Since Clifford Hay II made the trip to Nashville, Tennessee, last year as a finalist for the 2025 Small Fleet Champ title belt in the 3-10-truck division, 2026 got off to a steady start freight-wise, yet threw a wrench in the gears for the business in short order.
And in more ways than one.
On the strength of his small fleet’s track record — “we’ve never had losses like these” on the road, he said — he retained the Canadian-owned lumber company’s business. “We still just kept going after all the problems,” Hay noted. “I had enough back-up equipment, yet I’ve had to work a lot harder” personally, with sometimes “seven days a week driving trying to keep up with everything.”
A Small Fleet Champ does what he has to. Hay’s past experience is certainly testament to that. The business lost almost everything with a shop fire that was detailed in the original story Overdrive published about Clifford Hay Inc. in September last year with his Small Fleet Champ nomination.
One of the crash-involved drivers is no longer with the company, let go after Hay found him dishonest about circumstances. The other, though, took a different tack after he put the truck and trailer on its side.
“He’s been with me for 15 years,” Hay said of that driver, who laid it all out in plain English. “He took his eyes off the road” momentarily, then “hit the shoulder just so,” and momentum took him further into the shoulder.
“Once the load shifted it turned the truck right over,” Hay said. “Everything was totaled.”
As he braces for possible insurance impact come a September renewal, though, the owner-operator stays hopeful given his otherwise decades-long history of zero on-road losses.
“The shop fire was way bigger” in terms of impact, he said, confident in efforts to serve longtime principal customers even down a driver. The competition’s in the same boat in that regard, in some ways. “In my small area, everybody I know of is looking for drivers, qualified drivers,” hamstrung on growth efforts.
On its way to his headquarters as we spoke was a 2019 389 glider outfitted with an engine he knows well for maintenance — “my favorite engine,” he said, a 6NZ Cat. He’s already replaced the lost curtainside flat.
Neither of the drivers were hurt in the single-vehicle crashes, no fuel was spilled, “no environmental cleanups” necessary, he said. Looking at “the big picture, there was a lot of good in it.”
Look out for a new sleeper interior reboot for the 2007 379, he said, later in the year, and let’s all wish him luck with the undewriters meantime.
Clifford Hay Inc. continues steady, freight volume-wise. Here’s to a better 2027, the Small Fleet Champ said, looking out.
Clifford Hay II grew up in and around the trucking business. His father started the family business in 1972, and the junior Hay rode in his dad’s truck as young as two years old. He got his CDL in 1985 and has been trucking steadily ever since.
In 1999, Hay’s initial foray into business ownership duly came when he bought the family business, Clifford C. Hay Inc., from his father. At the time it was but a one-truck, one-trailer outfit. Today, Hay owns six trucks and 30 trailers, hauling hay, lumber and dry van freight, mostly operating in the Northeast and up into Canada out of his Cobleskill, New York, home base.
He grew the fleet in the early years of ownership, by 2010 up to four trucks, humming right along as a business. In February of that year, though, his garage caught fire and burned to the ground, along with his four trucks, all of his tools, everything.
“That was quite a setback,” he said. “You know, found out how underinsured I was. It was a huge wake-up call.”
Hay didn’t let the setback define him, however. In the 15 years since, he’s rebuilt the business beyond where it was at the time.
“If it wasn’t for my wife and daughter, with their support of telling me I wasn’t going to give up,” he said, encouraging him to rebuild the shop and get the business rolling again, Hay might not be where he is today. “My wife and daughter just kept pushing me like, ‘that’s not you’” to quit. “’We know who you are.’”
He went to his local bank. “No matter what I wanted, they supported me. No questions, nothing asked,” he said. “They said, ‘we know you can do it, your credit’s great.’ And whatever I needed to buy, to purchase, they have me the loan for it without any questions.”
Hay’s fleet hauls a lot of hay. Lumber and wood shavings, too, all of that for direct customers — that’s been the case since he bought the business and took on his father’s customers. The son has continued to grow during his quarter-century-plus of ownership.
“Cliff and his team have been hauling lumber and shavings out of here for years,” said Alex Darrah, sales manager with Durgin and Crowell Lumber Co. “I cannot imagine a more professional outfit. His trucks and equipment all look like show pieces; they are immaculate at all times. I don’t know how he does it.”
Hay’s personal 2007 Peterbilt 379 Legacy shows what Darrah means, no doubt, crowned Overdrive’s Pride & Polish Limited Mileage champ in 2024. While that truck doesn’t work anymore — he pulled it off the road in 2020 after working it for about a decade — it’s an example of the pride Hay and his drivers take in the company’s equipment.
Brett Anderson, sales and procurement manager with Irving Forest Products in Hay’s home base in Cobleskill, said the Clifford C. Hay Inc. team “provide exceptional service to us,” adding that the company considers the small fleet “a strategic partner in our business, and honestly would find it difficult without them. They are flexible, accommodating and fair. They are organized and highly effective at consistent communication.”
