Vigillo’s Steve Bryan Says Being Acquired Gives Him Dream Job
NASHVILLE — It was a gorgeous day in Tennessee’s capital on Feb. 24, but it wasn’t the weather that put the big smile on the face of Steve Bryan, the CEO of Vigillo, based in often-damp Portland, Oregon.
The cause of Bryan’s happiness was his data mining company’s acquisition by SambaSafety of Denver, which bills itself as the trucking industry leader of driver risk management solutions.
A decade after founding Vigillo, which has become tops in its niche, Bryan decided he wanted to relinquish his more mundane duties.
“There had to be some end after 10 years of this,” Bryan said in an exclusive interview with Transport Topics. “I’m super-excited. I have my dream job with lots of engagement with the industry as well as speaking engagements and meeting with customers, and no more day to day running the business.”
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Bryan, who was the featured speaker at the final general session of the Recruiting and Retention conference here, said that he and SambaSafety CEO Rich Crawford had been talking for quite a while about partnering before deciding in late 2015 to begin forging the deal they wrapped up on Feb. 17.
“We have our data set of [federal Compliance, Safety, Accountability] commercial truck data and they have a huge data set about all kind of drivers,” Bryan said. “We had always had this vision that if you could take their [motor vehicle records] data and our CSA data and put them together, you’ve got the whole lifecycle of the driver. The stars were aligned for this to happen.”
Vigillo’s database from its 2,000 customers includes more than 500,000 drivers. Samba Safety’s database from its 3,000-plus customers includes more than 600,000 drivers. The companies share less than 10% of their current customers.
Bryan said not only will jobs not be lost with the acquisition, both companies are looking to hire. He added that their data platforms and technology teams are very compatible.
Vigillo will remain in Portland and be known as Vigillo, a SambaSafety company.
“We agreed that the Vigillo name is so strong a brand in trucking that it didn’t make sense to replace it,” Bryan said.
