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Transportation 2025: KUHN, CHARLES

At age 16, Kuhn founded JK Moving Services, now North America’s largest independently owned and operated moving company, with $225.5 million in fiscal 2024 revenue. It employs more than 1,300 workers.

The company has moved presidents and their families in and out of the White House since George H.W. Bush’s administration, including moving the Trumps to Mar-a-Lago and back.

One of Loudoun County’s biggest landholders, Kuhn is a major investor in data centers through his company JK Land Holdings, which in February 2024 acquired 108 acres in Ashburn primed for data centers. While two data centers are planned for the property, the conservationist earlier this year

donated 10 of those acres to the Loudoun Freedom Center, giving the center more control over the land surrounding the African American Burial Ground for the Enslaved at Belmont.

Kuhn also founded JK Community Farm, a 150-acre nonprofit farm that donates its produce to area hunger relief organizations.

TRAIT I ADMIRE: Moxie. People that have the know-how and a fearless resolve to lead, raise the bar and embrace challenges with enthusiasm and determination change the world.

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Transportation 2025: LAYNE JR., AUBREY L.

Layne, a former state secretary of finance and secretary of under two governors, has worked at Sentara, a 34,000-employee regional health system, since July 2021, overseeing several teams, including legislative affairs, real estate, construction, supply chain, security, compliance, internal audit and privacy.

He also chairs the Virginia Port Authority board, which oversees the Port of Virginia, one of the state’s economic drivers. Port-related business and activity account for more than $124.1 billion in total spending and $5.8 billion in state and local tax revenues annually. His five-year term runs through June 2026.

Among others, Layne is also a member of the TowneBank corporate board and a member of An Achievable Dream’s endowment board.

A native of Hampton Roads and graduate of the University of Richmond, Layne earned his MBA from Old Dominion University. In 2024, Layne received UR’s Spider Athletics Alumni Achievement Award. He was a member of the university’s baseball team before graduating in 1979.

FIRST JOB: Selling cotton candy at the Hampton Coliseum as a youth

MOST VALUED POSSESSION: My great grandfather’s Bible

STREAMING SHOW I’VE ENJOYED: “MobLand”

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Transportation 2025: McDANIEL, CHARLES

McDaniel is Hilldrup’s fourth president since the moving, storage and since the moving, storage and logistics company was founded in 1903. The McDaniel family has owned the company since 1940.

McDaniel also previously chaired the board for UniGroup, the Missouri- based parent company of United Van Lines and Mayflower Transit.

Hilldrup now generates annual revenues exceeding $135 million. The company has 10 branches on the East Coast, 600 employees and 1.5 million square feet of storage space. In 2024, it moved more than 18,800 families.

In April, Hilldrup added a third warehouse to its Orlando, Florida, operations, bringing the company’s total warehousing capacity there to 400,000 square feet.

Hilldrup is the only agent in the UniGroup system to have received United Van Lines’ customer choice award 28 times. Nonprofit Move For Hunger named Hilldrup its 2024 Mover of the Year for helping provide food donations to people in need.

A University of Virginia graduate, McDaniel sits on the Stafford Hospital Foundation board.

FIRST JOB: Working for Hilldrup — specifically, picking up nails in the lot and getting paid 1 cent per nail.

HOW I DEFINE SUCCESS: Winning. There’s a reason people, businesses and sports teams keep score

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Transportation 2025: MEMORY, BEAU

Memory started with Transurban, an Australian company operating express toll lanes in Northern Virginia, in November 2023 after serving as executive director of the Public Highway Authority in Denver.

He oversees 155 employees and the company’s toll lanes on the Capital Beltway and i terstates 95 and 395, as well as the A25 Bridge in Montreal. Transurban’s North American fiscal 20 4 revenue totaled $349 million. Before working in Denver, Memory was chief operating officer at the North Carolina Department of Transportation and executive director of the North Carolina Turnpike Authority In November 2024, Transurban opened the estimated $69.7 million 95 Express Lanes Opitz Boulevard ramp in Woodbridge. Later this year, it plans to open an additional 2.5 miles of 495 Beltway express lanes.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Memory serves on the board of the Pentagon Memorial Fund, which raises money to support the Pentagon 9/11 Memorial. He’s also a member of boards for the Greater Washington Board of Trade and the Eno Center for Transportation.

ADVICE FOR NEW COLLEGE GRADS: Be agile. Raise your hand when opportunities arise. And be patient.

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Transportation 2025: MILLER, JERROLD

Founder of The Miller Group, the developer for Fairwinds Landing, Miller is guiding the development of the 111-acre project at Norfolk Southern’s Lambert’s Point Docks in Norfolk.

The $500 million development will transform the former docks into a marine center supporting the growth of offshore wind, shipbuilding and intermodal .

The project, a joint venture including The Miller Group, Balicore Construction and Fairlead, could create more than 200 local construction and engineering jobs. In 2023, Newport News Shipbuilding started production at a satellite campus at Fairwinds Landing. The Dominion Monitoring & Coordination Center, an offshore wind energy monitoring and coordination center, is expected to be completed at the site in September.

In July, Miller stepped down as CEO of Fairlead after 40 years of leading the engineering and manufacturing company and its earlier iteration, Earl Industries. Fairlead President Fred Pasquine became president and CEO. The majority owner of the company, Miller transitioned to Fairlead’s executive chairman.

Miller is a 1977 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy.

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Transportation 2025: HALL, KEITH

In 2023, Hall tasked Bob McGonigal, TFI International executive vice president, with helping turn around TFI’s U.S. less-than-truckload operation. Montreal-based TFI purchased TForce, which had lost revenue in the past few years, from UPS in 2021 for $800 million.

TFI reported its 2024 net income was $422.5 million, down from $504.9 million in 2023. Alain Bédard, TFI’s chairman, president and CEO, described TForce as “a big rock in my shoe” to analysts after the earnings report’s release. FleetOwner reported earlier this year TForce was struggling with poor service levels and was churning too many customers.

After the first quarter of 2025, however, Bédard praised Hall and two other TForce executives. The business is growing in small to medium-sized accounts while cutting back on larger accounts where it was losing money. It’s also revamping its IT systems and shifting from railroad to road shipments.

Hall previously served as regional director of operations in Greenville, South Carolina, as well as regional vice president in Los Angeles.

A Virginia Commonwealth University graduate, Hall began his career in trucking after he graduated from high school, working at Overnite, which UPS purchased in 2005.

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Retail | Wholesale | Food | Beverage 2025: SHEEHY IV, VINCE

Sheehy carries on his father’s legacy as an auto dealer, manning the largest dealership group in Virginia and one of the largest in the nation. His late father, Vincent Sheehy III, founded Sheehy Ford in Maryland in 1965 as a suburban business near the newly built Capital Beltway.

Sheehy Auto Stores was ranked No. 33 in the nation’s top 150 car dealership groups as listed by Automotive News in May. According to the list, Sheehy reported $2.36 billion in group revenue for 2024 at its 28 dealerships.

After graduating from Dickinson College, receiving an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and working for Prudential and General Mills, the younger Sheehy joined the family business in the late 1980s and became president in 1998. Sheehy Auto Stores is the largest retailer of Fords and Nissans in the mid- Atlantic region, and it added two Maryland Toyota and Volvo dealerships in November 2024.

In 2023, the Sheehy family donated $3.65 million to Catholic University of America’s Metropolitan School of Professional Studies to endow the Sheehy Family Scholarship.

Sheehy is a trustee of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

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Retail | Wholesale | Food | Beverage 2025: WARREN THOMPSON

Thompson became an entrepreneur as a teen, when he purchased and ran his family’s hog farm in Windsor. He now heads the largest minority-owned food and facilities management corporation in the nation, which he founded in 1992 with the purchase of 31 Bob’s Big Boy restaurants.

Thompson Hospitality provides dining services for more than 200 companies, universities and hospitals, representing over $2 billion in business. The company also owns several restaurant chains, including Milk & Honey, Matchbox and Wiseguy Pizza, and runs more than 70 restaurants. In 2023, the company launched the Thompson Restaurants division, which is its fastest-growing business. In 2024, Thompson Hospitality generated nearly $1 billion in revenue.

Thompson graduated from Hampden-Sydney College and the University of Virginia’s business school, and he was later a member of both institutions’ boards. Attending U.Va. was meaningful, considering that racial segregation prevented his father, Fred Thompson Sr., from attending the school decades earlier.

Thompson is a member of the American Heart Association CEO Roundtable and sits on Performance Food Group’s board of directors.

Last year, Thompson bought Wildersmoor House, a 17-acre equestrian estate in Great Falls, for $14.75 million.

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Retail | Wholesale | Food | Beverage 2025: SEVER, MICHAEL

Sever, a longtime Hershey employee, was named plant manager of the candymaker’s Stuarts Draft manufacturing facility in 2022. He had previously been site operations leader at the facility, which produces nut-based candies like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Almond Joy. The plant, which opened in 1982, is the second largest of Hershey’s seven manufacturing sites.

Sever managed the plant during a failed attempt by workers at unionization in 2022.

Hershey named a new CEO in August: Kirk Tanner, who was previously CEO of Wendy’s. In 2024, Hershey reported about $11 billion in net sales, slightly up from the previous year.

Sever’s 20-year career with the Fortune 500 company has taken him to China and included time as a plant manager in Hershey’s Lancaster, Pennsylvania, facility. In 2018, Sever became vice president of U.S. operations for educational travel company WorldStrides and started a small-batch confection company, Wild Blue Chocolate, with his wife, Jessie. He then held management roles at companies Danone and Kerry’s locations in Virginia before coming back to Hershey.

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Retail | Wholesale | Food | Beverage 2025: RAMPOLDT, JOEL

Lidl, a German discount grocery chain, entered the U.S. market in 2017. But it struggled to compete with its chief rival, Aldi, and Lidl has changed its U.S. CEO three times since 2018. In 2023, Rampoldt took the reins as the first American to lead Lidl’s U.S. division and its expansion.

As of July, the company operates more than 185 stores in nine states and Washington, D.C. — up from about 170 a year ago.

Rampoldt’s roots in the retail and grocery industry run deep: His first job was as a bagger at his local Kroger at age 15. After earning an MBA from Yale, he spent two decades advising leaders of U.S. and European grocery companies as a consultant at Oliver Wyman, KPMG and AlixPartners.

Lidl followed the appointment of Rampoldt by hiring four new executives and conducting layoffs in 2024. In stores, Lidl has relaunched its fresh meat and produce divisions.

In 2024, Rampoldt joined the board of directors of the Food Industry Association for a three-year term.

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