NWA Transport Keeps Area Companies Connected

John Hagan, Levina Miller and Buz Phelps saw a logistical niche that wasn’t being filled. So the three former Polar Express employees founded NWA Transport Inc. in Rogers in March 2001.

NWA Transport does logistics for about 25 area companies, including Allen Canning and Simmons Foods, both of Siloam Springs.

NWA Transport works with more than 600 small trucking companies to make sure its clients’ products are getting where they need to go on time. At the same time, the small trucking companies are benefiting from the additional work and not having trucks deadheading back to home base with an empty load.

“We’re filling a niche,” Hagan said. “We’re helping the smaller carrier because they know they can call us and we can call them.”

“Basically, what we do is we’re a truck brokerage,” Miller said. “We have our customers. They’re manufacturers. They call us and say they have a product they need moved from point A to point B, so we go out and find a carrier who can move freight from point A to point B.”

“They do a good job for me,” said Mack Farris of Water Tech Inc. in Fort Smith, which hauls treated industrial wastewater for the poultry industry. “All my long-haul, in-bound freight NWA gets for me.”

“It saved him money,” Hagan said. “We had the capacity and ability to do this for him. They fax in their loads or e-mail their loads in to us three weeks in advance, and we arrange to have it shipped.”

For shipping, Hagan said, NWA Transport deals primarily with individual owner-operators who have 30 to 40 trucks. If one of those companies has a truck in Detroit that needs to come back to Northwest Arkansas, the trucking company owner can call NWA Transport to see if goods need to be transported from that city to Arkansas.

Hagan said NWA Transport primarily serves 30 “lanes” (or “routes”) from Northwest Arkansas to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Atlanta, the Carolinas, California and the Pacific Northwest.

“We’re very lane specific in the fact that we know where we do good work — through the Midwest to the West Coast and through the Southeast,” Hagan said.

NWA Transport deals in full truckload business only. NWA works with trucking companies that transport via vans, flatbeds, tankers and refrigerated trucks. But NWA doesn’t deal with the transportation of hazardous materials.

Hagan said NWA has become involved even in its customers’ customers, working to make sure the customer down the line is satisfied.

“We have four things to sell: quality, service, dependability and price,” Hagan said. “A lot of people sell price. We’re not going to do that. We sell primarily quality, service and dependability.”

Hagan said someone at NWA is available to serve customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Hagan wouldn’t reveal NWA’s revenue, but he said the company grew by about 25 percent in its first year.

“We could grow a lot more,” he said, “but we’re going to do controlled growth because we’re working with our customers and we’re not going to put them in a bind by growing too big ourselves …

“We have seen too many companies such as ourselves who say, ‘Wow, let’s grow 50 percent this year and 50 percent the next,’ and they’re getting the cart before the horse.”