“I love the business, which is why notmuch keeps me awake at night, “ says the president and CEO of Thomasville, NC-based Old Dominion Freight Line.

America’s sixth largest LTL company celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2009 and while profit for the year may be down 50-60 percent, “we have a profit and the rest of the industry has losses,” notes its boss.

Congdon started in his father’s business at the age of 14–loading boxes on trucks to earn money for a trip to Japan. “It was 1970. I was a Boy Scout and wanted to go to the World Jamboree. My father paid me $1.65 an hour so I saved $400 and he paid the rest. The three-week trip including air fare cost just $800.”

For two summers he worked as a dockman as the family business expanded throughout the US northeast and south with the purchase of five regional carriers.

Then at 16 his father, Earl Congdon Jnr, gave him a toolkit and his son became an enthusiastic truck mechanic. “I had a car and I would visit terminals, work in service centers, ride with drivers and load and unload freight.”

The high school summer jobs were to have a lasting impact and after graduating with a degree in business administration, Congdon spent nine months in Raleigh, NC getting his truckers license and making
local deliveries.

“I felt from the first summer I was on the dock that I wanted my father’s job one day.” So Congdon joined the company’s industrial engineering department to learn the secret of how to make money in the trucking business.

Apparently one of them is to be a non-union shop. Earl Congdon Jnr, who turns 80 this year and remains involved in a business his parents started by hauling materiel for the US military, doesn’t believe in unions.

“If you asked my father how we have remained a free company his answer would be something I’ve heard a zillion times and totally agree with,” says his son.

“It’s all about communication. It’s all about having an open door with your employees to talk about problems and issues; but it is also about having a clear vision. We’ve always preached that what goes around, comes around and we’ve held true to that for as long as I’ve been here.”

Hopefully this adage will continue to hold true. Since October 2008 “OD” — as everyone from the receptionist to the CEO apparently describes the non-union trucking company - has reduced its workforce by 16 percent to around 10,000.

While Congdon admits that the initial Darwinian cull was useful in weeding out the less productive, a second round last year was not so painless.

“As the recession unfolded in the first quarter of 2009 we started to lay off people we really didn’t want to lose. We keep in touch with them and we’re going to get them back as soon as we can.”

However with only 2-3 percent growth expected this year off a “very low” 2009 base, OD’s CEO doesn’t expect re-hiring to happen any time soon - unless “with a poor economy there is potential for weaker players to fall by the wayside,” he adds.

Citing YRC’s mound of debt, Congdon says OD can very quickly hire back employees to cope with the gravitational pull of a sudden black hole appearing in the market.

“We’ve been increasing our capacity in anticipation of YRC going out of business. Yellow, Roadway and US Freightways were all competing with each other for a while; well that doesn’t make sense.”

Congdon suggests growth by acquisition brings with it the problems of human and network integration.

“UPS Freight bought Overnite; FedEx bought American Freightways, Viking Freight Systems and Watkins Motor Freight. We’ve competed with all of them in the past. Now they’re trying to be one company.

“We think our mousetrap of a single company, single management, single head office and single computer system is winning market share. Others are now trying to copy us,” he claims.

Back in the 1980s, as Congdon Jnr. was learning all about how to maintain his dad’s trucks, industry deregulation was leading to cut-throat competition, loss of profits and subsequent attrition.

With North Carolina’s reliance on tobacco, textiles and furniture, he also learned another lesson: “If you have all your bets in one sector, you’re in trouble. We went through a very bad period between ’84 and ’87. Things got really tight by the end and we came close to losing the company.”

However, OD managed to outlast enough of the fallen competition to cut costs and raise prices so that by the following year, it returned to profitability.

By 1991, Earl Congdon had decided it was time to reduce his family’s exposure to the vagaries of the trucking industry and went IPO. According to his son, not many people on Wall Street noticed. The amount of available stock was not enough to make a difference, so the management took the hint and instead began to implement a single source solution for long, medium and short-haul deliveries throughout four major US regions.

At this time Congdon, when he wasn’t ensuring the trucks ran on time, had been reading a lot of books on total quality m≠anagement (TQM).

“I felt we needed a change from autocratic to participatory management — that’s what I think TQM is all about,” he recalls.

However he couldn’t do much about it until 1992 when, at a company retreat for senior staff, the president announced it was “time to do TQM.” The following Monday he was in his father’s office making a pitch to take responsibility for quality throughout OD.

By 1997, when he was appointed president and COO, Congdon followed up the quality program with the first of what is now an annual looking-glass strategy event as the management remind itself, “Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going?”

By the end of that decade, OD was creeping east to west across the US and was up to 75 service centers. But it was not enough, explains Congdon: “We were viewed by analysts and customers as good between regions but not viewed as a second-day player.”

OD had become very good at connecting the service centers — but not perceived as operating between them. Apparently the company that was “helping the world keep promises” wanted to be Everyman’s overnightand second-day carrier.

Well, 12 years and two more public offerings in 2002 and 2004 later, OD now has 210 centers in six regions and plans to open another 40 throughout North America in support of its 70,000 customers.

The trucker’s next-day traffic is now 28 percent and second-day is 39 percent ofits overall business. Today, 86 percent of its line haul is three days or less.

With his appointment as CEO in 2008, Congdon knows more about his company than perhaps anyone. In 1980 his family business was producing about $50 million in revenue. Ten years later the figure had doubled. By 2000, expansion had produced over half a billion dollars.

In 2008 it was over $1.5 billion.

Between 1998 and 2008, OD had,an annual compound growth rate of 15 percent in revenue and 20 percent in net profit. In comparison, a five-year LTL industry operating margin in that period was 2.7 percent; the revenue growth was 7.6 percent.

Notwithstanding the current Great Recession, Congdon says its nonunionemployees make the Virginia registered (hence the name Old Dominion) freight line the “best positioned” LTL carrier for the future.

Despite three pilgrimages to Wall Street, the founding family still owns more than a third of the company stock. It’s one reason why, after 35 years in the business, Congdon likes to visit service centers and meet the latest generation of dockmen and drivers.

“It’s part of our culture to visit our employees,” he says. “My dad always had an annual meeting with the drivers and he had me do the service awards. I started when I was 16 or 17. One thing I learned real quick about communication with a truck driver is you’d better grip his hand first before he gets hold of yours and crushes it. I learned never to hand a trucker a dead fish.”