined capabilities, footprint, and technological savvy.
“Bob certainly had exposure to trucking (through his dad and grandfather), but to run it out of your apartment in Chicago, and build it from four trucks to where we’re at today, is an incredible feat over the course of 20 years,” said Jeff O’Connor, who joined Heniff in 2017 after previously serving as president and CEO of A&R Logistics (now Quantix).
“It truly is amazing.”
Service at scale
Heniff, 49, who grew up on the south side of Chicago, started a chemical-hauling operation after his father sold Apolis Transport, a bulk hauler based in Peotone, Ill., where Heniff worked full-time for five years and developed his passion for tank truck transportation. After three years honing his reputation with chemical producers, Heniff made his first purchase in 2001, buying the assets of Alsip, Ill.-based Frank J. Sibr & Sons—a former rival of Connerty & Heniff, his grandfather’s trucking company—out of bankruptcy.
That transaction grew Heniff’s fleet to about 45 trucks, and netted its first wash rack.
“The customers Bob inherited from the Sibr acquisition put him on the map with big shippers, like Exxon, Huntsman, and Eastman, and he kept that business humming,” Templeman said. “But with that, we knew eventually we needed to grow beyond the Chicago area. And then in 2005, we lost out on a bid where we were doing a majority of their work, but the customer decided we were a one-market carrier, and they needed multi-market access.
“It didn’t quite make sense to us. We were providing exceptional service for them in Chicago, but we realized then, maybe a little sooner than we would have otherwise, that we needed to grow into other markets.”
Their first move later that year was to establish a terminal in the Houston, Texas area, a hotbed for chemical manufacturers and shippers. From there, Heniff continued to grow organically into Kingsport, Tenn., through an opportunity with Eastman, and into Louisiana, giving the company multiple Gulf Coast terminals. But those additions only whet Heniff’s appetite for scaling up, and creating a nationwide terminal system.
Between 2014 and 2016, Heniff added four more transportation companies to its growing operation: Sinclair Cartage Inc., in Hinsdale, Ill.; Dean Brennan Transport in Manitowoc, Wis.; Horizon Tank Lines in Wilmington, N.C.; and EZ Alternative Transport in Nederland, Texas. Along the way, Heniff’s leaders developed a playbook for evaluating potential pick-ups, which no longer included saving businesses that were struggling.
“Safety and service sell in our world,” Heniff said. “So we never look for turn-arounds, and we focus on the safety component. If there are problems with safety we’ve identified, we want to make sure they’re easy fixes that can be remedied quickly. And if there’s a systemic issue with following DOT rules, we won’t touch it.”
By 2017, Heniff was running nearly 500 trucks—and looking to expand exponentially. So the company turned to private-equity funding, selecting Brown Brothers Harriman Capital Partners out of New York as its first institutional investor. “At the time, we’d done four acquisitions in quick succession, and learned how compelling the case was for acquisitional growth,” Heniff said. “We saw how quickly we could move the needle forward, and expand the services we provide to customers, by combining companies and gaining efficiencies of scale.
“But I also realized at that point there were certain limitations for what you can and can’t do on your own. I knew my team was more than capable of handling substantially bigger acquisitions, but we didn’t have the means to do it capital-wise.”
With BBH’s backing, Heniff purchased Miller Transporters and its affiliates in August 2018, and immediately doubled in size. But the next acquisition required an larger investment, so Heniff recruited Olympus Partners for the purchase of Superior and its Carry foodgrade business in December 2019—again doubling the operation’s size and scope.
The addition of Premier Bulk Systems in Gormley, Ontario, Canada, followed in February, and the company’s most recent pickup was Blaire, Neb.-based Jasa Transit, which was acquired through Carry six months ago.
The Heniff family of companies now extends into all major chemical and most key food-product markets, including West Coast terminals in California and Oregon; two locations in Arizona; terminals throughout the Midwest, including in Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky; numerous sites in the Northeast and Southeast U.S.; and facilities in Canada and Mexico, with a partner terminal in Santiago de Querétaro.
The companies’ combined operations include 27 rail-to-truck transfer facilities, 15 ISO container depots, and 33 wash racks—with more still to come.
“We’ve always focused on buying quality companies,” O’Connor said. “Miller was a quality company, Superior was obviously a quality company, Premier was a quality company, and so was Jasa. So our philosophy is, if they’ve got great customer relationships and great service, that’s somebody we want to align with. And we look at, what does the acquisition do for our network? Does it enhance our network, does it enhance our position with customers, and does it expand our offerings, whether it’s geographically or from a service standpoint.”
PE involvement
Many people associate private-equity investors with corporate raiders who plundered successful businesses in the 1980s and 90s, or view them negatively in light of today’s bad-actor hedge funds, like those with reputations for buying companies and then slashing budgets to extract profit, to everyone else’s detriment.
Heniff says some of those fears are well-founded—but mostly they’re overexaggerated.
“All they’re really doing is investing in me and my team to take this thing to the next level, and they want to give me every resource they can, which is basically financial,” he said. “That’s it. It’s a lot simpler than a lot of people make it out to be.”
The key, he cautioned, is to find the right investment partner, a task Heniff and his team took on themselves the first go around.
“Fortunately, we had a very sophisticated CFO who knew the ropes and was able to facilitate the process, and we went from there,” Heniff said. “We already had a couple of targets in mind, and with our experience, and learning about other businesses on the market—particularly the ones we’d bought to date—we saw there was a significant void in technology, and in the sophistication of back-office systems, so that was a big point to us as we grew, and continued to develop our systems. We knew we could take advantage of a larger acquisition and reap the benefits of it quickly, if we had the capital to do so.”
Securing enough capital to buy Superior required Heniff to “level up.”
Heniff expressed his interest in Superior to former board chairman Richard Lewis—who NTTC recently honored with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement award—before it hit the market; and Lewis told him there was a “high probability” the children of the primary shareholder, John J. Burns Jr., who died in 2017, eventually would sell. But when Heniff returned to BBH, he learned that, while they recognized the pick-up’s value, the funds required to execute the transaction exceeded their threshold for that investment type.
So this time Heniff hired an investment banker, who helped select Olympus from a pool of capital-providing candidates. “Everyone has a gameplan,” Heniff said. “You just have to make sure when you’re teaming with a financial partner that their gameplan is exactly the same as yours.”
With BBH, Heniff relinquished a small ownership stake. To secure a substantially larger capital infusion, he gave up a larger stake to Olympus, which now is a majority owner of Heniff Transportation, but Heniff says he never had “an inkling of concern,” knowing that relinquishing full control was necessary to fully realize his vision.
“The relationship’s very straightforward and everyone’s in it together,” he said. “They realize there could be some lumps on occasion. They’re in the same position we are. They’re no different, so all our interests are aligned. I take great comfort in it.”
Industry veteran Wes Stone, Heniff’s chief commercial officer who was the president and CEO of Superior at the time of its sale, said PE backing almost is a necessity in today’s world, which is filled with rising costs of doing business that can act as barriers to entry, or continued success, for smaller bulk operations.
“The cost of insurance and managing fleets is exponentially increasing, and in order to provide value to our customers, and more of what I call a single-stop shop, we need to have more resources and be more dynamic, and I believe the companies that do that, and have larger footprints, are the ones that are going to survive,” Stone said.
“It’s very hard to be a small player with the changes we’re seeing in the market today. I’m not saying you can’t do well, but Fortune 500 organizations need someone who can execute with highly specialized equipment, provide intermodal solutions, and deliver effective cost structures—and that’s what we’re doing at Heniff.”
Combining operations
The Heniff family now includes six companies.
Most of the transportation operations, including Miller Transporters and Superior Carriers, were rolled into Heniff Transportation, forming what now serves as the group’s chemical division. The exception is a trio of legacy union terminals that still operates as Miller, but they haul the same bulk chemical products.
Carry Transit now serves as Heniff’s food division, Premier is the Canadian arm, and Total Clean, acquired through Miller, houses all of Heniff’s cleaning operations, including its chemical and foodgrade wash racks that clean an average of more than 10,000 vehicles for Heniff and other carriers every month.
“Each brand has its own strengths and carries its own weight in the marketplace,” O’Connor said, pointing to Carry’s reputation with food shippers, who still recognize and value its unique position in the supply chain. “The key part is how you operate the companies together, and how effective you are at doing that.”
Heniff Logistics, the brokerage arm, completes their combined organization.
“We want to be the one-stop shop for all of our customers because we do have all the offerings of general chemical transportation, rail-to-truck transload, ISO depot work—we’ll import and export—and a brokerage division,” Templeman said. “So if we don’t have the capacity on the asset side, we have a fantastic third party that can go to the carriers they know and bring them to the table to get freight covered.”
Much like Heniff and Miller when they came together two years earlier, Stone said Heniff and Superior were complementary companies, which made combining them less complicated, despite a global pandemic that forced them to rely on Microsoft Teams for conducting integration meetings remotely. “We talked to a lot of folks and Heniff was truly the best fit, culturally, and for building the platform Bob and I wanted to see built,” he said. “There was very little overlap of organizational facilities, or customer base, in terms of the main companies we service, so it was true systemic growth. A lot of times you do acquisitions, and there’s so much overlap you end up shutting facilities down. That’s not what we’re doing here.”
Former Superior terminals, now fully rebranded as Heniff, gained ISO depot access. Heniff, which previously leaned on third-party maintenance providers, gained more of its own facilities, an R-stamp trailer repair and fabrication shop in High Point, N.C., that can even build custom wash rack equipment, and the SBL Driving Academy in Greer, S.C., which, in light of the driver shortage plaguing trucking, may be the most valuable asset. Heniff Logistics’ network also grew by absorbing Superior’s brokerage, Supernus Global Solutions.
To make it all work together, Heniff kept his workforce informed, and engaged—and his expert executive team fully empowered.
“I think folks were very receptive because we did what we said we were going to do,” Stone said. “We didn’t come in and slice people out of the business. We need everyone. And we did a good job of sharing the vision. We laid out the terminal networks, what they were going to look like, and our vision for the market, and how we saw that coming together. We talked about the dispatch system, which was going to be a change, and probably cause some stress, but had to be done to get the right visibility for our customers.”
To keep every driver on board, Heniff offers a lease-purchase program, and recently introduced its Driver’s Choice Pay Package. “We heard early on from a lot of Superior drivers they were concerned because Heniff paid by percentage, and they were used to mileage pay,” Templeman said. “Many wanted to stay on mileage. So we developed a way to pay them however they want to get paid. If they want to get paid percentage, great, if they want to get paid mileage, that’s great, too. So now we’re able to offer that to all our drivers, so they can choose what’s best for them.”
Technology advancement
A key tool for internal communication is truDigital, which Heniff uses to provide employees with important information on scrolling terminal screens. Sometimes the messages involve critical updates or safety reminders, and sometimes they simply say, “Happy birthday.” In every case, they help foster a feeling of community.
And that’s only one way that Heniff is optimizing operations with technology.
The company also boasts a new mobile application for drivers created with TransFlo that offers document scanning, load details, and dispatch information; and soon will add integrations that allow drivers to view live pay accruals, track their performance scorecards, and locate vehicles inside terminal yards.
The scorecards, which are tied to driver’s incentives, glean stats from PeopleNet’s Connected Gateway and Heniff’s data-driven TMW.Suite transportation management system (TMS), which, along with many other functions, delivers insight into driver behaviors, like speeding or hard braking, and hours-of-service (HOS) compliance.
Video collected from Samsara cameras enables real-time coaching, and protects drivers and the company in litigation.
“That has been a phenomenal tool for us, to improve driver safety, and to help coach drivers,” said Joe Neal, Heniff’s chief technology officer. “And we purposefully use forward-facing cameras only. We don’t do in-cab cams. We want it to be a positive tool. And what we see follows what you hear from everyone in the industry—that 80% of the time it’s not our driver who did something wrong, it’s the other guy on the road. So it’s a great tool to help exonerate them, and be that neutral observer that keeps them out of trouble.”
Neal manages an IT staff that now is 20 strong, with experts who monitor all aspects of Heniff’s technological capabilities. “We have people in an IT support wing, for infrastructure and systems, application development, custom integrations, and, most recently, we’ve put a really strong focus on keeping our security platform up to date, and doing everything we can to protect ourselves from cyberattacks.”
The team also integrated back-office systems of varying levels of sophistication collected through acquisitions. Miller, founded in 1942, was using TMW, but an “ancient” version that required significant updating. Superior, established in 1966, relied on antiquated AS/400-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) software that’d been combined over time with other architectures to form an inextricable “rat’s nest” of systems.
Now most operations are on the latest version of Trimble’s TMW.Suite for payroll, dispatch, settlements, and other functions. Heniff also utilized PC*Miler routing, mileage, and mapping software; 10-4 Systems visibility software; and PeopleNet electronic logging devices (ELDs)—all before they were acquired by Trimble. “What we’ve ended up with is a core of systems under the Trimble umbrella,” Neal said. “And when we look at that, we see a lot of positives. When we need to make enhancements or tweak the platform, instead of going out to different vendors, we’re going to one. That makes it easier to get stuff done.”
Similarly, he argues, it’s easier to utilize systems prominent providers already perfected than it is to design and build new ones in-house. “My model is, we already have all these phenomenal vendors in the marketplace—like Trimble, Tenstreet, GP Solutions, Tableau, and so on—so instead of writing all this software and building the systems ourselves, let’s form strategic relationships with leading vendors, and utilize their best-in-class, off-the-shelf software,” Neal said. “And then our secret sauce is establishing exceptional integrations.”
Other key tech pieces include SkyBitz trailer tracking for equipment and load visibility, SalesForce customer relationship management service, and VisiShip for railcar tracking in Carry’s transloading operations. “I like to say we’re an IT company that happens to have 2,000 drivers and 5,000 trailers,” Stone quipped.
Perpetual progress
Heniff also is a family of companies that’s committed to constant evolution, even as they grow expeditiously.
Total Clean recently upgraded its Bridgeview, Ill., foodgrade cleaning facility with bigger pumps for washing out stubborn chocolates, added automation in Blair that makes tracking cleaning temperatures easier, and issued Blackline Safety meters to every wash technician. “They just clip the meter on, and it monitors their movements and the atmosphere around them,” said Trent Mere, Total Clean president. “And so, if the meter detects anything, it gives them a warning, and also sends us a message, and we can reply to the message, or call the person right then, directly through the device, to make sure they’re OK.”
A new wash rack in Geismar, La., and a modernized water treatment system in Savannah, Ga., are in the works, and a new Total Clean website, total-clean.com—which will tie into Heniff’s driver app—is expected to debut soon. And Heniff’s new flagship facility on 25 acres in Hazel Crest, Ill., on Chicago’s south side, has eight wash and six maintenance bays, an ISO depot with space for 1,000 containers, and a Toplift Ferrari container handler that can move, stack, or load containers onto one of Heniff’s 900 trailer chassis.
Carry, which boasts FDA-registered sites, HACCP food safety procedures, ISO 22000 food safety management systems, and kosher certifications, is known for rail-to-truck transfers, with roughly 11,000 railcar loads transferred annually (plus another 5,000 each year by Heniff). And as it continues adding transload facilities in close proximity to its shipper customers—like one for flour in Ohio and another for vegetable oil in Virginia, both in the last year—Carry’s also looking to grow its trucking fleet, which currently includes 600 liquid and dry bulk foodgrade trailers.
“Bob’s motto is that we don’t want to be the biggest, we want to be the best, and investing in technology and doing the right things well, and maintaining a safe organization, with drivers who have good driving scores, is the best way to keep growing the business long-term,” insisted Mack Findley, Carry president.
Looking ahead
To continue evolving its technology, Heniff is eyeing an expanded partnership with Samsara that leverages data for additional visibility, like load temperatures; testing new smart trailer technology that uses barcodes for trailer assignments and inspections; and looking into ways to enable digital bills of lading for hazmat carriers.
“Technology is immensely important,” Heniff said. “If you can’t scale back-office systems to be more efficient, and proficient with data and processing invoices, to pay people quickly and accurately, volume can kill,” Heniff said.
The company also is looking to add equipment. It currently runs a mixed fleet acquired through acquisitions, but most new vehicles are Peterbilt Model 579 trucks, with automatic transmissions, aerodynamic packages, and the latest driver amenities, and Polar trailers. Unfortunately, supply chain issues, like the semiconductor shortage, are idling otherwise-complete units, and pushing critical orders down the road.
“Capacity is extremely tight,” Templeman said. “There isn’t a market right now where we don’t see capacity issues, just because customers are shipping more. And a lot of customers still are reeling from issues we had in February in Texas, with the freeze, or recent storms, or pushing out truckloads they’d normally ship by rail, because rail’s an issue, as far as getting cars or making enough product to ship by rail. So that’s been a capacity struggle, too, because we’re trying to cover four truckloads for every railcar not in service.”
All of which only makes further add-on expansion in the industry increasingly important.
“We’ll continue to look for acquisitions,” Templeman said. “There are other carriers out there we want to look at, and situations where others are looking to exit the business, so there will be more opportunities to add outstanding operations.”
And it’s all in the pursuit of building the best—and, perhaps, one day biggest—bulk transportation business in North America.
“I’m more upbeat than I was earlier in the year, as we continue to streamline, and become more proficient in everything we do,” Heniff said. “I’m comfortable with where the business is today, and with where it’s headed in the future.”
