On paper, Peter Jenkins is a relatively new employee with TransPro Freight Systems, which is part of the Kriska Transportation Group. While Jenkins signed on with TransPro in January 2022, he has a far longer history with one of Kriska’s other holdings, Champion Express.
Champion Express was initially owned and operated by Jenkins’ parents — and like any child of an entrepreneur, he spent a lot of time learning the business from his family. At Champion, he was schooled in the finer points of the trucking business and developed operational values that he still puts to work today as TransPro’s general manager.
For Jenkins, customer service is, first and foremost, his No. 1 priority.
“My father was a salesperson, and that got him into managing trucking and brokerage. That’s how I was raised, sales first,” he shared. “And closely aligned with sales is customer service because it’s much easier to keep the customer than it is to onboard a new one. Prospecting is time-consuming and expensive.”
“Our mantra has always been, ‘Take care of what you’ve got, value your customers,’” he continued. “I have customers, that still ship with us today and that I have good relationships with, that my dad (worked with) in 1991 or earlier when he started Champion Express. I’ve got customers from probably 12 years ago, when I was doing sales, that are still running and flourishing. It’s nice being able to see that freight on our TransPro trucks now. It’s kind of like coming full circle.”
Jenkins’ brand of customer service casts a wide net and extends not only to external clients, but also to the internal stakeholders that keep the company going.
“Champion was primarily brokerage, where TransPro is about 50/50 asset logistics, so we’ve got to take care of our drivers,” he said.
“We want to be a driver-centric company,” he said. “Our objective is to have our drivers haul freight that they want to haul because they’re going to be happier, they’re going to do a better job and, in the end, we’re going to deliver a better service to our customers.”
That often means drawing on good client relationships to benefit TransPro’s drivers, Jenkins said.
“When our drivers run into a roadblock that prevents them from executing their five to 10 drops, such as excessive waiting time, we can pull on our excellent relationships with our customers to try to smooth that out and solve that problem,” he said.
TransPro runs about 80 trucks, teamed with 165 dry van trailers and 65 refrigerated trailers, carrying less-than-truckload (LTL) freight from southern Ontario in Canada to anywhere in the U.S. The bulk of freight is northbound produce, Jenkins says, but it also includes a fair amount of temperature-controlled loads southbound as necessary.
“The company has always done a good job of building our outbound loads. We achieved a very profitable RPM (results through performance management) on the outbound,” Jenkins said, describing the company’s strengths.
“Of course, there’s always opportunity to maximize accumulation in an LTL environment. Tracking KPI (key performance indicators) is related to maximizing the footage that we get on our trailers outbound, trying to utilize more stop-off locations where we can stack our freight southbound so it’s all safe and secure,” he said.
“We can stop at specified locations on our route where we have partnerships, get that onto the trailer for delivery because a lot of deliveries won’t take decked freight,” he continued. “It’s a matter of managing those customer requirements by a consigning basis and that really allows us to maximize our outbound RPM.”
One area of opportunity lies with managing inbound freight, Jenkins says. That’s something he’s helping to maximize at TransPro through targeted, skilled salesmanship. It’s a strategy that plays to one of the 38-year-old’s particular passions.
“(On) the inbound RPM, we’ve often been exposed to the spot market as everybody’s felt over a period of time in the industry. The spot market’s been suppressed,” he said. “We’ve got an excellent sales team, and we’re utilizing various sales strategies. We utilize our technology wherever we can in our sales process to automate any portion of our sales process. That allows us to bring in more opportunities and close more opportunities and do less with the greater spot market.
“I always think of myself as a salesperson at heart,” he added. “That was one of my favorite periods in my career — when I was doing full-time sales for my parents’ company, before I stepped into more of a management role.”
In addition to leveraging the tried-and-true methods of his mentors, Jenkins has asserted his own skills and personality into his leadership style. He believes this has helped him borrow the best of all possible worlds to move the organization forward, maintaining the high standards of a company that has been repeatedly recognized as a best place to work within the trucking industry.
“To get people is still a challenge,” he said “We run a hybrid work environment, where work-from-home is an option. We offer flexibility to our people, which is very important in this current employment economy.
“To get and retain the best people and be flexible while still holding people accounting to their KPI and their productivity is certainly different than three years ago, when everybody was in the office every day and you’re able to speak to everybody,” he continued. “It’s a different style of management now. It’s a different way of relating to people. People always change, and culture and society evolve, and management styles have to adapt with that.”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2023 edition of Truckload Authority, the official publication of the Truckload Carriers Association.
Dwain Hebda is a freelance journalist, author, editor and storyteller in Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to The Trucker, his work appears in more than 35 publications across multiple states each year. Hebda’s writing has been awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists and a Finalist in Best Of Arkansas rankings by AY Magazine. He is president of Ya!Mule Wordsmiths, which provides editorial services to publications and companies.
