Buffalo Bills Player Doubles as Trucking Owner
This story appears in the July 25 & August 1 print edition of Transport Topics.
In the fall, Nickell Robey plays cornerback for the Buffalo Bills. But when he isn’t on the football field, he fulfills a lifelong dream and a family tradition to manage a for-hire trucking business.
Maximize Enterprise, which is based in the Orlando suburb of Bartow, mainly moves produce between Florida and South Carolina in refrigerated trailers. Robey’s company employs two drivers operating two Peterbilt trucks with Thermo King reefers.
“We work with big shippers, such as Tropicana, Tyson chicken, or medium-size businesses, to see what they have to move. We might move watermelons, milk, water or corn or other refrigerated items,” Robey said. “We also depend on the brokers and load boards to see what jobs are out there.”
The business isn’t profitable right now, Robey acknowledges. But with his NFL salary, he maintains that making money isn’t the top priority at this moment. The cornerback earned $1.5 million in his three-year rookie contract and signed a two-year extension last offseason for $4.1 million.
“It’s definitely not about money. I’m envisioning my future for life after football. It was an idea that I had in college, and I’m turning the idea into a reality. It’s about continuing the family business. It’s about pride. I take pride on the football field, and I take pride in my trucking business,” Robey said.
He does not have a commercial driver license, although he said he would consider getting one after his NFL career.
His family has been in the business for a combined 70 years, and Robey spent most of his time outside football, and as a child, at trucking companies.
His grandfather, Johnny Coleman, spent 35 years in the freight industry and transported beverages including Coca-Cola and Minute Maid. His mother, Maxine, owned and managed Maxine & Earl Robey Trucking for more than a decade. His father, Earl, and uncles were longhaul drivers for the company, which folded after Maxine died in February 2010. Meanwhile, Tina Carter, Robey’s aunt, is in customer service for Oakley Transport Inc., based in Lake Wales, Florida. Oakley specializes in transporting liquid food-grade products and hazardous materials on tanker trailers.
Robey said he believes his company will turn profits and continue to grow after his NFL career. He plans to have 100 trucks over the next 15 to 20 years, but Robey also remembers his father told him to take it one day at a time, one truck at a time. Maximize Enterprise is a reminder of that message. He named the company after his late mother, whom he calls the inspiration for the company mantra of “maximizing life, maximizing opportunities.”
During the football season, he leaves the day-to-day operations of Maximize Enterprise to his cousin, Holly Carter, whose duties include keeping in touch with brokers and monitoring load boards, tracking drivers, booking routes, overseeing repairs and handling accounts receivable. Business is tough, Carter said, because more freight comes into the state than goes out.
“What we will often do is take a pay cut going north out of Florida. But once we hit Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, our trucks get jobs and keep moving, and it makes up for the lack of what we made coming out of Florida,” Carter said.
The company operates in just those four states for now, but that could change if the business grows, Robey and Carter said. The next goal, however, is to purchase a flatbed or a low boy because they notice brokers and load boards in Florida have a lot of jobs for drivers with flatbeds.
Tami Russell, Robey’s great-aunt, runs the brokerage business BBB Transport and Logistics, which Robey bought last year. It specializes in oversize loads and flatbeds, Carter said.
Balancing the NFL and a trucking business is a challenge, Robey admitted. He spends time in the offseason building relationships with companies and brokers face to face, but during the season, much of the communication is over the phone.
“Even during the season, we will speak. He will call after practice and check in with us to see what loads we have scheduled for the day or whether the truck needs repairs. The only day we don’t speak is on Sunday,” Carter said.
Most NFL games are played on Sundays.
Other athletes have tried their hand at the trucking industry, with mixed success, after leaving their sport. Roy Williams, who was a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, began a trucking company in 2012. Karl Malone, who played power forward for the NBA’s Utah Jazz, launched a trucking company in 1993 with six tractor-trailers but folded the business 18 months later. And MLB’s Mookie Wilson, an outfielder for the New York Mets, became a longhaul truck driver in 1999, eight years after leaving baseball, and continues the job part time.
