By now you have likely heard the plan to bring our U.S. operating entities, Britton Transport and H.O. Wolding under one banner and rebranding them as Bison USA, effective January 1, 2022. I would like to take this opportunity to provide a little more context behind this important decision.
Firstly, this is not a story affecting only our subsidiaries, this is a story that affects us all. We are keenly aware of the tremendous reputations each of our businesses has earned in the communities that we live and operate within, with the customers we serve and most importantly, with the people who are Britton, HOW and Bison Transport. From the first days of our acquisitions to today, we remain conscious of the legacies we have created while at the same time we must continue to focus on the evolution of our enterprise.
Up until now we had purposefully stayed away from changing the names of our acquired entities. We did this for several reasons, not the least of which was to avoid the needless disruption and stress we would place on those businesses. Businesses are nothing more than a collection of people and you do not buy or sell people. We must learn each business and get to know the people that make each of these businesses special. We must earn the trust of our people and we must demonstrate the value we bring to a new business through collaboration and best practices. We also take the reputation and legacy of Bison Transport just as seriously as we do the businesses we acquire. We are very guarded as to what we are willing to put our name on and until such time as we can be sure that the business we acquire can live up to our expectations, putting the Bison name on the door is a nonstarter. These things take time and the outcome is never certain at the outset.
We are pleased to have learned that each of our businesses have many more similarities than we have differences and it is our collective belief that sharing an identity is better than keeping us separate. In fact the biggest differences today appear to be the colours of the trucks and the names on the equipment. Culturally our operating entities are all aligned and our people are focused on the same goals. Our teams have been leveraging each other’s best practices, customer and supplier relationships and sharing our people’s strengths from day one. We have been focused on what is best for the collective and we feel like the task becomes infinitely easier when we are not confusing brands, both internally and externally. We settled on Bison because the brand is more established on a national and international scale. Examples of this would be direct feedback many of us have received from our customers and suppliers and the success we have had co-selling our services and growing our businesses, together.
We bought these businesses to grow them, and we expect that this amalgamation and name change will help to expedite our growth. To grow a business requires people and our investment in our people and the communities we live and operate in has not wavered. With growth comes increased opportunities for all and increased investments in each of the communities we function in. We continue to have meaningful and rewarding opportunities for all who work here, with the intention of creating many more of these opportunities and we are very excited about this next chapter in our history.
If you recall, Bison Transport has also gone through a meaningful transition having been acquired by James Richardson and Sons Limited on Dec 31st this past year. Britton Transport and H.O. Wolding are not the only ones who will be refreshing their look. We have engaged a third party to look at our entire fleet, with the intent to modernize our on-highway appearance to better reflect who we are as an organization today while at the same time honoring our past. Our intention is to come up with a look that ties us all together, while at the same time reflects our differences, whether it be by country, by legacy or by operating regions. We have a team working on various concepts as we speak and we look forward to sharing more details as we progress through this image remake. I look forward to the next chapter in our exciting story.
Please feel free to direct any questions, thoughts or concerns to any member of your leadership team.