Maybe, or maybe not. If a company has a bad business model you can throw all the money in the world at it and all your doing is masking the problem. This company HAD a lot of loyal, hard working, long term employees. These were people who cared and had a personal interest in the survival and prosperity of this company. Some of your TM's and supervisors were drivers who had worked their way up the ladder. During the lead up to the PJAX purchase (and even before) many of these people were replaced with more "corporate minded" individuals. I know because I was one. Some people who didn't want to "play ball" were simply cut loose. I had the opportunity to speak with Dennis Moriarty, and asked him if he thought Vitran could survive as it is currently structured, his answer....NO. What we are trying to do ( service entire states with 1 or maybe 2 terminals) is extremely difficult, you have to have good paying freight (which we don't) you need drivers that can really hustle (which have lost a lot of) if your going to run a 400 mile route you need to leave the terminal before 9 AM (which we don't) and you need equipment that can move faster than a moped (which we don't have anymore). I think Moriarty gets it, Keylon on the other hand I just don't know.
There was an earlier thread asking about layoffs and my response to that would be, well it's about time. If you remember the conference call one of the reporters even asked why our labor costs haven't dropped given the fact that revenue was down 10%.
While I don't want to see anyone lose their job the sad reality is, if there isn't enough work to keep everyone busy then something has to give.
I'll give you a tiny example of what I think is wrong with this company. The barn I work out of used to do a lot of business, today we are down to a bill count of 90-120 per day. We have more than enough drivers to cover this freight. What we also have is 4-6 part-time dock employees, 3 supervisors, 3 office people, 1 salesman and a terminal manager. With the exception of the salesman that's at least 10 people on the payroll that have no direct contribution to our profit. At $17 million a quarter we simply can't afford this much overhead.
The tablets are cool, but expensive and have yet to show a meaningful improvement in productivity.
Linehaul has been restructured twice, in an effort to improve efficiency...well I'm still waiting. What I do know is that many of our line haul drivers have had their miles cut, some severely. I've taken my paycut to the tune of about $15,000 a year due to less miles.
Here is another suggestion...cut loose the cheap freight. We can't haul freight and lose money just for the sake of saying we have a full trailer, this is how owner-operators go broke. We would be better off shrinking the size of this company, keeping the good paying freight and making sure we get it DELIVERED ON TIME, DAMAGE FREE AND MAKE MONEY.
CONTRACTION....it's a dirty word but it may be the only thing that saves us. I would rather haul 30% less freight at 98% on time, make money on it, and rebuild our reputation, versus what we are doing now.
Just my .02
