"Not bad for a high shool graduate that started on a loading dock at 19 years old with Southeastern Freight." --MRL Transport owner Mark Ledford, on his four-decade trucking career
Going on six years now Mark Ledford of York, South Carolina, has been running MRL Transport, today with five total trucks and four drivers, in addition to himself hopping behind the wheel on occasion. He's got nearly three times as many leased dry vans staged at customer facilities in his area, squarely within the Charlotte, North Carolina, orbit.
MRL drivers haul direct customer freight outbound from the area, often bringing brokered freight back if nothing else is available. Some outbound customer loads do come with a direct roundtrip built in, though, he said. "Fortunately at all my customers I have drop trailers, and all my outbound freight is preloaded," Ledford noted, whether glass in racks, foam cartons, rolls of fiber, store shelving or another commodity.
Ledford's well-connected in the region, having spent his entire life and career there. Plus: MRL isn't his first trucking-company rodeo.
Dick Layton of Aplix Industries in Charlotte started working with Ledford when Ledford founded, owned and ran his prior fleet, Red Baron Transportation. "I have been doing business with Mark for about 20 years" now, Layton said. "He is a major reason I prefer to use small trucking firms versus using corporate ones. Just an all-around great guy, friend and business partner for us at Aplix."
Ledford founded Red Baron in the early part of the century with a simple philosophy: "Everything pays for itself."
He had three trucks leased to Chambers Transportation, still in business and run by the son of founder Tullis Chambers. Ledford bought a fourth, a brand-new 2003 Kenworth T600 he put under his own authority. At the time, he and his wife had decided they wanted to have children, and they had a Bichon dog they named Snoopy. Thus the Red Baron company name. "I drove the new one," he said of the T600, and "left the other three leased on to let them pay for the new one," in essence.
The Red Baron logo featured an outline drawing that Ledford quipped he's probably lucky to have avoided litigation over.
As time went on and he grew a book of business with customers in his area, he'd pull one of the leased-on trucks to his operation. "I want to give credit to Chambers Transportation" and Tullis, who was a real mentor to Ledford, he said. "He let me pick his brain about rates and such," among many other things -- somewhat uncharacteristic of a competitive business owner.
[Related: Lending a hand up the ladder: Legacy of mentorship for Trucker of the Month Jason Shelly]
When Ledford made his jump with Red Baron, too, Tullis Chambers was supportive -- of a fashion, anyway. As Ledford pulled trucks over to run under his own authority, according to Ledford, "Tullis said, 'I don't mind what you're doing. Just don't do it all at one time.'"
He didn't, and that's how "Red Baron got started: Let everything pay for itself." No factoring but for some brokered loads beginning around the 2008 recession. Minimal debt, with that "old-school premise of paying equipment off," Ledford added.
The fleet grew to base at a leased lot with an office and two-bay garage, 37 trucks, and 50 trailers split between dry vans and reefers.
"50 employees at one time," Ledford said. Big food-supplier companies as customers in U.S. Foods, Hormel, Dole.
Through it all, though, Ledford never found a go-to VP or "right hand," he said, looking back. "For all those years, I took all the phone calls -- did all the monitoring on the reefers, breakdowns, and etc., 24/7 for fifteen years. There was a time I was burned out," to say the least, he added. In 2016, he sold the fleet to a warehousing concern out of Atlanta and went to work for the new owner managing trucking operations.
Yet after almost three years, he was ready for a change after the new owner took the fleet in a different direction. Ledford resigned and, for a brief period, flexed a quality he'd learned early on he had -- an instinct for sales. He settled in with another small fleet owner in his area in freight sales.
MRL Transport owner Mark Ledford
Mark Ledford and his MRL Transport business are among semi-finalists for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ award, competing in the 3-10-trucks division.
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Finding the right size for effective management
Today, that other company's owner has indeed eclipsed Ledford's past growth, with well more than 100 trucks. Ledford himself has moved on, back to full ownership of his work situation with MRL Transport. While he knew he was pretty good with sales, he wanted more.
"I get bored" doing just one thing, he said. "I like to be very on the move and active."
This is the first 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.
Drivers are home every weekend serving customers like Aplix he maintains good relationships with from his early days. Shoe Show stores, too, among others.
"I’m considering buying one more [truck] at the end of the year for tax purposes," he said. "Two are paid for now out of the five. I can afford to do it." His two sons will be 21 and 18 this year. Neither have expressed much trucking interest. "I’ll be 60 in a month," he said in August. "I don’t have a reason to get any bigger," and right now he feels he's hit something of a sweet spot.
Drivers are paid by the mile, some topping 3,000 on a weekly basis and still getting home for the weekend. Ledford's got them all set up with direct deposit, and uses an inexpensive subscription to ITS Dispatch for that function. (He wishes he had the dispatch software when he was running Red Baron, frankly, he said.)
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 winner will be announced in late October in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
For repairs he won't do himself, he uses a former Kenworth dealer tech who went out on his own in nearby Lake Wylie, S.C., as Roberts Diesel.
"I think I'm in a good place," Ledford said, having achieved a "good balance" between being on-call 24/7 as a business owner and the ability to enjoy life a little more at the same time. "I've been fortunate with the drivers I have," he said. "If I lost one, trying to replace one or two is certainly easier than replacing five at a time."
All involved, himself included, are "making a good living," he said. "If I go on vacation I take an iPad with me on the road" to manage remotely.
It's all working, MRL Transport, Ledford said.
MRL customer Aplix's Dick Layton said Ledford's exceeding "everything you could expect from a small business owner that has to deal with logistics. I've been in this kind of work my whole career, and there are few people like him that take a lot of pride in how they run their business."
One of those MRL Petes here pictured backed up to a loading dock.
It's harder and harder to find, Layton added, "this type of business owner that cares about his customers the way he does."
The owner's come quite a long way from that 19-year-old kid working for a "map company in a shipping and receiving warehouse during the day," and in the evenings working on loading docks, he said. About six months in he learned to drive a yard switcher, switching trailers there for five years or more and dreaming about getting out over-the-road to drive.
"My sister was dating a guy who who owned five trucks," he said, "so I used one of his trucks and went and took the driver test."
He had the credential, the CDL, but no experience. "I remember going to the terminal manager and telling him I wanted to be a local driver" near the end of his time at that dock, he said. "I had a couple speeding tickets on my record, and he looked at me across the desk and he said, 'Mark, I never,' he said. 'I could say that I don't ever see you driving a truck.'"
Ledford laughs. "I tell that story because," well, if only that manager "could see me now."
[Related: Meet Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists]
