Small Fleet Champ John McGee Trucking: Almost 100% uptime for 24/7 oilfield biz

When he said the words above, John McGee was talking about the reality he's built around himself, his family and his 20-plus-strong crew of employed truck drivers in North Central Louisiana. "When our customers pick up the phone" to send a job their way, he said, they're banking on the fleet's reputation, built over nearly two decades now, for dependable service. McGee's is a history of safety and a commitment to longtime operators, hauling production water from oil well sites all around the region.

"It's 100% relationship," the small fleet owner said. From his years with just his own truck on up to today, he's always taken a direct approach to showing respect to people. "I don’t want anyone to refer to any of our drivers as a truck number," he said. About Edward Jackson, one of his top drivers, for instance, he added: "Every day, people call me and say, 'Can you send Edward?'"

Small Fleet Champ John McGee at his desk at headquarters in Simsboro, LouisianaA personal touch with customers and operators has served McGee to ride what's been an exceedingly good period for oil and gas production all around the United States, as far as he can tell. His Louisiana area, as well as some wells serviced in the Haynesville Shale nearby at the Texas line, has been producing such that, since around the time of the 2016 election, "I've had to turn down work," McGee said. "Knock on wood" that continues.

And that's even with doubling the fleet's size over the same period, part of what garnered McGee the 2022 Small Fleet Champ recognition. Take it a little farther back to 2013, and JMT was just McGee himself and two employed drivers, McGee running the rigs, doing the maintenance and conducting the operation straight out of his home. 

Enter Overdrive's 2023 Small Fleet Championship to put your fleet in the running for this year's award. "I had a barn at the house," he said, with a circle driveway that allowed enough space to bring in a tractor and "back in, a little shop inside the barn," though he did most "work on the trucks in the gravel driveway, battling the fire ants and the red mud."

Back then, his son Lucas, now in his 20s, "worked for me in the afternoon and during the summers," McGee said. He remembers telling Lucas "before I die, I want to have a piece of concrete and a roof over my head to work on these trucks." It's been a long road there, but Small Fleet Champ John McGee has most certainly arrived.