The pandemic has forced the transportation brokerage company Total Quality Logistics to be “very agile,” in finding space to ship goods worldwide says President Kerry Byrne.
For its first 20 years, TQL concentrated on filling up trucks for sellers. The last five, it expanded to planes and ships. That came in handy as Fortune 100 companies needed shipping help during COVID.
“What we found through the pandemic is there are shippers who hadn’t leaned on us for some of those other services prior to the pandemic that really did throughout the pandemic,” he says.
TQL contracts with more than 90,000 trucking firms, rail cars, planes and cargo shipping lines to get goods from A to B. The job is getting done despite the fact there aren’t enough drivers. “Our ability to find capacity has been challenged by the fact that there’s a shortage of drivers, but we can actually find the capacity, it’s just rates are higher.”
Since 2020, TQL has hired nearly 3,000 employees, a 50% gain to accommodate this rapid growth. Byrne anticipates hiring 1,000 more people.
With the variant omicron and a concern about manufacturing in Asia, TQL is concerned supply chain issues may not resolve until 2023
