Dana Gardner's growing chemical-tank hauling operation represents a case study in turning lemons into lemonade. He's bought and drove some real clunker trucks -- and made money with them. He found a fellow rising star in a rep at TQL and also turned an otherwise crushing pandemic into a fountain of high-dollar hazmat freight that's helped sustain him to this day.
Gardner, just 33, hails from Kentwood, Louisiana, a small town best known for giving the world pop superstar Britney Spears and the Kentwood brand of bottled water. But now his fleet, Dana Gardner Trucking, LLC, is giving truck drivers another reason to pull off I-16 to check out his late model Peterbilt 389s. Sometimes, they do this at great personal risk.
"I live on a front street off Highway 16," in Amite City, he said. "People pass you being nosy. I had a guy hauling loads for J.B. Hunt who saw my my white truck and orange truck [two of the aforementioned Peterbilts] sitting out in the yard. Luckily he didn’t kill himself," because he veered off-road and into the woods "cause he saw how nice the equipment was."
But Gardner didn't always have such impressive equipment. In fact, the first truck he bought would turn heads for all the wrong reasons.
After starting out as a yard driver for a bottling company in 2012, Gardner bought his first truck in 2015. "I was working on the site where they make the bottles and jugs when I initially started," he said. "I got my experience up and learned how to back real good as a yard driver" before branching out and purchasing his first truck, a "1999 International 9400i Eagle model" that "was sitting literally abandoned for two or three years after this guy was hauling logs with it."
Gardner didn't pay much for the truck, and got what he paid for. "I got the truck for $7,500, but probably should have left it where it was," he joked. "The truck had 4 different colors on it" and needed and in-frame rebuild.
Dana Gardner
Then came a moment every owner-operator and independent can likely relate to: He asked how much the shipper was paying the carrier.
"I knew right then and there what I was going to be doing" as far as getting his own authority goes, he said. He's since done that, and today Dana Gardner Trucking sits at five trucks with three company drives and two owner-ops leased on, with solid revenues and a semi-finalist status in Overdrive's 2024 Small Fleet Championship, in the 3-10-truck division.
School of hard knocks yields big dividends on the other side
The job entailed hauling heavy containers and "the ends wasn't justifying the means" as the International took its dumps on him.
"That truck lasted about four or six months," he said. Next, he bought a 2007 Freightliner Columbia, financing the purchase. "I was green, and let's just say I bought a lemon," he said.
After a few months, he went back to working as a company driver and got cleared to run hazmat, mostly gasoline around the Baton Rouge area. Sensing opportunity, he entered into a lease-purchase agreement with Quality Carriers for a 2018 Cascadia, his first non-lemon. "All I was doing was preventive maintenance," he said of that unit. As for the Columbia, "I basically had to give that back."
In that period around 2018, freight for him felt lackluster, yet he saved his money. Once again, he inquired at his fleet what the linehaul was, and heard back "don't worry about what the load pays, just haul it."
"I bought that truck back the same week," he said, picking up his old Columbia and a flatbed trailer for just $11,000 -- lemons in front of and behind the fifth wheel, he said. "The trailer didn’t have brakes, I came to find that out."
Yet he was determined to give it a go.
In 2019, Gardner got his authority and lurched off to a not exactly awe-inspiring start. "After the first two loads I dropped," he said. "I didn’t even have fuel money."
A friendly trucker at a truck stop introduced him to factoring companies, and he began to more effectively manage cash flow for his new business.
"2019 wasn’t the best year, and COVID happened" shortly after, he said. "But in December I was doing good because my equipment was paid for."
But the owner-operator in Gardner yearned for something more. Namely, "a long-nose Peterbilt," he said. He sold the Columbia for $15,000 and purchased a 1995 Peterbilt 379 with a strange claim to trucking fame.
"I should have left that truck where it was, also," he said. Powered by a 475-hp Caterpillar, "the truck had been in the show 'The Walking Dead.' The truck was a zombie, actually. It was a black truck. There was green slime on the paint but the Cat was just purring when it cranked up."
Here's that "zombie" truck, with no slime to be seen. Gardner said that was after a serious clean-up.Dana Gardner
The 379 "fixed itself week in and week out, but it was a piece of junk. I just wanted that Peterbilt that bad," he said.
That takes us to early 2020. Recall the lockdowns, the furious hands stuffing shopping carts with toilet paper and hand sanitizer, the shutdown rest stops and truck stop showers, the bored suburbanites ordering anything they could get their hands on from Amazon. Hero worship of basically anyone who still had to leave the house for work.
[Related: 'The more essential I'm gettin', the stinkier I get'... Another week gone by]
By mid-2020, a racial reckoning over police brutality rocked the nation.
The upshot of it all, for Gardner, was a bunch of grant money and cheap loans to help his minority-owned business survive and thrive.
This is one of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that will air throughout this month. (Access all of the published profiles via this link.) Two finalists in each category (3-10 trucks, 11-30 trucks) will be announced in October.
"I got a lot of grants," he said. "I just kind of worked the minority status. They were giving money away. I got $20,000 from PayPal," as well as a $10,000 Verizon grant which was backed by famous comedian Kevin Hart. "I end up getting like $40,000 in grants and bought my first brand-new truck in 2021," a Peterbilt 389.
At that point, still pulling flatbeds, mostly, one lazy Sunday cruising the load boards Gardner made an important discovery.
"If you know trucking, you know there's nobody on a load board on a Sunday," he said. "But I saw a power-only gig posted for $10,000 with TQL. I had reservations about it right then," but he called and met someone he still hauls loads for today.
"They had a pipeline go down on the West Coast and they needed emergency fuel haulers from Phoenix to California, Phoenix to Utah, Phoenix to all over," he said. "That’s my background -- gas and chemicals. The rate was a $10,000 flat rate. They said 'give us your clock, $10,000 a week, working 6 days and taking a 34.' He said, 'When can you leave?' And I said, 'I can leave right now.' He sent me a rate con," also compensating every mile from his house to the job site.
"I couldn't believe it because this is TQL," Gardner said, but it turned to be truth in advertising from the broker for three months. "Because of those three months, I brought six guys on that had their own separate authority," collecting referral bonuses and training them up along the way, he said.
A Pete 389 hauling a shined up tanker trailer -- this is Dana Gardner Trucking's bread and butter.Dana Gardner
Gardner did this business with one TQL rep, and soon met another who has since been dubbed the "Tanker Queen" of the mega broker. That broker, a fellow small town person, said she's "probably one of two brokers out of 10,000" at TQL who specialize in bulk transport and tankers, and that she's rapidly risen through the ranks there, in large part thanks to the consistency of small carriers like Gardner.
Gardner said he and the Tanker Queen now have something of a "brother-sister" relationship, as she was "just learning the ropes" of the tanker game around the same time Gardner came on. Gardner "always goes the extra mile to shuffle things around" when it's crunch time, and trains his drivers up to a level of excellence that's left "no spills, no incidents, nothing" -- something virtually "unheard of" in the industry, she said.
[Related: Small Fleet Champ John McGee Trucking: Almost 100% uptime for 24/7 oilfield hauling biz]
By August of 2021, after he'd cashed in on that West Coast bonanza, Hurricane Ida hit in his neck of the woods, and he quickly got hooked up hauling fuel relatively locally for Sun Coast out of Houston.
"They put me on game and said, 'Do some fuel work right here at your house,'" he said. "I was making like $2,000 a day and I got in good with Sun Coast. It was $10-$12 a mile on everything. ... That's just how much the need was."
At that point, Gardner had everything he needed aside from a trailer, which proved hard to get. When at first trailer rental company TMI denied him, citing a lack of experience, he did some research and found Kenan Advantage Group. Now, after the years passed, he's renting from TMI and buying his own trailers, too.
Gardner's a go-to for need-it-now situations for TQL's Tanker Queen. In 2022, for instance, she paid the company handsomely to deadhead to Ohio to pick up a trailer and then run multiple tanker loads from Alabama, to Florida -- around 200 miles paying "exceptionally well," in addition to the deadhead.
"The rail cars had went down again. she said, 'I can deadhead you down, what's your price?'" he recalled. "The economy was so jacked up with rail car delays and strikes they couldn't get rail cars down in Panama. I kept moving and bought my second brand-new truck."
Now, with a little more time and experience under his belt, TMI proved a willing partner.
"They've been leasing me two trailers and I haven’t really looked back from there," he said.
Chad Coston, who works at Wabash and maintains Gardner's trailers, described him as a "cool southern dude" who always works with kindness and clear communication.
[Related: Jamie Hagen is 'hellbent' on fuel economy, growth with his small fleet]
Coming back down to earth
Things continued at that breakneck pace -- how fast might you leave the house for a $13/mile load? -- until about October 2022, "when everything switched," said Gardner. Here's where the high-flying dream touches back down to earth. Still, Gardner had put away money for a rainy day and continued to take care of his drivers.
Drivers back in 2022 were paid 90 cents loaded and empty and averaged $2,500-$3,000 per week, he said. Since then, he's stepped down to 80 cents loaded and 50 cents empty, with two owner-operators leased on getting a 70/30 split.
It's no surprise that Gardner and his TQL rep got along so well when they were printing money during the pandemic, but the relationship has endured even through hard times, because the two share the same work ethic. "I can call him at 1 a.m." and Gardner will answer with a can-do attitude, she said.
"I made so much money I was able to withstand in the troublesome times," he said. "I'm paying right at $14,000 per month insurance, the trailers costing about $2,000 to $2,500" now with six trailers leased and two owned. "My expenses were high, but I'm not living above my means. That's just how the chemical game is."
Gardner survived 2023, even duplicated some of his prior-year success, but at much worse margins. "2023 was horrible. We ended up doing" more than a million in gross revenue, "but it was the hardest million I ever had."
One of Gardner's units in the shop.
Since Gardner's education in the school of hard knocks, bouncing from lemon to lemon, he's upped his game a bit at Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses educational program. "They got me looking good on paper," said Gardner. "They took everything out of my head and put it on paper."
The National Association of Small Trucking Companies is sponsoring this year's Small Fleet Championship program. Finalists receive a year's worth of membership in the association, with access to a myriad of benefits from NASTC's well-known fuel program to drug and alcohol testing services and much more. All will be recognized at the association's annual conference, where the winner will be announced in November in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
He's begun sponsoring some local youth as they ascend through Louisiana's formidable sports programs and into college, trying to give back to the community he calls home.
TQL's Tanker Queen noted she recognized the kind streak in Gardner, when in the grip of the pandemic's baby formula shortage, as she struggled to find enough baby formula to ship back to her hometown in Charleston, West Virginia, Gardner simply asked "how can I help?" and headed down to his own local Walmart to pitch in.
Besides Gardner's hard work and discipline, he's a cool customer who broke the stale carrier-broker divide.
"My one piece of advice to carriers and brokers is please, please stop hating each other," said the TQL rep. "You can accomplish way more together, that's the beauty of it. Now I can honestly say I'm excited to see where Gardner will go."
Who knows -- maybe in the future, when people think of Kentwood, Louisiana, they'll think not of Britney Spears, but trucking magnate Dana Gardner.
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