Valley trucking company rides fast track to growth

The growing trucking and
logistics companies plan
to move to Liberty.

By DON SHILLING

VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR

AUSTINTOWN — Falcon Transport has been putting the pedal to the metal, and people have noticed.

The Meridian Road company has grown so fast that a trade publication just ranked it as the 97th-largest trucking company in the nation. Falcon and its sister company, Comprehensive Logistics, posted revenues of $205.5 million last year, a 15 percent increase.

They have added 40 office workers in the past two years to manage new business. That’s created a problem — overstuffed offices.

To give workers more elbow room, both companies are planning to move their headquarters to Liberty.

About 200 workers will be moving to the former headquarters of Delphi Packard Electric, 4944 Belmont Ave. Packard moved its headquarters from Liberty to Warren in 2002.

The administration of Comprehensive Logistics, now located at the company’s Victoria Road warehouse in Austintown, will move in September or October, with Falcon workers following shortly after.

Continuing growth

The move comes on the 25th anniversary of Falcon, which has been operating out of leased Meridian Road offices nearly the whole time. It will continue to lease at the Liberty building, which is owned by V&V Realty.

Don Constantini, chairman and chief executive of Falcon and Comprehensive, is preparing for the growth to continue.

For now, the companies will be using about 70 percent of the 45,000-square-foot building. But they have the option of taking over the rest of the building when the lease of a current tenant, EDS, expires.

Constantini is planning ahead because Comprehensive is about to enter a new arena that could lead to significant growth — coordinating global shipping for customers.

The company is bidding on work that would coordinate import and export activities for companies, including ocean-bound freight.

Constantini said auto suppliers and other companies are being forced to move production overseas to keep costs down, which creates transportation needs.

With Comprehensive’s skills in domestic transportation, he thinks the company could expand significantly when it starts working globally. It is lining up partners to help it handle overseas deliveries.

Comprehensive’s services

The local company manages the domestic transportation needs for its customers, including shipments by truck, rail and barge.

It also has 4 million square feet of warehouse space at 12 plants, where it receives parts for auto manufacturers. Comprehensive arranges those parts in the order that assembly plants need them and ships them just in time for assembly.

Its Austintown warehouse serves the General Motors’ Lordstown complex, where it handles 85 percent of the parts shipped to the plant. Comprehensive sends 480 truckloads of parts to the plant each 16-hour workday.

Comprehensive accounts for about 40 percent of the companies’ combined revenues and most of the revenue growth sited in the Top 100 ranking.

The company is growing quickly because it has developed standard operational systems and technology that is being duplicated with new clients, Constantini said.

Falcon has been growing, too, he said. The company has three divisions: Automotive, where parts are brought into assembly plants; flatbed, which hauls steel, aluminum and construction materials; and general commodities, which transports consumer goods.

Growth at Falcon

The growth at Falcon comes from good, old-fashioned marketing, Constantini said. Staff has been reaching out to potential customers and meeting expectations on the work that it already has, he said.

Transport Topics, a trade magazine based in Virginia, not only ranked the local company in the Top 100 overall, but it also ranked it as the 38th-largest company in the truckload sector.

Schneider National was the largest in the truckload sector with revenues of $3.4 billion last year, while UPS was the biggest overall with revenues of $47.5 billion.

This isn’t the first national ranking the local company has received. Falcon has been named a GM supplier of the year five times and a Chrysler supplier of the year twice.

Still, Constantini said the Top 100 ranking is significant because there are tens of thousands of trucking companies in the nation. The ranking will raise the profile for Falcon and Comprehensive as they continue to expand, he said.

“We’re a significant player in the trucking and supply chain management business on a national basis, and we’re based right here in Youngstown, Ohio,” he said.