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

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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, then a small regional shop in Levelland, Texas where he built a rail program and shorted the daylights out of the 1992 milo crop. He left that job over a values disagreement with 90 days of savings and a child on the way, and his phone started ringing the first day out. He brokered 300,000 bushels of corn that afternoon, spent every dollar of the commission on office furniture and a phone system, and opened The Titan Company on October 15, 1995. The business grew into commodity brokerage, freight brokerage and a truck fleet after he bought out his friend Joey's ten truck operation in 1996. Then came a $450,000 warehouse in Lubbock, sunflower seeds at six dollars a ton, and the morning he drove out at 3AM to find out why a hundred trucks were sitting in line waiting on loads.

That curiosity turned into Titan Transloading, an $8 million bet on a frac sand facility, unit trains unloading 400 truckloads at a time, and a partnership with Lansing Trade Group that he sold into in 2013 and 2014. Shannon also explains how he used single family real estate as a hedge against diesel prices, how a single phone call put him in the hydrochloric acid business for fifteen years, and what happened when COVID stopped the oil field with 148 trucks running and a bank note that did not stop. He talks openly about negative cash flow of $300,000 in a month, telling his team he might not make it, thinking he would lose everything, and how he came out of it with zero debt and reserves in the bank. We close on what he would tell anyone entering the grain business today, and why Titan is not offshoring its brokerage to AI.

Chapters:

0:00 A Doctor's Son Who Didn't Want Hospitals
1:39 Cargill Sends Him to East Dubuque
3:13 Why He Left Cargill for a Small Shop
5:35 Finding Home in Levelland, Texas
9:36 The Milo Short That Made $3 Million
11:56 Rail Programs and Shorting, Explained
16:37 Walking Away Over Values
20:36 Waiting to See If the Check Cleared
21:21 300,000 Bushels on Day One
22:57 Merchandiser vs Broker, the Difference
28:22 First Hires and Buying Joey's Ten Trucks
30:44 Commodities and Freight Under One Roof
32:19 The $450,000 Warehouse Gamble
34:38 A Hundred Trucks Lined Up at 3AM
36:17 Borrowing $8 Million
38:40 400 Truckloads Per Train
42:34 "Can You Transload Crude Oil?"
47:23 209 Bobby Street and a Promise to His Dad
48:12 Real Estate as a Diesel Hedge
52:55 How the Acid Business Started
56:03 148 Trucks When COVID Hit
57:35 Down $300,000 in a Month
1:00:41 The Drive That Changed His Mind
1:02:40 Selling the Trucks and Paying Off Every Dollar
1:04:41 Family and Life Today
1:09:24 Advice for Anyone Entering the Grain Business
1:12:32 AI, Offshoring, and Why Titan Won't

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