Now-six-truck High Road, LLC, owner Sharon Lee is unique among contenders in Overdrive's 2024 Small Fleet Championship. Though she comes from family stock with a long trucking lineage -- her father, Carl Bingham, himself ran a small fleet in New York and pulled Broadway-show and other touring acts during her childhood -- asked if she'd ever considered getting her CDL herself, "Absolutely not," she said, simply, with a big laugh. "I can barely park my SUV."
Yet it's trucking that is her day-to-day, through and through. Her company launched in 2016 with a distinctly specialized mission: to support concert tours across the United States and Canada, from one- or two-truck boutique tours to one recently completed for K-pop singer IU that required 14 trucks.
One among High Road's three company drivers and three leased owner-operators served as lead man for that big production, with other support contracted with an independent owner and seven Landstar-leased owners with tour experience, Lee said. Company drivers are salaried employees at High Road, with a per-diem for meals expense when they're on tour, sometimes group hotel buyouts for layovers. Leased owners dedicated to a tour earn a set per-day rate, and otherwise earn a percentage if tours are slow and the company's moving general freight in the interim.
High Road, LLC, owner Sharon Lee
Year 2023 was a little slower than the prior year, as rates for general freight tanked and downward pressure with new competition began to spill over into the tour-haul world, with trucking in the niche in high demand post-COVID. At once, Sharon Lee is poised for future growth even with modifications to her prior five-year plan, started in 2023, to add "two trucks and three-four trailers per year each year" moving ahead, Lee said. "We quickly had to adjust based on the decrease in revenue."
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This year has proved fruitful thus far on that front with the addition of another truck and one leased owner, the latter part of the adjustment. For these and other reasons, High Road's among five semi-finalists in the 3-10-truck division for Overdrive's Small Fleet Champ award.
Accidental trucking beginnings: 'How many planes do we have?'
Following early-years experience -- see the shot below in the podcast cover image of toddler Sharon on the step of one of her father's rigs back in the day -- High Road's Sharon Lee got her first professional trucking experience after working in sales in other industries. It was a story told in part in this edition of Overdrive Radio from earlier this year:
In 1998 when Lee was in her 20s, she was "looking for a change of a career," she said. She "interviewed at this company" and was "hired on the spot, started my first day and the company was Forward Air."
At the end her first day on the job, a coworker who was training her probed for questions about the work. Sharon Lee's first question for him: "How many planes do we have?" He walked her out on the dock at the terminal and "turned bright red," she said. "He said, 'What do you see out there?' And I said, 'Trucks!' And he said, 'What do you think these trucks are doing?' And I said, 'They're taking freight to our planes.'"
Well, not exactly, she learned. "And that was how I got into trucking," she said, later hired by a client trucking company to focus on freight moving to trade shows and conferences, where she spent the bulk of her time before launching High Road in 2016. Along the way, she was at a concert one night and saw some road cases there.
"That looks just like trade show cases," she thought, shelving the thought back in the memory bank. When her company later on separated from its corporate owner and decided to close their doors, "I decided to open doors [and] took on some of their trade show business," she said, with a long-term goal of diving headfirst into the concert-touring industry.
This is the last of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that have aired here over the last month. (Access all of the published profiles via this link.) Two finalists in each category (3-10 trucks, 11-30 trucks) will be announced Friday, October 11.
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Then COVID hit, and every tour in the United States came to a screeching halt in 2020. "We stopped," Lee said. "We got rid of trucks, played a lot of Candy Crush, cried, prayed."
By then, part of the legacy business in the Northeast High Road took over was being managed by Mike Camuso, Lee's son, who today oversees a warehouse in Londonderry, New Hampshire. He's involved in tour support, for sure, he said, but also works with local clients there on events, that portion of High Road's business accounting for about 20% of overall revenues. "We do storage for multiple clients, fulfillment work, events for an energy-drink brand," Camuso said, supporting "rollout at colleges" and other sites.
High Road picked up some of this kind of "retail work" during COVID that helped keep the business a viable entity, said Lee. "We were just blessed. ... We were also still doing trade shows at the time. And those stopped as well. It was a rough time."
Yet coming out of it, demand was intense. "End of 2021, beginning of 2022 was just insane," Lee said. "Because not only were trucks no longer available, but live music came back big time."
The company begged, borrowed, stole, according to Lee, to find equipment. "Orders were taking months," rentals were unavailable. Lee "subcontracted out some of the work. We brokered it to other people that we could find or that we had partnered with in the past."
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One of those new folks got his first taste of tour work through High Road at that time -- independent Paul Sagehorn, trucking with a step deck and a 2024 Volvo today out of a home base of Sparta, Wisconsin, when the one-truck fleet isn't on tour with High Road.
"A friend of mine lives in [Sharon Lee's] area," said Sagehorn. "In 2021, in the Fall when tours were just barely getting re-started, she had a two-truck tour." His friend's ended up being one of the trucks, Sagehorn's own the other. "Man, once I started doing it, I was hooked. It’s such a different experience" than freight hauling. Compensation is good, he added, "currently better than anything else going" with widespread freight-rates challenges.
Predictable, too. "You get paid daily, so you know what you’re going to make," he said.
Owner-operator Sagehorn enjoys the "smaller tours" he's been on with High Road "because it's really personal," he said, though he also lauded High Road's lead drivers on the recent, fairly sizable 14-truck IU tour he was also a part of. Lee's driver lead "did such a fantastic job coordinating things."
That lead driver, John, turned a joke of Sagehorn's into a bit of downtime fun on the IU tour. Here he's pictured as righthand man to Sagehorn's own Superman, in a Robin costume that others involved on the tour also got in on in other ways.
Owner-operator Paul Sagerhorn as Superman, at an Oakland truck stop not long before the IU tour concluded.
Sharon Lee, too, Sagehorn lauds for the personal touch. "She’s been really good to the drivers," he said. On the most recent tour, "She came out to New Jersey and took us all out to dinner, then met us in Atlanta," too.
Hands-on support delivers dividends with customers/clients, who pay that personal touch right back to High Road drivers and the company itself. Lee told the story of a Switchfoot tour on which her lead driver experienced a personal tragedy when his son was murdered. "The team immediately got on the phone with me" and arranged to get him home, Lee said. "We flew him home for a few weeks, and when he went back on tour, they were just incredible."
It was the High Road operator's birthday shortly thereafter. A musician himself, John, who functions as lead driver for many of High Road's tours, was called onstage to "sing a song with them and play guitar," Lee said. "It was so impactful for him. And for the last two weeks of the tour, he was on their set list."
Prioritizing for the small business owner: 'It's about taking care of the people'
Candidly, "I don't love trucks," Lee said. "I hate trucks."
Lee's equipment investment to date has been supported closely by those who do love them -- her drivers. They're what drive her, meanwhile -- what she most enjoys about the trucking niche High Road has carved out is "taking care of the people," not just the drivers but all of any given tour team that's involved. "The truck part of the business is a means to an end. I love the company, I love the clients, I love the drivers."
She spends a lot of energy focusing on how to treat the team around her, and that personal touch yields bedrock trust. She trusts her operators' points of view on potential new hires, for instance, involving them directly. Trucks and trailers, too, most definitely, with which they all have a little bit of fun with a unique naming convention rather than a numbering system. Trucks are christened with female names from famous songs -- there's a Lucile, a Roxanne, Molly, Bernadette, Jenny. "All the trailers are 1980s bands," said Lee -- Duran, Winger, Aha... the list goes on. "It's easier than trying to remember numbers."
Sharon Lee's close focus on her business and personal relationships pays off time and again with customers/vendors in the tour/production business around Nashville and across the country, for reliable partnerships. Concert-production small fleet Legendary Transportation owner Paul Rogers, headquartered in Gordonsville, Tennessee, has worked with High Road for three or four years now in various ways, from including one among his drivers on a High Road-led tour to having work brokered his way by Lee and company. "She’s a stand-up lady to work for," Rogers said.
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Rogers helped her early on when she was in a bind staffing an early tour. "We met through another driver," Lee said, and after the driver dropped out of his commitment to a High Road tour, "I called Paul in a panic. 'What am I going to do?' He said, 'Promise me you will never use that guy again, and I’ll send you a guy.'" Everything worked out to the satisfaction of both parties, ultimately. "And Paul, on this last tour we just had -- he had one guy on that tour."
When tour business is slow, High Road operators occasionally support Legendary's production runs. "He's both a client and a vendor," said Lee of Rogers. "We had a tour starting in Nashville, and the driver got to the venue and realized he didn’t have a ramp. Paul shot it over to the venue real quick."
Lee's looking to more expansion -- whether investing in more trucks or, better yet, leaving the powered-equipment decisions to others by leasing on new owner-operators -- in the coming years. "I do see myself focusing more on the parts of the business that I really enjoy, which is the connecting, the sales part of it," she said.
The National Association of Small Trucking Companies is sponsoring this year's Small Fleet Championship program. Finalists receive a year's worth of membership in the association, with access to a myriad of benefits from NASTC's well-known fuel program to drug and alcohol testing services and much more. All will be recognized at the association's annual conference, where the winner will be announced November 7 in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
"I speak at conferences regularly," she said.
Among key lessons learned running the High Road business: "Do what you do really well and hire other people to do what you can't. And that's really tough. For a small business, that's really, really hard because you think about your resources and, 'Oh my gosh, I don't want to pay this person or bring somebody else on,'" she said.
She gave the example of getting High Road's Canadian motor carrier authority, which she feels like she wasted countless hours on to figure it out before "I finally just wrote a check" to someone else to help secure it, she said. "I think with a lot of small business owners, whether they're owner-operators or small fleet owners, you do learn to do a lot of things really well. You really do. I mean, I can kill it on a spreadsheet. I can do marketing, I can update our website. I can run QuickBooks, I can do all of these things, but is that where my time is best spent?"
Not really, she added. "There are other people who can do those things too, and do them so much better than me. It makes so much more sense to invest my time growing the business, continuing to work on ... our reputation. It is something that's extremely important to me. So getting our name out there, working on that, speaking at conferences, staying connected in the touring community, giving back, investing...."
What goes around comes around.
"It all comes back to you eventually," she said.
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