Temporary Professionals | Case Study 2

Interim CEO - A $30M 3PL offering warehousing, freight brokerage, and drayage trucking was acquired by a private equity firm and facing a leadership transition. At the same time, there was a threat of not retaining several of the top 6 customer accounts. The founder and president announced imminent retirement. The private equity firm needed a leader to stand in the gap and work effectively to retain major accounts.

3PLR deployed a 3PL expert to serve as the acting CEO, while recruitment for a new CEO started. Our consultant started immediately to evaluated and determined that the freight brokerage and drayage operations were stable and quickly turned attention to struggling warehousing operations. Two major initiatives were launched to stabilize major accounts and reorganize business development. Process re-engineering efforts focused on order planning and execution for export consolidation and transloading operations. Executive meetings with a major accounts were initiated focusing on quality reviews, demand and capacity planning, investment, pricing, and service contract terms. New business development and sales promotion practices were grossly inadequate, leading to implementation of leading 3PL practices in the areas of sales qualification, costing and pricing methods, pipeline management, capacity and labor planning, and new business on-boarding.

Over the course of 5 months, one major account was lost due to prior mistakes in service costing and pricing. The account rejected price increases despite markedly improved. export consolidation performance. Two major accounts expanded volumes, while other majors remained stable. New business development efforts filled the pipeline, supplanting a myriad of temporary storage projects with longer term opportunities with more valued-added services. After a new CEO was hired, our consultant work for several weeks to orient the new leader and transition improvement initiatives.