The Brad Jacobs Test: Are You Actually One Company?

On Monday, Brad Jacobs announced he was preparing to build his ninth company, backed by a $1 billion investment in a little-known business called CKX Lands.

John Kingston at FreightWaves did a nice job breaking down the move. Jacobs and his investors have agreed to inject $1 billion into the publicly traded company, which has interests in oil, gas, and timberland. What industry Jacobs actually intends to consolidate next remains a mystery, at least publicly.

You could have some fun guessing. Given his background, I’d probably lose an afternoon trying to figure it out myself.

But I think there’s a more interesting question for the supply chain industry than what Brad Jacobs is going to buy next.

What would Brad Jacobs do with the businesses we’ve already bought?

Because the man who helped build United Rentals, XPO, GXO, RXO, and now QXO has spent decades demonstrating something that a surprising number of otherwise sophisticated enterprises still struggle with.

Buying a network and operating a network are two very different things.

And somewhere between the transportation management system, the warehouse, the dock office, and the guard shack, I suspect there’s a considerable amount of enterprise value still waiting to be integrated.

The acquisition is the easy part. Relatively speaking.

Jacobs has participated in roughly 500 acquisitions over his career. But when McKinsey interviewed him in 2022 about building businesses through M&A, he was emphatic that purchasing companies is not the entire strategy.

The difficult work begins after the transaction closes: integrating operations, bringing people together, consolidating technology, and making an acquired company more valuable as part of the larger organization than it was independently.

His examples are instructive.

At United Waste Systems, the strategy was to acquire landfill capacity in certain markets and then consolidate the collection businesses bringing waste to those facilities. The opportunity wasn’t simply ownership of more assets. It was making those assets more productive by improving the density and economics of the entire operation.

At United Rentals, Jacobs and his team completed roughly 250 acquisitions. But he later explained that the company made even better returns on the new locations it opened using the operating model it had developed. Once the business knew how to make a location successful, it could replicate that capability.

Then came XPO.

After Jacobs took control of a small transportation business in 2011, XPO acquired companies across brokerage, intermodal, last-mile delivery, contract logistics, and transportation. In 2015 alone, the acquisitions of Norbert Dentressangle and Con-way transformed its scale and reach.

The Con-way transaction was especially revealing.

XPO identified opportunities to consolidate purchasing, reduce duplicated overhead, combine technology infrastructure, share transportation capacity, and use data from a much larger freight network to improve carrier selection and asset utilization.

Those weren’t vague promises about synergies. XPO reported approximately $200 million in cost improvements associated with Con-way by 2018, alongside substantially higher adjusted operating income in its LTL business.

Eventually, XPO separated its contract logistics and brokerage operations into GXO and RXO. Creating value sometimes meant integrating companies. Other times, it meant giving distinct businesses their own management, strategies, and capital structures.

The common denominator wasn’t acquisition volume or a particular organizational chart.

It was figuring out which capabilities should work together, making them do so, and measuring the economic result.

Jacobs was remarkably explicit about the technology involved. Asked how he approached integrating acquired platforms, his answer was “fast and standardized.” He advocated moving quickly toward common enterprise systems because companies cannot operate at their full potential while essential information remains fragmented.

Fourteen years after he started building XPO, that’s a lesson worth revisiting.

Especially if you run a supply chain.

One company at headquarters. A hundred companies at the gate.

Think about what happens when a manufacturer acquires another manufacturer, a retailer absorbs a competitor, or a 3PL takes over another distribution network.

Corporate starts identifying opportunities to consolidate purchasing, eliminate redundancies, streamline transportation, standardize systems, and improve the economics of the combined footprint.

The ERP migration gets a budget. The warehouse management roadmap gets a steering committee. Transportation starts consolidating carrier contracts and putting freight through a common TMS.

Eventually, leadership can look across the network and see purchasing, inventory, production, orders, and shipments through increasingly consistent systems.

That’s meaningful progress.

But go visit the facilities.

At one location, drivers check in at a guard shack and receive a paper slip. At another, they call a number on a sign. At a third, there’s a kiosk, an appointment system, and somebody in the shipping office who still has to make three phone calls before anything moves.

One location has spotters working from radios. Another has a yard management system. Another knows where most of its trailers are because Dave has worked there for fifteen years and is pretty sure he remembers.

To be clear, these are examples of the kinds of variations that can exist across a network, not a claim that every shipper operates this way.

And some local differences are perfectly legitimate.

But the underlying problem is that a shared transportation plan doesn’t necessarily produce a shared picture of physical execution.

The TMS knows which load is scheduled to depart. The WMS knows what the warehouse has picked, packed, or loaded. The ERP knows what the business expects to ship.

Does anyone across the enterprise know whether the actual trailer is in the correct location, whether it’s ready for the next move, whether the seal and paperwork are complete, and whether the arriving driver can leave with it?

In some facilities, absolutely.

Across every facility, consistently, using a common set of operational events and definitions?

That’s a more interesting question.

We may have built companies with one corporate brain and dozens of disconnected nervous systems.

The missing system isn’t necessarily another system.

Consider a fairly ordinary drop-and-hook pickup.

Transportation schedules a carrier to collect a load at 4 p.m. The warehouse has completed its work, and the shipment is recorded in its system. The driver arrives, checks in, and goes looking for the assigned trailer.

But the trailer hasn’t been released to the pickup location yet.

Maybe a spotter hasn’t moved it. Maybe the dock coordinator is waiting on a final check. Maybe the trailer number was entered incorrectly. Maybe the loaded trailer is sitting in a parking area that doesn’t match the last update.

The guard calls the dock office. The dock office calls the spotter. Someone goes looking for the trailer. The driver waits.

By the time everyone agrees on what is actually happening, a perfectly good transportation plan has become a late pickup.

The software systems involved might all be functioning exactly as designed.

That’s the part that bothers me.

The gap isn’t necessarily a failed ERP or a bad TMS. It is the absence of a consistently executed, observable process that connects the transportation plan to the physical work required to fulfill it.

When that process changes from facility to facility, the network inherits variability that headquarters cannot reliably diagnose, much less optimize.

An exception at one warehouse becomes a late carrier. A late carrier becomes a missed appointment somewhere else. And by the time the problem appears in a transportation performance report, the original cause may be buried beneath three other explanations.

Every department can explain its piece of the failure.

Who owns the whole thing?

You can’t consolidate what you can’t see.

Here’s where I think the Jacobs comparison becomes particularly useful.

The value of a consolidated business comes from more than negotiating better vendor contracts or eliminating duplicate corporate expenses.

Scale should create capabilities that individual facilities could not economically develop on their own.

Better data. Better systems. Better utilization of assets. More reliable execution. The ability to recognize and correct an operating problem at one location before it becomes a recurring problem at fifty others.

That does not mean every building needs an identical software stack, layout, or staffing model.

It means the enterprise needs enough consistency in its operations to understand what is happening, compare performance, coordinate activity, and intervene when the system isn’t working.

A manufacturer can standardize its transportation contracts across 200 locations without standardizing the way those locations receive and release trucks.

It can standardize warehouse management without creating consistent visibility into trailer readiness and movement outside the dock doors.

It can consolidate facilities and still allow each site to develop its own version of the handoff between the carrier, the gate, the yard, and the shipping office.

The financial statements reflect one business.

The physical execution can still resemble a collection of independent companies.

And that ought to make anyone responsible for post-acquisition integration a little uncomfortable.

Because how much of the expected value from consolidation depends on operations being able to work together in ways they currently cannot?

Maybe supply chain integration needs a different diligence checklist.

Imagine evaluating an acquisition with the same attention to yard execution that goes into warehouse capacity, inventory accuracy, transportation contracts, and IT infrastructure.

Not simply asking whether the target has yard management software, but understanding how work actually happens.

Can the company establish the real status and location of its trailers across the network? Can a receiving facility consistently distinguish a scheduled arrival from an actual arrival? Does the outbound process have a reliable, timestamped definition of load readiness?

Are there clear responsibilities for the handoffs between warehouse associates, dock coordinators, yard drivers, gate personnel, and outside carriers?

When an exception occurs, does that information become visible to transportation and the next person responsible for acting on it?

And perhaps most importantly, can the company introduce an operational improvement at one facility and reproduce it across the rest of the network without reinventing the project every time?

Those questions belong in enterprise integration planning, not just in the backlog of whoever manages the yards.

Because if the goal of consolidation is to turn a collection of businesses into something more valuable, the physical movement of freight is a peculiar place to stop integrating.

The next billion dollars might already be on the property.

Jacobs has a billion dollars ready to deploy toward another venture. What he intends to buy remains to be seen, and I wouldn’t pretend to know.

What interests me is that while everyone is watching to see where the next rollup happens, there may be an enormous amount of unfinished integration work inside the companies that have already spent billions consolidating.

The industry has invested heavily in planning, warehouse systems, transportation technology, and increasingly sophisticated automation.

There is no shortage of intelligence about what freight is supposed to do.

But the economic value of all that intelligence depends on a physical operation being able to execute the plan.

At some point, somebody still has to identify the right trailer, move it to the right door, load it, verify that it’s ready, release it, and get the driver back on the road.

If those actions aren’t coordinated and observable across the network, enterprise integration is incomplete, regardless of how impressive the software looks upstairs.

I don’t know what Brad Jacobs would do with every company’s yards, and I’m not suggesting he’d prescribe the same solution for all of them.

But I suspect he’d ask a fairly uncomfortable question before celebrating how successfully the organization had integrated its acquisitions.

Have we actually built one operating company, or have we just put one logo on a hundred different guard shacks?

That’s the question I’d take into Monday morning.

Research and references

1. John Kingston, FreightWaves, “Jacobs’ ‘playbook’ will target new industry, to be determined,” November 9, 2026: freightwaves.com.
2. Brad Jacobs, McKinsey, “XPO’s Brad Jacobs on building businesses through M&A,” November 8, 2022: mckinsey.com.
3. XPO, Con-way acquisition announcement, September 9, 2015 (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1): sec.gov.
4. XPO, May 2018 investor presentation, including reported Con-way integration improvements (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2, slide 15): sec.gov.
5. CKX Lands and Jacobs Private Equity, November 9, 2026 announcement (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1): sec.gov.
6. XPO, 2023 annual report and spinoff history (Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023): sec.gov.