Phillip Yeager was 43 and had spent 19 years at the Pennsylvania Railroad when he quit to start his own company. In 1971 he and his wife Joyce put $10,000 into Hub City Terminals, a windowless one-room office above a flower shop in Hinsdale, Illinois.
The firm began as a shipper’s agent, an intermediary that booked intermodal freight with the railroads. Yeager, who founded what became Hub Group and served as its chairman, died in October 2008 after complications from a heart attack. He was 80.
Building the company
In 1975 the Yeagers set up a series of S corporations to expand. Each office ran on its own, with its own profit-and-loss center. The name changed to Hub Group in 1985.
His son David, who had been with the company since 1975 and opened its Pittsburgh regional office, became chief executive in 1995. Hub Group held its initial public offering the next year. In 1997 it became the first intermodal marketing company to pass $1 billion in annual revenue. By 1998 it had 34 regional offices, and it borrowed $100 million that year to start buying out the minority interests in them.
In 2004 the company dropped its regional structure for a single profit-and-loss center, headquartered in Lombard, Illinois, so it could compete as one network. Two years later it bought the Memphis drayage company Comtrak Logistics for $48 million.
David Yeager took over as chairman in November 2008, a month after his father’s death. Hub Group later bought Estenson Logistics for about $306 million in 2017 and CaseStack Logistics for $225 million in 2018. Phillip D. Yeager, the founder’s grandson, became chief executive on January 1, 2023, when David retired.
Hub Group now has headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, and reports more than $5 billion in revenue.
