Why the Top 100?

The Top 100 For-Hire Carriers Survey is something of an institution around here, now 14 years old, the latest version published in last month’s issue. It never fails to prompt calls and letters. This year has been no different.

Some people want more information about the fleets we list. Others want to know why a particular carrier is missing when everyone knows it belongs. We get calls wondering why we rank by fleet size — annual revenues would be more interesting, although folks forget that most companies are private and not compelled to indulge such things — and besides, how many trucks a carrier has says little about its ability to make a customer happy.

In light of all this, others ask why we bother. A few folks on the inside ask the same question every now and then.

The fact is, we do the Top 100 because people care. Even a reluctance to join in the fun tells me the survey is useful. If a fleet owner or manager won’t give us numbers, it’s because those numbers mean something. It’s because they indicate something true about a given operation. Why else would anyone want to hide them?

We sometimes get a call after publication from some fleet owner claiming we missed him. The survey is a surprisingly big undertaking, and we do find ourselves having missed someone almost every year. It’s usually a fleet that grew bigger quickly, but sometimes it’s just one of those quiet outfits that doesn’t ordinarily seek the limelight but calls supporting the notion that we’re doing something worthwhile.

In fact, I don’t need that external confirmation of the survey’s value. When we conceived it more than a decade ago, then-publisher Jim Glionna and I, we were an upstart magazine looking to have an impact. Sure, I’ll admit there was a purely commercial reason behind the survey’s genesis, but in this editor’s eyes, we were also looking to make a practical difference.

The industry was hardly studied back then. No way to benchmark how a given carrier was doing in a volatile industry that was approaching both deregulation and free trade. Nobody had ever tried it before, and there were precious few numbers of any sort to define trucking, so we forged ahead. The first one was tough. To whatever extent we’re a credible magazine now, we didn’t have the same stature back then. So when I called Arrow or Day & Ross or anybody else, I had a bit of a fence to climb.

Nonetheless, with gaps aplenty, it was accomplished. Yes, no doubt there were fleets inflating their numbers, and maybe there still are a few, but not over the course of so many years. Who remembers their last lie?

I soon realized that employee numbers were a better indicator of a fleet’s relative success than vehicle counts anyway. So I added people in the next version. If I couldn’t get financial figures, and almost nobody would provide them, the next best measuring stick was people. You might park trucks against the fence when business drops off, but not assets of the human variety. There’s a story in there somewhere, but I’ll leave that for another time.

In any event, emboldened by the gratitude we encountered for having done the for-hire survey, we then drove down a very muddy path indeed. Given that half of all trucking is done by private fleets, it seemed logical — actually, necessary — to study that sector as well in the Top 100 way. Big mistake. Tried it twice, got the t-shirt… and gave it up as a distinctly lost cause.

Private trucking remains unstudied, not just by us, though I still harbour a wish to try it again. But it’s so fragmented, so diverse, so unconnected to any common thread, that it’s a bigger job than we have resources to deal with on our own. Even the mighty Statistics Canada largely steers clear.

So we’re left with the for-hire survey.

And it is just exactly what it is — an annual accounting of the size of the country’s top for-hire fleets measured by vehicles and people. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
For carriers themselves, it should be useful in that benchmarking sense, a way to see who’s grown and who hasn’t, a way to measure yourself against others. For researchers trying to define the nature of Canadian trucking, it’s one more weapon in a slim arsenal. And for marketers, well, it’s become almost essential as they try to cost a given project or pinpoint an approach to Canadian fleets.

We’d welcome suggestions as to how to make the survey more useful, of course, and ideas for other research as well. Send me an e-mail, or call me at 416/614-5825. I’m keen to do more.