As a younger man, 28-year-old Justin Miller was an over-the-road trucker that had already been through some ups and downs when he reached a point where he was in debt and needed steady work, hopefully doing the job he loved. A friend at his church told him about Efficient Transportation in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and Miller got a job there as a driver.
Fast forward a few years, and he now owns the hauling company – and he has very definite ideas about how he wants to treat his customers and employees.
“What makes us different from other transportation companies, and why I think that we’re the best to work for and the best to use to haul RVs and cargo trailers, is simply because of the service and the communication and the effort we all put in for all our customers and all our drivers,” Miller said. “We all work together as a team.”
Efficient Transportation hauls primarily cargo trailers and towable RVs. His trailers – company-owned – are capable of hauling three 16-footers.
“If it can be hauled on a trailer, as far as a camper goes, we haul it,” Miller said.
The company has about 30 employees total – 20 of them drivers – and Miller said bringing in more drivers is absolutely a priority, because he has all the work he can handle.
“If somebody would call me and say, ‘Hey, Justin, I’m going to have another 100 drivers for you. Can you have them busy starting Monday morning?’”, Miller said, “my answer would be, ‘Absolutely. Can you get me another hundred drivers?’”
His RV clients include nuCamp, Xtreme Outdoors, InTech RV, Sunset RV, Aliner and Braxton Creek. The company also hauls cargo trailers for ATC Trailers.
“A lot of camper manufacturers, they just send me an email once or twice a week and say, ‘Here are the loads that I need covered for next week.’ So, like nuCamp sends me 10 to 15 loads every week for me to haul the following week. And right now, we can’t even do that because I don’t have enough drivers,” Miller said. “So, another camper manufacturer might send me between 10 to 15 loads a week as well. Another one, a cargo manufacturer, 10 to 15 loads a week.
“I’ve got so many different cargo trailer manufacturers and camper (manufacturers) that are begging me to just dedicate to them. (They say) that they’ll pay me whatever they need to in order to have my service … they absolutely love what we do because our service, our communication, our drivers that we have; and we can self-load and self-unload. In today’s industry, that’s very hard to find companies that can self-unload the campers off the trailer. So that way, the customer can stay inside talking to his customers and selling campers.”
With that kind of demand and the inability to deliver everything every customer wants, Miller said his people skills are constantly put to the test.
“I basically walk that tightrope every single day, making sure that every customer is taken care of,” he said.
Efficient Transportation serves customers all over the U.S. and Canada when it can, although that has been difficult ever since COVID began.
“A lot of our loads pick up out of (Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana); those are our main locations, and then I’ve some customers out west that we pick up loads from as well, and I’m working on some out of Texas,” Miller said. “As we continue to grow, I’m hoping to get a lot more RV customers like manufacturers and dealers, to where I’m asking my drivers to deliver out west and then pick up a load and bring it back here.”
Having been a driver himself, Miller said he’s developed a system that allows him to get the most out of every trip, both from an efficiency standpoint and to help the driver boost their paycheck. If there isn’t always a trailer or camper that needs hauling on a driver’s return trip, perhaps there will be a passenger vehicle that needs shuttling.
“The way I have it set up is so unique, that there are owner-operators, once they drive for me and come and work for me as an employee, they tell me they never want to go back and be an owner-operator because they don’t want to have the stress of scheduling, trying to find loads, and then trying to find back-loads yet as well,” Miller said. “A lot of my guys that are OK being on the road for three, four weeks at a time – the money that they’re averaging and bringing back, it doesn’t make sense for them to be an owner-operator and pay all the insurance and the diesel fuel and everything else.
“So, I have it set up so I have customers out west so that after my drivers deliver their loads, they will go to those customers, pick up a load and bring that load back this way, even if only comes back halfway or (goes) even further, it’s still a full load that’s anywhere from ($3,000 to $8,000). Plus, if it’s a full load like that sometimes I still have room to put, like, one car on that, so that pays another $1,000 to $1,500.”
With all that juggling, it’s easy to see why Miller touts the benefits of working for him versus some other long-haul companies. But he does stress that all his drivers are required to load the trailers themselves and then unload them when they get to their destination. That’s a big selling point to customers, he said.
“There’s a lot of drivers that just do drop and hook,” he said. “They go to a place, and they unhook their trailer and they hook up to another trailer and then they go again. Those are not my drivers.”
