Growing up as the son of U.S. Xpress Founder Max Fuller and the grandson of Southwest Motor Freight Founder Clyde Fuller, Craig Fuller says that trucking runs through his blood.
"When I grew up, I idolized my dad. And when I was younger, I wanted to be like my dad and run U.S. Xpress," he recalls. "But that was not my destiny."
Craig says he fell in love with the trucking, hearing his father talk about the challenges of the industry, and decided to go to work at U.S. Xpress after earning a business degree from Baylor University.
Craig's older brother, Eric Fuller, ultimately succeeded their father and ran U.S. Xpress for six years, until the company sold in 2022 to Knight-Swift Transportation. But Craig worked in his family's business for two decades, both as a manager at U.S. Xpress and later as CEO of both Transfund and then Transcard.
In 2014, Craig says his dad fired him from Transcard because the growing company demanded more cash and the elder Fuller didn't want to turn to others to raise more capital. Although Craig was initially devastated to lose his job, he says that experience turned out to be the best thing that could happen.
After a couple years of consulting for freight tech companies and day trading in stocks, Craig decided to use his freight knowledge and entrepreneurial ambition to create his own business. Similar to how Bloomberg terminals provide real-time financial market data and trading information through the Bloomberg news service, he created FreightWaves to offer data and news about the trucking industry.
"For all the talk about global oil and financial markets, nobody talked about the global shipping market," Craig recalls. "I realized that the problem was that there wasn't a good real-time information source for what was happening in the trucking industry on a real-time basis in terms of content, context and data. That was the inspiration for FreightWaves.
"We started this business at the right time, in the right place and with the right team that was able to talk in a language that made sense to brokers," he says. "When I look at the impact we have had as a business, I think it is much greater than any financial return. We built a business that created transparency across this market that is unmatched... ."
FreightWaves has helped to bridge blue-collar trucking and white-collar finance sectors, enabling transparent data for freight shipping. For years, trucking and logistics suffered from a lack of transparency, leading to uninformed decision-making in an industry that accounts for 12% of global GDP.
The company generates data and news via its SONAR software and digital displays -- information that fuels futures trading and boosts the growth of the freight brokerage sector. SONAR, FreightWaves' data tool, is a dashboard with more than 150,000 time series indexes, aiding transportation providers in bench marking, analyzing, and forecasting rates, capacity, demand and costs.
Craig says in the year 2000, freight brokers managed about 6% of the market. FreightWaves now estimates with the aid of SONAR and the evolution of the industry, more than a quarter of all shipments are handled, in some manner, by brokers, and that share is projected to keep rising.
He calls himself an evangelist for his businesses and has lured investors from across the country to his company to expand his holdings over time. But when he started, local investors didn't provide the financial backing for his venture.
Photography by C.B. Schmelter / FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller speaks after being named a Spirit of Innovation award winner during the annual awards ceremony at The Signal in October 2019."My dad told me I was on my own, so I went to California and all over to raise venture capital," he recalls.
In 2018, Craig pitched his FreightWaves business startup to AOL Founder Steve Case, who was looking for growing new businesses outside of the traditional venture capital hubs in California's Silicon Valley or tech hubs like Boston and Austin, Texas. He won Case's "Rise of the Rest" pitch competition, securing $100,000 in equity and the endorsement of one of the nation's best-known business investors.
With the backing of outside investors and partners, FreightWaves has grown to become the largest provider of market news, research and data for the $10 trillion global logistics industry, with an average 2.7 million page views per month.
The company has grown over the past six years to generate more than $45 million in annual revenues with about 170 employees, who work both remotely and at the FreightWaves' headquarters in what Craig has dubbed "freight alley" in Chattanooga.
With the success of FreightWaves, Craig capitalized on his lifelong interest in aviation and in 2021, bought Flying magazine, one of the largest publications for commercial aviation and private pilots. Last year, he acquired Boating, Yachting, Sailing World, Cruising World, SaltWater Sportsman, Wakeboarding and Sport Fishing magazines from Florida-based Bonnier.
He now has about 180 workers employed at all the publications, which are separate businesses from FreightWaves. By the end of next year, he anticipates his aviation and boating businesses will generate more revenue than FreightWaves, which also continues to grow.
"I originally bought Flying as a kind of trophy property," Craig says, noting that he has been flying airplanes since he was 13 years old. "But since starting FreightWaves, I have fallen in love with the media business, and I have realized how they can help influence the way people think about topics."
He concedes that the traditional print model for magazines is tough, relying upon only advertisers and subscribers. But he has sought to capitalize on the influencing power and reach of his media holding to support other businesses, ranging from finance ventures to fly-in residential parks.
"If you own the media property, you can drive other types of businesses that are connected," he says.
Craig is using that philosophy to help promote a pair of local fly-in residential parks in both Hixson and in Bledsoe County. He is part of a group that acquired the Dallas Bay airport and surrounding property for a $70 million fly-in residential community.
In Bledsoe County, he is proposing to build a $1 billion luxury fly-in resort for jets, complete with a residential community. Called The Fields at Fall Creek and featuring a 4,200-foot airstrip, the development is planned to hold 800 homes, many with aircraft hangars, when fully built out over 20 years.
"There's been a lot of interest in these projects, and if you build the right story and have the right amenities, people will come," he says. "Our best days are still ahead of us."
Fuller at a glance
* Job: Founder and CEO of FreightWaves Inc.
* Age: 44
* Education: Business degree, Baylor University 2006
* Career: He began his career at U.S. Xpress as a sales executive and later headed several company divisions and spin offs, including a fleet card business that was eventually sold to U.S. Bank. He was CEO of Transcard before his father fired him and after working as a consultant for freight tech companies and doing his own day trading, Fuller created FreightWaves in 2017.
* Personal: He and his wife live with their five children on Elder Mountain