Leave the Driving to Them

The U.S. is increasingly not only a nation on wheels but a nation that rents and leases its wheels. Quite a few of the bigger ones belong to a Miami-based corporation called the Ryder System, which owns 37,000 trucks and successfully leaves the driving to someone else. Ryder trucks are rented to transport new cars to dealers throughout the South, speed deliveries of air freight from New York airports, haul chickens to market in Georgia, deliver the Miami Herald to distributors and move housefuls of furniture across town almost anywhere in the U.S. Though the red-and-black "R" trademark on its units is not as well known as those of Hertz or UHaul, Ryder last year grossed $221 million, up more than 25% from 1969.

Windshield Deal. The man behind the company's growth is its founder and chief, stocky, plain-spoken James A. Ryder, 57. "I really never did like driving trucks," he admits, and his secret over the years has been to find enough customers who do not like--or need--to own them. They range from corporate giants that lease an entire fleet of Ryder trucks to avoid investing capital in their own, to weekend gardeners who want to save delivery charges by their local nursery.

Ryder's dislike for driving trucks came from firsthand experience. In 1932, he quit his job as straw boss with a construction firm and raised a $125 down payment on a Model A pickup truck. Figuring his deals with a piece of chalk on the windshield, he was soon hauling trash from Miami's beaches and delivering building materials to Palm Beach. His first leasing contract, with a Miami beer distributor, came three years later, but it was not until after the World War II trucking shortage had eased that Ryder--who was still a truck operator as well as a leaser--entered the big league. Then, says Ryder, "I was all for buying anything that moved." His biggest catch in a rapid series of acquisitions was Great Southern Trucking Co., the largest common carrier in the Southeast: it proved to be an expensive overextension of his resources. Ryder sold the debt-burdened firm to International Utilities Inc. in 1965 and determined to stick to his rapidly expanding specialty of leasing.

Although the Great Southern experience left Ryder "more sober and more thoughtful," it did not keep him from experimenting. He considers himself something of a trucking consultant and has even endowed a chair at the University of Miami for transportation studies --partly to ease his own regret at not having had a college education. The Ryder corporation operates a 300-depot maintenance system that services other fleet owners as well as its own trucks, and has an engineering consulting division that advises truck buyers on their design needs and markets its own computer system. Last week Ryder and a consortium of Miami warehousemen began operating a storage-control system that keeps track of thousands of in-and-out movements of goods for hundreds of clients and is expected to cut the high loss rate common in warehouses. Like many other leaders in the freight industry, Ryder is convinced that shippers should be able to own "intermodal systems" that could provide air, ground and water transportation for customers under a single bill of lading. "Today, the company that originates a shipment is careful about it," he says. "The others don't care what happens to it."

Ryder is up each morning at six and begins the day by doing 50 pushups and taking a mile-long run through Miami's fashionable Coconut Grove with his three German shepherds. He relaxes by sailing one of his five floating rigs, from a sunfish to a 116-ft., $950,000 yacht. At the office, he is known as a boss who gives full reign on day-to-day matters to his lieutenants but nonetheless makes his opinions known in streams of one-line memos. Ryder's formula for creating the kind of empire that has made him personally worth at least $17 million sounds a bit like a Franklin homily in truckerese: "There's a helluva danger in quick success without any bumps."

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