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TALKING TCA
Next Gen Executives
TCA’s young leaders take the spotlight, drive the future of trucking
Peter Jenkins
TransPro GM Peter
Jenkins continues
legacy of leadership
begun by his parents
at Champion Express
O
By Dwain Hebda
n paper, Peter Jenkins is a relatively new employee
with TransPro Freight Systems, which
is part of the Kriska Transportation Group.
While Jenkins signed on with TransPro in January
2022, he has a far longer history with one
of Kriska’s other holdings, Champion Express.
Champion Express was initially owned and operated by
Jenkins’ parents — and like any child of an entrepreneur, he
spent a lot of time learning the business from his family. At
Champion, he was schooled in the finer points of the trucking
business and developed operational values that he still
puts to work today as TransPro’s general manager.
For Jenkins, customer service is, first and foremost, his
No. 1 priority.
“My father was a salesperson, and that got him into managing
trucking and brokerage. That’s how I was raised, sales
first,” he shared. “And closely aligned with sales is customer
service because it’s much easier to keep the customer than
it is to onboard a new one. Prospecting is time-consuming
and expensive.”
“Our mantra has always been, ‘Take care of what you’ve
got, value your customers,’” he continued. “I have customers,
that still ship with us today and that I have good
relationships with, that my dad (worked with) in 1991 or
earlier when he started Champion Express. I’ve got customers
from probably 12 years ago, when I was doing sales,
that are still running and flourishing. It’s nice being able to
see that freight on our TransPro trucks now. It’s kind of like
coming full circle.”
Jenkins’ brand of customer service casts a wide net and
extends not only to external clients, but also to the internal
stakeholders that keep the company going.
“Champion was primarily brokerage, where TransPro is
about 50/50 asset logistics, so we’ve got to take care of our
drivers,” he said.
“We want to be a driver-centric company,” he said. “Our
objective is to have our drivers haul freight that they want to
haul because they’re going to be happier, they’re going to do
a better job and, in the end, we’re going to deliver a better
service to our customers.”
That often means drawing on good client relationships to
benefit TransPro’s drivers, Jenkins said.
“When our drivers run into a roadblock that prevents
them from executing their five to 10 drops, such as excessive
waiting time, we can pull on our excellent relationships
with our customers to try to smooth that out and solve that
problem,” he said.
TransPro runs about 80 trucks, teamed with 165 dry
34 Truckload Authority | www.Truckload.org TCA JULY/AUGUST 2023