Shawn Stewart and the education of a loading dock

A loading dock is an unsentimental place to begin a management education. Freight has weight. A departure has a time. A job title, however handsome, will not lift either. Shawn Stewart began his logistics career there, as a warehouse freight handler at EGL in 1995. Before he was responsible for an organization, he was responsible for the work immediately in front of him.

His subsequent career would take him through operations, regional management, ground transport and freight management, then into the leadership of CEVA Logistics’ North American business. In April 2024, he became chief executive of Forward Air. The distance between those jobs is considerable. The connection between them is what makes his story worth following: a business built on promises eventually depends on somebody getting a shipment through a door.

Stewart arrived at Forward after its acquisition of Omni Logistics, taking charge of a company whose combination had already generated conflict and a change of leadership. He inherited the task of making the combined operation work. His warehouse beginning gives that assignment a particular interest. He has spent decades seeing how the parts fit together. Now the parts have shareholders.

The first introduction came from home

Stewart has credited his mother with introducing him to the industry. In a public Mother’s Day message, he described entering at the bottom and moving into management with her continuing support. It is a modest origin for a career that would eventually involve responsibility for billions of dollars in business. The first useful connection was a family one.

His early adult years also included Navy service, from 1992 to 1998. He received the Navy Achievement Medal for service aboard the USS Inchon and USS Theodore Roosevelt. Those dates overlap with his entry into logistics. The chronology does not require an invented moment of revelation, a dramatic departure or a conveniently timed change of heart. There was service, there was work, and the career developed.

At EGL, which became part of CEVA, his responsibilities widened. His positions included director of operations in Dallas and operations leadership covering the South Central United States and Mexico. He also held western regional roles before moving into ground transport and freight management. These were different views of the same underlying problem: getting people, capacity and customer commitments to agree with one another.

A warehouse job has a relatively immediate horizon. Regional responsibility adds more facilities, more routes and more ways for a decision in one place to inconvenience someone in another. Stewart’s progression supplied repeated changes of scale. The executive title came after years spent inside the machinery of the business, with different pieces of that machinery under his care.

When the map became the job

From April 2020 to March 2024, Stewart served as CEVA’s president and managing director for North America. The remit covered the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. More than 15,000 employees and over $5 billion in top-line turnover sat within that responsibility. The figures describe an operating organization, with all the distance and delegation that implies.

At that scale, visiting a facility is one way to shorten the distance. In 2023, Stewart described taking CEVA deputy CEO Olivier Storch through sites in Indianapolis, Chicago and Houston. He wrote about enjoying the chance to meet employees and see their work directly. A site visit gives an executive something a presentation cannot supply quite as readily: the opportunity to ask the next question of the person actually doing the job.

There were customer judgments, too. In March 2022, General Motors recognized CEVA as a 2021 Supplier of the Year in inbound material management. Stewart publicly credited the team’s work. The distinction belonged to the organization, and it is useful to keep it there. His role was to lead a regional business whose performance was being evaluated by a demanding manufacturing customer.

The distinction also points to the kind of service he was managing. Inbound material management connects logistics to production. It requires attention to what a customer needs next, rather than treating the delivery as an isolated event. Across Stewart’s career, that wider view becomes increasingly visible: a shipment is one part of somebody else’s plan.

A new truck still needs a useful route

His years running CEVA North America included work with Kodiak Robotics on autonomous freight deliveries. CEVA carried its first load with Kodiak in November 2021. By March 2022, the collaboration included Dallas-Fort Worth to Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth to Oklahoma City. Autonomous tractors pulled CEVA trailers carrying consumer products. The technology had an address to go to.

That specificity is helpful. Innovation becomes easier to discuss when it has a route, a load and a customer purpose. Stewart’s explanation at the time tied the partnership to business value and supply-chain needs. The project put an emerging technology inside the ordinary obligations of a freight service. The novelty rode at the front; the trailer still needed to arrive.

It would be easy to make his warehouse background sound like an attachment to older methods. This episode gives the career a more interesting shape. Someone who began handling freight was also helping lead a business testing a different way to move it. Familiarity with the physical task can coexist with a willingness to change the equipment doing it.

The assignment waiting at Forward

Stewart’s appointment as Forward Air CEO and a director took effect on April 28, 2024. Interim chief executive Michael Hance continued as chief legal officer and secretary. Forward had completed the Omni acquisition in January, and the combined business needed operating leadership after a contested transaction. Stewart stepped into the consequences of a deal made before his arrival.

The professional fit was clear enough. He had run a large logistics business spanning several countries and services. Forward brought an expedited ground network together with Omni’s broader logistics capabilities. The practical question was how those capabilities would work together for customers and produce an acceptable financial result. A larger menu has limited charm if the kitchen cannot keep up.

By 2025, investors were still pressing the company. Activist investor Ancora pushed for a sale, while the operating business was addressing pricing and its freight mix. This context matters to Stewart’s profile. A turnaround is an assignment with interested observers, competing demands and a clock that belongs partly to other people. His experience did not buy him a quiet room in which to complete it.

Forward’s management biography dates his additional president title to July 2025. The expanded title added another line to the formal record. The essential test remained practical: could the company improve its operations, retain customer confidence and make the financial case for the business it had assembled?

“Success is not owned; it is rented, and the rent is due every day.”

A leadership maxim Stewart says he lives by

That borrowed maxim suits the recurring nature of freight. Yesterday’s successful delivery does not complete today’s order. An organization must repeat the work, and the people running it must keep earning confidence. Stewart has also emphasized trust and consistent treatment across an organization. These are stated principles; their significance lies in the daily decisions employees and customers experience.

Two numbers that belong in the same story

In August 2026, Forward reported second-quarter consolidated operating revenue of approximately $673 million, its highest quarterly total to that point. The expedited freight segment’s operating income rose to roughly $34.9 million from $19.5 million a year earlier. Those figures gave Stewart evidence of operating progress to discuss.

The results also included a $244 million goodwill impairment associated with Omni Logistics. Consolidated operating loss was about $201.3 million. Those numbers belong beside the revenue figure. Removing them would turn an unfinished operating story into an advertisement. Revenue measures business coming through the organization; it cannot, by itself, settle the question of what that business is worth.

On the quarter’s earnings call, Stewart described targeted pricing to attract heavier shipments into lanes with available capacity. The explanation returned to the mechanics of the network: how much weight is moving, where it is moving and how well each dispatch is filled. After the acquisition arguments and executive titles, the conversation had come back to freight taking up space in a truck.

Some deliveries carry a family history

There is another thread running through Stewart’s public life: support for veterans. CEVA’s 2018 sustainability report pictured him laying a wreath and described the company’s transport support for Wreaths Across America. It is a setting in which the usefulness of logistics becomes especially plain. A ceremony depends on objects arriving, and on people giving their time.

Years later, he described the personal connection more closely. At Dallas Fort Worth National Cemetery, he laid wreaths for his grandfather, a World War II veteran, his grandmother and two uncles. The family detail gives substance to the corporate commitment. For Stewart, this work includes particular people in a particular place.

His public account of family life is similarly ordinary: golf, travel and making time for his children as they grow older. It offers a quieter measure of the person whose professional biography is expressed in employees, regions and turnover. The scale changes again. An executive can delegate a great deal; time spent with family remains his own appointment to keep.

Forward’s next scheduled quarterly call, on November 9, 2026, will bring another assessment of the business. Stewart’s career has supplied experience on both sides of the warehouse door. His present assignment asks what he can do with it. The freight will supply one answer, the financial results another. Neither has much patience for a handsome job title.