Noël Perry continues to be endlessly fascinated by transportation.

By the time he was born—1946, Summerville, New Jersey—he already had transportation rolling through his DNA. His father and grandfather both were Pennsylvania Railroad employees. His brother was a railman. His early memories also fueled his passion for transportation. Among the first:

“We lived on the first floor of an old Victorian house in Flemington, New Jersey. Behind it was a roundhouse. In the evening, when the commuter engines would come back into the roundhouse, my mother would prop me up on the sink and we’d watch the trains go by. I was about two. I also remember waiting at the station in Lambertville, north of Trenton. My father was coming up from Philadelphia, and the train was pulled. By steam locomotive. And I remember riding behind steam on the Redding.”

At five, after his father died, Noël grew up in roadhouse Philadelphia, spending his school years in a very good yet, nonetheless, charity school (“like Hogwarts without the magic”) that was reachable by trolley cars.

Noël took his first job, in 1968, as a loading dock manager. Soon after, joining the Air Force, he trained and stationed around the country—San Antonio, Sacramento, Merced, northern Maine, Westover—before tours of duty in Vietnam.

“In essence,” he says, “I had a logistics job in the service. I learned about fuel load, efficiency, timing, geography, planning and teamwork. That’s the advantage of the military: responsibility and work habits. As an officer, you’re responsible for managing yourself.”

By his last year in the service, Noël knew he wanted to study logistics at Harvard. Never one to bide his time, he took a job as a trucker for most of a year before studies began.

At Harvard, Noël was the research assistant to the assistant dean at the Department of Economics, John Meyer, who is acknowledged as creating the discipline of transportation economics. That connection opened doors to government work, studying productivity in mass transit. (“We were the guys who recommend articulated buses, back in 1975, that we use today in New York City.”)

Walter Gropius, architect and founder of The Bauhaus, taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. During Noël’s time there, the school moved away from design and toward economics. This combination created an interesting situation: is economics a design discipline like architecture? Noël will tell you economics is more an analytical discipline, one with design aspects to it, of which he references and uses frequently. Still, economics has an efficiency affect rather than an aesthetic effect.

Harvard’s combination is one example of many: cross-disciplines, clashing and melding, with students and experts campaigning to make order from seemingly disparate disciplines that often have competing agendas. Noël thrives in such a milieu.

“Harvard is one hundred percent the case method,” he says. “You’re graded heavily on your class participation. I was graded on my ability to speak about transportation. A large difference was that others were book smart, whereas I knew a lot about transportation, from experience.”

That participation solidified for Noël’s passion for public speaking. Today, it serves as one of the many reasons why audiences appreciate his provocative, engaging and insightful presentations.

His endless fascination with transportation combines with a true passion about his work and a thorough grounding in the details. From that, he explores the edge of the envelope: the extreme elements of the industry that grab his attention. “My specialty,” he says, “is the counterintuitive hypothesis.” Though sometimes he may seem to provoke just for the sake of provoking, he always has statistics and analysis to back up the provocation.

Brent Hutto, Chief Relationship Officer of Truckstop.com puts it simply and directly: “You’re gonna be less wrong if you use Noël.”

Another way to look at the arc of Noël’s career: Since 1976, he’s been an analyst, sometimes closely connected with operations. Before that, he was in operations. With deep study in the disciplines of observation, he’s trained to see things other people don’t.

Through Public Speaking engagements, Market Research and The Transport Navigator: Transport Futures has become the perfect synthesis of Noël Perry’s work experience and analytical expertise.

Susan’s first memory:

She was in kindergarten, staring at a tub of glue paste. Everyone around her was using her paste, and she was happy to share.

That memory completely honors the passion and expertise she brings to consulting with Transport Futures. Susan Collins is the glue that keeps it all together.

Let’s push the metaphor a bit further. She’s a force of nature. Years of professional experience inform her strategy, and everyone who encounters her sticks with her initiatives. Because they’re good. They’re well thought through. She’s still sharing that tub of glue paste.

Born in Brooklyn. Raised in Queens. Youngest of four children. Dad was a marine; the family moved around often. Mom was a widow at 39 and took a variety of jobs: part-time in retail, cleaning at a local funeral home, tallying receipts on a comptometer at home and then finally working full time as a bookkeeper for a construction company in Queens.

Susan’s high school was in Manhattan, and then she attended Katharine Gibbs business academy, also in Manhattan, before the working life.

Her first job was as an assistant to the sales group at Westvaco Paper Company (more on that in a bit). Then she worked in the research department as an assistant at The Penn Central Group.

“From there,” Susan says, “I worked for House Beautiful magazine. I started with Hearst as assistant to the sales department. When a position opened as assistant decorating editor, I took the job. Though I left the sales side, I remained friends with them. In my new position I frequently went on photo shoots and gathered materials for upcoming issues and began building relationships with the magazine staff. I was very involved with putting all the pieces together.”

We begin to see how her first memory of that glue paste works into Susan’s way of doing business. It also speaks to the longevity of her relationships. She met Tim when they were in elementary school together. They married in their 20s.

From Queens, they moved to Douglaston, NY, where both daughters were born. Then they moved to Huntington, Long Island. Susan worked various part-time jobs in retail, selling cosmetics, handbags and clothing.

The family relocated to the South—first Raleigh, NC, where Susan worked at John Deere HQ as a relocation specialist and then Gainesville, GA, where she joined the PGA Tour as their HR expert. She loved the work but needed to be closer to home. She joined the HR department of Course Crafters, a local golf course construction company.

And networked. Susan took on consulting jobs for various concerns in Gainesville. She first became involved in transportation through a logistics research project for GTO 2000, which evolved into ten years as their Business Services Manager. Which turned into VP of Agent Relations, overseeing 35 offices strategically placed around the country.

Susan started her consulting firm, 63rd & Eliot, in 2015. First assignment: Director of Industry Relations with Truckstop.com, a natural and perfect next step. Some three years ago, Susan met Noël Perry, who soon joined Truckstop.com as Chief Economist; Susan identified, encouraged and organized opportunities for Noël’s unique writing and speaking style and carefully positioned his industry engagements.

Today, Susan champions the organization of Noël’s initiatives with Transport Futures. “I know Noël is very respected in the industry, and I believe in him,” she says. “For me, it’s exciting and challenging to get this lifted off. There are a lot of analysts out there, but Noël thinks about things like no one else does. He’s real. He’s genuine. That’s very important to me. There’s no way you cannot be successful if you have that authentic talent.”

We could explore Susan positioning herself as Ed McMahon to Noël’s Johnny Carson. But what we really want to do is take you back for a moment—to her first job, at Westvaco. Her words:

“I was assistant to the sales department. They’re all running out to sell the paper. There was this older gentleman, I thought he was 95 then. He was little, not even five feet tall, kinda crusty, with curly hands. He ran his own department and was in charge of all the sample paper. If you had a customer that wanted samples—matte, gloss, super glossy or of a certain weight—the sales team would ask me to put together a sample kit to take on their sales call. And that was this man’s department.

“When I first started working there, this guy never spoke to you. Did not want you in his area at all. He’d cut and then graduate the paper samples—six inches, eight inches, ten inches. I remember telling him I need this and that, and he’d tell me I had to wait. ‘Could you please get it ready?’ ‘Well, I’ll see what I’m doing.’

“I worked there a few years. Eventually, we’d have conversations. In time, he showed me how to cut the samples. And this guy never let anyone else into his area. I think he grew to trust me. He knew I wanted to do a good job. He knew it was important for me to get things done for the people who relied on me. It wasn’t about threatening. He understood that I respected his time and, if I could be trusted, it would all work. Eventually we talked about other things: lunch, his wife, family matters. What a dear, sweet man!”

Susan Collins. Building and growing relationships the right way. She’s our glue that binds.