Robert Young III
Robert Young on Tuesday presided over his last shareholders meeting as the chairman of the board of ArcBest Corp. of Fort Smith.
Young has been with the company since 1952, been a director since 1970 and board chairman since 2004; he was also CEO from 1988 to 2006.
CEO Judy McReynolds will replace Young as chairwoman of the board. Young is retiring because he reached the company’s mandatory retirement age of 75, a policy he played a large role in implementing.
“When I put it in, I didn’t think it would ever affect me,” Young said in a sit-down meeting with reporters after the shareholders event. “I was 60 years old at the time; 75 — I’ll never get there anyway.”
In his address to a roomful of executives and board directors at company headquarters Tuesday, Young said he wanted to thank the “three legs of the stool” — employees, stockholders and customers — that have made ArcBest successful.
For 2015, ArcBest reported income of $44.8 million on revenue of $2.66 billion.
“It has been a great 52 years,” Young said.
Young said he is the third board member who has retired after reaching the mandatory retirement age. He said he originally thought that losing experienced hands would negatively affect the company.
“In any business, young ideas are important because the world’s changing,” Young said. “How you reach the customer today is so different. It’s a good move to have regular replacement. You lose some institutional memory when people retire, but the trade-off is a good one.”
After his last official act with the company, Young said it hasn’t sunk in that he was leaving.
“It hasn’t really settled on me yet,” Young said. “It’ll take me a week or two to figure out that I’m not supposed to be here. I’ll miss it, but it’s the right thing to do. I don’t want somebody to have to come to me and say it’s time for you to step down.”
Young said the company was in good hands with the 10-member board, which was reelected during the meeting. Young owns more than 1.2 million shares, or 4.7 percent of ArcBest, according to the company’s proxy filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission.
“The future is very bright,” Young said. “It darn well better be, I own a lot of stock.”
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