Meiborg Brothers celebrates more than 40 years in business

Yahoo

30-05-2025

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — You've probably seen their trucks scooting around town. Meiborg Brothers has been hauling freight for more than 40 years. Leaders at the Rockford-based business said the future is bright.
'Meiborg companies were founded in 1981 by my father, Bill Meiborg,' said Zach Meiborg, the company's President and CEO. 'He started off as a single truck leasing and with a company out of Milwaukee hauling dry goods to the west coast and produce back.'
He said the company has grown over those 40-plus years.
'We've grown the Meiborg company to 200 trucks, 700 trailers, almost 3 million square feet of warehousing, a truckload brokerage and a 24/7 repair shop that has its own wrecker and service truck,' he said.
Meiborg gave us a tour of their facilities in Rockford to show us their operations.
'This here is the nerve center of what we do at Meiborg,' he said while walking through the company's offices on Harrison Avenue in Rockford. 'It's our operations floor. We have customer service, we have dispatches, we have planning, we have truckload brokerage, accounting, and even our executive team sits out on the floor here because you can't really run the company if you don't know what's going on in the company. And the best way to know the company is to be in the company. '
He said the company's asset division, which are their trucks, operates primarily out of the Rockford-Chicago market, Houston, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia.
'We do service the full 48 states as well as Mexico, Canada, and we have roundtrips to Alaska. But 80% of all the freight that our assets run go between these three points,' he said.
What they haul and warehouse is varried. Products like forklifts, food products, solar panels, are part of what they help move around the country and world.
'Everyday things that you use that come and go by truck or go for export overseas or imports comes through our logistics hub,' Meiborg said. 'Some of the really neat freight that we haul are like concert loads. Today, we have six trucks in the Chicago moving Beyonce's concert into the south side of Chicago there to perform. We've also done Metallica, Taylor Swift, Alabama. We've done some really neat bands over the years.
He said his drivers cover a lot of ground each day.
'The goal is to run the truck about 550 miles a day and generate as much revenue as you can in that 550 miles. A driver can legally drive 11 hours within a day, 14 total hours on duty, and within a week, 70 hours maximum,' he said.
'As a company, we generate about $105 million of revenue a year,' Meiborg explained. 'That's not profit, that's revenue. And trucking goes through some wild economic ups and downs. Some years are great years. Other years are not so much. This is why we balance the trucking aspect of our company out with other revenue streams, such as the warehousing, the truck repair, fuel aggregation to blend things out and make it more smooth. Now all of this revenue gets generated and this is the team that sorts it out. This is our accounting team. We have payroll to process. We have taxes that we need to pay, fuel taxes. We have to purchase trucks and pay vendors. So as much money comes in, there's a lot that goes out.'
Meiborg said he's proud of where the company came from.
'We're happy with where we're at,' he said. 'The future of our company definitely lies in the next generation. I'm a third-generation truck driver and second-generation owner of the company. My boy here, Luke, is a fourth-generation truck driver and eventually soon will be a third-generation ownership of the company. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished as a company. It's not just me, though. It is absolutely the team effort, whether it's the technicians to the dispatchers, to the drivers, they do a great job of moving the freight forward and making sure that we are the best transportation firm for our customers, employees and vendors.'
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