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BLP 362: From a Coin Flip to 750 Trucks: Inside the 75-Year Wayne Transports Empire

Release Date: 04/28/2026

BLP: 379 50 Years of Fighting for Truckers

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on Todd Spencer joined OOIDA as an owner-operator member in 1976 and has spent the half century since fighting for small business truckers. We sat down with him at OOIDA headquarters in Grain Valley, Missouri for a long conversation about the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the fights it has won, and the ones still ahead. He was elected to the board in 1978, came on staff in 1981 as editor of Land Line and communications director, back when the organization was small enough that he was not sure he would get paid, and became president in 2018 after decades as Jim...

BLP:378 Who Is OOIDA Actually Fighting?

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch On Plaintiff’s attorneys, large carrier associations, and the autonomous vehicle lobby. Those are the fights OOIDA is in right now, and Rod Nofziger walked us through all of them. We sat down at OOIDA headquarters in Grain Valley, Missouri to talk about what the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association actually does, who it is up against, and why the fight never ends. Rod worked for the US House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure before moving to DC law firms where OOIDA was a client, and he has been on staff 22 years. His father drove a truck, and he says he...

BLP:377 He Started With a Desk, a Chair, and a Seven Line Phone

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on From one desk, one chair, and a seven line phone in 1995 to a trucking, brokerage and transloading operation three decades later. Shannon Himango joins us to walk through the whole thing. He grew up in Two Harbors, Minnesota as a doctor's son who knew nothing about agriculture, got hired by Cargill out of St. Olaf with a degree in biology and economics, and got sent to East Dubuque, Illinois instead of the Geneva office he was hoping for. That is where he learned corn, beans, barge freight, rail freight, truck freight and how to trade the basis. After Cargill came Amarillo,...

BLP:376 Nobody Knows How Much Is in the Pile. These Two Fixed That.

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on Nobody really knows how much grain is in the pile. Rebulk is a Kansas City startup using LiDAR and a mobile app to scan bulk commodity piles and return exact volume and tonnage, and co-founders Warren and Cole joined us to explain how it works. Grain, feed, fertilizer, sand, salt, landscape rock, even raw tree logs with no defined pile shape. Walk around it with your phone, and the app tells you what is on the ground. Warren came out of Milk Movement building supply chain systems for the dairy industry, where he kept noticing feed piles that nobody could account for. Cole spent his...

BLP:375 From Finance Guy to Trucking CEO

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on Frankie Wilmot didn't grow up in trucking — he married into it. A former finance guy, Frankie became CEO of Corcoran Transportation Group about four years ago, right as the industry was heading into one of its worst downturns in history. In this conversation, he takes us through the full story: two cousins who started competing trucking companies in Billings, Montana back in the 1960s, a business that split apart across a generation, and how it came back together into one operation running roughly 150 trucks across four specialized fleets — including an Alaska division that runs...

BLP:374 From the Battlefield to the Brokerage

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on Ted Fyock Jr. spent six years as an Army armor officer, deployed to Iraq with the 3rd Infantry Division, and then built a career in consulting before starting Carolina Expressways, a bulk freight brokerage, from nothing. Jared Flinn sat down with Ted at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on land George Washington once owned, to walk the whole road. Winston-Salem roots and a family that has served in nearly every American conflict since the Revolutionary War. ROTC at Appalachian State and a commission in 2007, at the height of the surge. Kuwait, Baghdad, and Sadr City. Marrying at 24 and meeting...

BLP:373 They Sold the Company to Their Employees. Now they're Millionaires.

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on Emery Sapp & Sons is 100% employee owned, 3,000 employee owners strong, with 98 millionaires and about 600 trucks on the road every day. Jared Flinn sat down with co-CEO Robert Gillis in Columbia, Missouri to talk about what happens when a founder sells his company to the people who built it. Billy Sapp started in 1972 because the civil contractors wouldn't show up on time, so he did the work himself. In 1999 he and his partners sold the whole thing to their employees through an ESOP. Twenty six years later, 15 new millionaires were made in a single year, and most of them work...

BLP:372 He Bought One Dump Truck Out of High School, Now He Runs 40 Trucks Across Kansas

Bulkloads Podcast

Watch on Jesse Knight bought a four-axle dump truck the fall after he graduated high school in 1992, because there wasn't enough family farm ground left for a third man. Thirty-five years later, Knight Trucking runs roughly 40 trucks out of Lebo, Kansas, split evenly between end dumps and pneumatics, hauling rock, sand, salt, and food-grade freight across the Midwest. In this episode, Jared Flinn sits down with Jesse and his son Colby for a conversation two decades in the making, Jared first knocked on this door 20 years ago working truck logistics at Bartlett Grain. Jesse walks through...

BLP 371: His Dad's Dying Words: "You're Not Welcome At Page" | So He Earned It Back

Bulkloads Podcast

On his deathbed, Keith Titus told his son: "You're not welcome at Page. I have a plan, and you're not part of it." Three years later, the plan had failed. The company was down from 230 trucks to 70, losing a million dollars a year, and the bank had cut them off. Then Dan's mom — a 27-year school bus driver who never worked a day in the business — made a decision that changed everything: she put every dollar of her husband's life insurance into the company. "I grew up on a dirt-poor farm. I've got no problem going back there." In this episode, Dan Titus of Page Trucking sits down with us in...

BLP 370: Rolling Coal, an $18M Fine, and Redemption: The PDI Story

Bulkloads Podcast

They fined him $18 million. He built a diesel empire anyway. Jerad Wittwer grew up the son of a St. George milkman and rancher, overhauled his first engine at 13, and turned a passion for horsepower into Performance Diesel Inc. (PDI) — one of the most recognized names in diesel performance. But the road there ran straight through one of the most controversial chapters in trucking: EPA investigations, deleted trucks, and an $18 million federal fine. In this episode, Jerad sits down with Jared Flinn for an unfiltered conversation about the whole journey — the rise, the reckoning, and the...

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Check this episode out on our YouTube: https://youtu.be/hc33VvhAS_I

In 1950, a teenager who'd dropped out of school to save the family farm bought one truck and started hauling gasoline. Today, Wayne Transports runs 750+ trucks, moves nearly 290,000 loads a year, and posts driver turnover rates a fraction of the industry average. In this episode, we sit down with the next generation of Wayne ownership to unpack the full story — the Korean War tragedy that almost ended the company before it started, the bank loan that gave it its name, the move from Milaca to Rosemount that unlocked decades of growth, and how the family handed the president's chair to a non-family member for the first time in company history… one month before COVID hit.

We also get into the operational side: the AI tools rebuilding their dispatch floor, the camera + safety stack keeping their fleet on the road, the acquisition playbook that's added 35 trucks a year, and why their turnover sits at 18% while the rest of the industry burns through drivers at 60-90%. If you run a fleet, drive for one, or want to understand how a real American trucking dynasty actually gets built — this one is for you.

🚛 Need freight? BulkLoads connects shippers and carriers across the bulk space — find your next load at https://www.bulkloads.com/?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=Video&utm_campaign=Wayne+Podcast

⏱ TIMECODES / CHAPTERS

00:00 — Meet the next generation of Wayne ownership

00:35 — Handing the presidency to the first non-family member (Jason Bucci)

01:37 — One month in, COVID hits: 86 drivers laid off overnight

02:30 — "If you can't keep it in the black, I'm coming back" — Wayne's mandate

03:00 — Memories of Grandpa Wayne, cinder blocks, and card games

05:00 — The 8th-grade coin flip that started everything

06:30 — Hauling cattle to the South Saint Paul Stockyards

07:30 — The Korean War tragedy that almost ended the company

08:11 — The bank loan, the collateral form, and how "Wayne Transports" got its name

09:08 — Building the Malacca shop and the 1979 move to Rosemount