Kevin and Liz Otto have a strong hand on the reins of small fleet Otto Transfer. The business, if you can believe it, is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year.
You heard that right. 80 years. It’s not many a small trucking company that can claim that kind of longevity.
“My father started it in 1946,” said Kevin. His dad, Charlie, hauled livestock out of Delano, Minnesota, where the Ottos are based today. Also: beer, empty beer bottles, “all kinds of things that a small trucking company would have done back in the ’50s and ’60s.”
Also from the archives, this notice made it all official those decades ago.
Since Kevin and his wife, Otto Transfer CEO Liz Otto, bought the company to fully take those reins in 2002, Otto Transfer increasingly has specialized in pole hauling on stretch trailers, with all company-owned equipment.
- They’ve executed an intricate dance between 16 and 18 power units, and a larger number of trailers, in recent years, Kevin noted, about half sleeper tractors and the other half Freightliner 114SDs equipped with over-the-cab unloaders.
- For a primary shipper customer producing power poles and lumber, Otto Transfer is “vital to what we do here,” according to the customer.
- Kevin and Liz Otto are active in their state’s trucking association, with Kevin rising to Chairman of the board for a time.
- Minnesota Trucking Association President John Hausladen called them the “dynamic duo. Kevin is a trucker, trucker, trucker from way back — the operations guy, gets it, loves it. Liz comes from a communications background, so she’s good at envisioning, branding. They’re the complete package — with a family focus, community-minded, active, great family.”
- The company’s active in Share the Road educational outreach at a local school.
Sewing seeds of the ‘dynamic duo’
Liz and Kevin Otto have been married for more than 30 years now, and Kevin got his start trucking in the family business, getting his CDL as soon as he possibly could at age 18.
“I went to college to be a pilot,” he said, and “drove truck in the summers through college.” He started full-time with Otto in 1995, the year he and Liz married.
At the time, he was on the road quite often, focused on “building a fleet within” Otto Transfer, according to Liz, as his father worked through his own ideas about how ownership succession would work with Kevin and his siblings.
Charlie Otto then passed suddenly in 1999, and Kevin and nine siblings and his mother spent the next years working through the business’ future. After he and Liz finally bought the company fully in 2002, the pole-hauling part of the freight mix put Otto on course to 22 power units.
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Through that first decade under their ownership, Liz worked in marketing and public relations. “I was working in Minneapolis,” she said, “living the agency life” but with a 40-minute commute each way as their young family grew.
“We had four kids,” she said, and she “was working some part-time configurations and trying to figure out how we were going to make a go of it here with our young family.”
This is one of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles that will air throughout the next weeks. (Access all of the published stories via this link.) Two finalists in each category (3-10 trucks, 11-30 trucks) will be announced in October.
“I was able to use my organizational development, marketing, PR, human resources skills to help the company through some periods of time that were really critical for us,” Liz said, as the business changed significantly in years that followed.
The power-pole work Otto was doing outbound from Minnesota to the East Coast didn’t dry up overnight, but the power industry shifted in ways Kevin described as “above my pay grade” to fully explain. The company didn’t lose customers, he noted, but “we used to send five to six trucks from Minneapolis to the East Coast every week. And it just kind of disappeared” over time, whether old timber wasn’t available any longer or the “utilities are preferring to use steel more.”
The company did what it knew how to do, roll with those market punches and focus on controlling what they could control.
Namely, according to Kevin, making sure “that our drivers are taken care of.”
Kevin drove full-time for 10 years, and as such has always been a big believer in due compensation for the big ask that’s made of any professional truck driver.
“If you’re asking your driver to be gone,” away from home, “they should be expecting compensation,” he said.
Trips over 200 miles are paid a mileage rate for that work, with hourly pay on top of that for loading/unloading, any inspection that lasts more than 15 minutes, a breakdown, sitting in a hotel waiting for a truck to come back. “If they’re not at home” but on the clock, “they’re pretty much paid,” Kevin said.
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Under-200-mile trips are all hourly. For the miles, “we go off the ELD meter,” he said, “what the truck turns, actual miles,” which can seem like a rarity even in this day and age as so many fleets cling to short-miles conventions.
Over the years, said Liz, too, but mostly notably in the last 10, the company’s been able to give profit-sharing bonuses to drivers at year-end — “in some cases mid-year, too. Bonuses are never guaranteed, but we do our best to celebrate our team’s success in this way whenever we can.”
All place a huge emphasis on safety. Every year the company parks its trucks for a day they call “Stop for Safety Day.” While safety pursuit is a year-round affair for drivers and leadership, the training day brings in spouses and significant others, too. Speakers present on topics from “achieving clean inspections” to “load securement best practices, eating and sleeping well, operating safety around power lines, and softer skills, such as how improve communication,” Liz said.
Steph Russek, who wears a variety of hats in the office at Otto, is here pictured during the 2025 Stop for Safety event.
A size ‘sweet spot’ in a specialized niche
The Otto fleet’s at 16 trucks today, about half sleeper tractors — mostly Freightliner Cascadias and a couple Western Stars — and half FL 114SD daycabs with loaders atop the cab as a prime tool for operators. A significant value-add for customers, too.
Ben Bugos, Bell Pole & Lumber senior operations director, noted Otto Transfer’s work for the company stretches back to well before the time he joined Bell. “Kevin’s dad started hauling poles for Bell many years ago,” he said.
Charlie Otto working the unloader in an archival company photo.
An Otto operator unloading more recently.
For Bugos and Bell, Otto Transfer is “one of our largest carriers,” and they’ve “been with Bell for the longest period of time” among the current contracted carriers.
The National Association of Small Trucking Companies sponsors the Small Fleet Championship. Finalists receive a year’s worth of membership in the association, with access to a myriad of benefits from NASTC’s well-known fuel program to drug and alcohol testing services and much more. All are recognized at the association’s annual conference, where the winners will be announced in late October in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
Storms in northern Indiana had Kevin back out on the truck himself in August.
“They lost a bunch of transmission lines, distribution power lines,” Kevin said. “And so I got a phone call … and we pretty much took half the fleet and started loading them with poles and sent them down to NIPSCO, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company.”
He was part of that team — “got to see good old Chicago” again on the way down, he said. “Wow, hasn’t changed.” Plenty traffic, plenty construction ongoing.
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Otto’s got the team to deliver at a moment’s notice, at “kind of a sweet spot where we are right now,” Kevin said. “The drivers that we have in this highly specialized category are really good. And it’s also this stance of keeping our equipment fresh. And we do a really good job of that.”
Trucks are all late model, the oldest a loader truck that’s a 2020, all Detroit D13-powered, automatics for the sleeper tractors and 10-speed manuals in the loaders, Kevin noted. The sleepers “can really get some fuel mileage,” running just shy of 8 mpg even with certainly less-than-aerodynamic freight.
Daycabs average about 6.4 mpg fleetwide.
Otto’s stretch trailers make far-overlength freight a possibility, too, like this load, shown carefully being maneuvered through city streets.
Otto employs two mechanics and handles most maintenance outside any warranty work in-house. “We keep the trucks about five years and send them packing,” generally, he added.
Mechanics outfit the daycabs with the loaders themselves, too, in addition to other finishing work after order.
For routine oil service, we “run them out to 50,000 miles,” Kevin said, minus oil analysis. “We believe that we’re buying the right oil,” and no analysis will ever “convince us to go to 100,000” for a change interval.
Trailers are stretch (up to 80-foot) flatbeds and what Kevin called “rail trailers — like a log trailer on steroids.” They come in every three months for a comprehensive check in the shop. “We’re really into watching for irregular tire wear” there, Kevin said, as a window on bigger problems before they get too big.
The unloader is shown in operation delivering to a baseball field.
Giving back with education, advocacy
Bell Pole’s Ben Bugos called Liz and Kevin Otto “just great people,” extending that commendation to so many other Otto family members he’s had the pleasure of interacting with through the years.
Liz counts more than 30 people from the family who’ve been part of the company operations over its history, a legacy they all celebrate with a bevy of reminders of history around the property where their old farmhouse/office and shop are located.
For instance, this old door-turned-planter outside the office. The door comes from a “1972 Chevy C20 involved in a fire after my dad had sold it in an auction,” Kevin said, then found after the fire.
(A little tip about the old office: The building dates to the 1800s and just might be haunted, but that’s another story.)
Liz and Kevin both are quite active with the MTA to this day, Kevin often in touch with staff about issues with permits and various state agencies. “He not only brings issues to my attention,” said MTA President John Hausladen, “but he works to solve the problem.”
Kevin and Liz (right) in conversation with their Senator current state gubernatorial candidate, Amy Klobuchar, during a visit to the U.S. Capitol with MTA in past.
Liz was active in MTA’s pre-pandemic Experience Trucking outreach to “visit with their local trucking companies to understand what trucking is all about,” she said. Steph Russek, Otto’s general manager, “has been a part of the annual conference committee” for MTA, too.
“They are just great people,” Ben Bugos said of his company’s No. 1 carrier. “They will continue to be a vital part of our business for years to come.”
MTA President Hausladen and the Ottos got a chance to meet current Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration chief Derek Barrs when he attended multiple days’ worth of the association’s annual conference.
Hausladen wasn’t surprised when, at the opening barbecue of the event, he looked up from a conversation he was having at one moment and just “who goes and sits by Derek Barrs?” as Hausladen told. “Kevin Otto. He immediately took his opportunity.”
What did they talk about? Kevin’s takes a light touch with those opportunities, he said, ever an eye on the future.
“It was a bit of an accident,” he said of how he came to be seated where he was, as he moved to say hello to their state FMCSA division administrator. “These enforcement folks have a tough job. Even us good carriers sometimes cross them and it helps to know who these people are.”
He recalls that “when I realized I was sitting with a table of FMCSA folks, I joked about needing to keep moving, as I was sure I had issues that they would all like to talk to me about. … These folks constantly get hammered about issues facing our industry. We all have many of the same ones.”
In this case, Kevin Otto “asked about [Barrs’] career, and how he got where he is today. Really nice guy.”
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