When Amazon knocks at the door, you answer.
For Alex Algaze and Daniel Lopez, that knock came in 2015 when the e-commerce giant decided to disrupt the freighting industry.
Algaze and Lopez, both of whom have a background in finance, own a Tampa-based freight trucking company called Green Logistics, which operated and managed a light-haul operation with FedEx. Now they’ve partnered with Amazon to deliver packages in the middle mile.
A few years ago, Algaze and Lopez got word that Amazon wanted to transition from using large freighting companies to smaller businesses.
“They wanted to have a little bit more control over the freight and to decrease their cost,” said Algaze, who oversees the business development side of Green Logistics. “The best way for them to do that was to create a network of small business owners willing to jump whenever they tell us to jump.”
Amazon offered Green Logistics a chance to join the project as one of the first five carriers in the United States. Why them? Algaze and Lopez said their willingness to embrace innovation and run a dynamic company made them standout.
“We always knew that this business had a lot of options to scale,” said Lopez, who handles financial management at Green Logistics. “We were seeing a paradigm shift towards technology in the [freighting] industry. One of the first projects we had when we took over this company was realigning our entire business to electronic logging devices. Technology was becoming such a vital part of the day-to-day operations in this industry.”
Green Logistics currently has five employees and between 50 and 70 drivers, depending on the season. The company’s 2018 revenue was approximately $8.7 million.
Since 2015, Green Logistics has felt the ups and downs that so often result from technological disruption. After all, Amazon made its name turning entire industries on their heads. Every few weeks or months, the company would let Algaze and Lopez know it changed its demands or procedures as it figured out the most efficient way to run their new operation.
“We’ve experienced their disruption of an industry that had a hundred years without any major changes,” Lopez said. “All that volatility was clearly them saying, ‘Here are the rules of engagement in the industry, but we want to make it work this way.’”
Algaze added, “Every time that we'd adapt to a change that Amazon was presenting, there was an investment behind that. We were about to make money until they made the change.”
Partnering with a company as valuable and influential as Amazon has its obvious perks, but the constant changes can be tough to manage. Algaze and Lopez have begun to diversify, working with less flashy but more consistent clients, such as those in industrial waste. But they’re still tethered to the e-commerce giant. Algaze said roughly half of Green Logistics’ business currently comes through Amazon.
