Relationships Matter More Than We Admit

What holds this industry together? Not the tariffs, not the contracts, not the service level agreements — though we all treat those like they're the backbone. I think the real answer is something I understood before I ever had a job title in this industry, because I grew up watching it happen at my family's dinner table. Not literally, most of the time — but that's where the real work seemed to happen, over meals with colleagues from other companies and other countries, people who'd flown in for a conference and ended up joining us for a meal at our table. I didn't understand until much later that what I was watching was the actual foundation of this industry.

My dad has been in this industry for over 40 years and when we were living in Thailand, going to "the office" as kids wasn't some rare special occasion — it was just part of a normal weekend. My siblings and I would tag along and "help out" at the warehouse, which mostly meant playing in the bubble wrap and getting high fives from my dad's colleagues on our way through. Some of those same employees are still working today — and now, instead of high-fiving me on my way through the warehouse, they're colleagues I work alongside. It's a good reminder that relationships matter just as much inside your own company as they do with the partners outside it. When we moved to the States, my dad began to work from a home office, so the industry wasn't some abstract thing happening at an office downtown — it was quite literally in our home. And that meant our house was full of people. Colleagues and partners from other companies, from other countries, would come over for family meals. We'd go to baseball games together, whole families in tow. In both Thailand and the States, a steady stream of my dad’s industry partners came through and ended up staying with us, sometimes for days at a time — sleeping in my old room, eating breakfast at our table like it was nothing unusual. My mum has never worked a day in this industry, but she knew all of them. She was friends with their wives, knew their kids' names, kept up with their lives the way you do with real friends, not business contacts. I didn't think of any of it as "networking," because it wasn't. It was just what our life looked like.

It's only now, doing this work myself alongside my sister, that I understand what I was watching growing up: an entire industry that runs, underneath all the tariffs and paperwork, on genuine relationships between families. What still gets me is that some of the same people who slept in our guest room, who I watched baseball games with as a kid, are people I now partner with professionally. The introductions were made decades ago, at a dinner table, long before either of us had a stake in any deal. When I pick up the phone with them now, there's a foundation there that no contract could have built, because it wasn't built for business in the first place. It was just built. That's part of what makes this industry a little magical, even when it doesn't feel that way at 11pm with a shipment stuck at a border. So many of the companies in it are generational, second, third generation, sometimes more, which means the relationships are generational too. You're not just trusting a company's track record. You're trusting a family's name, built up over decades by people who understood something my dad clearly understood: the partner on the other end of the shipment is a person, and the people who show up for you outside of business are usually the same ones who show up for you inside it.

But it isn't easy, and I don't want to pretend it is. This is also an industry scattered across every continent. Some of my partners are in places I may never actually visit myself. That comes with real cultural differences and language barriers, on top of time zones that never line up nicely for anyone. These factors make it easy for relationships in this industry to stay surface-level if you let them. Navigating it well takes more than professionalism, it takes compassion, open-mindedness, and genuine respect for how differently people do things elsewhere. I've learned things from partners abroad that have genuinely shaped how I see my own work. We usually only see each other in person a handful of times a year, at conferences, so what happens in between those days, the check-ins, the small conversations that have nothing to do with a shipment, matters more than people realize. That's the relationship being built.

And here's the thing: once you get there with someone, despite all of it, it stops feeling like work. Some of the people I work with most closely are people I've genuinely come to know on a personal level, not just a professional one. They've been there for me outside of work, and in the same breath, they're the ones I can call at odd hours when something's gone sideways on a shipment. I don't think you can separate those two things. The personal relationship is what makes the work relationship work. I carry all of this forward now, and honestly, it's not even that different from how I grew up. I still have dinners and get-togethers with our partners and colleagues, except now my own kids are the ones at the table, the way I once was. It feels like it's come full circle, the same kind of evenings I grew up in, just one generation further along.

We talk about this industry in terms of routes and volumes and turnaround times, and those numbers matter. But every one of them is being delivered by a person who decided, in some small way, to go the extra mile for someone they trust, often because someone showed them what that looked like, once, over a family dinner, in a way that had nothing to do with business at all. I got a front-row seat to that before I even knew I'd end up in this industry myself. Now I get to give my own kids that same seat. I don't think that's something I'll ever take for granted.