BLP:373 They Sold the Company to Their Employees. Now they're Millionaires.
Release Date: 09/14/2026
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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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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BLP 369: 1 Gas Station to 1,400 Employees: How Wallis Built a Fuel Empire
Bulkloads Podcast
Bill Wallis went to work at 13 to help his family. He served in the 101st Airborne, came home, and bought a single gas station in Cuba, Missouri in 1968. Today Wallis Companies runs 67 stores, a 42 truck bulk fleet moving 120 loads a day, and employs around 1,400 people. In this episode, Matt and Alan take us inside the fuel hauling world most truckers never see: the predictive dispatch tech, the back to back state safety awards, why their turnover is almost zero, and the tribute show truck they built for Bill called "Blue Collar Roots." CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro: Meet Matt and Alan 0:41 From a K9...
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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 in the field. Robert breaks down how the ESOP actually works, why about a quarter of every employee's salary goes into it, and why more owners don't take that path. He also gets into the $2.8 billion I-70 reconstruction between Kansas City and St. Louis, the $608 million stretch ESS won coming out of St. Louis, the broken gas tax that funds our roads, and the freight side of heavy civil, including the 600 company trucks plus the third party haulers, quarry trucks, and brokers it takes to keep aggregate moving. If you haul rock, asphalt, or aggregate, this is a look at the other end of the load.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Meet Robert Gillis, co-CEO of Emery Sapp & Sons
01:55 Billy Sapp, 1972, and the problem that started the company
03:30 What an ESOP actually is, in plain terms
06:43 Why more owners don't sell to their employees
10:30 98 millionaires, and 59% of them work in the field
12:04 If it's in the dirt, on the dirt, or over the dirt
14:00 The $2.8 billion I-70 rebuild and the $608 million job
19:30 The gas tax problem nobody talks about
22:25 What trucking really means to a heavy civil contractor
23:56 600 company trucks and the third party haulers behind them
26:05 Why this company runs with two CEOs
31:08 3,000 retirements riding on your decisions