Jay Baier, president and CEO of Baier Transport in Seabrook, went from wondering whether the vehicle-transport business he bought was a lemon to racing toward success.
Baier has been obsessed with cars since he was a small boy and loved hanging out in his grandfather’s garage while he tinkered on cars. He spent his teenage years working at car washes and gas stations. And while earning a degree in business at the University of NH, Baier became an amateur car racer on weekends, which led him to working on a pit crew for a race car team out of Massachusetts. “I worked my way up to director of marketing and PR for this team,” he says of his first career after college.
“Toward the end of my personal racing career and my full-time career working for a motorsport team, I began organizing transportation for high-end sports and racing cars for teams, drivers and friends,” he says. “I had a trailer and truck, and I would put these crazy cars on to deliver them.”
After a while, Baier felt he achieved all he was going to professionally with the motorsports team and wanted a business of his own. A friend pointed him to an ad for a family-owned vehicle transport business for sale in NH.
Within a year, in July 2019, he closed on the deal to buy the business, which transported vehicles primarily for car dealerships. But he kept his marketing gig. Business was slow at first and he only had two trucks and an unheated office. “I was out in the cold fixing trucks. That first year I was questioning myself every day,” Baier says.
That year his wife lost her job during the pandemic, and he lost his marketing job. “All of our dealerships and customers shut down and all our trucks were parked and did not move for two weeks,” he says. One of those trucks was parked in Florida and was stolen.
“We quickly made a plan,” he says, explaining they switched the focus to moving vehicles for snowbirds traveling back and forth to Florida. “When COVID hit, people were trying to get Florida because things were still open down there,” Baier says. “That was our saving grace to keep our doors open.”
As the car dealership business returned, Baier kept the providing the individual service while expanding to serve fleet management firms. Baier Transport began partnering with Merchants Fleet in Hooksett, one of the largest fleet management firms in the country.
“We now do 85% of the transport of their vehicles nationwide,” Baier says. “We went from waking up and wondering how we would survive COVID to getting incredibly busy at the end of 2020 and into 2021.”
Baier is no longer questioning his decision to buy the business. From moving 2,500 vehicles annually, Baier has grown the business to 20 trucks, around 30 employees, and moving 30,000 vehicles annually. Fleet management companies now account for 75% of Baier’s business, while car dealerships account for 20% and personal vehicle transportation makes up the remaining 5%. “It was so unexpected, the influx of business coming in,” he says.
Baier says the company will increase the number of units moved by nearly 70% in 2024. In its first year, Baier Transport generated about $800,000 in revenue—Baier expects revenue will reach just over $20 million this year. “We’ve seen crazy growth,” he says, adding he will be investing in technology to optimize customer service and bring his business to the next level. For more information, visit baiertransport.com.
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