'Self'-made man drives delivery company.

A motivated man and his pickup truck can accomplish nearly anything. Witness 26-year-old Jason Self, who has needed less than five years to transform a boy-and-his-truck operation into today's VSM Delivery Co., a $2.4 million operation that specializes in expedited deliveries for industrial customers.

VSM checked in at second place in Arkansas Business' rankings of the fastest growing companies in the state, with a 344 percent average increase in revenue from 1994-98.

(The rankings were led, for the second straight year, by Communications Management Specialists, which designs and implements wireless networks across the country. CMS posted an average annual revenue increase of 733 percent and pulled in $13.3 million in 1998. VSM, though, actually had a higher growth rate in 1998.)

Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that Self is a high school dropout who took his first company, a Mayflower swimming pool service business, into bankruptcy when he was 22.

Self went to work for a Little Rock delivery service called Shuttle Express in 1995. But within a week, he saw that he could do the same work on his own and quit the job. Not long afterward, Shuttle Express went out of business.

"Basically, I started in 1995 doing local pickup and delivery," he says, mostly for industrial clients around Little Rock. From that point, however, it grew to what Self calls "hot shots" - expediting freight on a same-day basis for manufacturing plants operated by companies like Tyson Foods Inc., International Paper Co. and Weyerhauser Corp. - especially parts and equipment that would allow the companies to avoid shutting down their production lines.

Today, the company's biggest clients are the Pine Bluff Tyson Foods plant; the B.F. Goodrich Co. plants in Heber Springs and Sheridan; and George Fischer Sloane Inc., Democrat Printing & Lithographing Co. and The Peerless Group of Graphic Services, all of Little Rock.

"I had two employees in '95, and now I have 48," Self says. The company has branches in Little Rock, Texarkana and Bentonville, and it uses 15,000 SF of warehouse space on Interstate 30. Remarkably, no one on the staff is over the age of 34.

VSM now has 15 vans, six 24-foot trucks and three full-size tractor-trailer rigs. Total assets are in the neighborhood of $1.1 million, Self says.

Goal of an IPO 

"A public offering is a goal over the next five years," he says. The company is structured as an S Corporation. Self owns 75 percent of the operation, and his mother owns the rest.

"We're in line to get a $2 million contract with Airborne Express," Self says, explaining why he sees annual revenue rising to $6 million in 1999. "The way we're going, I see at least five more years of big growth. Our company goal is to be as big as Federal Express. That's what we talk about at every meeting."

"Now we ship nationwide. We'll do everything from a $7 delivery across town to a $10,000 ocean move," which was the case when the company moved a shipment of retail store fixtures from Toronto, Canada, to Maul, Hawaii.

"There is nothing we can't do," Self says. "We can do what American Freightways does, what J.B. Hunt does, and we can do what UPS does."