The $100 Million Mistake Most T&L Owners Are Already Making

Content for this blog post came from the TIA Livestream The Decisions That Define What Your T&L Business Is Worth

Building a $100 million business in transportation and logistics is a worthy, attainable goal. But on a recent TIA Livestream, Spencer Tenney, President & CEO of Tenney Group, pointed out something important: most owners are approaching it like a formula when it’s actually a puzzle.

Why it matters: Freight brokerage is one of the most unforgiving industries on the planet. The gap between building great value on paper and actually converting it to liquidity is where most owners quietly fail.

The three-part framework Tenney lives by:

• Control the controllables. Financial reporting is your first impression with buyers. “The right buyer is looking at five to eight deals at that time, you might just get dismissed and never get on the dance floor,” Tenney says. Clean, defensible financials aren’t optional. They’re table stakes.
• Respect the uncontrollables. Market timing isn’t the right question. “Build a business that can attract a premium valuation irrespective of what’s happening in the market,” Tenney advises. When the right strategic buyer has an expensive problem you uniquely solve, that is the right time to sell, regardless of your personal calendar.
• Pull every lever at the closing table. Most owners leave value behind. They skip a global buyer process. They don’t engineer deal structure creatively. They walk away from seller notes that would have outperformed the market.

The single biggest controllable right now: Leadership development. Tenney is unambiguous. “If the founder is responsible for everything, there’s nothing to invest in, that’s just a high-paying job.” Private equity isn’t buying what your business is today. They’re buying whether your leadership team has the motor to 3–4x the company over the next three to five years.

The revenue risk most owners ignore: Concentration. If your top-line revenue is tied to a handful of salespeople’s personal relationships — or one major shipper — a buyer will price that risk against you. Tenney’s prescription is depth: multiple contacts on both sides of every key relationship, and a comp structure that aligns salesperson incentives with company value creation, not against it.

The market reality for 2026 and beyond: Tenney forecasts a saturation wave for middle-of-the-road freight brokerages within roughly 24 months as suppressed M&A activity from 2023–2025 floods back to market. “The ones who wait will be commoditized from a valuation standpoint,” he warns. The owners who win will be those who’ve already decided: Can I compete at the speed AI and technology now demand, and do I want to?

The honest answer to that question determines everything that comes next.