Brad Jacobs

I studied Conway and it was interesting because they told me

They said, Brad, one thing you need to know is there's not a lot of cost out opportunity here.

I said, okay.

And I went in and I found tons of cost out opportunity because I saw the organizational chart.

It was like someone just took spaghetti and threw it against the wall.

It was three different HR organizations, three different IT organizations, three different operating divisions.

Everything was three for the different parts of the company instead of having a

shared services, which is a more traditional way of doing it.

And I said, wow, it's like a lot of money we can take out of this just doing that.

They had a government relations division with a fairly sizable staff and significant budget, but they didn't really need that.

It really didn't make any difference.

So we pivoted and we said, you know what, let's get into asset-based LTL.

It was a big pivot because we had been previously doing non-asset businesses, although Intermodal was quasi-asset because you lease the trailers, the containers.

So that ended up becoming a fantastic deal.

Had I turned that down, had I been rigid in my thinking on that, had I just stuck to the original initial strategy and said, you know what, no, that's a little off the beaten path, we would not have created billions of dollars of value because we bought that company for $3 billion today.

We're not selling it, but if we were to sell it, it would be many times that.

The perfect business, which doesn't exist, by the way.

But if I had the perfect business, here's what it would look like, Patrick.

Number one, it would be highly respected in the industry by its competitors.

It would be very highly valued by the customers.