What do motorcycles, pharmaceuticals, steel rods, live caged monkeys, and a helicopter all have in common?

These are just a few of the diverse products delivered on time and intact over the past 68 years by Givens Transportation, Inc., a full-service, family-owned company based in Chesapeake. 

Givens provides tailored solutions for transloading – the movement of goods from one mode of transportation to another during the shipping process — as well as warehousing and logistics for a variety of industries. “We pick up containers from port, store and manage the inventory, and then ship it out to the end consumer,” explains Trevor Dunlap, president. “We take the dirty work out of figuring out how to move products.”

For safety and security purposes, Givens transports pharmaceuticals - the most regulated commodity they handle - with a team of two drivers.  

Givens offers 2 million square feet of public and contract warehouse space, a fleet of 170 trucks from the East Coast ports of Norfolk, VA and Savannah, GA, as well as domestic and international air freight services. With facilities in North Carolina (Greensboro); South Carolina (Columbia); Georgia (Savannah), Nevada (Reno) and Washington (Seattle), Givens offers services between every business address in the U.S. and to cities in 180+ countries.

The company was founded in 1957 as a motorcycle dealership by Gerald Givens, who also raced motorcycles on the amateur circuit. Gerald met sales representatives from Honda just as the Japanese manufacturer had started importing vehicles to the U.S. West Coast. They asked him to become the first Honda dealer on the East Coast. This began a customer relationship with Honda that continues today, over 60 years later.

“Our founding story really centers on Mr. Givens’ entrepreneurial spirit and the fact that he just wanted to figure out how he could best support his customers,” Trevor explains. “When Honda was going to start importing motorcycles to sell, they needed someone to help warehouse them once they came through the port of Virginia. They asked Mr. Givens, ‘Do you know anybody with warehousing space that might be able to help us?’ And he said, ‘Let me ask around.’ And then he went out and leased a building in Norfolk and got into the warehousing business. A few years later, Honda came to him and said, ‘We’ve got all these dealerships on the East Coast, but we’re struggling to transport our motorcycles to them without them getting damaged. Do you know anybody with trucks that can help us?’ And Mr. Givens said, ‘Let me ask around.’ And he went out and leased some trucks and that’s how the company got into the trucking business.”

Today, with close to 500 employees, 380 in Virginia alone, Trevor says Givens’ team members are by far their most important asset. “The backbone of our organization consists of the commercial truck drivers and forklift operators and material handlers who run the warehouses. We have four people on our warehousing team who recently celebrated 25 years with the company. We’re lucky to have a lot of longevity on our team.”

Givens’ drivers have a lower turnover rate than the industry standard, and they recruit drivers from within a 50-mile radius – an area smaller than the industry norm. “One of our core values is family,” says Trevor. “We want people to be close to their families, so we try to mitigate the amount of time our drivers are out. It’s certainly a tough job, but our trips average three days. We try to get them back for every weekend and once in the middle of the week if we can.”

Givens has been a member of TowneBank since 2018, but Trevor says they’ve known Kim Shuler, commercial banker, and Rufus Parks, credit administrator, for probably 30 years. “It’s the relationships with the individual bankers at Towne that make this so successful. Having long-term relationships allows us to educate them on the type of business we’re in, and when they have intimate knowledge of what we do, they can better support us,” adds Trevor, who recently joined the TowneBank Virginia Beach Board. “Over the last three years we’ve built three new buildings – two here in Chesapeake, and one in Savannah – and those were certainly made possible with Towne’s help from a loan perspective.”

“It’s a pleasure to work with the entire Givens team,” says Kim. “Since they have been a member of Towne, we have watched them expand to the Greensboro, NC and Savannah, GA areas, and we have been happy to assist with this growth.” 

For more information, visit Givens.com.