From One Truck to Large Brokerage: PDQ America’s Story with Michael Clements and Aaron Dunn

Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast

In this episode of Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast, host Brent Hutto is joined by Aaron Dunn, Director of Sales and Marketing at PDQ America, and Michael Clements, President at PDQ America.

Join them as they:

• Dig into the story behind PDQ America
• Explore PDQ’s pretty darn quick attitude
• Share the conversation that led to their podcast, Trucking for Millennials
• Highlight some of the key learnings from running Trucking for Millennials
• And more!

Michael Clements is the President of PDQ America, an asset-light freight brokerage specializing in open deck hauling. Aaron Dunn is the Director of Sales and Marketing at PDQ America, responsible for building relationships with customers and carriers alongside leading brand positioning, marketing strategy, podcast production, optimized digital media creation, and distribution. He currently Co-Hosts Trucking for Millennials with Michael, where they discuss trucking news and engage with transportation and logistics professionals.

Episode Highlights:

[02:13] PDQ America started in 2013 with a flatbed truck and a 32 ft gooseneck trailer. Taking things one load at a time, the business quickly grew to needing another truck and trailer and Michael had to wrap his head around the laws that came with owning a truck business. Several months in, they got their first big truck: a 2007 Freightliner Columbia, which was quickly followed by a 2011 Freightliner Cascadia. However, the rapid success might have been too good to be true. PDQ started out in the hauling of oil and gas products in a period of snatch and grab. Though he hates to admit it, it gave Michael a false bottom for where the business could go.

[10:04] PDQ stands for pretty darn quick. It started off as a hotshot. They had guaranteed work from day one but going with a hotshot model guaranteed affordability. Michael pretty much walked into a perfect situation. The original truck and trailer pair came from someone local passing away and their wife selling it on to a dealership who then passed it onto PDQ. This gave them the perfect starting point for those first two years of growth. But once oil and gas took a major hit in 2015, Michael started losing customers and went into a lot of debt that he had to work his way out of, going down to just two drivers and trying to get by as best they could. It was this slump that led the company to rebrand to a logistic company that did both brokerage and trucking, changing its name from PDQ Trucking to PDQ America.

[20:57] In 2019, Michael wanted to start a podcast for PDQ, sharing their journey and trucking news. He put out feelers on LinkedIn and someone tagged Aaron, who at the time, was out in the wild creating a local podcast. They met up and Michael shared his idea of Trucking for Millennials. Aaron’s background was not in trucking, it was in car sales and marketing. With a keen eye for creating content and building a message, he was always looking for local people to think in innovative ways about marketing. When he saw Michael’s post on LinkedIn, he knew he had to meet him and hear his ideas. It was pretty much a yes from the get-go, and Aaron was keen to learn about the trucking industry and apply his skills to it.

[29:44] Through Trucking for Millennials, Aaron has got to learn more about the industry every day through his own experience and through the lens of the people they interview. Over the past four years, he has compounded his knowledge by having more and more conversations with truckers, technicians, brokers, vendors, and any other logistics role you can think of. Everyone has a unique perspective of the industry and all of those together have given him a true perspective on what’s going on, as well as how it’s evolving. When he started out, there was fallout from ELD mandates, and then rates shot up, and then COVID hit. Through each fluctuation, Aaron has learned more about the industry that he can bring to the podcast himself. That being said, through every conversation and change in the industry, one thing is commonly said: collaboration and discussion are paramount in the trucking industry.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, instructions on how to do this are here.

Freight Nation: A Trucking Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so