After 40 years in business, Evans Transportation could have settled into the role of a legacy logistics provider. Instead, it’s behaving more like a restless startup.
Over the past decade, the Delafield-based company’s revenue has increased by 600%, according to chief commercial officer Charles Miller, largely due to investments in new technology, finding new business in the growing data center sector and benefiting from recent reshoring efforts by many companies throughout the economy.
“Growth for us, I think, is what we do with that revenue,” said Miller, who’s been with Evans for 13 years. “Are we able to acquire and retain great people? Are we able to offer more services? Do we have enough ears listening to what our customers are telling us? Growth is really a service and capability number more than anything else. Revenue just helps drive us there.”
Focusing on capabilities has positioned Evans to thrive in a logistics landscape that’s continuously being reshaped by technology, geopolitics and customer expectation, Miller said.
Charles Miller
Today, Evans has about 150 employees, but that number hasn’t grown linearly with the company’s revenue due to aggressive adoption and in-house development of logistics-specific technology.
“We build a lot of things ourselves,” Miller said. “If we don’t see it on the shelf somewhere, we’ll build it. Sometimes we say we’re a technology company that just happens to be in the logistics business.”
One recent move involved implementing industry-specific AI to handle the company’s deluge of inbound phone calls.
“We get tens of thousands of calls a week. There’s just no way we could take them all,” Miller said. “Now, every call gets answered, and we get real-time market intelligence on a scale that just wouldn’t have been possible.”
The company also recently began using another new technology that Miller said might be the only company in the industry to have at this point.
“We’re getting really comfortable being uncomfortable,” Miller said, discussing the constant integration of new technology partners and tools. “The speed in which we find new partners, new technology, and we put it in the system and integrate is faster than it’s ever been.”
Geographically, Evans primarily focuses on North America, which has paid off as companies shrink their global supply chains and reshore operations, particularly to Mexico, after the supply chain chaos that ensued a few years ago and scarred many companies.
Another growth area has been the boom in data center construction. Data center construction grew by 70% nationwide last year, several construction industry reports show, with several data centers under construction and planned in Wisconsin as well.
Evans has found business in managing the complex logistics around building those multibillion-dollar facilities.
“Which is certainly more challenging,” Miller noted. “It’s project management more than it is just logistics.”
Amid several changes in the logistics industry in recent years, customer experience has been one of the most profound in Miller’s view.
Evan’s customers, which are predominantly in the tech and manufacturing sectors, have been looking for more visibility of their supply chains. Miller says that consumer brands like Amazon set the standard for this with package tracking and real-time updates, but B2B customers have increasingly been looking for the same transparency.
“(Customers want to know) these widgets are coming in this day, so they can produce their widget on this day, so they can let their customer know what they should expect,” Miller said. “From the inbound side then to the outbound side of the customer experience, the expectations have changed and, I think, for the positive.”
Evans has also begun managing freight handled by other providers, using its tech to act as a logistics control tower across multiple vendors.
“We’ve basically started leveraging our technology to manage other logistics providers on our customers’ behalf,” Miller said. “We started doing that even for European shipments recently. I think, as a business, it’s become a lot more about being helpful and less about just trying to provide one service.”
In the future, the company plans to add to its local staff, which it’s been preparing for through partnerships with local schools.
“If you really want to understand a business, logistics is the best business class you could ever take,” Miller said. “You get access to every part of a customer’s operation from how they buy, to how they make things, to how they sell, to how they close their books. That’s what I like about it most. Every day is a master’s class.”
