This is the second blog post in a series marking the 10 Year Anniversary of the founding of LYNC Logistics, a Chattanooga-based, female-owned, freight brokerage. We’re taking a look back at LYNC’s origin stories, the evolution of the company, the unique office culture, and what the future holds for LYNC so stay tuned for more of the story. If you missed our first post, check it out here.
The Founding Mother
The appeal of starting LYNC Logistics was about more than just cutting out the middleman, Cindy shared, “I also saw it as a chance to have a company completely owned by me. I could make it into the company I wanted to without anyone else telling me how to do it.” And Cindy didn’t just want the company to be hers, she wanted it to be hers—a completely female-owned company in a male-dominated industry. So that’s what she did.
Cindy started putting out feelers for someone to help her run the company and at some point, someone passed her the name Keith Gray. Keith had experience in the brokering industry and had the right connections to find more staff and help build the company from the ground up.
Keith brought in the first group of brokers while Cindy recruited elsewhere. “We started looking for people with good sales ability. If a server [at a restaurant] was good, we told them to come down. We let people who were interested shadow people in the office to see if they were a good fit.”
One Door Closes, Another Door Opens
For five years Cindy and Keith grew LYNC while Cindy still operated Lesco. Then, in 2017, Cindy and her husband Less made the difficult decision to close Lesco. “The trucking company had gotten really tiring, I wasn’t sleeping well. I was always worried about the next wreck. We’d grown it so big; I had 50 good drivers and about 10 that were constantly on the move every day and I was just always worried that something really bad was going to happen,” Cindy said. She was ready for a better work-life balance and to put all her energy into LYNC.
“I was scared to death, absolutely terrified of failing, that we would get in there and lose all the money that I put in and that we wouldn’t make a go of it,” she shared. But the fear of not trying outweighed the fear of failing and in 2018 LYNC cut the ribbon on their newly renovated office building and unveiled their new branding.
“I was scared to death, absolutely terrified of failing.”
The Strategic Growth
As time has gone on and LYNC has made a name for itself, the company has also forged its own path to growth in the industry. “We decided to quit following that path that everyone else was following. We decided that while revenue is great, and all the awards we won for revenue growth were awesome, it wasn’t feeding the bottom line as well as we wanted it to,” Cindy explained. “We went back and evaluated, ‘what does it cost us to run a load through the system, what is the cost of aging payments, and what could help us be more effective at our jobs?”
In short, Cindy explained that they stopped paying attention to the revenue from each load and focused only on the margin of each load. Gaining more and more customers and more and more loads didn’t benefit the company if they were only making a fraction of a penny or nothing at all on a load. Efficiency and effectiveness far outweigh an unending and high-profile customer list for LYNC. “We’re growing, but it’s sustainable growth, not just revenue growth.”