Q&A with Ryan McConnell on Atlas World Group’s 75th anniversary
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In September, Evansville-based Atlas World Group celebrated its 75th year in business. The company, with headquarters on St. George Road, also marked the milestone at its annual convention in Florida in November.
Atlas World Group is made up of a family of companies, including Atlas Van Lines and Atlas Logistics. Ryan McConnell, president and COO of Atlas Van Lines, spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the company’s focus on collaboration and optimism for growth opportunities.
Tell me about the history of Atlas World Group.
In 1948, we were founded in Chicago. We had a small group of investors who were all small business people who brought our company together as almost a national brand at that stage of the game. There were a few additions as time moved on that gave us a 48-state capability.
As we moved down that path, we knew we were going to grow and, in 1959, made the decision to move from Chicago to Evansville. That decision was based on those same founders who said, hey, to be able to expand and grow, get us into a place that we’re not landlocked, that there’s a good, solid labor force.
And that was the start of our history coming into Evansville and building out what we’ve become today and now celebrating our 75th anniversary.
Tell me about your career with the company.
I’ve been with Atlas since 1994. It was going to be my first job out of college, and I was going to go on to bigger and better things. But I’m from the area, love being from this area and being here, and it stuck. I started [on the] ground floor. I was in operations. I was a dispatcher in the company. I worked in our sales and marketing team in various roles.
There was a reinvention of our company around 2014, 2015 where we decided we were going to look at the long term, not just a year or two out, but five, seven, ten years out. I was able to participate in that with our owners and board of directors and have that chance to elevate both personally and professionally. Now I’m the president and COO of our flagship brand and the namesake of the company.
What have been the successes of Atlas World Group?
It’s the ability to bring the agents in the field together to serve our clients every day. The agents have what I’ll call our two core tenets. Our service side: the ability to perform work in the field. And our sales side: building and growing our revenue and customer base.
What we do from headquarters is support all those sales and service efforts. When it works with good process, efficiency and productivity, everybody benefits from that. It has become the staple of who we are and making sure that we’re delivering exceptional customer service.
What challenges has the company faced?
In the late ‘70s, we started to go through challenges of the times. In the early ‘80s, those multiplied. We became a public-facing company, where we started off as private, and as that grew, private equity companies came into play, stock and SEC came into play, and the owners of the company said, “We really liked being private. We wanted to go forward with that.”
Then in 1988, a small group of agents came back together, purchased the company and—like anybody else doing that—faced considerable debt that they had to overcome to be able to accomplish what they wanted to do and went private again. Over the course of many years, they’ve built us back into what I would consider the leading van line and even at a higher level with Atlas World Group, one of the premier names in relocation and mobility.
Today’s economic times are challenging. We faced it in the past. We’ve gone through pandemics, we’ve gone through national emergencies and we’ve always found ways to shore up who we are, what we do and the way that we go after our business. It’s by putting customers first. We’ve always said, focus there, do the right things, have the right process and you’ll overcome those things.
Probably the biggest hurdles for us right now are high home prices coupled with high mortgage rates. At the same time, how that fits in from a wage perspective and the affordability component. So we’re continuing to monitor that.
Driver shortages always get talked about, and what we tend to focus on is putting the best professional van operators into the field and making sure that they’re our premier service opportunity. Then we supplement that with different modes of transportation to make sure that our clients are taken care of and we can deliver on their expectations as well.
Atlas Van Lines had some furloughs back in August.
A sign of the times. Just had to face that. It was small but not small to the people who were impacted by that. The good news is there are some acquisition opportunities in front of us that look like we’ll grow again in the short term. I’m not at liberty to talk through those at this point, but great things are on the horizon for us.
How has Atlas World Group changed over the years, and how has it stayed the same?
The technology-driven component has really pushed change for us. I’ve seen our workforce, when I started back in 1994, be right at the 500 mark. Today we’re more at a 300 mark because of the automation and the components of who and what we are.
The cultural piece is the part for us that’s stayed the same for my entire career and was established prior to my being here almost 30 years ago. That culture component is working for our agents, all in the purview of what we’re trying to deliver for a client and a customer. That piece has never been changed, challenged or overridden. Our values push for that.
At the same time, while we’re trying to make sure that we’re all working in a standardized, common process for efficiency, we know that entrepreneurialism with our agents is going to deliver our clients’ expectations. We’re building a foundation that allows agents to be expressive in the market, to provide better service and be able to go out and maintain that autonomy.
What makes the company unique?
It goes back to the culture that we have and being focused on what happens every single day. It’s easy to get caught up in process, on the way we do things, on financials. The piece that’s always driven us and made us better is the engagement level that we have with the agents who are in the field every single day, providing for the customer.
Engagement keeps us in tune with what’s happening in the market. It keeps us in tune with client expectations, agent expectations and the ability for us to work in a seamless manner when we operate. There’s a lot of confidential information in the business world as we all come to expect. But there’s also this fine line of transparency we have that’s unique between the agents and our headquarters’ teams.
We build out our strategy with a basis of focused groups that are not just comprised of the corporate side telling our agents what to do. Rather, it’s agents comprising the vast majority of those committees that drive the strategy and the components behind that to help us propel forward in the future.
How does it feel for Atlas World Group to reach this milestone of 75 years?
Because the company is agent-owned, it’s really a spectacular moment. To be able to see the owners invest back into us time and time again changes the way in which we look at that timeline. We still have staff who were here during the takeover event and then the buyback period. People with 40-plus years of experience, and we’re able to tie all that back together and say: We’ve seen the good, we’ve seen the bad and now we’ve seen what we can [do] better.
It’s the pure optimism of the people who own the company, who work in the company that gives the belief and fortitude behind what it is that we really believe in the brand. As our CEO likes to say, “The first 75 years were exceptional. What will the next 75 look like?”
How does the future look for this company?
Growth. When we set up our strategy, we knew to be able to give the people in our company greater opportunity as we move forward, that has to be part of the equation. And growth that’s good for not only the company but also the people within it, trying to make sure we drive that forward, that piece of our culture as a core component.
We’re not anything without the people that make us the company that we are. Whether they’re in this office in Indiana or at an agency in California or New Jersey or Florida. And every [professional van operator] that pulls one of our 3,000 trailers around this country or drives a truck for us on a daily basis. All believe in the same values and the pieces that are going to make us who we are.
Technology, things like AI and machine learning, those all become a component of what we do on a daily basis. But it’s how the people engage those opportunities that will drive us forward. Process improvement becomes a big opportunity for us. As the technology moves, the way in which we do things has to change. That’s really the adoption process that we do across the country and as we move forward around the globe.
What advice do you have for other businesses that seek this type of longevity?
Adapt and grow. Continue to learn. As you do all those components, you find a good basis. We’re in a great state to do business. The company loves to be here. The owners are proud to be able to support us in what we do every single day.
Fiscal responsibility is mission-critical right now. But that can’t come at the risk of not adapting, changing and growing at the same time. As we balance those equations, we understand what that looks like from a financial perspective. But, it’s also a measured risk that we continue to grow inside the market, and with people, process and technology. It’s at the forefront of everybody’s mind.
Recessions are a moment in time, and how you manage yourself through them points to where you’re going to be on the outside of what today is. I always hesitate to use the R word. But we’re finally seeing economists within our market of transportation start to use that word a little bit more.
The freight market has had some level of demand correction. Now we’re starting to see what everybody believes may be a supply-side correction to match demand. As that continues to happen, we’ve got to be very nimble, very dynamic in the way in which we go about things to make sure that we’re here for another 75 years.