2006 Small Business Awards
Southland EDC's Small Business Persons of the Year

Rob Ukropina and Phil Nabal of Overnite Express in Irvine, CA, were named Southland EDC's Small Business Persons of the Year at the annual awards breakfast held June 8th at the Irvine Marriot Hotel.

Rob and Phil have grown Overnite Express into a $20 million overnight shipping company, delivering over one million packages annually throughout California, Arizona and Nevada for more than 7,000 small businesses.

Rob, CEO, founded Overnite Express in 1992 with the idea of offering a later pick-up time (9 pm) than rivals FedEx and UPS, delivering to a small geographical area, and giving extrordinary service.

In 1994, Phil Nabal joined the company as Operations Manager. At that time, Overnite was a small entrpreneurial company, and now successfully oversees 200 associates.

With the help of Southland EDC and the SBA 504 loan program in 2003, Rob and Phil were able to expand the business by purchasing a 52,000 square foot building in Irvine to accommodate their state-of-the-art automated sorting system. Approximately 150 new jobs have been created due to this expansion.

The project team was Robert Dodge, Southland Senior Loan Officer, and Ed Gerber of Pacific Western Bank, formerly Cedars Bank. The total project cost was $4.7 million, of which the bank financed $3 million and Southland $1.2 million.

The name of the game at Overnite Express is service, "Our drivers are the only ones in the industry provided with two-way radios for constant communication on the status of deliveries, enabling them to make address corrections for mis-addressed shipments instead of returning them to the senders," said Rob.

All clients are treated equally at Overnite regardless as to whether they ship one package or a hundred. All shipments are 100% guaranteed and you can also call Rob at any point with questons on the service and expect that he'll pick up the phone.