U.S. Xpress Co-founder Joins List Of Most Influential Business School Grads

U.S. Xpress co-founder joins list of most influential business school grads

› Age: 62.

› Job: CEO of U.S. Xpress Enterprises.

› Education: A native of Athens, Tenn., Fuller graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1975 with a B.A. degree in finance and business administration.

› Career: He has worked in the transportation industry more than 30 years. After working at Southwest Motor Freight, he and attorney Patrick E. Quinn started U.S. Xpress in 1986.

› Board memberships: He has served on the boards of SunTrust Bank of Chattanooga, The Enterprise Center and the Chancellor’s Round Table at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

› Personal: Fuller and his wife, Janice, live in Chattanooga and have three children and three grandchildren.

In the 1980s, when the trucking industry was first deregulated and the modern motor carrier industry started taking shape, Max Fuller was a young man from Chattanooga with trucking in his blood and ambition in his heart. Although he had no way of knowing it at the time, he found himself milling around Europe with the future Carnegies and Morgans and Rockefellers of American freight transportation.

Every year, truck manufacturer Freightliner would round up American truckers and company owners and send them on a tour-de-force through Europe, to see innovation on display. Among the Americans were Duane Acklie, founder of Crete Carrier Corp.; Clarence Werner, founder of Werner Enterprises; J.B. Hunt, founder of J.B. Hunt Transport and Russ Gerdin, founder of Heartland Express. And Max Fuller.

"It was a fraternity," said Fuller, lounging on a sofa in his office at U.S. Xpress' corporate headquarters off Jenkins Road near Ooltewah. "I couldn't have forced my way in to be part of that club. You had to be asked."

But the trucking giants he calls acquaintances and friends are not the only prestigious company Fuller keeps anymore. The chairman and CEO of U.S. Xpress was also just named one of the 100 most influential business school graduates around the globe by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools and Businesses.

The inaugural list sought to find and name global leaders from all fields who have impacted their industries and, in doing so, the world. Fuller was nominated by Robert Dooley, dean of UTC's College of Business, and made the list for pioneering innovation and technology in trucking — an industry that was already considered "mature" 30 years ago.

Fuller's fellow top 100 leaders include Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, Colin Powell, former U.S. secretary of state, and Tommy Franks, retired U.S. Army general.

Fuller brings a distinct Chattanooga flair to the elite roster of who's-who names. On one recent morning, the floor-to-ceiling, south-facing windows in Fuller's office opened onto a steady, cold rain and the slow-moving traffic on Interstate 75 below. In the distance, misty clouds shrouded the hooked horn of Lookout Mountain, around 13 miles away as the crow flies — and around 17 miles away as the truck drives.

Fuller is Chattanooga, through and through. Born here to a trucking stalwart in his own right, Clyde Fuller, Max grew up here and stayed here for college. He earned a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and went on to work for his father's company, Southwest Motor Freight.

Fuller and his brother, David Parker (whose mother married Clyde Fuller after the death of Parker's father) rose in the ranks at Southwest Motor Freight through the early '80s, before leaving the company after it was sold in the middle of the decade.

In 1986, Fuller and Parker — with assistance from their father — started separate trucking companies. Parker started Covenant Transport. Fuller partnered with former Southwest Motor Freight lawyer Pat Quinn and started U.S. Xpress.

Covenant, headquartered in Lookout Valley and headed by Parker, has grown to operate more than 2,700 trucks and 6,700 trailers, and is traded publicly.

U.S. Xpress is headed by Fuller. Quinn, who served as co-chairman and president at U.S. Xpress, succumbed to illness in 2011.

U.S. Xpress today operates 7,000 tractors and more than 19,000 trailers. The company has grown rapidly, so fast that officials took it public in 1994 to finance its growth. In 2007, U.S. Xpress was de-listed and again went private.

And the key all along has been innovation, and the dare-to-think-different helmsman in Fuller who hasn't been afraid to test new waters.

When Max Fuller was a student at UTC and working for Southwest Motor Freight, he discovered the electronic calculator. It was smaller, faster and quieter than its mechanical predecessors. Fuller could see its potential. His father, not so much.

"I went and bought one of these little electronic calculators, and he didn't believe it would give us accurate information," remembers Max of Clyde's reaction. "So he wouldn't pay for it."

Clyde Fuller was of a different time and mindset, of a paper and pen mentality, and of a brute force and grind approach to work. He pioneered American long-haul trucking, but he never gave up his Remington 99 calculator.

Max Fuller never set out to reinvent the 18-wheeler and the long-haul industry; he set out to perfect it and build on what men like his father had already done.

Sitting around listening to the Werners, Hunts, Acklies and Gerdins, Fuller soaked up their decades of experience and heeded their words of advice.

"Since I was the younger guy, they were kind of leading me along," he said. "I was getting a collection of 20, 30 best ideas. I was looking for a nugget of knowledge."

What he got was the rock on which he could build U.S. Xpress, the foundation for the house he would eventually construct of technology and innovation.

While at Southwest Motor Freight, Fuller bought the company a computer database, to his father's dismay.

"When he found out I had committed to buy an IBM computer, that was the end of the world," he remembers.

Fuller's youth was his advantage. Where his competitors — most his father's age — were slow to come around to electronic logistics, he didn't fear the coming change; he harnessed it.

Long before Chattanooga became the Gig City of startups and scruffy entrepreneurs, Fuller was implementing technology in unsexy ways in an unsexy industry. He helped pioneer GPS and satellite tracking for commercial truck fleets. He was an early adopter of automatic transmissions on commercial trucks.

Fuller had researchers at The Sim Center at UTC study the aerodynamics of tractors and helped pioneer fuel-saving side skirts for trailers. Many of U.S. Xpress' innovations have been widely adopted by the commercial trucking industry.

He says now that risking the innovations allowed U.S. Xpress to leap 25 years ahead of its competitiors. And it's been the rampant contentment of the trucking industry driving him all these years to do the job better, faster and more efficiently.

"It's really the frustration that the industry has been so slow to adopt new technology," he said.

Fuller's forward-thinking outlook and willingness to embrace innovation are what landed him on the AACSB list of the 100 most influential business school graduates.

"We're looking for innovators, which I know Max has been in the industry," said Dan LeClair, executive vice president and chief operating officer at AACSB International, a group devoted to recognizing and promoting accredited education.

AACSB-accredited schools were asked to nominate a graduate who fit the criteria of an influential leader. LeClair said AACSB received almost 200 nominations, from 125 schools in 25 countries.

"It was quite a bit more competitive than I thought it would be," he said.

Among those named to the top 100 list are leaders in all arenas, including government, business, non-profits and even military. Selection was not limited to those who simply rose in the ranks in the corporate world.

"It's easy for us to find people who are CEOs," said LeClair. "It was harder and more important for us to identify the people like Max who were trailblazers."

He said all the inaugural listers have at least one thing in common: "They built something significant."

"They were trailblazers. They were reformers. They were investors. They were social entrepreneurs," he said.

Looking back, Fuller sees so many things falling his way again and again.

He was born into trucking. And in Chattanooga, a "central port to a big part of the population of this country," he said.

Clyde Fuller gifted his sons trucks to get their companies started. And because Chattanooga was a smaller city, there was less initial capital required to get a company off the ground compared to some of U.S. Xpress' competitors.

In 1986, the year U.S. Xpress began operations, fuel prices took their biggest drop in history at that point, remembers Fuller. And fuel is roughly 20 percent of the cost of operating a long-haul trucking company.

"It turned out to be almost the perfect time to start a trucking company," said Fuller. "By 1989, we were growing so fast that we almost couldn't finance the company."

Fuller says he always seized the opportunities before him — but he doesn't take credit for the opportunities that appeared.

"I really believe I've been put in the right places at the right time," he said. "No one could have been that smart to put me there. I'm not that smart."

It's just like falling in with the eventual godfathers — the gatekeepers, Fuller calls them — of American motor carrier transport: "I couldn't make these things happen."

But Fuller the innovator isn't finished. He doesn't say much about retirement, other than "I probably won't." There are still untapped, undiscovered, technologies to harness. There are still ways to get goods to Americans faster, cheaper.

"I'm looking for a better way to do things," Fuller said. "I'm looking for that competitive advantage."

Then, he shared one of his favorite pieces of advice: If you don't like the result you're getting, change the equation.

After talking trucks for an hour, Fuller dropped an unexpected "Star Trek" reference. Remember when Capt. James T. Kirk reprogrammed the no-win-scenario Kobayashi Maru training exercise before taking the test himself.

"That way," said Fuller, "he knew all the answers."

I thought this was an interesting read. It had lots of insight and history of the company. Thought it might be useful to share...