Dive Brief:
- Washington-based 3PL Radiant Logistics seized on Yellow Corp.’s bankruptcy this month, hiring two Yellow Logistics leaders to open a new Radiant Road and Rail location in the shuttered company’s old hometown.
- Steve McCleary and Ryan Stroup, who were instrumental in building Yellow Logistics beginning in 2017, joined Radiant and opened an office in Overland Park, Kansas, in about two weeks, according to an Aug. 16 announcement. McCleary leads customer- and carrier-facing teams at Radiant, while Stroup handles field sales.
- "With the abrupt closure of Yellow, we were able to move quickly to stand up an operation in Overland Park, while attracting quite a few very passionate and talented people looking to minimize service disruption for their customers," Stroup said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Yellow’s demise has left its competitors with a flood of LTL freight and a bidding war for terminals — and thousands of industry veterans looking for work. The nation’s third-largest LTL provider employed 22,000 union and 8,000 non-union employees, all but a few of whom lost their jobs.
Radiant’s move shows other companies aren’t waiting to see how the bankruptcy proceedings shake out to scoop up Yellow’s laid-off talent.
"Over the years we have looked at various acquisition candidates in the brokerage space to help build out our bi-modal brokerage capabilities at Radiant Road and Rail but just never found the right fit,” Radiant Founder and CEO Bohn Crain said in a statement. “I believe our patience and discipline is going to be rewarded with the opening of operations in Overland Park.”
Under Yellow’s union contract, Yellow Logistics could only sell truckload brokerage, Crain said. At Radiant, McCleary and Stroup’s team can sell LTL brokerage services as well as Radiant’s full suite of domestic, international and cross-border services.
“We called this initiative 'Project Charger' because we believe this is going to super-charge the growth in our over-the-road brokerage capabilities,” Crain said. “Now it is time to go to work and prove just that."
The Overland Park location will help build out Radiant Road and Rail’s brokerage operation, which provides TL and LTL trucking, temperature-controlled and dry intermodal, asset and brokered drayage, transloading and other services.
Yellow sought to sell Yellow Logistics just before shuttering locations, laying off workers and filing for bankruptcy this summer.
