Bradley Jacobs considers himself a builder and a dealmaker. That’s what he has been doing since 2011 when he started XPO Logistics (XPO). Jacobs bought a small, struggling trucking company, then made 13 acquisitions over the past six years, building it into a transportation behemoth ranked in the top tier of the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest industrial companies by revenue.
Jacobs tells Fortune that many people questioned his strategy in those early days. For starters, he was new to the transportation industry. He had founded and built other companies in businesses as diverse as construction equipment, trash collection and oil trading—but not trucking.
So what’s the secret to his success? “The success I had was finding something that I really wholeheartedly believed in and could get a bunch of other people to also believe in it and work together to succeed those big visions,” he says, adding, “It’s really about creating a community that’s very energized and focused on accomplishing something big.”
And XPO is big. It has $15 billion in revenues—double the sales from just a year ago. It is a one-stop shipper for companies like Home Depot (HD) and Walmart (WMT). It is a global company with 90,000 employees doing business across North America and in 34 countries.
To hear Jacobs tell it, he’s not finished building. He pictures more acquisitions and XPO getting even bigger. Watch the full interview above to learn more.
