Love's Travel Stops Surpasses 300 Locations; Founder Has Ambitious Expansion Plans
Love’s Travel Stops topped the 300 locations mark in December with facilities in Kentucky and Oklahoma, and the company’s chairman and founder is working on plans to capitalize on his bullish outlook — for the rest of the 21st century.
Tom Love started selling gasoline for cars in Oklahoma in 1964. His business model was no frills, pump it yourself and low prices.
He added truck stops on interstate highways in 1982 — with Amarillo, Texas, as the first one — keeping the same approach. In recent years, though, the Oklahoma City-based corporation has decided to change course and add more amenities, especially big-rig parking spaces.
“It’s been a gradual evolution from a bare-bones operation. Now we’re selling electronics like a Best Buy, and we’ve got hardware stores and branded restaurants,” Love said in a recent interview with Transport Topics.
Bigger is now better, Love said, especially because of parking spaces. He said these days the company likes to put in about 105 truck parking spaces at each new truck stop.
“We often ask after a location opens, ‘Why didn’t we make that larger,’ but we never look back and say a travel stop was too large,” he said.
Love concedes he was not a talented student, having flunked out of college during his first year. He was very different from his father, Frank Love, a talented lawyer who later became president of oil producer Kerr-McGee Corp.
Love said Kerr-McGee hired his father after the elder Love beat the oil company in a court case. Eventually, he switched from the legal department to general management.
When college didn’t work, Tom Love enlisted in the Marine Corps in the late 1950s, post-Korea but pre-Vietnam.
He and his wife, Judy, started their business ventures in 1964 when they leased a gasoline station in Watonga, Oklahoma.
Whatever Love lacked as a student, he more than made up for as an entrepreneur.
Forbes magazine said Love is worth $3.9 billion, but he says that’s difficult to evaluate because his company is privately held.
Love’s still is a family business. Sons Frank and Greg are co-CEOs, and their sister, Jenny Love Meyer, is vice president of communications. Judy Love is still active in the business and also runs the family’s charitable foundation.
The U.S. truck stop industry has three large chains and many smaller participants. Love’s ranks No. 2 among the industry’s Big Three, when measuring by number of locations.
Pilot Flying J has about 550 travel plazas, according to its website. Love’s just topped 300 with its Kentucky and Oklahoma additions, and TravelCenters of America had 253 stations as of Sept. 30, according to the company’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Love’s two main competitors grew significantly because of large recent mergers. Pilot Travel Centers and Flying J joined in 2010, and TA bought Petro Stopping Centers in 2007.
Love has followed a different path for his company, preferring to build new truck stops. During 2015, about 30 travel stops were built with more than 3,000 parking spaces for rigs, Love said. He expects to add 40 to 50 stops in the year just started.
“It’s a pretty steep growth curve. We’re adding a lot of new nozzles,” he said of the diesel pumps being placed into service.
Love said he has great confidence in the truck stop industry’s future, largely because of projections on the continuing importance of trucking, as both population and consumption are expected to keep growing.
“We’re set to boom for the rest of the century,” he said. Asked about the wisdom of a prediction running more than 80 years, Love gave himself an out.
“It’s a bold prediction, yes, but I’m 78 now, so I won’t be here to take the abuse if I’m wrong,” Love said, tongue in cheek.
More seriously, he said he is happy to agree with Warren Buffett, who has observed that the luckiest person is usually a baby just born in the United States.
Love also said he is pleased with his decision several years ago to concentrate on compressed natural gas rather than the fuel’s liquefied form.
“Our bet was on CNG, and we thought it through well. We like what we’ve done, and we’ve been selective about where we’ve placed them,” he said.
Love said company executives are in constant discussions with fleet customers, and they’ll add CNG pumps based on demand.
