One Minnesota CEO decided he needed to move here to make impactful changes

Dave Bozeman had the choice of living anywhere when he was hired as chief executive of C.H. Robinson.

Several leaders of Minnesota-based companies live elsewhere, so he could have stayed in Michigan where he was at the time or returned to his hometown of Chicago where C.H. Robinson has a large regional operation.

He chose the Twin Cities. He, of course, had input from his wife, Dawn, and the youngest of their five children, who is still in school, since the family likes to entrench themselves in civic life wherever they live.

But it also came down to being where the action is for C.H. Robinson, one of the largest third-party logistics providers in the world. He was hired to turn around an unsettled company at a time when supply chains are constantly changing and digital-only providers are intent on disrupting the fragmented industry.

“If I’m going to go in there and do the things that I like to do — that’s improving companies, driving performance, developing people, and really going up and to the right ... I can’t do that remotely,“ Bozeman said. ”I have to be where the headquarters are.”

At the time, the company was under pressure from an activist investor — one who had helped to push out the previous CEO and was pressing the Eden Prairie-based Fortune 500 company to improve efficiency and divest its global freight forwarding business in order to concentrate on the company’s strength in the North American trucking market.

Once Bozeman moved here in June 2023, he dug right in to try to understand why.

This is Bozeman’s first job as a CEO, but he’s no stranger to leadership roles. He came to C.H. Robinson from the Ford Motor Co., where he was vice president of the customer service division. He also had led Caterpillar’s enterprise systems and was vice president of Amazon’s transportation services.

“Dave is a seasoned executive who has a strong track record of reinventing complex operating models with industrywide impact, proven expertise in global supply chain and logistics management through various economic cycles,” said Jodee Kozlak, chair of C.H. Robinson’s board of directors, in announcing Bozeman’s hire.

Bozeman immediately got to work reshaping C.H. Robinson, starting with research.

And while Bozeman got to work, he and his wife started exploring their new home. They landed in the Plymouth/Medina area, and they are finding ways to contribute.

“Wherever Dawn and I go, it’s part of who we are, and we kind of share that responsibility to do that,” Bozeman said.

On the business side, Bozeman joined 3M’s board of directors and spoke at several big functions, including the Minnesota Business Partnership annual dinner.

Dawn has started volunteering with the Red Cross and recently joined the board of Black Men Teach, a St. Paul-based nonprofit helping recruit and retain young Black elementary school teachers. She plans to use her breadth of experience in education with the organization.

“Both Dawn and Dave are really invested in public education,” said Markus Flynn, executive director of Black Men Teach, adding that all five of the Bozeman children attended public schools. “It’s a testament to their belief in public education.”

Deep dives are a specialty of Bozeman. To him, to transform a company — the task before him — means meeting an organization where it’s at and applying the principles of lean manufacturing to figure out where it can go.

Lean manufacturing essentially breaks down a company’s processes into steps to identify and aggressively reduce waste. It traces back to Henry Ford’s assembly line and Toyota’s refining of that process. It’s widely credited for General Electric’s turnaround in the 1970s and 1980s, and to its CEO, Jack Welch, who was an evangelist of the method and taught GE’s version of Lean Six Sigma worldwide.

To Bozeman, lean principals can apply to the flow of goods or the flow of information, whether it’s making mining trucks or following the life a shipping order.

“Lean is a mentality and a methodology that you can apply to any industry, but also any situation,” Bozeman said. “I apply lean principles within my personal life.”

C.H. Robinson wasn’t an organization known for lean management, so he gave each member of his senior leadership team the book “The Lean Turnaround” by Art Byrne to help familiarize them with the language and concepts.

“I introduced it because I needed to have a conversation with people, and I needed to connect with them,” he said. “I knew that if I was speaking about value stream maps and waste reduction without a context, that wouldn’t work.”

Then he used lean’s “four Ps” to evaluate areas of the company. “The four Ps for me are our people, product, process and portfolio,” Bozeman said.

He scanned all those areas to assess the strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement within each category. That included “Gemba walks,” a Japanese method of observation while walking through a workplace to find areas for continuous improvement.

He sat with workers to learn the company culture and get an end-to-end vision of the life of a freight order.

Bozeman said he learned a lot, both where the inefficiencies were and also what drives the organization in a good way.

“I was delighted to see the technology piece was there,” Bozeman said. C.H. Robinson is known for its Navisphere technology platform that helps connect shippers with transportation carriers.

But Bozeman said the culture was just as important a find.

“I saw people. And this was probably the most important thing: that they really love and cared about this company, and they just simply wanted to win,” Bozeman said.

He then worked with other company leaders to use what he found to drive change. That meant improving margins by reducing costs. It also meant recognizing where each division could work together, eliminating steps and driving growth.

Bozeman also decided to keep the company intact, keeping Global Forwarding because it makes C.H. Robinson an end-to-end provider of logistics services and distinguishes C.H. Robinson from its competitors.

“The strength and the structure of that business, we’ve fundamentally improved,” Bozeman said.

Bozeman had to lead change at a difficult and unpredictable time. Since C.H. Robinson appointed him CEO in June 2023, the freight market has been in an extended down cycle. Typical down cycles in the freight industry have lasted 18-24 months but the current down cycle is 34 months long.

Despite the down cycle, Bozeman says that C.H. Robinson has been gaining ground. Aided by a strong balance sheet, the company has continued to invest in new tech. In 2024, for example, it introduced new artificial intelligence tools that have greatly speeded up the order process by eliminating as many manual touches as possible.

Just as important, Bozeman has led a shift in business model that rewards discipline and efficiency. The changes have started to show results.

Earnings and sales have grown in the last three quarters, halting a string of declining quarters.

“Bozeman’s plan to lower costs and raise productivity has been executing for several quarters now,” said Jeff Kaufman, an analyst who covers transportation and logistics for Vertical Research Partners.

Earnings for the fourth quarter and fiscal year exceeded analyst expectations, despite revenue being down in each period by more than 6%.

“We are still early in our journey,” Bozeman said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “But the operating model is helping us execute a solid strategy even better, and we expect further improvement as the accountability that the operating model demands is embraced deeper in the organization. I’m confident in the team’s ability to drive a higher and more consistent level of discipline in our operational execution.”

Brian Ossenbeck, who covers C.H. Robinson for J.P. Morgan, said after an investor day presentation by C.H. Robinson in December that he believes more improvements are coming.

“We are encouraged by the characterization that the company’s transformation is only in the ‘third inning’ with more opportunities ahead to push productivity gains and best practices down to the regional level over time,” Ossenbeck said in his research note.

C.H. Robinson’s business is dependent on a lot of factors that are out of the company’s control. If manufacturing and retail sales are rising, more freight is shipped. If fewer energy plants or houses are built, fewer supplies are needed.

Bozeman is pushing C.H. Robinson to be more nimble to capitalize on opportunities across business cycles.

“One thing that we know we can control is doing logistics like no one else, period,” Bozeman said. “And we’re going to do that at the high, and we’re going to do that at the low, so higher highs and higher lows. This happens to be the low, and I feel like we’re winning at the bottom of the cycle.”