Opinion: Congressman Lauds Don Schneider
This Opinion piece appears in the Feb. 27 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Editor’s Note: Don Schneider, chairman emeritus and former president and CEO of Schneider National Inc., died Jan. 13 in De Pere, Wis., at the age of 76.
As one of the nation’s most influential trucking executives, Don Schneider transformed the trucking business started by his father in 1935 into one of the largest truckload freight carriers in the United States.
Under the younger Schneider’s leadership, revenue for the privately owned company grew from $82 million in 1976, when he took over as president, to $2.6 billion by the time he retired in 2002. Today, the carrier, based in Green Bay, Wis., ranks No. 6 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers and No. 3 on the TT Top 50 Logistics Companies list.
Don Schneider was a leader in trucking’s transformation from a strictly tires-on-the-highway industry into one embracing the technology and techniques needed to do business in the 21st century. An early adopter of intermodal transportation, Schneider forged alliances with railroads and was among the first to establish a logistics subsidiary.
Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.) is a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives and chairman of that panel’s Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials. On Jan. 23, Shuster recognized Don Schneider from the House floor and entered the following remarks into the Congressional Record:
House of Representatives
HONORING DONALD SCHNEIDER
HON. BILL SHUSTER OF PENNSYLVANIA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Monday, January 23, 2012
MR. SHUSTER. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to rise today to recognize Mr. Donald Schneider, a pioneer who transformed the transportation industry as we know it. I am pleased to have the opportunity to call attention to his service and his remarkable story of American entrepreneurship and ingenuity.
Mr. Schneider, chairman emeritus and former president of Schneider National Inc., ran one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers with nearly 12,500 tractors and 35,000 trailers, all painted in a distinct shade of orange. You may have seen his trucks driving down our great national highways, hauling goods from coast to coast. Behind these trucks was a stellar businessman who leveraged new technologies and innovation to grow his company into one of the most successful, recognizable and respected transportation and logistics companies in North America. In the process, an industry was transformed and millions of Americans benefited from his life’s work without them even realizing.
Mr. Schneider was a hard-working man who began as a mechanic’s assistant and truck driver at the age of 18. He graduated from St. Norbert College with an undergraduate degree in business and married his wife, Pat, in 1957. After serving a 13-month military tour of duty in Korea, Mr. Schneider graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School, then began work in his father’s trucking business in 1961, fusing his passion for trucking with a keen business sense.
Over the next three decades, Mr. Schneider expanded his fleet substantially, using modern management techniques and acquisition of regional trucking companies to grow his business. Under Mr. Schneider’s leadership, Schneider National was one of only a few pre-deregulation truckload carriers that survived and flourished after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980.
Later in the same decade, his company even began to install satellite communication in trucks. By allowing companies to track their trucks in real time, consumers benefited from faster package deliveries and just-in-time inventory management.
His company’s entrance into the logistics business in 1993 heralded a new frontier in trucking by enhancing the ability of companies to manage time-sensitive deliveries and inventories. Meanwhile, his use of standard-sized trailers that could run over the road and ride on railroad flatcars — known as intermodal transportation — established partnerships with the railroads and was followed by all others in the industry.
Now, it is unimaginable how the trucking industry ever fared without Mr. Schneider’s visionary ways.
Though Mr. Schneider was a great man, he never lost his common touch. He insisted on being called by his first name and was a community philanthropist who was active in several charities. In a 1997 interview, he was quoted as saying, “My job is important, but it’s no more important than the driver or the people in the service center.”
Mr. Schneider was a man who had a true servant’s heart, and America has been enriched by his service to this country. His entrepreneurial spirit will endure not only in his company’s orange trucks and trailers, but in the homes of countless Americans who have benefited from his innovations. I invite the American people to join me in celebrating his life.
