Never Stand Still

Hi guys!
I think tomorrow I'll give this thread a shot in the arm.

Saturday night Katie and I were hanging out driving around and she doesn't really know very much about trucking so I took her to my yard because she wanted to see where I worked and I showed her our trucks and told her how to read the numbers on the tractors and the trailers and what it all means.

I work for a broadline food service distributor so I showed her where the ramp is on the trailer and how the refer units work and how we connect two trailers together. Just the introductory course of course.

I know that sounds like the worst date ever, but actually she was really receptive she said "Your like really interesting, I don't know very much at all about the food business or trucking and this is all new to me I figured I would have to do some homework, but I thought that the homework I would have to do would be about sports instead it's this, which is wow this is all way new to me."

 

So we are friends and you see CF got them selves into a mess. Larry Scott mortgaged the company to some loan sharks and it was up to Moffitt to get it back.

So in 1990 Moffitt made some telephone calls and was able to put CF revenue equipment up as collateral and Moffitt was able to get a $300 million dollar line of credit from Bank of America.
However firing Larry Scott was proving hard because if he was to go it made management look bad and banks wouldn't want to lend CF money.

Now Larry Scott was still CEO of CF at this time and in June of 1990 Scott, gave a state of the company.

In June of 1990 CF trucking revenue was at $11 million dollars a day and a 2.9% rate hike was on the way and competitive discounting was over.


Con-Way Companies were running 20% ahead of 1989 revenue and operating profits were over 4million dollars for the Con-Way Companies. Now Conway South West Express was formed in 1990 and that cost CF a few bucks, but the Con-Way companies always did good and were always well run except for CEX which was always a mess from day one, but that was a mistake from the beginning.

Even Emery Air Freight was doing better they only lost $15million in May which was $5million less then in April so that was pretty good.

Now later in the summer of 1990 Emery Air Freight was only losing $1.1 million a month and Larry Scott said that Emery Air Freight was "functionally fixed"

However, Leach, O'Brien and Chambers decided that Larry Scott needed to go and in mid July Larry Scott was fired and O'Brien and Leach ran the company as CEO's.

Scott's big undoing was like Sneads just a little to much to fast. However, Scott was right, though Emery Air Freight had a future with "globalization" on the horizon.

However Scott almost bankrupting the company trying to get Emery off the ground and still not being able to make Emery profitable was Scotts undoing.

Unfortunatly Emery Air Freight's bad rep took the company down, so CF's PR department started a "save the babies" campaign to say look our trucking and regional trucking are still really really good and you need to continue shipping with us.

The Con-Way companies them selves were always ran very well from day 1 and besides a few bumps with CEX there wasn't much trouble with the Con-Ways.

In 1984 they actually called CF CF Motor Freight and didn't go back to being CF until 1991.

Now by September of 1990 CF MotorFreight hit revenue of $200million monthly and the Con-Ways were above $50million dollars.

Donald Moffitt had managed to get all of CF's loans straightened out and got CF out from under the thumb of Chemical Bank. CF got absolutly hosed with there loan from Chemical Bank and Moffitt said it was the most expensive loan in the history of the world.


While CF was back on track even Emery Air Freight was starting to head in the right direction there was still some trouble on the horizon with CEX.

Tune in next time to see how they fixed Con Way Eastern Express.

 

Not really. All it says is they were able to get Emery to where it wasn't losing as much money and Scott declared it "functionally fixed".

I think Emery actually started doing better in the 1990s. Emery went under in 2001 one of there planes got in a terrible wreck and that was the end of them.

Emery was just a mess of bad companies and mergers and was a goofy investment for CF it did pan out a little in the 1990s when they got a contract to haul mail, but I don't know they didn't go into great detail on what CF actually did to fix Emery.

If you can find anything out let us know.

 

@Mike_77
Page 404 they talk about what to do with Emery Air Freight so that's coming up.

 

So real quickly here we are, with the fate of Conway Eastern Xpress a.k.a CEX.

In the late 1980s and 1990 CEX's union contract was about to come due and was time to be renegotiated.

At the same time, CEX had been losing money they lost 7million on $67.7 million in 1989.

CEX was a loser from the begining and never fit it was a company that Conway bought out known as Penn Yan Xpress and it was also a teamsters outfit. The only teamsters Con-Way outfit out there.

Anyhow Con-Way wanted easier work rules and the union wanted harder stricter work rules in the job descriptions.

Well it didn't take and the union and Con-Way couldn't figure out a good contract and with CEX being a loser from day one CF decided to pull the plug and just like that in 1990 CEX was gone.

The union workers who were on strike coulnd't believe CEX went under so fast. It cost money to put CEX under, but at the amount it was losing it was worth it to Con-Way to put CEX out to bed. So that's just what happened to CEX.