Sparhawk Trucking Liquidates

That company isn't big at all. Kind of surprised they didn't find a buyer. Maybe they wanted too much or their debts are worse than reported.

 

if I'm not mistaken, almost half of their fleet is owner operators.

 

Should've filed chapter 7 complete liquidation. Bank will give them back the trucks and start all over with a clean slate. Nobody else would want most of them and might be a good deal. Chapter 11 hardly ever works out, you already have too much debt and not enough assets.

 

They had nothing of intrinsic value to offer.

4 years ago when Schneider bought DeBoer they specifically excluded the land and immediately sold off almost all the rolling assets. The only thing of value was their brokerage. And that's when equipment prices were still high. The same deal today wouldn't make sense.

To my knowledge, Sparhawk doesn't have it's own brokerage arm and has an aged fleet - many of which are hood trucks. Any carrier would be better off buying the equipment at auction and hiring the drivers off the street than buying the company. Especially when it looks like there are a couple of pending crash lawsuits - I'm not sure because this AI crap makes it hard to search.

Beyond the current market, Sparhawk looks like a mismanaged business. 16 office workers, 16 shop workers, and 42 drivers is a weird distribution. Yeah, they've got a lot of L/O, and I suspect that a lot of their drivers have left in the last 6 months. When you look at their google search result, there are more classic car pictures than trucks which makes me think the owner was using company assets for personal projects.

 

Chapter 11 gives the owners more time to siphon out assets.

 

There was a little bit of information on mutha trucker, but I don't think it dug down too deep. They were just saying how good the owner was to his employees. But that doesn't mean he was a great businessman.

 

Two things separate northern Wisconsin trucking companies from the Chicago Outfits. They pay W-2, not 1009 and the employees have a healthy dose of Stockholm syndrome.

 

Their big problem was the huge liability judgement from the railroad accident.

They have a brokerage arm also.

Their fleet was fairly new, had plenty of brand new tractors and trailers.

Was far more than 42 trucks, was well over 150 before filing.

What's being auctioned off now (ended last week) was all the old junk they had parked and used for parts.