MARKET EXPRESS APPOINTS DONALD SANDRIDGE AS PRESIDENT
& CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AND GREGORY GALBRAITH AS CHIEF REVENUE OFFICE
PORTLAND, Oregon, January 15, 2025 – Today, Market Express, a premier dedicated truckload carrier on the West Coast, announced the appointment of Donald Sandridge to President/COO and Gregory Galbraith to Chief Revenue Officer.
“The addition of Don to our team, and the changes I’m making organizationally to enable Greg to fully focus exclusively on customers, are key parts of our growing investment in human capital to serve our customers,” said Peter W. Stott, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Market Express. “I’m very proud of the team we’ve been able to assemble here at Market Express and the growth that is manifesting itself across our various divisions.”
Mr. Sandridge previously served as Chief Operating Officer and EVP at Market Express, having come to the company in early 2024 from CRST where he was President – Dedicated Solutions West. Mr. Galbraith previously served as COO of the Market Express intermodal and truck brokerage business units and has been part of the company since its inception in 2016.
“I am very excited to be part of the entrepreneurial culture and Market Express team where I can fully leverage my 20+ years of experience on the West Coast in dedicated fleet and pool operations,” said Sandridge. “I’m excited by the growth we are seeing across our three service divisions of truckload, intermodal and brokerage, even in the current environment.”
“I am energized to take on this new challenge and having the opportunity to be able to exclusively focus on driving new revenue sources with our customers while helping solve the challenges shippers have in dealing with the complexities of dedicated and multi-modal transportation here in the West,” said Galbraith.
About Market Express
Market Express is a premier dedicated trucking company and solutions provider on the West Coast providing customers tailored solutions through its three divisions: Dedicated trucking/van fleet operations across 11 Western states; Intermodal services using the company’s own fleet of containers and specialized intermodal equipment of its customers and third parties; and domestic full truckload brokerage.
The company operates from 23 facilities in the U.S. and Canada with over 500 employees and contractors and is headquartered in Portland, OR.
The company consistently drives innovation in its mission of delivering best-in-class transportation solutions while growing its business safely and responsibly, exceeding expectations of customers, employees, and investors. For more information, please visit Marketexpress.com
Media Contact: Lea Pfau, Market Express, 971.867.2340, lea.pfau@marketexpress.com
Peter Stott is chairman and CEO of Market Express.
By Rob Smith – Contributing writer
Jun 9, 2023
Lighthouse Awards recognize companies that have been included on the Private 100 list for five consecutive years.
Market Express
Headquarters: Portland
What it does: Regional transportation
Top executives: Chairman and CEO Peter Stott, President and Chief Marketing Officer Greg Galbraith, Chief Administrative Officer Jay Wilson
Chairman and CEO Peter Stott
Employees: 517
2022 revenue: $248,547,416
Two-year revenue growth: 113.02%
Peter Stott is under no illusion about his company’s future growth.
Stott is chairman and CEO of Market Express LLC, a regional transportation company he co-founded with his nephew, Greg Galbraith, in 2016. For the three years ending in 2022, the Portland-based company recorded 113% revenue growth. It reported almost $250 million in revenue last year.
“The larger you get, of course, the harder it is to repeat,” said Stott, whose company ranked as the Portland Business Journal’s fastest-growing company in Oregon back in 2019. “We’re a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar business now. It’s hard to keep rolling at a thousand percent.”
Market Express is just Stott’s latest endeavor in a highly successful, decades-long entrepreneurial career. Stott founded his first transportation company, Market Transport LTD, as a student at Portland State University back in 1969.
He co-founded forest products company Crown Pacific, served as CEO at development firm ScanlanKemperBard and served on the board of trucking and logistics firm Conway. He remains president at Columbia Investments, a company he founded in 1988.
Stott admitted that he had no idea Market Express would become so successful so quickly. The transportation and logistics company offers intermodal and brokerage services and boasts a fleet of almost 400 trucks and 800 dry and refrigerated trailers in 11 Western states. Growth has been fueled mostly organically but also by several acquisitions.
“I would say I was pleasantly surprised (by our growth), but we knew we had to get from zero to a certain level in a hurry before we could start making any money,” he said. “But I really had no expectation that we would end up where we are today.”
Now, however, the company is coping with a freight recession, meaning that fewer trucks are delivering goods because of manufacturing downturns and weakened consumer demand. A freight recession, Stott noted, generally precedes an economic recession, though he added that the company is well-prepared for any headwinds coming its way.
That confidence is borne out of more than half-a-century as a successful business executive. He said a colleague recently told him that it was an “anxious” time in the freight industry. Stott admitted to being apprehensive but said he’s not really worried.
“In this business you never really relax,” he said. “You worry about your employees and your business, and I worry about the economy.”
Challenges notwithstanding, Stott’s goal is to grow the business to between $500 million and $650 million in top-line revenue within the next five years.
“It’s like hitting the pause button,” he said. “Just make sure that when you come out of it, you’re ready to go.”
May 11, 2023
Name: Greg Galbraith
Company: Market Express
What it does: Transportation-trucking/railroad
Title: President
Focused on sales and marketing, Greg Galbraith helped lift Market Express to become one of the fastest-growing companies in Oregon, with a projected revenue of $286.7 million this year. As part of the C-suite and board of directors, he identifies new opportunities for sales and growth. Community focused, he is a board member of the Peter & Julie Stott Foundation benefiting education, the environment, arts and disadvantaged communities. He is also on the board of the Pacific Northwest Evans Scholars Foundation, providing college scholarships for youth golf caddies with limited finances.
What is your favorite piece of business advice?
Know what you know and what you don’t know.
What advice would you have told yourself 20 years ago?
Don’t limit yourself. You don’t always know what you’re capable of.
What was your biggest challenge last year and how did you overcome it?
The company was growing so quickly I was concerned about the infrastructure we had in place to support the business. The first action was to keep the team’s morale high and very focused by encouraging employees to collaborate on the most important priorities. Next, I encouraged cross training among individuals and groups while adding minor technology enhancements to drive better productivity and efficiencies. Most importantly, empowering our people, especially certain key roles, to make decisions quicker and to support them along the way. These actions appeared to have a profound impact on our ability to get through the work, create high customer satisfaction, while also looking forward to sustaining what we were building.
How could local and state leaders improve the climate for businesses? Our leaders need to put some stakes in the ground and take action. Businesses don’t feel like our elected officials are listening. Crime, drug use and homelessness are just some of the problems impacting our city and dampening business enthusiasm. With genuine engagement and collaboration between local and state officials and our business leaders, we might be surprised at what is possible.
Proving everything old is new, Portland trucking icon’s second venture jumps from zero to $50 million in two years
Linda Baker, Senior Environment and Technology Reporter·
In 1969 while he was a student at Portland State University, Peter Stott started his first trucking company, Market Transport, with a truck he paid for with a loan from a professor, $90 of his own money and a draw against his insurance policy. The company grew to 2,500 employees and contractors and $359 million in revenue. In 2006, Market Transport was sold to UTI Worldwide Inc. for $197 million.
Three years ago Stott got back into the business, launching Market Express with three employees, one truck, one trailer and one driver.
Today the truckload, less-than-truckload and intermodal transportation company is one of the top five regional carriers on the West Coast. It employs 333 staff and contractors, operates 200 trucks and 550 trailers and grossed $50 million in 2018. Revenues in 2019 are expected to clock in at $83 million.
Stott and other members of the executive team sat down with FreightWaves recently to talk about the exponential growth, driver shortages and other challenges and what’s changed about trucking over the past 55 years.
The company owes its success, they said, to a trifecta – a strong economy, a pair of fortuitous acquisitions and one man’s personal brand.
In 2013, Heartland Express purchased Gordon Trucking, a major carrier in Pacific, Washington. That was followed by Heartland’s purchase in 2017 of another big West Coast carrier, Interstate Distributors, based in Tacoma.
“There was fallout from the acquisition that provided some opportunities for us, in addition to there being a strong freight market,” Stott said. “The two things came together at the same time.”
The third factor was Stott himself. Stott is something of an entrepreneurial icon; he founded and was CEO at Crown Pacific, a publicly traded timber management company, served as chief of the commercial real estate firm ScanlanKemperBard Companies and co-founded Columbia Investments, where he continues to serve as president.
He also served 15 years on the board of trucking and logistics firm Con-way.
“Let’s face it – another group similar to ours that didn’t have the profile of ours would have had a much bigger challenge,” said Greg Galbraith, president of Market Express and the former president of Market Transport. “Peter’s reputation speaks for itself. He’s got a Rolodex that allowed us to do some things others wouldn’t be able to do.”
Market Express is primarily an I-5 carrier, with 50 percent of revenue coming from dedicated services. (Interstate 5 is the main interstate highway on the West Coast, running largely parallel to the Pacific coast of the contiguous U.S. from Mexico to Canada.) The company serves mid-size shippers and Fortune 500 companies that transport consumer goods (mostly food and beverage) north and paper products south.
Stott and his team have been aggressive about soliciting business, expanding the company’s geographical reach while staying focused on corridors. The company runs a Denver-Los Angeles-Denver route; Market Express is also starting to run trucks on a Denver-Portland-Los Angeles triangle; as well as a Denver to Kansas City lane.
“Colorado, like Oregon and Washington, has a growing economy with great growth opportunities,” said COO Nick Campos.
In 2017, Market Express purchased Denver-based Westco Express. That added around 60 trucks and helped establish the transportation and logistics company as a regional powerhouse. Looking ahead, the company aims “to add more logos,” said Galbraith, a reference to future acquisitions. “But growth is higher on the organic side,” he said. “It’s much easier to grow organically and frankly we think it’s more profitable. It will be a blend.”
Like other carriers, Market Express said growth depends on its ability to attract and retain the people who work behind the wheel.
“The number one thing that has propelled us forward is we are a ‘respect’ organization,” Campos said. “And the respect standard in this industry is how you treat your drivers. You don’t treat them well, they won’t stay with you. There are plenty of other options for them in this economy.”
Market Express driver salaries average in the mid-$50,000s to over $70,000 for over-the-road.
When Stott got his start in trucking in 1969, there were pay telephones on the highways and typewriters in the office. The weight limit for trucks was 74,000 pounds, and the I-5 freeway northbound from Portland into Washington state was mostly a two-lane road, as was the freeway across the border to California. Hiring a driver involved a one-page, two-sided application, followed by a spin around the block to see if he could shift gears – an automatic transmission in a heavy-duty truck was unheard of.
“A lot of the nuances have changed,” said Stott. But the core business model has not. “If you put technology aside, it’s still the same business as when I started driving 55 years ago. Drivers are still the best sales people for the company.”
Looking ahead, the team aims to ramp up its brokerage service, currently about 20 percent of revenue, as well as its intermodal division, now about 10 percent of business. “We’re going to try and get our customers going with two products instead of one, and if we can get all three, that’s even better,” Galbraith said.
The team talked about regulatory and technology changes roiling the industry.
On the topic of digital freight brokerages, they were politely dismissive. “There are a lot of different spins that are placed on the same way of doing business,” said Campos.
Self-driving technology offers tremendous potential to improve safety and efficiency, they said. “But in the short-run, the hype around autonomous vehicles is a bit discouraging to the industry,” Campos said. “It’s a bit of dis-incentivizer when we claim we can replace drivers with a computer.”
Asked about a cap-and-trade carbon pricing bill making its way through the Oregon legislature, Campos said people often miss the point about trucking and greenhouse gas emissions. “People view trucking as a high carbon footprint business,” he said. “But we’re not. We’re here because the consumer wants to buy from Amazon, or needs a head of lettuce. We’re all high carbon individuals and trucking is a byproduct of that.”
As the industry changes, Market Express soldiers on. By the end of March the team will have relocated from its temporary offices on the premises of the Jubitz Travel Center to an adjacent 17-acre site.
The move marks another back-to-the future moment for the company and Stott, a long-time philanthropist whose name adorns his alma mater Portland State University’s Peter W. Stott Center, the subject of a recent $54 million renovation.
“It all started with Peter’s brand,” said Galbraith, “and we took it from there.”
Article from FreightWaves
Truck drivers in high demand as stores in Oregon work to replenish stock
PORTLAND, OR (KPTV) – Certain items just can’t seem to stay on store shelves amid the COVID-19 outbreak, and local stores are working hard with their suppliers to replenish stock.
That means truck drivers are working around the clock to try and restore the balance for consumers.
Market Express is a locally-owned, for-hire trucking company based in north Portland that serves not only the metro area, but everything west of Denver between Mexico and Canada.Right now, the company’s 320 drivers are in very high demand.