Lorentz's All Freight International's niche:
Give personal attention to small clients
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)
Original Article
Linda Lorentz has created a niche for her small freight-forwarding company in an industry of goliaths through a combination of individual service and precise attention to detail.
Lorentz's company, All Freight International Inc., occupies a modest suite of offices in Burien and helps arrange the movement of worldwide cargo for client companies around the region.
The company also is modest in revenues, just $3 million in net revenues last year, only double that of 10 years ago. But that's fine with Lorentz, who is president.
She's more focused on the process of moving cargo, and the harmony of her 35 employees, than on growth for its own sake. In addition to arranging cargo shipments, All Freight works with clients on custom clearance issues and security requirements, which have become increasingly complex since the terrorist attacks of 2001.
"I have a curious nature. I always want to know how it works. I find the whole industry very interesting," said Lorentz, who was born and raised on Taiwan, and who took the name Lorentz through marriage. "My reward is when I can help solve the problem. I like the challenge."
In some ways Lorentz's career in the freight-forwarding business is accidental, the product of her Chinese language skills, the fact that she could type, and her tenacity.
When she moved to the Seattle area from Taiwan, after working for four years in Indonesia, she got a job typing for a company engaged in international trading. Trade was something she had neither prior experience nor interest in, but she quickly found she had an affinity for the industry, and was gradually promoted.
"It was all by chance," she said about her career. "The opportunity was there, and I happened to be there at the right time, and get it started."
She moved up to Fritz Companies, one of the nation's largest forwarders, and later moved on to a much smaller Seattle company, Bostrum Warren Inc. That company was subsequently sold to a financial management company, creating a turning point for Lorentz.
"Customers were encouraging me, saying, 'Why don't you start your business?'" she said. "I didn't know if I could run a business. It had never entered my mind."
But the encouragement was significant to her, so she took the leap, and started the business in 1985.
In those early years, it was unusual for a woman to start her own company, especially in the freight business, and Lorentz sometimes felt under special scrutiny. She remembers being invited to an "executives only" reception, and when she arrived in a room full of men, one of them walked up to her and said, "Who are you. What are you doing here?"
"I handed him a card, and said I was invited," she remembered. "'He said, 'You are the president?' I felt 6 feet tall and said, 'I am the president.'"
This tenacity has marked her every step.
"Once I had the challenge I was going to open the office, I made the commitment, it has to be a success. It cannot fail," she said. "So I worked very hard. I worked 15 hours a day, easily, every day, for three years."
Throughout the development of her company, Lorentz has kept her own knowledge of changing trade and customs regulations current, never wanting to be relegated to just managing others' knowledge. Maintaining a high level of knowledge in her shop is a key way she's able to counter the global networks offered by some of her far-larger competitors. All Freight also operates a Los Angeles office.
"We've always had three or four licensed brokers in our company," she said, adding that she's legally only required to have one in each office. "I felt it was important to have high standards and depth of knowledge."
The company has about 200 clients. Lorentz said she takes a personal interest in her clients' businesses, wanting to understand their unique problems so All Freight can craft responses to those problems. All Freight also offers classes to keep clients informed about changing standards.
"I will ask a lot of questions, to go through an education process with them," she said. "I think a lot of customers enjoy having that kind of conversation, helping them think about that process."
David Stepp, an attorney at Bryan Cave LLC in Los Angeles, said the degree of consolidation in the forwarding industry has provided a market for a few smaller companies such as All Freight.
"I think there's a role for someone like Linda's company, because of the personal service provided to customers," he said. "She is able to understand the business that her clients have, the type of products they're importing, what their very specific needs are."
Norm Hasagawa, a partner in Pac/Gro & Associates LLC of Walnut Creek, Calif., an importer and exporter of agricultural goods primarily from China, said he's worked exclusively with All Freight International just because of the service they offer. In fact, Pac/Gro operates as something of a virtual company, relying on All Freight to do much of the company paperwork, Hasagawa said.
"In the beginning when we started this business, we didn't have any employees," he said. He added that as his company has grown, he has received offers to move his business to much larger freight-forwarding companies.
But Hasagawa has stayed with All Freight because they give the "detail-oriented personal touch we like," adding that a company like his would seem like "small peanuts" to a large forwarding company, which wouldn't give them good attention.