The Chicago-area mostly owner-operator fleet Get Cargo's going on 20 years in business now, with a 10% of gross fee for leased owners, ready access to the company discount fuel network, and a network of shop vendors built up by owner Stevey Nikolov over years.
As with most low-percentage-fee lease contracts, owners pay monthly in liability/cargo insurance chargebacks (occupational accident, too), and once a year for lesser expenses.
"My ELD, PrePass, those deductions are annual," said Nikolov, Get Cargo owner since establishing the business back in 2008 with an office in Elk Grove Village.
He cut his teeth in Chicago trucking after coming to the U.S. first as a student (English major), working summers on the West Coast around the turn of the century. He stayed on as an intern in a service-industry business out West, then got immigrant status like so many Eastern Europeans at the time, working by 2005 for a trucking company in Elgin, Illinois.
By 2009, after some other staff departures, he found himself responsible for dispatch of more than a hundred trucks.
His throat hurt. "I go to the doctor, 'here's some pills,' and two-three weeks go by," Nikolov said. He ends up with a nose-and-throat specialist. "They stick an actual camera in my nose to be able to get to my throat."
The doc didn't like what he found. "Are you an opera singer?" he said. Nikolov never has been, never will be. "Your voice chords are so worn out. And I've seen this with singers, with opera singers specifically. So what do you do?"
Nikolov: "Dispatch."
Later that year, he'd take that doc's advice to "change drastically the way you work," he said, to build something better right there in the center of Eastern European-led U.S. trucking, where at that time he could well see what he called the "corner-cutting" of a lot of the companies around him. His own position, trying to effectively dispatch more than 100 drivers, might serve as a good example.
Nikolov, originally from Bulgaria, doesn't say that to "talk back to my people," he said, but "in more than one aspect, whether it's with the broker, whether it's with the shipper, whether it's with the DOT," he wanted no part of the corner-cutting.
His situation at the company was untenable.
He had two trucks leased on there himself, so he rented the office in Elk Grove Village on E. Higgins Road and came to a gentleman's agreement with the other trucking company owner about leaving with those two drivers, too. He put the word out that he was in business for himself, and Get Cargo was born.
Word got around quick.
Svetozar "Stevey" Nikolov
Since 2011, he's run the company with a primary residence Toronto, Ontario.
Building a circle of trust: Customers, owner-ops
This is one of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that will air throughout the next weeks. (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.
Rios heard about Nikolov from a friend. "Stevey's a great guy," Rios said, laughing as he added: "At least you don't get a hard time when you take a day off."
Loads get Rios home most weekends "He tries to keep me every weekend at my house," he said of Nikolov. "He’s a family guy."
Owner-operator Rios's truck and trailer emerged from a recent Missouri inspection with CVSA clean-inspection stickers on both, yet he got dinged for a worn-out Illinois plate that's been through the ringer, that's sure, with the owner's long tenure leased there.
(A new one was well on its way, Nikolov said just after the inspection several weeks back.)
Most of the Get Cargo fleet's owner-operators own their dry vans, as does Rios. A few work with flatbeds, much of the freight coming through longtime brokerage relationships -- Nikolov's longtime broker partner in John Anthony Toveli, for instance, owner-president in the Bloomingdale, Illinois, agency office for Haulistic.
"I can say if I give him a load I forget about it," Toveli said, fundamentally, asked to offer an assessment of the small fleet. Toveli's been working with Get Cargo since nearly the very beginning of the business. "In 18 years ... I had one issue with a breakdown."
The problem wasn't the minor delay it caused. Rather, Nikolov's persistent efforts to keep the broker in the loop on the load's progress. "He kept me over-updated," Toveli said, laughing.
This Get Cargo owner-operator, based in Fort Worth, Texas, shown here with a flatbed load.
In today's world, where a freight agent has to worry about "the actual existence" of any carrier they're considering doing business with, Toveli said, he'll take the oversharing with the reliability he doesn't have to worry about with Get Cargo.
Nikolov attributes the small fleet's longevity to that kind of trust, his No. 1 priority with respect to both owner-operators leased and customers.
"Relationships," he emphasized, "having someone trust you with their freight" is something you have to protect. "You do what you promised them you're going to do. Things happen, trucks break down, and if it's on a Saturday and I know we cannot fix the truck, guess what? I'm going to find a way to tell this broker, this customer, 'Hey, we might be late for your 8 a.m. on Monday. We might be, I don't know, but I'm telling you now. So when you walk into the office at 8:10 on a Monday, that's not the first thing you are bombarded with."
Roughly 95% of Get Cargo's freight is built on the foundation of those brokerage relationships.
Yet he's also broken something of an unwritten rule about the sanctity of weekends off by scheduling direct-shipper freight with a retail giant: Walmart.
Most of the leased owners are Monday-Friday, taking a restart at home over the weekend, yet since becoming a vendor in Walmart's transport network, Saturday-Sunday pickups are now part of the mix.
[Related: Rocking, rolling: KST Logistics stacks honors after founder's tragic passing]
No lease-purchase games with contracting owner-ops. Though Nikolov will rent Get Cargo van trailers to leased owners there, efforts to build trust in the relationship include his advice to any owner to invest in their own trailer.
He tells any who will listen, point-blank: "I make more money renting" one among his few 2022-'23 vans, of course, yet it's been something of a motto for him: Rent for the least amount of time you need to save to buy your own.
"They need to see that 'this guy actually cares about my well-being,'" he said. "If you buy it now and pay it off in three years, you have at least another five years of basically worry-free" hauling, keeping more of the rate long-term.
A trailer, too, "is a good investment," he noted. "It keeps its value much longer than the truck does."
[Related: The case for trailer ownership -- and tips on spec'ing the wagon]
In the last year or two, at once, Nikolov's found ways to support leased owners in tight spots with their equipment, too, with three long-term rental tractors from Williams NationaLease downstate in Normal, Illinois.
Rather than charge back lease fees, though, Get Cargo covers the cost and drivers run as company haulers for 35% of gross for compensation. "It's a model that works, particularly because I have my own trailers," he said. "I get to use them," and the operator can either save to reinvest in another truck, repair the engine, whatever the case may be.
He gave the example of one of his owners with a long-running 1999 Kenworth that had a catastrophic engine failure and was just going to let the truck go and find work elsewhere. Nikolov was able to keep the operator aboard with the long-term rental.
Shown is one of the Williams Nationalease KWs in the Get Cargo fleet.
'Rules give you freedom'
Get Cargo's long used the well-known Motive ELD system, easing dispatch from afar, though it's not always a selling point with drivers. When Nikolov spoke to Overdrive for this story he relayed a conversation he'd had with an operator from earlier that very day.
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 are 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.
Nikolov gamed out the Monday-Friday schedules for most, weekends off. "And I'm about to say how much money on average they're making," Nikolov said, when the driver cuts in -- "wait a minute. What do you mean you restart Saturday and Sunday?"
"Most of them are family guys," Nikolov said. "They like to be home. Every once in a while, I'm not able to get them through their house, but ..."
"No, no, no, you mean you don't have 24-hour logbook?"
The conversation ended soon after, as the driver had effectively said the wrong thing to the wrong guy. "Let me stop you right there," Nikolov told the driver. "I'm not that kind of company."
For all the press around removing registered ELDs from the federal register for the devices, "Obviously this is still happening," Nikolov said, with backdoor manipulation of logs, as the driver suggested, to run 24-7 and make it look right.
[Related: Revoked ELD maker reveals 'huge' demand for HOS cheat devices]
Get Cargo-leased owner-operator Rios' longevity there is testament to support and the fundamental business sense Nikolov tries to engage and encourage among all who are leased there, something that's come second nature to him through the years.
"One needs to have some kind of entrepreneurial spirit" to do trucking right, he said. "I've always had that. I've always known in my life that I'm going to do something on my own. Not because I don't like to follow rules. No, I like rules, because rules give you freedom. Because when you follow the rules, nobody can tell you, 'Hey, you're not doing this right.'"
Stevey Nikolov is 46 years old, a "long way from retirement," he said. If he can get another 10 years fully out of his Get Cargo business he'll be happy. Rules and regulations pile on, and "when will it be just too much?" he asked himself.
Non-domiciled driver Harjinder Singh's 2025 triple-fatal attempted u-turn in Florida goes to show "there are a lot of bad apples out there," Nikolov said, "a lot of people who are doing things that give reasons to the government to shut trucking companies down, making the circle smaller, the circle of trust. It keeps shrinking smaller and smaller."
Get Cargo's Elk Grove Village headquarters sits at the corner of E. Higgins Rd. and Gaylord -- on both sides of Gaylord, trucks are allowed to be stopped and parked, as long as it's not between 2 and 5 a.m., Nikolov noted, one of the reason he chose the office almost two decades ago.
"I deliberately chose that location for that reason," he said, with the business running almost entirely on paper in those early days, and drivers needing a place to deliver BOLs. "I'm no genius. I'm not Einstein." Other trucking companies followed in his footsteps. "Suddenly there were six other companies in the same building. There are three on the second floor, one on the first floor. The owner of the building, they rent out rail cars -- the company’s called TransMatrix. They are registered with a DOT number," too.
Today, the fact has created a new problem for Get Cargo -- some large brokers refuse to work with them simply for that reason.
Rules give you freedom. To an extent, sure, until they restrict your business such that that money doesn't make sense anymore, he added.
Get Cargo at least remains in the circle of trust for broker John Toveli. "Nine years ago when I got married," Toveli said, Svetozar Nikolov was on the list he gave to his soon-to-be wife of people he wanted to invite to the wedding. "Stevey was the only person in my industry who was invited to my wedding."
[Related: Decades of careful growth: Car Couriers' auto-haul hustle]
