News

Daseke paying $108M for founder’s common shares

Nov. 16, 2022

Don Daseke launched the flatbed specialist nearly 15 years ago and still owns nearly 30% of its stock.

The board of Daseke Inc. has agreed to pay nearly $108 million for all common shares of the company still owned by Don Daseke, its founder and first CEO.

Texas-based Daseke Inc., No. 25 on the FleetOwner 500: Top For-Hire Fleets of 2022 list, will pay Daseke $40 million in cash and issue him preferred stock (that it can redeem at any point) worth another $67.6 million for the nearly 29% of the company he owns. The transaction, which is expected to close this week, values Daseke’s shares at $6 each and comes about six weeks after the company’s board said it had approved a $40 million stock buyback plan.

Shortly after that vote, CEO Jonathan Shepko said, Daseke told his fellow directors he was looking to sell his stake in the company for estate planning purposes.

“This provided us with a unique opportunity to repurchase a substantial portion of our outstanding shares on very friendly terms,” Shepko said in a statement. “Shifting capital earmarked for an open-market share buy-back to support this repurchase has put us in a great position to lock in what we believe to be an extremely attractive repurchase price in a single transaction, without straining our tradeable float.”

Shares of Daseke Inc. (Ticker: DSKE) have rallied on this week’s news. After closing at $5.97 on Nov. 11, they finished trading Nov. 15 at $6.61. Over the past six months, however, they have fallen about 13%, shrinking the company’s market capitalization to about $415 million.

Daseke, who was 82 when Daseke Inc. filed its most recent proxy statement this May, launched the company in late 2008 with an eye on consolidating the U.S. flatbed and specialized transportation market. In ensuing years and via numerous acquisitions, he grew his venture to more than $650 million in sales. He was its CEO and chairman until August 2019 and remains its chairman emeritus.

In late 2016, he engineered a reverse merger with Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp II that valued Daseke Inc. at $626 million. After Hennessy shares began trading as Daseke Inc. about two months later and at about $10 apiece, Daseke and his wife controlled, directly and indirectly, more than 15 million shares, or about 34% of the company.

About the Author

Geert De Lombaerde | Senior Editor

A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of experience in business journalism. Since 2021, he has written about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications FleetOwner, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, Oil & Gas Journal, and T&D World.

With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati. He later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector and many of its publicly traded companies.