.floatimg-left-hort { float:left; } .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 12px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 12px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 12px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} When Jimmy DeMatteis was growing up, one of his dad’s favorite expressions was that no matter how bad the economy was, “people always eat.”

Good words to live by, particularly if you’re a trucker hauling perishable food for a living. In 1969, that truck driver, James R. DeMatteis, founded Des Moines Truck Brokers Inc. (DMTB) with Joseph T. Comito and his son, Joseph M. Comito, the owners of Capital City Fruit Co.

Forty years later, people still have to eat, and that’s part of the reason Des Moines Truck Brokers is seeing double-digit percentage growth in its load volume, despite a period of unprecedented challenges for third-party logistics companies.

“Really, we market ourselves as experts in perishable foods and transportation of food items, and that’s helped us a lot, especially right now,” said Jimmy DeMatteis, whose father recruited him to join DMTB in 1984.

The family-owned business, which serves as a matchmaker between small trucking companies and shippers that need to move freight, has weathered several recessions by brokering loads for Iowa-based food companies that include Capital City Fruit in Norwalk, Fareway Stores Inc. in Boone and Ankeny-based Mrs. Clark’s Foods, among others.

‘Like one of us’

Last fall, Norwalk-based DMTB received a significant industry award when it was named the 2009 Broker of the Year by the National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC). The NASTC represents the top 5 percent of small trucking companies, or about 2,600 businesses operating about 50,000 trucks nationwide.

“Anytime you get a national award like that, I think it speaks volumes of the people you have, the customers you have and the carriers you work with,” said the younger DeMatteis, who has been the company’s president for the past 5 1/2 years.

Those small trucking companies are typically owned by the driver, who may have a couple of other drivers and trucks, DeMatteis said, but no sales force and not many customers knocking on his or her doors for business.

“So what we try to do is service those guys; we treat them like they’re one of us,” he said. “A fellow might take a load out of Iowa to Arizona and then get there and not have anything to load, so they call people like us.”

On the shippers’ side of the business, “our customer base ranges from one guy who ships one load every six months to the people who are shipping six loads a day,” he said. “We can’t ever be a one-size-fits-all service provider. You’ve got to adapt to the needs of that customer.”

The company has nine employees, including several graduates of the Iowa State University transportation logistics program. “Our goal is to make it easier for our customers,” DeMatteis said. “They call here and they know that they’re going to get accurate information, they’re going to have timely responses and freight picked up and delivered on time. And you can’t do that without good communication.”

More price shopping

DeMatteis said DMTB’s load volume has increased by approximately 23 percent since May 2009, and that over the past nine months, each week’s load has been consistently larger than the corresponding week a year earlier. One of the keys to that growth has been a concerted effort over the past two years to solicit more business from existing freight customers, he said.

“The theory being, it’s easier to sell that low-lying fruit than to just walk in cold to some guy we don’t know,” DeMatteis said. “It made sense; some of these customers have been with us 10, 15, 20 years. They know what you’re capable of; they know you have a good record, that you have safe carriers on the road. … And guess what? They gave us more business.”

As the recession has worn on, shippers are less willing to absorb extra costs such as higher fuel prices than they were initially.

“Now what I’m seeing is that as we’re a year or so into the recession, smaller carriers are a little bit desperate and there’s a little more price shopping going on with the shippers,” DeMatteis said. “So our margins dropped, because we’re passing through more money to the carriers. We have to, to keep those guys in business and keep our freight moving, which in turn keeps our customer base happy.”

Consequently, the company constantly works with its customers on cost-reduction strategies such as consolidating more freight onto one truck. “Shippers are becoming more willing to look at cooperating on combining loads, but it takes a little bit of cooperation,” he said.

So what can businesses do to reduce shipping costs?

“The thing I would look at is opening lines of communication with your suppliers, calling meetings and asking them to come in to take a look at this stuff and work as partners,” DeMatteis said. “I think people avoid that; I think the tendency is to avoid talking with the trucking people. But I assure you, every guy on the dock has some idea that his boss hasn’t thought of. And it’s the same with the truckers; we get truckers coming in here all the time telling us how we should do our job.”

At the same time, DMTB is looking at new ways to grow.

“We’re aggressively trying to make changes to positively sustain us into the future,” DeMatteis said. “We’ve come 40 years, and we want to go another 40 years and beyond. Our plan is to grow and to become a much more significant company than we are today. We’re looking at the possibility of adding warehousing to our services, and maybe having satellite offices with shippers so that they have somebody right there on staff to provide assistance.”

The coolest thing about the business? “We get the opportunity to be heroes,” DeMatteis said.

“Sometimes a company is out of product, and they’ve got something that just got off the boat and they’ve just got to get it here,” he said. “That’s where we really shine. All of a sudden those phones light up and they’re working, and they get somebody on that load in 15 minutes, and there’s high-fives all around the room, and everybody’s excited. And that’s a great way to end the day. We get to be heroes, and that’s pretty cool.”