CCJ | Commercial Carrier Journal : October 2008
Profile:ATA Chairman Charles 'Shorty' Whittington
94 Commercial Carrier Journal October 2008 C harles Shorty Whittington knows something about working hard and getting a little dirty. As an Indiana farm boy, Whittington was operating farm trac-tors by the time he was six years old. And even as the family's business evolved to include selling feed and fer-tilizer, operating a grain elevator and, ultimately, running a trucking com-pany, he understood that taking on challenges most people would prefer to avoid is a tough but reliable path to success. In many ways, this is also how Whittington, chief executive officer of Grammer Industries, sees his involve-ment in the American Trucking Associations as he becomes chairman of the organization this month. Specializing in success Whittington joined the family busi-ness in 1968 after graduating from Purdue University with a degree in agriculture. He quickly learned some of the basics of trucking through the company's operation of grain trucks. When I got into the elevator busi-ness, I joined the grain feed associa-tions, Whittington notes. As I found out how important truck transporta-tion was, I decided that I could prob-ably make more money in trucking than in the grain elevator business. Grammer Industries' transition into principally a transportation services com-pany took more than a decade. In 1972, Whittington landed a contract hauling mail between Columbus, Ind., and Cincinnati with two trips a day. It wasn't a big operation, but it was an opportu-nity to learn transportation, he says. A few years later, Grammer Industries began leveraging its investment in trucks further by backhauling fertilizer on loads of grain to river barges. In 1977, 90 percent of Grammer Industries' business was grain and fer-tilizer. But Whittington saw an oppor-tunity in specialized transportation and made two key moves: It bought its first trailer for transporting anhydrous ammonia, and it landed its first oper-ating authority. The key to Whittington's business model was hauling commodities that didn't appeal to the average trucking or rail operation for various reasons. We didn't want to compete with the Schneiders, the Qualitys and so on, he says. We kept our ducks lined up in a specialized field, and that has worked well for us. By 1986, Whittington had decided to commit to transporta-tion services as Grammer Industries' principal business. That was the year the company bought out an anhydrous ammonia fleet, and Whittington followed that with acquisitions in the late 1980s that diversified Grammer Industries by commodity and geography. Diversification was critical because Grammer Industries no longer could afford to have all its assets tied exclu-sively to agriculture. At one point, 70 percent of the company's annual business took place during 70 days in the spring, Whittington says. In recent years, for example, Grammer Industries has been hauling lique-fied petroleum gas. Whittington had shunned transporting LP gas in the 1980s as not being specialized enough, but later he found that the LP gas business helped smooth out the com-pany's spring and summer seasonality. Today, Grammer Industries' trans-portation services include anhydrous ammonia, LP gases, carbon dioxide, nitric acid and bulk liquid corrosive hazardous waste throughout the eastern half of the United States. The company provides other services, including safety and emergency response training, emergency recovery and rail car offloading, consulting and development. Whittington has diversi-fied further through a biofuels busi-ness, Integrity BioFuels. GROWING INTO LEADERSHIP Incoming ATA Chairman Shorty Whittington finds success in a farm-raised work ethic. BY AVERY VISE Shorty Whittington has been a longtime leader in the Agricultural and Food Transporters Conference.