Roberts Rules the Road

But those are yesterday's victories. Today, back in the trenches, the King is working on his next challenge. Finding trucks is only half the battle. The other half is persuading drivers to accept a short run. Take the load Vasilatos is trying to dispatch from Elkton, Maryland, to Jamaica, New York, a 155-mile delivery that's about as popular as a state trooper at a truck stop. To reach the destination, JFK International Airport, a driver must cross Brooklyn. Through tolls and traffic. In an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer. On a Friday afternoon. Good luck.

Earlier, Vasilatos had managed to assign another Jamaica delivery by predispatching a driver on a second, more lucrative run to be made later. "You've got to wheel and deal a little," the King explains. The other dispatchers on his Customer Assistance Team - seven to nine people cross-trained to organize the transport of a load from start to finish - gave Vasilatos the nickname "King" because he's so adept at handling drivers, some of whom can be prickly and impatient.

And that's on a good day. Drivers for Roberts aren't employees of the company; they're independent contractors. Since they, not Roberts, own their trucks, many drivers feel that they should decide which loads to accept, and naturally they want the long (and thus the more profitable) hauls. So Roberts will occasionally allow a driver to refuse a run. Today everyone seems to be exercising their right of refusal.

The computer locates a truck 56 miles from the pickup point. The driver is Leroy from Texas. Instead of beaming an electronic message, Vasilatos calls him. "I've got a load from Elkton, Maryland to beautiful Jamaica, New York." There's a long pause on the line, then a groan. "I can't handle that today. I just can't," says Leroy. After hanging up, Vasilatos discovers another run on the dispatch board. Lovely. He starts wheeling and dealing. Things start clicking. The computer finds trucks; the drivers accept the loads.

Vasilatos covers a short run of four crates of Avon makeup from Newark, Delaware to Philadelphia, then a hazardous-materials load that's traveling from Waterbury, Connecticut to Woburn, Massachusetts. Still, the Jamaica run looms, and time is running out. Then the computer system makes another suggestion. It's got a truck that's dropping off a load not far from Elkton. Vasilatos fires a dispatch offer over the satellite to "D3228," a driver named James. A minute or two later, a much-relieved Vasilatos reads James's reply on the screen: "No Problem."

Just like that, Jamaica's covered. The King has done it again.

Rewriting the Rules of the Road

Roberts Express has been in the business of expedited shipping since 1981, when Bill Blodgett, the former treasurer of Emery Air Freight, saw the potential for a high-performance alternative to the status quo in trucking. Up until then, if a manufacturer needed a shipment on demand, it had two choices: Pay through the nose for air freight, or send the shipment by truck and wait several days. Roberts, formed in 1948 by the merger of two Ohio trucking companies, had worked in tandem with air freight for years. It operated regionally, delivering critical freight first for the airlines and later for Emery, after the air-freight provider acquired Roberts in 1971. Five years later, after the trucking operation failed to turn a profit, Emery gladly sold it to Blodgett, who envisioned a new market and a unique service.

Today Roberts provides shipping that's often cheaper and faster than air freight. How is that possible? Planes travel faster than trucks only while they're in the air. So while air freighters wait around for a trucking company to bring the shipment to an airport, unload and reload the shipment, and then do it all over again at the destination, Roberts trucks remain on the move. Sometimes slow and steady really does win the race.

"You know how a tennis racquet has a sweet spot?" asks Greulich, a lanky, gregarious narrator of Roberts's history. "Well, our sweet spot is 500 pounds, 800 miles or less. That's the center of our market." At that weight and that distance, Roberts costs a third as much as air freight and can deliver the goods one day sooner.

By obtaining authority to run trucks throughout the United States and Canada, Blodgett, who eventually sold the company to Roadway Services Inc. (which later became Caliber Systems Inc.) and has since retired, took the northeastern Ohio regional company national. The new company became such a success that last January, FDX, parent company of FedEx, added the shipper to its arsenal as part of its acquisition of Caliber Systems. Roberts Express has amassed a team of independent contractors who own and drive five types of vehicles, the smallest being minivans, or "A" units (in Roberts's parlance), and the largest being 48-foot tractor-trailers, or "E" units. The idea is to match the cargo with the right-size vehicle. Unlike companies that send a truck on multiple runs, commingling cargo from different customers, Roberts provides dedicated service. Your freight is the only freight on the truck, which is why the company charges substantially more than standard trucking companies - often two to three times as much.