When Conrad Daniels joined his in-laws’ transportation company in 2000, he walked into a business at its peak — one of the largest minority-owned trucking companies in the country. A year later, the family sold all of it.
For most people in freight, the truck is the business. HJI’s story argues the opposite: the truck may just be the handoff. The lesson for operators is simple — margin often lives where your customer’s operation is most fragile.
What the family kept after the sale looked like an afterthought: a small warehousing company with exactly one customer, Ford. "We went from something really a big elephant to a small mouse," Daniels says. That mouse is now HJI Supply Chain Solutions — seven distribution centers across Kentucky and Tennessee, roughly 1.2 million square feet, and more than 500 employees.
The origin: two trucks and a procurement officer willing to take a chance
The company traces back to Wade and Alice Houston. Wade Houston was one of the first Black athletes at the University of Louisville and went on to coach at Tennessee — the first Black head basketball coach in the SEC, the family says. (His son, Daniels’ brother-in-law Allan Houston, became an NBA All-Star and Olympic gold medalist.) When the Houstons and partner Charlie Johnson went into business, Ford wanted its supplier base to look more like its customer base — and handed them a route. They started with two trucks and two trailers, later entered a joint venture with a larger company out of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and grew it into a company Daniels estimated at roughly $400 million in revenue.
By 2001, three founding families with diverging interests chose to divest. After an ESOP deal that spread ownership to employees, the trucking business was gone — and Daniels, an industrial and systems engineer by training, was left rebuilding around a single Ford warehouse.
The insight: the truck is only the start of the value chain
"Everything that comes on a tractor has to get unloaded, has to get warehoused, and then something has to happen while it’s being warehoused," Daniels says. The work that pays is what the industry calls line-side presentation — sequencing.
HJI’s first and most punishing example was drive shafts. More than 300 variants feed Ford’s F-250s, F-350s, F-450s, Expeditions and Navigators. Rather than make the plant warehouse all 300, HJI receives them and arranges them in the exact order the line will install them. On a line building roughly 70 trucks an hour, the operator just grabs the next part.
The economics are brutal and clarifying. HJI works on two-and-a-half to three hours of lead time, with a new broadcast every 20 to 30 seconds. Get it right and you earn about a dollar. Get it wrong and you’re looking at roughly $2,000 a minute in line-down cost. That difficulty became a moat — HJI still runs the program two decades later, re-bidding every four to five years.
The lesson that built the company: diversify before you’re forced to
Automotive "was really good until it wasn’t." The 2008–2009 downturn taught Daniels what concentration risk feels like and pushed HJI to apply its sequencing discipline elsewhere — where, it turned out, the work was easier than automotive’s split-second supply chain. Today that includes kitting for food and beverage (assembling a bottle and two shot glasses into one retail SKU for Brown-Forman), healthcare, appliances and e-commerce. When COVID hit, HJI stood up a custom order-entry system for a healthcare customer and distributed a reported 8 million-plus pieces of PPE within six to seven weeks.
What’s next
Daniels became president in 2017 through a six-year succession plan. He’s targeting 15% profit margins, an acquisition of a company half HJI’s size, and doubling in five years — on the back of 40% top-line growth in 2021 and roughly 30% the year after. The levers: autonomous mobile robots to strip out non-value-added walking and lifting, and a deliberate experiment to flatten the org chart and cut supervisory overhead. Underneath it sits a stated mission to narrow the racial wealth gap. His formula: "Set the tone, shape the culture, and role-model the behavior."