How do you get things around the world quickly and safely? Answer: Have a good team!

The Chris DeBlasio Podcast

How do you get things around the world quickly and safely? Answer: Have a good team!

- [Chris] On this episode of C Level I talk with Brian Oxley and Enrique Alvarez of Vector Global Logistics. So tell me a little bit about you guys and your business. - So, my name is Enrique Alvarez. I'm originally from Mexico city. I came to the US in 2004 to study B-School. I went to Wharton, Philadelphia. Graduated in 06, and then came down to Atlanta to work for the Boston Consulting Group. That's where I met Brian. We were both doing consulting for almost three years, where we wanted to start something on our own. We thought about different projects and different potential ventures, and we looked into logistics, and for us, logistics was a very interesting industry. - So why logistics? What interests you the most? - Well, after conducting a couple of weeks of due diligence, and just interviewing some people, and really getting to know the industry well, after a project that we did for a company down in Mexico, we realized that the industry was very fragmented. There's a lot of mom-and-pop shops out there. There's a lot of large international companies that are doing logistics, but even those big players are not, uh-- don't account for a lot of the market share in the industry. So it was very fragmented. The other thing that we found is that the economy wasn't very good. It was really a lot of companies going under, unfortunately. So, time-wise, we thought that that could be an opportunity. And, I guess I'll take a step back, and I'll just tell you a bit more about what our company is, and what kind of industry we're participating in. I mean, we're an NVOCC, which is a Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier which is a logistics company, an international logistics company, and what that basically means is we have contracts with a lot of different suppliers, a lot of different contracts and contacts with agents around the world, and we're shipping ocean containers for our clients. So, someone calls us and tells us that they need to ship 10 containers from Savannah, Georgia, to Nigeria, Lagos, and we not only coordinate loading the container, making sure the container gets there on time, making sure that it's loaded in the two hours that we have, but then also making sure the container returns to the port, goes to the other end of the world, and then we do the same thing at the other end of the world with our agents. - I can't imagine how difficult it is. I mean, I can't even plan a company party with my office, let alone, like, shipping something across the world, so--

- When we got into it we found-- in looking at different opportunities beyond logistics, we found that logistics was a good opportunity for us because, as Enrique started to mention earlier, it was, you know, very fragmented, a lot of smaller companies, it was kinda like the Wild West where people were moving freight, doing whatever they wanted to do, but their mindset, what we found in the industry, is just people don't-- people did it okay. They didn't do it well. They didn't communicate to the customer and be proactive, and the freight companies would try and price gouge the clients where they would try and charge an exorbitant margin. They were trying to maximize their margin on each and every shipment, versus thinking about the long-term value of the client. And, for us, when we got into the industry that was our approach, right? And coming from our roots of BCG, it was all about thinking about the long-term value of the client. And, so we don't wanna ship with that company for this shipment, or the next shipment, we wanna ship with them for the next-