By Paul Spillenger

You could get a very wrong impression about USA Truck Inc. from a cursory look at its current headquarters in Van Buren, Arkansas.

The building's exterior is a nondescript yellow-beige, with all the metallic charm of an aging double-wide. Its reception area is cramped and spartan, its location on Van Buren's Industrial Park Road uninspiring.

From such austere appearances you'd probably never guess that Bob Powell's 1,000-truck, $130 million company has the most earnings growth for the lowest multiple (16.5) in the truckload industry.

You might never suspect that in 1997 the medium-haul, irregular-route carrier increased its net income more than 130 percent over the previous year, on only 20 percent revenue growth.

And you probably would be surprised to learn that USA Truck's 1997 operation ratio - 89.1 percent - put it at number three among publicly traded truckload companies, after Knight Transport (82.4 percent) and Heartland Express (83.5 percent).

Most recently - in mid-February - the dry-van company announced it would be expanding its fleet by 17 percent, bringing its tractor and trailer total to almost 1,200 and more than 2,000, respectively, by the end of 1998.

Things are definitely picking up in Van Buren. Analysts are throwing about the word "turnaround," and in January ABN-AMRO Chicago Corporation called USA Truck an "undiscovered jewel with great prospects."

Everybody loves a winner.

The man at the top
At the center of the perfomance the analysts are crowing about is former Arkansas Best Corporation executive Bob Powell, an ex-Navy bomber pilot who was offered his first trucking job by Robert Young Jr. (father of the current Arkansas Best Corporation president) right after Powell got out of the service in 1960.

The future USA Truck president learned the ropes at Arkansas Best's St. Louis branch during the 1960's and rose in the ranks over the next two decades, ending up as a senior vice president.

In 1983, Powell became chairman of USA Truck, Arkansas Best's wholly owned truckload subsidiary, founded shortly after deregulation.

"We saw it was the only way to go - to get into trucking on a nonunion basis, to be competitive," Powell recalls. "That's how USA Truck emerged. We started out handling three or four major accounts north-south, and it grew from there."

When the parent company was taken private in 1988 in a leveraged buyout, part of the deal was that USA Truck would be sold to a group of Arkansas Best managers, which it was in January 1989.

In 1992, the company went public.

Powell graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1956 and was commissioned in the US Navy the day he graduated. He served as a pilot on board the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid until almost 1960, where he flew a plane known as "The Flying Dump Truck," which could carry more than its own weight in bombs.

Though Powell never dropped bombs on hostile targets, he did a lot of practice bombing in the Caribbean - on old scrap trucks.

Powell says he thought about a career in the military, "but seven or eight months at sea at one time was a little bit more than I wanted to do," he says. "I enjoyed the time I spent there, but I was happy when I left."

Powell's military background has proved useful in the increasingly competitive - some would say "cutthroat" - trucking business, he says.

"I learned you've got to have respect for people and demand the proper discipline to get the job done," he says. "You don't set your own schedule in the military. We have a lot of ex-military drivers, and they make some of the best drivers. If we had our preference, we'd like to have everybody with military experience."

Inside, outside
The exterior of USA Truck may be plain and unassuming, but there's plenty going on inside.

The company's spanking new corporate headquarters is only 50 percent occupied. The second floor is all pillars and electrical wires hanging out of the ceiling, but one has the feeling that before too long it will be bustling with activity.

Powell says he has no concrete plans yet to fill the second floor, but the fact is he's ready for anything that might come down the road at him. With 65 acres of land and 30,000 square feet of office space to expand into, USA Truck would be able to incorporate, say, a large acquisition in about as much time as it would take to work out the details of the purchase.

We're keeping our eyes open, not putting our head in the sand," Powell says of the possibility that USA Truck might buy a company. "But acquistions have problems too. They've got to be made at the right time, or they could spell trouble for you."   Next Page