As owner-operator and April Overdrive Trucker of the Month George Kincaid put it earlier this year, furniture manufacturing isn't what it once was in the great state of North Carolina. Yet Scott Denmark and Scott Cruthis, owners of Thomasville Furniture Xpress, headquartered in the town that bears part of its name, know there's still plenty demand for hauling furniture from shippers in the area.
"Some is still made here," Denmark said. "A lot is imported." The near-30-truck TFX gets it close to its final destination, whether a furniture store or warehouse, almost all of the work LTL.
The pair of owners have known each other going back decades. "We both drove trucks" as owner-operators, Denmark said. He's been off the road for 25 years now, though, and was operations manager for close to 18 years at Shelba Johnson Trucking (since bought by another company) before founding TFX not long after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Denmark and Cruthis pooled resources to start. "He owned three trucks" at the time, Denmark said, "and I had one that was paid for," all late model, capable trucks. $200,000 to invest between them. "We borrowed another $200,000 and bought some trailers and a local truck," all with an eye to do what they knew best, Denmark added: LTL furniture delivery.
Barely four years later TFX has grown quickly with Denmark's operations expertise and Cruthis' oversight in the shop, with plenty of help from now 17 full-time employee drivers and eight operators either leased or with authority but dedicated to TFX's customers.
Snider Fleet Solutions Business Development Manager Rob White has known Scott Denmark since "I actually sold him the first set of truck tires he ever bought," White said, when Denmark was an owner-operator close to 40 years ago. TFX's success rests in part on Denmark's expertise in LTL-furniture-haul efficiency, as White sees it, harking back to the TFX co-owner's time with Shelba Johnson.
"He changed the way they did business," White said. He's "extremely smart and efficient." White's worked tire accounts for "some of the largest fleets out there. But Scott, as far as being a numbers guy, I haven't met anyone as smart as him in the trucking industry."
Helpful, too, White said. "He’s just one of those guys. I could call Scott any day seven days a week and say, 'Hey I need you,' and it'd be, 'What do you need? Let's go.' I can’t think of a better person in my 44 years of my career that I’ve enjoyed.
"I knew when he opened that company that he’d be successful."
Ed Christiansen, owner of Brielle Furniture in Sea Girt, New Jersey, an at-least-twice-weekly destination for TFX drivers today, sees similar attributes in Denmark, Cruthis and the team they've built. "They’re reliable," no question, Christiansen said, with a core of operators not shy of communicating directly with the furniture retailer.
Denmark's the kind of owner who will "pick up the phone on the weekend" to help put out a fire or simply fill a need as necessary, he added. "His rates are great, and he takes great care of me."
Scott Denmark and Scott Cruthis, with the team they've built around them at Thomasville Furniture Xpress, are among semi-finalists for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Championship, concluding next month.
[Related: Skin in the leased owner's game: Oberman Logistics' simple, transparent plan for expansion]
Primed for partnership: Team of owners with complementary expertise
TFX owners Scott Denmark (right) and Scott CruthisAll photos courtesy of TFX
But for an older Freightliner glider whose driver just "loves that truck" and his weekly run to New York City, all of the 12 road tractors TFX owns today are 2025-'26 International LTs, Cruthis noted, with an additional five daycabs utilized within the Thomasville/Greensboro region.
Among those Internationals are the seven tractors shown here parked up at TFX headquarters.
Cruthis has full greasing on an every-10K-miles schedule, oil- and fuel-filter changes at 20K, then a complete drain and service at 40K. He's been "old-school" traditionally, Cruthis said, about maintenance. "I always did 15,000" for a full drain interval. Yet he's using full-synthetic oil in the late model equipment. Two of the trucks he brought to the business, since sold, he approached the same way. Both were Peterbilts with the same engine.
At the time he bought them, "they recommended going 60,000 miles on the Paccar engine," he said. Cummins' recommendation depended on the fuel mileage. Getting six mpg, change earlier. Seven, longer. "I just settled on 40K to be conservative. They'd recommended 25K for changing the fuel filters." He went with 20K and was heartened by the results.
One of Scott Denmark's prior trucks they've still got -- bought new in 2014, a Peterbilt 579, Paccar-powered, that now has more than 1.3 million miles on it and which TFX uses as a spare. "That one right there has been a really good one," Cruthis said. "Those year models seem to do really well."
A lot, he knows, depends on "how you service them," he said, likewise the amount they're idled, what he calls "about the worst thing you can do" for the emissions equipment.
TFX has held onto this prior truck of Cruthis' as well, a 1999 Detroit-powered Kenworth T600 the pair have outfitted with a converter on the fifth wheel for towing capability to deal with breakdowns and the like. "I've basically about redone it mechanical-wise from the ground up" over the years, Cruthis said, pushing 4 million miles now all told with different operators between Cruthis and his father and another driver over 25-26 years.
Company headquarters sits on the property of a former small fleet owner who sold out to Denmark and Cruthis early on in the TFX journey, more than doubling their size that first year with "eight trucks and maybe 12 trailers," Denmark said. And the lease on the shop "to work on the trucks. We took on that business."
Commitment to customer service, operator support, with efficiency in mind
Since that time, building efficiency has been the goal. Scott Denmark had his brother, Jeff, a software engineer, modify to Scott's specs a custom transportation management system originally designed for a different company. It's a powerful aid today in building the often complicated LTL loads TFX drivers deliver. Company drivers are paid on miles and, crucially, stops. "The hustlers are running 3,000 miles a week even with 26 to 28 stops a week," Denmark said. "People don't believe it."
Drivers by and large "live right within 45 minutes of our terminal," Cruthis said, with much of the outbound freight originating in the region. "Drivers got to pick the color of the trucks." One operator wanted a blacked-out truck -- "we powdercoated some of the chrome" -- otherwise there were a couple of grays and an array of others.
TFX preaches safety, paramount along eastern-seaboard lanes that present no small amount of hazard sharing the road with motorists. Their safety record shows a low out-of-service rate, and has been helpful with insurance companies quoting them for renewal that don't "normally quote newer companies," Denmark noted. Premium cost "per mile and/or per unit continues to drop every renewal. We try to hire experienced and qualified drivers and preach safety all of the time," inspecting equipment on a trip-by-trip basis "to help prevent any mechanical issues from turning into safety issues."
Drivers are outfitted with “dashcams in all of the vehicles," Denmark added. "As a former truck driver I didn’t really see the value of the cameras, but as a fleet owner it opens your eyes to things you don’t always see as a driver,” a bonus when incidents happens over the road.
[Related: Every smart mod to Trucker of the Year's 4M-mile 1995 Kenworth T600]
This is one of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that will air throughout this month. (Access all of the published stories via this link.) Two finalists in each category (3-10 trucks, 11-30 trucks) will be announced in October.
It's working, mostly. "I’ve got probably 90% participation in that," he said.
With the custom software, Denmark can better keep the operators moving and earning, at the very least. The set-up allows Denmark to, for instance, see every order he's got potentially for a given time period in the Philadelphia area, a frequent destination. "I pick the ones I want, then it puts them on a Google map," he said, and "I can put them in order" to dispatch the driver with stops. "Hit a button and the dock gets a printout. It prints out every freight bill" in order to make arranging the load easier.
Denmark estimates the software saves him another full-time employee in the office -- "$50K a year, easy," he said, if not more. Otherwise it's a lean ship with just Denmark his wife Jana, Scott Cruthis, and expert multitasker and Office Manager Stacy Valadez there most days.
Denmark estimates there are "seven or eight" companies doing the specialized work they do. Rates in LTL furniture hauling are per-pound, with a minimum for pieces below a certain weight, he said, say a "20-pound piece -- for a minimum charge of 100." Overall weight for any full trailer (53-foot dry vans in this case) will "never hit gross," he added. "A heavy load for me is 15,000 pounds."
Revenues are certainly above average compared to truckload freight, and there's at least one mega player in the space in J.B. Hunt, Denmark said. His biggest advantage is in long working knowledge of facility destinations, routes, that software as an assist to build efficiency and "put the loads together to trim the miles down" to save costs and drivers' time.
The National Association of Small Trucking Companies sponsors the Small Fleet Championship. 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 winners will be announced in late October in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
The importance of trucking companies like TFX is lost on the average retail furniture buyer and the wider public, Christiansen emphasized. "I could sell $10 billion worth of furniture, but if nobody delivers it to me what good is it?"
Both Denmark and Cruthis came to TFX with name recognition among furniture shippers and stores, and after those early gains with equipment, word of mouth built the customer base somewhat organically. Christiansen's known Denmark for 35 years, he estimated, and his move to TFX as primary for freight coming into the store in Sea Girt followed that organic pattern, too. When TFX started up, "I started to give him a little bit of freight," Christiansen said, then a little bit more, and more. "And now he handles all my freight."
[Related: Derrick Wolfe has built a 'sweet' business in New York's Finger Lakes region]
Growth's been quick for TFX over just several years in business, yet it hasn't felt overwhelming, Cruthis said.
"We've never had a salesperson" dedicated to the task, Denmark said.
"COVID really put this industry behind" the eight ball on production and delivery, as Cruthis had it. For many suppliers, "it was taking six-seven weeks from pickup to delivery when we started." Yet "our average service is less than five days from time of pickup to delivery."
If stores are four to six weeks from getting what they want and "they hear of a company that can move it in a couple days," he added, you can expect good results for that company.
Word got around fast.
"We knew a lot of people already, of course," Cruthis said, but more and more a sales rep would go to a furniture store. "They'd say, 'We’d like to order something but it takes so long to get it.'" Time went on, and TFX was on the tip of that shipper sales rep's tongue more and more and more.
Since that initial $200K borrowed, then more for the buyout of the fellow small fleet, "we’ve been able to keep up and not have to finance anything," said Cruthis. "We bought 25 brand-new trailers within the last year" -- all Hyundai vans. In addition to replacing, and then some, the trucks acquired through company buyouts.
Both owners no doubt know the job now -- maintaining business with service excellence, made easier with groundwork laid well for the long haul.
[Related: Meet the 2025 Overdrive's Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists]
