Raymond B. Greer didn’t even have the job yet, and he already knew what one of his first priorities would be as president and CEO at Transport Industries Holdings: The company needed anew name. Formed in 2000 when a New York-based private equity firm bought Mesquite-based Transport Industries LP, it had grown through acquisitions and was poised to hit $1 billion in revenue for 2005. But outside of a strong base of core customers, the company had little to no brand equity. “Part of that was just a byproduct of the way the business grew up,” Greer says. “Their strategy was no strategy. They didn’t want to have a lot of presence or be well known.” Greer had done the research. He saw the potential that existed with the new businesses that had been brought into the fold during the past five years. If that potential was to be realized, there needed to be unity.
“There were nine different brands in the market, and none of them had any brand equity that you could build off of,” Greer says. “And yet at the same time, the company was one of the largest providers of transport services in the United States. I recognized before I was even hired that there was a brand problem, and we needed to do something about it.”
Greer’s challenge was convincing the company’s 2,900 employees and its customers that this was a problem worth tackling.
“If you went to the driver, you went to the customer, you went to the employee, none of them would have said there is an issue here,” Greer says. “But if you look at it from a CEO’s point of view and how you want to build your business and have brand equity to support your growth strategy, it was a significant issue.”
Greer got the job in early 2005 and set out to fix the problem by uniting everyone under one name: Greatwide Logistics Services.
