Trucking Tycoon Driven to Succeed

People in Northwest Arkansas were just as likely to see Johnnie B. Hunt Sr. out eating barbeque or conducting business at Neal’s Cafe in Springdale as they were to see his name on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.
The man, who business partners said had an insatiable appetite for making deals, started his career as a truck driver but ended it as the founder of the nation’s largest truckload carrier, J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc., which closed last year with $3.1 billion in revenue.
Friends said he had a zeal for living life to its fullest.
Fayetteville banker Gary Head tells a story about being a passenger in Hunt’s Cadillac Escalade. They were trespassing and got stuck in mud during a downpour. Hunt nearly flipped the vehicle and Head had to call for a tow.
In the next breath, Head tells how Hunt made a cold sales call to Anheuser-Busch Co. in St. Louis. The two were on a hunting excursion. The following year, Hunt’s trucking company began hauling beer.
“He was probably the greatest salesman I ever knew,” Head said.
Hunt, a retiree turned real estate developer and angel investor, died Dec. 7 in Springdale due to complications from a head injury. He was 79.
He is survived by his wife, Johnelle; a son, Bryan; and a daughter, Jane Hardin. Several Northwest Arkansas buildings, more than 10,000 tractors and nearly 50,000 trailers that daily crisscross the country bear his name.
Services for Hunt were held at the Church at Pinnacle Hills in Rogers on Dec. 11. A canopy of gray skies blocked sunlight from the sanctuary where about 1,500 people gathered to pay tribute to the legendary man whose signature was a white Stetson hat.
Down to Business
Hunt retired as the chairman of the trucking company in 1995 but remained as the senior chairman until 2004. In 2003, he entered business deals with a group of investors in what is now called the Pinnacle Group of Rogers.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as of mid-November the Hunt family owned 34,499,415 shares of the company’s common stock. Shares closed at $21.55 on Dec. 12, for a total value of $743.4 million.
Total market capitalization for JBHT is just more than $3 billion, or about 144.2 million outstanding shares.
The Hunt family, along with 11 JBHT officers own a combined 44,097,879 shares, or about 30 percent of the company.
Hunt’s other personal holdings include partial ownership in a bevy of Rogers real estate developments, including the $84 million Pinnacle Hills Promenade Mall in Rogers; Central Redi-Mix and Pinnacle Air Executive Jet, both in Springdale; and trash-collection Roll Off Services Inc. of Fayetteville among others.
Developer and architect Collins Haynes started the Pinnacle Air venture in 2002 and was eventually bought out by Hunt and other investors.
“When people needed money, he lent them money,” Haynes said.
Hunt kept track of who owed him what and how much revenue a given businesses was projected for in a little brown notebook he carried in his shirt pocket.
Seat-of-His-Pants
Traveling down U.S. Highway 71 about seven years ago, Hunt happened upon a familiar name, so he turned off and followed the signs to The Hunte Corp., which he quickly learned sold purebred puppies to select retailers.
“He just walked in and told the receptionist, ‘Hey, I want to buy a dog,'” said Andrew Hunte, CEO and chairman of the Goodman, Mo., company.
“He became my mentor,” Hunte said. “He was a very smart business man who had incredible vision … He’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever met in my life.”
That’s just the way Hunt was. Business partners quickly became friends.
The road of entrepreneurship took Hunt down various paths.
One of his all-time favorite business endeavors was the J.B. Hunt Big Horn Lodge in Exeter, Mo. Over the years, Hunt stocked it with red stag, buffalo, deer and sheep species, black buck antelope and wild turkeys.
“Mr. Hunt used to come up here quite a bit, but not as much the past few years,” said Betty George, who runs the lodge with her husband, Jim George. “He really enjoyed it and would have family Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and things like that up here, so he will be missed greatly.”
Honesty was at the top of Hunt’s agenda. He preferred to close deals with a handshake rather than having a contract signed with lawyers in the room, which became a necessity as his business ventures delved deeper.
Many business owners said they tried to absorb as much of his business-savvy as possible. However, some say he kept his model for success guarded.
One reason is, they said, he didn’t really have a model. If it sounded like it would work, Hunt was on board.
“His optimism was overwhelming,” said Jim Lindsey, chairman and CEO of Lindsey Management Co. in Fayetteville. “His goodness was obvious and his basic decency could not be hid. He was a very good man.”
Mark Simmons, chairman of Simmons Foods Inc., got to know Hunt through his father, Bill Simmons, who founded the Siloam Spring poultry company in 1949. Bill Simmons was among the original investors in J.B. Hunt Transport when Hunt moved operations from Stuttgart to Lowell in 1972.
“J.B. had so many ideas and he’s like every great entrepreneur, not all of their ideas are necessarily good ideas, but when they hit on a good idea, it really does well for them,” Mark Simmons said.
“He was extremely outgoing,” he said. “Every person he met was someone he could talk with and talk to. My friends used to call J.B. a professional visitor. He was very good at that, and I believe building relationships had a lot to do with his success.”
It was Hunt’s ability to be personable with anybody that helped make him a legend. He was co-owner of Montana Tractors in Springdale and would stop by that office every few days for coffee.
Rodney Miller, CEO of Montana Tractors, said Hunt helped grow the company to 80 employees with 350 dealers in 48 states. Hunt formed the company with the idea of battling top manufacturers such as John Deere Tractors by offering a quality product at a better price.
“He was always thinking outside the box,” Miller said. “He was a common man as you and I would see him, even though he was very affluent and well thought of in big circles.”
Hunt Kept Truckin’
J.B. Hunt was shaped by the Great Depression’s unforgiving years. Those lean times instilled in him a hunger and a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude that led him to make the most of every opportunity.
Early in life, his drive took him through the treacherous roads of northern Arkansas while hauling lumber for his uncle’s sawmill.
When the mill shut down, Hunt was forced to look elsewhere for work. He wound up with another route between Texarkana and Fort Smith. He was then recruited by Superior Forwarding to drive between Little Rock and St Louis.
All the time on the road gave Hunt opportunity to think. When he saw farmers burning rice hulls in the fields, the light bulb went off. He would use those hulls as poultry bedding, selling them to northern Arkansas’ poultry farmers. In 1961, he founded the J.B. Hunt Company in Stuttgart.
Hard times were always in the rear-view mirror, but Hunt was determined to make it. Once the company reached profitability, he was looked to the next level.
In 1969, he bought his first fleet, a ragged group of five trucks and seventrailers, with the money from a contract awarded by James T. “Red” Hudson for the Ralston Purina company.
Over the years, Hunt played to his strengths. The rice hull business provided capital and he knew the trucking business was on his horizon.
After dergulation of the trucking industry in 1980, Hunt knew it was essential to streamline and cut costs to stay competitive.
Hunt standardized his drivers, down to the uniforms. He transformed his mismatched trucks to a 100 percent company-owned fleet, standardizing operation and service.
Hunt also kept his trucks fuel-efficient, limiting their speeds to 55 mph, despite speed limits.
In 1983, the side job became the main job. Hunt sold the rice hull business for $2.4 million and went public with J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. The initial public stock offering generated $18.5 million.
During the 1980s, the company experienced growth of 30 percent to 50 percent annually.
“Mr. Hunt embodied the creativity, risk taking and work ethic that re-defined the trucking industry post de-regulation,” said Steve Williams, CEO and chairman of Maverick Transportation in Little Rock.
In 1989, Hunt made a critical decision, coupling trucking with the railroad, when he entered into a joint venture with what is now Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. of Fort Worth. This marked the creation of Hunt’s intermodal division.
“Like many deals that J.B. did, originally it was a handshake deal,” said Steve Branscum, BNSF vice president of consumer products.
The success of that intermodal arrangement is in the numbers. The first year did 20 loads via rail but now about 600,000 annual loads pass between the to transportation giants. Intermodal is about 45 percent of JBHT’s business, which brought in $1.28 billion in revenue in 2005.
The deal was also important as it changed Hunt’s fleet. Hunt didn’t want to use the railway’s smaller containers because it would mean shippers would have to change the way they pack trailers.
Instead, Hunt asked trailer manufacturers to build containers with the same interior space as trailers but with the additional strength necessary to support them as they are lifted to and from railway cars.
“J.B. saw that containers had a lot of potential in terms of efficiency in operations,” Branscum said.
Hunt semi-retired from the trucking business in 1995, handing over the day-to-day operations. He took the title of senior chairman until he fully retired in 2004.
Hunt’s fleet of five trucks and seven trailers has ballooned to 10,480 tractors and about 49,733 trailers/containers, earning revenue of more than $3.1 billion in 2005.
Lane Kidd, president of the Arkansas Trucking Association, said Hunt was one of the most influential people of the 20th century in the state’s trucking industry.
“J. B. Hunt was a simple but complicated man,” said Robert A. Young III, chairman of Arkansas Best Corp. “A great friend. An untiring thinker. A people person. He was forever turning over new (and old) ideas in his head.”