David Parker: a man of faith, for the long haul

On April 16, David Parker, founder, CEO and president of Covenant Transport Group, was inducted into the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's College of Business Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame alongside Carl Austin Watson, the late founder of Chattanooga's Mountain View auto dealership group.

Parker joined Clyde Fuller, the trucking magnate who reared him, and his brother, Max Fuller, in the hall. Max Fuller is head of another local truck company, U.S. Express, the fifth-largest private trucking company in America.

The induction was an undeserved honor, Parker said. In the wake of the great trucking industry shake-up between 2007 and 2009, he says he is just happy to be carrying the nation's goods and making money again.

At 6 p.m., just 15 minutes after a torrential rain ends, the invited guests begin showing up at the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club. The valets collect keys and issue ticket stubs. Thirty minutes later, David Parker arrives as the guest of honor. He can't get through the door without pats on the back, congratulatory hand shakes. He and Jacqueline, his wife of nearly 39 years, pass the cardboard posters featuring Parker and Watson.

The poster says Parker started with a promise to God and 25 trucks, and turned that into a "$750 million enterprise with six subsidiaries and a network of more than 2,700 trucks and 6,700 trailers." Covenant is publicly traded, and closely watched.

The sun is falling behind Lookout Mountain, and the bad weather has passed, at least for the day. Off in the direction of Covenant Transport's Interstate-side corporate headquarters, a purple- and blue-laced twilight sky unfurls.

Dinner is served.

But I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee.

The Covenant Transport facility is located southwest of downtown Chattanooga, adjacent to Interstate 24.

Genesis

David Parker grew up around trucking. As a boy he watched the choreography of big-wheeled tractors and trailers at terminal yards, asphalt deserts rich with the aroma of belching chrome blow stacks and hot rubber tires.

Clyde Fuller, founder and longtime operator of Southwest Motor Freight, is who Parker talks about when he talks about his dad. Parker's biological father died when Parker was two. His mother married Clyde Fuller, and a trucking dynasty was born.

"Clyde Fuller raised me," says Parker, a hot fluorescent light fixed on his face and a crowd of Chattanooga who's-who assembled in front of him. "My father [Fuller] was an entrepreneur. ... If there was a definition, his picture would be beside it."

Clyde Fuller (a 2000 Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame inductee) built Chattanooga-based Southwest Motor Freight into a successful long-haul trucking firm. His sons joined him, each with their own skills - David in sales and operations, Max in maintenance and finance. Both worked their way up and became executives. The brothers then took over leadership of the company after their father retired.

Then, in the mid-1980s, an investment firm came along and offered to buy the company from the brothers. Parker and Fuller agreed. They each took money and agreed to a no-compete clause that forced them out of the market for six months. Parker took his $150,000 - equal to $327,000 in 2015 money - and went on vacation, the first two weeks on a trip to Montreal, Canada. He'd never taken a vacation before, he says. He and Jacqueline spent the first night of their honeymoon in Monteagle, at "the Holiday Inn up there on the left," he tells the crowd. They laugh, and he praised Jacqueline's patience.

After returning from his vacation in Canada, Parker took a trip to Fall Creek Falls, the state park outside Spencer, Tennessee, an hour's ride north of Chattanooga. Here was a successful, young trucking executive, out of work, with a wad of cash in his pocket and an open road ahead. He says a strange compulsion enveloped him while he was praying at Fall Creek Falls.

Parker's faith runs deep. He mentions God repeatedly during his Hall of Fame induction speech. It's "my Jesus" and "the most important relationship in my life." It's the root of every point, the beginning of every success story and the end of every trial. And it's where the Covenant Transport story begins - in 1985 at Fall Creek Falls. A divine impression on a young man's heart: Go start your own trucking company.

"I said, 'God, I'm scared,'" Parker remembers. "I said, 'I don't know how to go and ask banks to lend me millions of dollars.'"

Parker made an agreement - a covenant - with God. He would run the business the right way, if God would provide. He put his $150,000 into starting Covenant Transport, with 25 trucks and 50 trailers.

And today, Parker knows two things for certain: God has provided and trucking has paid off.

I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after my own heart, who will do all my will.

David Parker

In it for the long haul

R.H. Luvin, Jr. was one of the first people Parker hired at Covenant when the new company was formed in 1985. Luvin introduced Parker at the Hall of Fame ceremony. A mutual friend introduced the two, says Luvin. And "at the ripe old age of 34," Luvin didn't expect to find the upstart founder of a new trucking company was younger than him.

"I walked in, and I met a guy that was 28-years-old and getting ready to start a company, and I gotta tell ya," he says, "I was a bit taken aback by that."

But Luvin soon saw that Parker needed his help.

"I knew absolutely nothing about trucking," he says, "and I was thrilled to find out he knew absolutely nothing about accounting."

Luvin has been with Covenant 30 years now, and has spent most of every day in the same building as Parker.

He calls him "a man of uncommon character." When employees show up at the office, Parker's there. When they leave, Parker's there.

To a room accustomed to hearing prepared speeches playing up business leaders and entrepreneurs, Luvin goes off script. He threw his notes away before arriving at the ceremony."

"David is a man who has a giving heart, and I found that out very quickly," he says. "Before we ever realized whether we were making any money or not, David was giving money away.

"I found that over the years to be very refreshing, even at the point in time when we didn't have money to give, and I commend him for that."

One day in 2008 - the same day, inronically, that President George W. Bush complained about the moribund state of the American economy - Covenant officials met with banker and signed papers for a new $300 million credit facility. In February 2006, Covenant stock traded as high as $16.25 a share. But by late November 2008 - less than three years later - the company's stock plummeted to as little as $1.40 per share, erasing 86 percent of the company's market value.

"If you've read the paper in the last 10 years, we've lost a lot of money," Parker says during his Hall of Fame speech. "I always tell people: I lost 99 percent of my pride."

From 2006 to 2011, Covenant was profitable only one year, in 2010, and its cumulative losses over the six-year period totaled more than $107.5 million.

But faith and the covenant - represented by a scroll on the outline of America in the company's logo - kept Parker going through the rough patch in the road.

"There are times that are tests that come about to make sure that you're doing the right thing, because you are going to live it," Parker remembers.

In those hard years, Parker let go some. He handed more power over to his executive team. He put more in the hands of his drivers. He trusted others to carry out his dream.

Covenant Transport driver David Bryson stops at a welcome center near Fair Play, S.C.

Shares of Covenant have more than tripled in value over the past four years.

Parker isn't working less, and that's not the message he wants to send. He still wakes up every morning (including weekends) at 4 a.m., works out for over an hour-and-a-half, studies the Bible and arrives at the office on weekdays at about 6:50 a.m.

He isn't obsessed with material things.

"I drive a Mercedes, because I can afford to drive a Mercedes, but I don't care," he says. "Give me a Chevrolet, I don't care."

He says he envies college students who have a chance to get a degree, something he never did. He craves knowledge, to know more, how to be a better manager, owner, husband, father, friend and follower.

Parker encourages upstart entrepreneurs, but also warns them: It's a lifestyle. It's a lot of work.

A Covenant Transport truck drives along I-24 over Cummings Highway.

The dinner is over, the induction ceremony is in the books and Parker is trying to get out the door. But he finds himself unable to get out the door without answering one more round of questions.

His phone rings.

I'm on my way, he says.

Next year, there will be a banner hanging from the ceiling during the 6-to-7 p.m. social hour: David Parker. Founder and president of Covenant Transport, Hall of Fame 2015 inductee.

Parker is admirer of the biblical character David, man after God's own heart according to scripture.

He points his hand at his own chest.

"That's what I want to be."

This article appears in the May issue of Edge magazine, which may be read online at www.meetsforbusiness.com