From One Truck to a Multi-Division Delivery Company
Amy of Slicker Trucking has lived nearly every version of the FedEx contractor model. Speaking live at the Route Consultant Expo in Nashville, she walked through how she and her husband Dave grew from one man and one truck into an operation spanning P&D, express integration, line haul, spot work, and now FedEx Custom Critical — with a headcount Amy estimated hit around 245 during peak, counting part-time and full-time.
The origin is humble. Dave bought his first P&D route in 2008 for $20,000 after driving for a friend for a year — back when you only needed one route to own and scanned your own boxes off a pallet with a rented scanner and paper maps.
The Lesson for Operators
If you run a freight business, the takeaway here is blunt: the contract isn't the business — the people are. Amy reframes it directly: "We are a people management company that just happens to deliver boxes. The boxes are just how we get paid." For most people in delivery, the route is the asset. This story argues the asset is whether you can hire, manage, and keep good humans — and stay compliant when the rules change underneath you.
How the Growth Actually Happened
Slicker grew the old-fashioned FedEx way first: own a core zone, add supplemental drivers, then buy zip codes. One booming zip code in Medina, Ohio — once country land, now filled with $500,000-to-million-dollar homes — turned a single route into 11 to 13 drivers in that same zip code.
The real inflection point came with contingency work, which Amy describes as servicing uncontracted areas or helping struggling contractors dig out of volume — for more money, because you're sending your resources into the unknown. A contingency opportunity that started in 2017–2018 grew into a 17-route contract, now a 32-route contract. Another terminal became an 11-route contract; another became a 10-route contract.
Then COVID hit, and headcount roughly doubled — Amy cited a swing of 65 to 135 employees — which she reads as proof of how essential the delivery network is.
The Partnership That Nearly Ended It
The most useful part of this interview isn't the growth — it's the near-failure. Slicker had a business partner who handled finances while Dave ran operations. Amy, an analytics person by background, started asking questions in January 2018 because the numbers didn't add up.
The partner was misappropriating funds, and Amy believes the accounting firm was in on it. They separated from both. At that moment, with about 17 employees, they floated payroll out of their personal savings.
"We're either going to do this or we're going to walk away. And this is the moment that we have to determine that."
They leaned in. By May 2018 the exponential growth started.
The Operator Warning
Amy's partnership lesson is sharp: no one will work as hard as you, and if they say they will, demand transparency. Dave trusted at a young age that his partner was operating at the same velocity and integrity. He wasn't. Both partners have to be asking questions of each other — not just splitting the work and assuming.
Treat FedEx as a Customer, Not a Partner
The biggest mindset shift Amy preaches: FedEx is your only customer, not your business partner.
"When you're a partner, you expect something from the partner... When you remember that they're your customer, you owe them everything, and they owe you a paycheck."
The upside of the model, in Amy's words: no marketing (the boxes always come), no AR (you're paid weekly, no net-15 or net-30 chasing), and a documented playbook FedEx provides — videos, a contractor class, and written expectations. "It's literally there for you. You just have to follow the instructions."
The catch: everything FedEx doesn't teach you is the hard part. Managing people, hard conversations, labor and fuel cost control, safety, and compliance are all on the operator. That gap is also where the net margin lives — roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, and you cut out a whole person's cost.
Where Peers Lose Money
Amy named the failure patterns she sees:
- Overpaying for services and getting into relationships with the wrong vendors.
- Bucking compliance — fighting cameras, 2.0 integration, or Employment Practices Liability insurance.
- Keeping drivers "light" as a pacifier to avoid hard conversations, which leaves the operation un-lean and costs too high. As she put it, "you get upside down."
Squeezing Costs Without Begging for More Money
Rather than always asking FedEx for more, Amy's team innovates on cost. One example: a vendor-supplied nitrous in the line haul tires that costs $10,000–$12,000 a month but saves $16,000–$18,000 in fuel. They're also testing electric trucks (a Bright Drop unit), finding range drops from about 270 miles in good weather to roughly 230 in freezing Ohio cold — and already hitting a charger issue in deep cold.
Scale brings purchasing power — but also lumpy bills: $40,000 in tires at a time, or $100,000 in plate renewals when they come due.
The Hiring Philosophy
Amy's clearest operator principle: "I can teach a good human to drive a truck and deliver boxes. I can't teach a good delivery person to care." Hire good humans who can deliver, not good deliverers who don't care about the outcome. She distinguishes responsibility (a job description) from accountability (caring about the end result), and warns that tolerating a bad employee is toxic to the whole team — "hire fast and fire faster."
What's Next
Slicker is leaning into 2.0 — the integration of FedEx Express volume into the Ground network — which Amy says has already driven five new routes in one terminal over two years. She's betting on a company she describes as an $88 billion business continuing to innovate, and on FedEx's stated initiative to convert uncontracted areas into stable, owned contracts heading into 2025–2026 — which she argues raises the value of established operators like hers.