Meet the Industry: 10 Questions with Sean Michael of National Transport Services
Olds Cars sat down with Sean Michael from National Transport Services to talk shipping your classic cars.
SAN ANTONIO, TX — Sean Michael had a better idea. He knew National Transport Services had made traditional freight shipping its bread and butter for a generation, but he was convinced there was something better on the horizon. He believed hauling cars, specifically collector vehicles, was where the company should focus, and his intuition has turned out to be right so far.
Michael works as the booking agent at NTS these days, and he recently took time out for 10 Questions.
Q. OLD CARS: Can you give us a quick history on National Transport Services? How did it start?
A. SEAN MICHAEL: The owners started with shipping freight and what happened was they started dabbling with shipping cars somewhere around 2019. I was working at a classic car dealership and I commissioned them to ship a couple cars (in Los Angeles)… Well, Covid came around and that dealership closed and I was looking for work and I contacted them. And the reason I’m telling you all this is the business kind of went from (dabbling) a little bit in shipping cars, then I came on I said, 'We’re going to ship cars! I have all these classic car connections and we're going to use my connection and your business,' and we’ve expanded from there. In 2020 I joined the team and... we went aggressively into shipping vehicles.
Q. OLD CARS: Was that a big change for the management and ownership to get on board with?
A. SM: Yeah, that was a big change. Prior to that, the company, the brothers, the uncle, and the whole family, was into freight, and that’s what they grew up on. Shipping cars was something completely new, but I convinced them it was something profitable, and it’s fun, and so they went with it. I would say it’s 99.9 percent shipping cars now.
Q. OLD CARS: What are your most common jobs? Is there one type of order that makes up the bulk of what you do? Is it people buying a single car, or moving, or what?
A. SM: The typical customer is 45 to 80, and a lot of them are retired or later in life. It is a mix of buying from auctions and private parties. Most of it is a classic car guy or enthusiast who is retired or on his way to being retired … and most of them are purchasing.
Q. OLD CARS: Customers can either transport their cars with an open trailer or an enclosed trailer. Do you usually have to talk things over with them and help them make a decision, or do they know what they want?
A. SM: I would say most most of the time they know they want to go enclosed, but I still talk things over with people because there is a certain percentage, I’d say 30 or 40 percent, who are not quite sure which way to go. We explain to them, if it’s a classic car, and you want our professional opinion, it goes enclosed. There’s a number of reasons. No. 1, classic cars tend to have rare parts and if any of those parts are loose and falls off, they’re gone and you’re going to have a harder time replacing those.
No. 2, what a lot of people don’t know, the open trailer transporter guys are terrified of shipping classic cars. They’d rather pass on a classic car and stick with something else. But the enclosed guys tend to be much more seasoned and experienced, and they’ll ship those all day long. We always tell people, 'If you are shipping a classic car, go enclosed. It will probably get there faster, and it will get there safer.'
A high percent go with enclosed, I would say 7 out of 10, something like that.
Q. OLD CARS: Do you do a lot of business with snowbirds – people heading south for the winter?
A. SM: Oh, yeah. Definitely. That’s always a thing. Right now snowbirds are definitely going south and most of them have already done their work for now and they will typically be calling us shortly after Christmas for the spring, to go back up.
Q. OLD CARS: If car buyers really do the math and figure out costs and travel time, is shipping a car generally more practical than trying to travel a long way and fetch it themselves?
A. SM: I have this conversation a lot with customers, too. If you think about it, a lot of times guys are thinking about flying out and driving home. So that’s whatever it costs for a ticket, at least a couple hundred bucks. And then you have to get insurance to drive a car home. You're gonna have to stop. If you’re driving 10 hours in a classic car, you're going to be completely worn out, so you’ll probably need a hotel. And you've gotta stop and eat several times and that all adds up. And not to mention your time is valuable and you’d probably rather be doing a lot of other things.
Q. OLD CARS: Are you shipping more classic cars or more exotics and supercars?. Do you haul more ’57 Chevys or newer Ferraris?
A. SM: I would say ’57 Chevys. We definitely do the older cars. We do Ferraris, too, but the older Ferraris. I see a lot of ’80s and ’90s Ferraris.
Q. OLD CARS: Do you do a lot of business with the big collector car auctions?
A. SM: We don’t necessarily go to the auctions, but we get a lot of business to ship cars to and from the auctions. I would say we get more business, honestly, from dealers and online auctions.
Q. OLD CARS: How is your company set up? You are based in San Antonio; how do you cover the entire country?
A. SM: It’s set up as a brokerage, so we have access to tens of thousands of truck drivers around the nation. Let’s say there is 15,000 truck drivers hauling vehicles in the United States. Not all of those are good drivers or qualified drivers; in fact, the majority of them are what we call disqualified. We do a vetting process, and you’d be shocked how many drivers operate with no insurance, operate with no license, they’re not bonded or they are revoked from the department of transportation. So we go through a vetting process and we wind up with what’s called a Preferred Carrier List and we’re always looking for drivers, and the guys we use we know are good. When we send them a car, we double-check their information, their license, their driving record … We have a smaller pool of drivers, but we have drivers in all four corners of the United States providing service.
Q. OLD CARS: Any good stories of really cool or famous cars you’ve gotten to transport?
A. SM: I know we have shipped for Wayne Carini. We shipped for Shawn White, the Olympic snow boarder. And we’ve shipped some pretty expensive cars, like Gullwings. There is a dealership in New York called Gullwing Motor Cars, and we work with them a lot, on a lot of really high-end, million-dollar cars. We’ve shipped Packards and Duesenbergs, Bugattis....
Q. OLD CARS: OK, you get one car for the day, and then you have to give it back. Any car in the world. What are you taking?
A. SM: This is a tough question. It kind of boils down to two cars, and they are completely different cars. A 1957 BMW 507 — it’s a small BMW, but I think it’s a beautiful car. And a 1960 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. Two completely different cars, but I love them both!
National Transport Services
8610 N New Braunfels Ave S-607
San Antonio, TX 78217
888-346-2202
https://shipnts.com/
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