Q&A: Old Dominion Freight Line Exec on Scope, Scale, and Growth
Chip Overbey. Photo: Old Dominion Freight Line
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Chip Overbey. Photo: Old Dominion Freight Line
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Old Dominion Freight Line recently posted a short animated video highlighting the scope and scale of the less-than-truckload carrier. We spoke with Chip Overbey, senior vice president of strategic planning, to learn more about OD’s impressive growth strategy. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
HDT: The freight climate was soft last year, yet you continued to invest in building, remodeling and expanding service centers. Why is that important?
Overbey: This is nothing new for us. We’ve been reinvesting in this company and this business for many, many years. Between 2006 and 2015 we’ve invested over $900 million in our service centers network. If you count equipment and technology, since 2012 we’ve invested a billion and a half or more. Even during the recession we were investing in the business. We believe we have a premium service. Our value proposition is a high-quality service for a fair an equitable price. Even when economic conditions are somewhat off, in a just-in-time, online economy, if it’s not available to sell, there is no sale. So people need their goods, they need them on time, they need them in good condition, and the best way to do that is to have the capacity available to them when they need it.
If you look at [our] service center count from 2005 to the end of 2014 compared against other publicly traded LTLs, their terminal parity is down 27%; ours is up 42%. That means we’ve got the capacity to move [customers’] goods though our network in a time-sensitive manner, over 99% on time, around 0.3% claims ratio.
With tractors and trailers, against those same carriers, our tractor count is up 30% and trailers the same; the nearest competitor is about half that. At the end …Read the rest of this story
