Celebrating 5 Years, A Gazillion Miles & Many Promises Kept
At LiVe Logistics, we’re celebrating miles and miles and miles in business this month, but it’s easier to tell you it’s our 5th anniversary.
No matter how you measure it, that’s something worth celebrating.
Measured against the likelihood of any business reaching the five-year mark – and throw in a global pandemic for good measure – and it’s a lot to be thankful for, beginning with the many clients who helped us get here by trusting us with the job of getting their products where they need to go, safely, cost-effectively, and on time.
Every business, if they’ve got any brains at all, is quick to praise their customers. But believe me when I tell you, the people we work with in this industry are some of the best people on the planet. Many of them have become friends as well as customers and business partners over the years, and the miles. It’s like having a second family.
Speaking of miles, below are a few of the milestones we’ve celebrated over the past five years.
Breaking Even
A year-and-a-half into our adventure as business owners my brother and I had enough money to begin paying ourselves while continuing to grow the business. Things had been trending in the right direction for a while, but that did not diminish our happiness the day we realized we had crossed the line from red to black. It changed everything. With six kids between us, those first paychecks were far from ornamental.
Moving into the Fast Lane
The first two years were a blur of hard work. Our staff grew from a handful of people to six and then 12. We left our 1,200 square-foot office and moved into our current space, where 7,500 square feet have given us room to grow. It’s now become all about finding the talent we need. We’ve more than doubled in size again and have added another office location.
A 10,000-Foot View of the Road
In late 2019, we went live with a state-of-the-art, cloud-based transportation management system that provides 24/7 tracking of every order. The system runs financials and accepts data from our customers using electronic data interchange. It allows us to operate at a much more efficient level so that we can continue to grow as a service-based 3PL company while staying out in front of any issues that arise.
Boom
Today we’re seeing explosive growth, with new customers coming on and existing customers adding work – especially refrigerated and frozen (reefer) freight. We’re working even harder to find the talent we need, but it’s a nice problem to have, as the saying goes.
Driving Forward
For all of these milestones, the thing that is most satisfying after five years is that we have been able to stay true to our roots as a family company. That’s not just a legacy thing: there are five of us working here every day: my brother and I, our wives and my brother-in-law. We’re all still friends. We work hard together, we take vacations together, we’re raising our kids together. It all sounded crazy at first, but it’s still working.
Maybe best of all, we’ve built a business of people who have become like a second family to us. And we’ve done it without losing sight of the kind of business we still want to be – a business built around providing the highest-quality service to our customers on every single job.
Our families started this business to build something we could stand behind. Today, we still pride ourselves on sticking to our word. Here at LiVe Logistics, what we say is what we do.
And we couldn’t be any more grateful to you for noticing.
– Adam Wakefield, CEO