How a PE-Owned Cellulose Insulation Manufacturer Recovered $9.4M in Freight Spend

$6.1M of the recovery came from costs that never appeared on the P&L, recoverable EBITDA hidden inside unaudited invoices, unbenchmarked rates, and untracked freight.

The portfolio company recovered $9.4M in freight spend, including $6.1M in costs the company had not known it was paying. The majority of the EBITDA contribution came from spending that had never appeared on the P&L as a separate line.

The Freight Operation Before Haversack’s Engagement

Freight was managed without reporting tools to benchmark FTL pricing against national averages. Carriers passed steep markups through, and the company absorbed them without seeing them.

FTL quotes were collected by phone and email. BOLs were processed manually. Shipments moved without real-time tracking, which left operations without visibility or control once freight was on the road.

The invoice queue ran without an audit step. Errors flowed through to accounting unnoticed. Pallet sizing was non-standardized, inflating dimensional cost on every outbound shipment. None of it appeared on the P&L as a separate line. It was absorbed into cost of goods.

Inside the Freight Value Creation Sequence

Early in the engagement, the company opened FTL sourcing to a competitive bid board, replacing quotes by phone and email with structured market pricing. A tailored LTL carrier network was built to deliver better rates. Haversack TMS went live, ending manual BOL processing and giving operations real-time visibility.

Business intelligence was activated across freight spend, surfacing invoice errors approved without audit and identifying inefficiencies the team had never been able to see.

The combined result was:

• $9.4M in recoverable freight spend

• $2.1M from FTL and LTL

• $1.1M from invoice leakage

• $6.1M in costs the company had not known it was paying.

Where This Pattern Repeats Across PE Portfolios

At an 8x EBITDA multiple, $9.4M in recovered freight spend equals $75.2M in enterprise value. The pattern is consistent: any PE-owned manufacturer where freight runs without competitive bidding, without a TMS, and without invoice audit has a version of this problem. The numbers change. The structure does not. The question worth asking is which portfolio companies fit the pattern.

See how our engineered insource solution turns freight into recoverable EBITDA across PE portfolios.