The Larson Group (TLG) has won the 2025 Successful Dealer Award. The award was presented Tuesday during an awards banquet in Nashville.
“We’re honored and humbled to be here tonight and to be the recipient of this award,” COO Melissa Larson told the audience Tuesday. “There are so many amazing dealers in the room. We are honored to have spent the day with you ... This award really should go to every single TLG employee who goes the extra mile every day for us.”
The Successful Dealer Award program was created by Trucks, Parts, Service in 2013 and has become one of trucking’s most coveted dealer awards, highlighting commercial truck dealers for sales and business success, workforce development, customer service excellence, marketing and outreach, industry engagement, community involvement and more. The award program is sponsored by Automann, Interstate Billing Service, National Truck Protection/Premium 2000 and Procede Software.
TLG took home this year’s award after previously being a finalist in 2018 and 2019. Other finalists this year were first-time honorees Dobbs Truck Group, Selking International and Vanguard Truck Centers, and second-time finalist Truckworx (2019).
The Larson Group also was a finalist for a previous award presented by Successful Dealer magazine in 1997, and Larson said Tuesday her family still remembers that experience and what it meant to be recognized for business success.
“I had the pleasure of spending the weekend with [my grandfather] and on Saturday I told him we had this award ceremony coming up and he said ‘I hope you guys win this time.’ This truly means a lot to us.”
Long known as one of trucking’s premier dealer operations, Larson and CFO Mike Headley accepted Tuesday’s award on behalf of its nearly 1,500 employees, specifically citing the efforts the company’s workforce brings to the market each day that enables TLG to be a market leader.
“We all know this is a people business. We talked about it a lot today. It’s near and dear to our hearts,” Headley said Tuesday. “[This] is not about Melissa and I, it's about the 1,500 other employees that we have and what they do every day. They come to work with a positive attitude, knowing that [business] is a challenge, knowing that these times aren't the best right now. But they still come in every day and do their best to keep America going.”
Founded by truckers with customer satisfaction on their minds, TLG remains successful nearly four decades later because never loses sight of its uptime promise to customers.
TLG is a business where going above and beyond is standard operating procedure. Where bespoke solutions to customers problems aren’t just possible, they’re often encouraged. Where technology and innovation are harnessed in unique ways to provide resources to customers they didn’t even realize they needed.
Yet TLG also is a company that understands “blocking and tackling,” and the vital service dealers provide the American trucking industry. Whether a customer comes to TLG to buy 20 new Class 8 tractors or a $20 part, the company understands their business is relying on TLG to come through and can’t let them down.
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“TLG is all about the customer, our customers’ success and creating solutions that our customers’ needs for their pain points,” says Heather Caldwell, director of marketing. “Their success is our success. We’re here to support them and make their lives easier.”
Headley agrees.
“A lot of times when a customer comes to us, our question isn’t, ‘What do you need?’ it’s ‘What are you trying to accomplish?’” he says. “We try to train all our people that whenever they are working with a customer and [the customer ask] a question, our answer should never be ‘no.’ Or ‘we don’t do that.’
“We want to understand what they’re looking for so we can find a way to support them.”
TLG’s ability to support customers is well known.
Besides its prior Successful Dealer Award accolades, the company has been crowned Peterbilt’s North American Dealer of the Year seven times. It’s a regular honoree in the OEM’s year-end segment awards and is known nationwide for its customer-centric approach to dealer service.
Also active in state and national trucking associations, customer segment associations and Paccar and Peterbilt dealer committees, TLG is a business that never misses a chance to get better. The company’s internal improvement processes make that clear as well. TLG has training modules for all employees, apprenticeship programs for potential and new tech hires and professional development programs designed to cultivate its next generation of leaders.
There are multiple generations of Larson in the company’s leadership, but with 26 locations across eight states it takes more than the family alone to keep the Larson’s family values instilled networkwide.
As Headley told TPS last month, “We probably spend more time on TLG culture than almost anything else that we do,” Headley says. “It’s part of our training, it’s part of our onboarding and I think it’s part of that continual reinforcement of ‘This is the way TLG does business.’”
And winning the Successful Dealer Award is validation “the way TLG does business” works.
“Any time you get recognition it reinforces you’re doing the right thing,” Headley says. “It means you’re doing something right and people are noticing.”
