NationaLease
Mutual protection yields mutual success: The WWII era brought another lesson in the power of alliances.
It all began with independent operators realizing that they needed a system to support one another. In 1944, just years after the end of the Great Depression and a year before the end of World War II, the heads of 17 independent truck leasing companies met in Chicago to combine their efforts and share ideas within a new organization called the National Truck Leasing System.
Its foundational concept was reciprocity. If a truck belonging to an independent member broke down far from home, another member in that region would service it. It was an idea whose time had come. Even before the decade ended, the network grew to 25 affiliate companies serving 135 cities with a shared pool of 10,000 trucks.
Almost from the beginning, the shorthand name NationaLease became part of its brand and gradually superseded the original formal name.
From that first compact, the NationaLease network has evolved into a combined customer fleet of more than 180,000 tractors, trucks, and trailers across a thousand service locations in the U.S. and Canada. Now representing more than 100 independent businesses, NationaLease is one of North America’s largest full-service truck leasing organizations. True to its founding ethos, “National Connections, Local Ownership,” this alliance allows member entrepreneurs to do what they do best: provide best-in-class service to customers on both the local and national levels.
Today, billions of miles down the road, NationaLease is proud that its family of independent businesses continues to provide a level of service and commitment that just can't be matched, offering their customers key competitive advantages in every marketplace.
