Here's the timeline as I know it. It's kind of interesting.
Yellow buys Preston in 1993 to get their hands on Saia (at the time a little non-union carrier owned by Preston).
Yellow buys Jevic in 1999 and in the same month shuts Preston down. (Their intention was to link Saia with Jevic and form a national non-union entity. They wanted to keep up with Conway and Roadway who had "shed" the union already.
Yellow comes to find out that Jevic and Saia don't fit. Now it's post 9/11 with the economy in the toilet. Meanwhile, the teamster contract is coming up. Yellow can't go into the negotiations owning 2 non-union profitable carriers and cry poverty to the union. They have to get rid of Saia/Jevic. So, the form SCS, a small holding company made up of a handful of former Yellow execs.
So Yellow spins Saia/Jevic into SCS. The stocks not doing so hot. A group of investors from Wall Street start pressuring SCS to "do something about Jevic" because they felt we were holding the stock down. (bunch of crap, SCS never supported us).
So, SCS plans not to sell us but to liquidate us! This is now May 2006. I have seen the written plan after the fact. The president would have gotten over $1 million in 2 payments for helping with the shut down.
Our presidnet decides Jevic is too valuable, too many good people, too good of a brand name to be crapped on. He along with our CFO go out to the street to find us someone to buy us. And they do: Sun Capital.
They bought us a new lease on life and unfortunately you all know the end result.
Equity firms are heartless money machines, but what was the alternative?
These are the facts as I know them.
Hope everyone is doing well.
Here is a question that I have always thought about and it is, Why didnt Jevic have the capital to stand alone without the help of the investment companies??