Along with the new name, Riley also resurrected an idea that he had tried at Seigle's for a while: offering a money-back guarantee for overnight service. "It wasn't hard for a lot of companies to provide overnight service," Hank Epstein, vice-president of finance, admits, "but the guarantee was unique."
G.O.D. fast became the trucking company Riley had always envisioned while growing up and working in -- then finally directing -- his father's trucking ventures. Riley's trucks were painted white, with red wheels and bumpers. His drivers wore pressed white shirts with a G.O.D. insignia on the front and an American-flag arm patch. They looked very much like the Federal Express drivers Riley had so admired. Best of all, sales roared ahead. "At a time when most truckers were cutting their prices, he found people willing to pay for service," says Samuel Highsmith, president and chief executive of Batesville Truck Line Inc., in Batesville, Ark. "He saw the Cadillac where others saw the Hyundai."
* * *
The numbers bore out Riley's original vision. In 1983, its first full year, G.O.D. picked up sales of nearly $400,000. The next year sales shot up more than 400% to almost $2 million. Sales doubled to about $4 million the year after that. During its first five years the company grew at a rate of nearly 7,500% -- fast enough to earn the 16th spot on the Inc. 500 in 1987. In 1988 it ranked 61st. Even Riley was surprised how fast it all happened. In 1988 he was just 32 years old.
Still, he rarely thought about the numbers as anything more than steps toward another goal. G.O.D., he boasted, would grow at 25% a year until it hit $200 million -- or until it was 100 times bigger than any business his father, Richard Riley, had run.
The last of those businesses had been Seigle's Express itself. Walter Riley, who'd begun his trucking career at age eight, had joined his father right out of high school and from the start proved far more adept at company building than the elder Riley had ever been. By 1979 Walter, then 24, had taken a stagnant and marginal business and pushed sales to more than $3 million. Pretax profits, which had been a rarity, were running at almost 8%. Repeatedly the younger Riley had remade Seigle's, finding new customer groups and market niches, buying more trucks, relocating to larger terminals, and finding inventive ways to exploit the new capacity. In those days everybody at Seigle's was feeling confident, even his dad. Finally, Richard Riley owned the kind of business he thought he should have owned all along. A thriving company at last. And it was his. All his.
It was an unfortunate and dangerous equation.
As far back as 1973 the elder Riley had talked about selling his son a piece of the company. Whatever happened to that plan? Walter asked every now and then. Don't worry, came Dad's reply, we'll get around to it. By 1979 Walter feared that his father had backed out entirely. He brought it up again. Talk to me a year from now, his father instructed, and if we're still doing well, I'll consider it.
Maybe they both knew what was coming. During a vacation to St. Thomas in early 1979, Walter made a mental note of a tremendous opportunity in the moped-rental business. When he returned home, his father's lifelong fear of growth seemed even more overpowering. It was as if Richard Riley was afraid, deep down, that he would soon be running the company again. And he didn't want his son to leave him with a business that was already about four times bigger than he had ever handled. Don't buy any trucks, he told Walter. Don't take on any more debt. Don't bring on any salespeople.
The crash was coming, and neither of them was going to swerve. "They were at each other all the time," Hank Epstein recalls.
One evening, Walter was in the dispatch office talking with an employee. His father appeared outside the doorway. "I've got to talk to you," he said to Walter. "In a minute, Dad," Walter replied. "No," his father shot back. The argument escalated behind the closed doors of Walter's office. Employees outside heard a lot of yelling. The next thing they knew, Walter stomped out, leaving, it seemed, for good.
For a year Walter stayed away -- part of that time plotting to start his own trucking company. But he abandoned his plan and instead moved his family to St. Thomas, where he struck gold renting mopeds. And where he waited for what he believed was inevitable.
Seigle's quickly began to deteriorate. As employees and customers hit the exits -- and deregulation, due in 1981, neared -- Epstein persuaded Richard Riley to sell. When Walter heard, he rushed back to New Jersey. He bought the business for a price that was, he concedes, a bit on the high side. "But if I hadn't given my best shot to buy that company, I don't know if I could have looked at myself in the mirror."
Once they signed the papers, Walter felt free. The company was now his weapon, and he planned to wield it. Eager to prove himself to his father, whose highest aspiration, so far as Walter could tell, had been to eke out a living, the younger Riley pushed hell-bent for growth. Not healthy, manageable growth, but bigger and bigger numbers, more and more recognition from employees, from competitors -- and finally from his father. The company and its employees were Riley's race car, and he was stamping hard on the accelerator. It did not make him a very enlightened manager. "I never looked at the internal processes of the company because I never thought they were significant," he says.
But he knew he needed employees to achieve his goal. He wanted them to feel just as insatiable as he felt, to be fueled by the kind of anxiety that made it impossible for him to sit through a short meeting without punching someone up on the speakerphone or running downstairs to talk to the guys in the shop. Riley wanted to motivate them, and he decided he could use money to do it.
