LOGISTICS: IT SOLUTIONS & 3PL SURVEY 2008 - Road Works: RoadLink’s three-year North American road trip Roadlink’s CEO & President has taken his vision of the company half-way on a three-year road trip. Thus far this year the company has acquired three intermodal trucking services and inked a strategic agreement with a third. Remarkably, RoadLink has in total added eight companies in the last 12 months…and there is likely more in the works.By George Lauriat, AJOTIn talking with Chris Munro, Roadlink’s CEO & President, his enthusiasm for the task at hand is unmistakable – he wants to “build out” the Atlanta-based RoadLink into a truly North American intermodal “logistics player” from Canada to Mexico. Munro has been busy since he arrived in January 2007, as RoadLink, which is arguably already the largest logistics service provider in North America, has purchased eight companies in the last twelve months – the latest Vancouver, Washington-based American Freight Systems, Inc. (AFS). The acquisition is already the third of the year that also includes strategic agreement with a fourth intermodal trucking company. Before joining RoadLink, Munro was CEO of Linfox, a $1 billion Australia-based, pan-Asian logistics company. Linfox wasn’t Munro’s first foray into logistics, earlier, Munro held senior positions at Exel. RoadLink’s business is largely built around container drayage; the business of moving boxes to and from the port area with a customer base that is built of steamship lines, transportation service providers like NVOs and freight forwarders and more recently railroads and IMCs operating largely within 100 miles of the port. The initial strategy behind the formation of RoadLink was simply to create large enough group of drayage trucking companies to have leverage in the market (largely with the steamship lines) and size enough to favorably negotiate with service providers on issues such as fuel and insurance. “The drayage market was incredibly fragmented with 6,000 mom and pop shops,” Munro observed. Munro added, “overlaid on this landscape was the dramatic increase in imports into the US, particularly with the shift in inflow to the East Coast.” The challenges to the mom and pop drayage companies has also dramatically increased with TWIC, driver shortages, clean air requirements, rising insurance costs and the biggest threat of all, skyrocketing fuel costs. Munro acknowledges that when it comes to fuel prices it is likely something “we will learn with.” The result of these financial pressures has been an almost doubling in bankruptcies among trucking companies. In this difficult economic environment, size and access to capital, two important elements in RoadLink’s business arsenal are key not only to survival but expansion. A GRAND STRATEGY RoadLink has grown very rapidly from a loose confederation of drayage companies to a highly defined group that now has more than 60 Service Centers, 50 on-site customer locations, 2,200 vehicles and more than 5,000 Associates and Independent Contractors, in its fold. From the perspective of financial resources, the company is owned by Fenway Partners, LLC, a New York-based private equity firm that specializes in logistics company investment. Fenway Partners, looks to invest in companies with $100 million to $600 million enterprise value and reportedly has $1.6 billion in investments under its management. The closeness of the arrangement is reflected in the fact that Chris Munro also an operating partner of Fenway and director of Fastfrate. In November of 2007 Fastfrate was bought by Fenway Partners (under a collaborative fund of 75% with Fastfrate management retaining 25%). Fastfrate is one of Canada largest trucking firms with seventeen terminals and handling two billion pounds of freight annually. In late June, RoadLink and Montreal-based FastFrate entered into a strategic alliance tied to RoadLink’s acquisition of CP Ships Trucking Ltd. (C-Truck) from Hapag-Lloyd (Canada) Inc., which is currently under routine revi