Looking Ahead Devine’s Vellutini celebrating the past, looking to the future

BY STEVE BRAWNER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN KOSZKA HISTORICAL TRUCK IMAGES COURTESY DEVINE INTERMODAL

Even as Devine Intermodal celebrates 100 years in business, its president, Karen Vellutini, has her eyes on the future.

“We’ve survived a hundred years because we’re always looking ahead,” she said. “What’s ahead of us, and how can we best adapt. How can we be nimble to get to where we need to be? What’s on the horizon? What’s the next thing? We’re always looking ahead. … It’s part of our DNA.”

The company’s official name is Devine & Son Trucking Company. As Vellutini explained, Jim Devine was already thinking about the future when he started the company with one truck in 1923, the year the “& Son’ – Jim Devine Jr. – was born.

Devine Intermodal operates roughly 250 trucks, about half driven by employee drivers and the rest owner-operators. It has about 35 office staff members. About 75% of its business is intermodal, 20% is truckload and the remaining 5% is warehousing. It serves all ports and rail ramps in Northern California and Northern Nevada. It mostly handles agricultural products and processed foods on the exports side and mostly consumer goods on the imports side. While it has 48-state operating authority, Vellutini said it focuses on operations in California, Nevada, and Arizona.

The company started in the Sacramento area and has reinvented itself every 20 years, Vellutini said. The 1920s and ‘30s were focused on establishing itself and developing its footprint. The company started by hauling mostly lumber and agricultural products and added trucks and drivers during those years, even during the Great Depression. In the 1940s and 1950s, it grew its fleet size and expanded its geographical service area.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the company adapted to intermodalism, and then in the 1980s and 1990s it grew its intermodal brand. Also, during that time, the Devine’s sold their stake in the company to John Drewes, its CEO and owner.

The 2000s and 2010s were focused on acquisitions. Devine acquired a like-sized company in the Central Valley, a truckload carrier, a Reno-based trucking company, and a Fresno-based drayage company.

“We’d always served those markets, but having a base of operations in those places really helped us grow even more than we were doing organically,” she said. “And, John’s leadership through our evolution and acquisitions has been instrumental in the growth path of Devine.”

Vellutini said the company’s culture has enabled it to expand and succeed. Soon after it opened its Reno office, it hired a manager with warehousing and thirdparty logistics experience who asked if the company had ever considered running those kinds of operations. That question led to Devine offering those services.

“I’m really proud of our company culture,” she said. “It fosters people being creative and generating ideas. We’ll throw something on the wall and see if it sticks. And it’s fun. This is a tough business. It’s a stressful business. But, we have fun in the process. We’re a place that fosters collaboration within departments, across departmentally, with our drivers as well. I’m really proud of the team we have. It really is a team atmosphere.”

Looking ahead, Vellutini expects the next 20 years to be a time of increased adaptation – to zero emissions vehicles, regulations, and technologies such as driver interfaces, self-driving and real-time cargo tracking.

Vellutini came to the company in 2002 after working nearly 14 years in the industry. She grew up in Sonora, CA in the foothills with no trucking background and then studied international business at San Diego State University, ultimately graduating from Fresno State University.

Vellutini then went to work as a sales representative in San Francisco for Singapore-based Neptune Orient Lines (NOL) and remained with the container shipping company for nearly ten years. When she started in the industry, the biggest ships were 4,500 TEUs, or twenty- foot equivalent units, and were about the size of three football fields. Now the biggest liners are nearing 24,000 TEUs.

"FOR ME, IT WASN’T ABOUT PROMOTING WOMEN IN THE INDUSTRY AS MUCH AS IT WAS PROMOTING THE INDUSTRY AS A WHOLE AND EDUCATING PEOPLE AND TRYING TO BRING NEW PEOPLE INTO THIS INDUSTRY. IT WAS ABOUT PROMOTING IT AND TEACHING PEOPLE HOW INTERESTING IT REALLY IS."

“I still remember being on the bridge of a ship my very first time and watching containers get loaded and unloaded on the ship and being completely in awe of the whole process, and so I was smitten,” she said. “That was it. I was in it.”

After NOL acquired American President Lines (APL) in 1998, she worked under the APL umbrella for an additional four years.

In late 2001, Vellutini moved to Sacramento and was telecommuting and making the long train ride commute to Oakland. A mutual customer connected her with Devine Intermodal’s thenpresident, Dick Coyle. She was looking to end the commute, while he was looking for someone with her skill sets and business acumen.

“It was win-win,” Coyle remembered from his current home in Boise. “She filled the role, the void that we had in our company right away, and it was good for her because we were local and it was a good continues