Highland Forwarding in 1998 with the belief and deep conviction that there was a way to provide a higher level of service in the freight forwarding industry than I have experienced in the previous 10 years of working for other firms.  Logistics was becoming a commodity with a low level of expertise being given to the clients.

My vision was to start a company that would put the customer first and not just say it, but actually do it. What a radical concept! Now almost 20 years later we can judge the results of this revolutionary idea:

• Highland Forwarding has grown from 1 employee in 1998 to over 40 today, offering full range of services in air, ocean, export, import, customs clearance.
• Highland Forwarding has won the INC5000 award for the top fastest growing USA companies for 7 years out of the last 9.
• We started a sister company – Highland Project Logistics – in 2011 and have become one of the most trusted project forwarders in the USA and indeed worldwide, with clients across the globe and serving major industries such as oil&gas, energy, mining and cement.
• Our own trading company – Lumitrade LLC – offers trading services to our customers, ranging from buying products on their behalf to assisting with importation of products for exhibitions.
• We have our staff in Boston, Houston and Montreal and sales and handling operations in all major ports and airports of USA and Canada.
• Our international needs are served through our representative and sales offices in Ireland, Singapore, Russia, Brazil, UAE, and India. We are members of 4 major freight forwarder networks, giving us more than 5000 partner offices worldwide.
• We designed and built our own 36000 sq.ft. (3000 sq. meters) headquarters office complex outside Boston, USA on 15 acres (7 hectares) of land that will allow for future growth. The building was completed in 2013 and is our pride and joy, giving our employees a world class environment to provide world class service.

After 20 years, we are a very stable, medium sized logistics company.  So what makes us different and allows for this growth?

Most importantly, we put our employees first. If we take care of our employees, they will take care of our clients. The rest will take care of itself. Second, we focus on quality, not quantity. We may handle fewer shipments per person than the industry average, but we do not think of our business as a race. We spend time with the clients to understand their needs and design the best solution for them, one that they may not have even thought of. We do not consider ourselves order takers, but rather problem solvers.

In order to achieve point two, we need to go back again to point one – employees. We hire the best and brightest, with a Bachelors’ degree at a minimum. Over half of our staff has Master’s degrees. Since we are in an international business, we put big emphasis on foreign languages. We always try to speak the client’s language, wherever they may be. Our employees come from over 15 different countries and can speak more than 20 different languages (see here for a full list). We prefer to hire new employees with no logistics experience so we can teach them the “Highland way” of serving the client. Taking on former staff of our competitors would only make the process more difficult, having to retrain them from the “assembly line” mentality to a customer focused, empowered employee.

Where do we go from here?  Our mission is far from accomplished. We have been a positive change in the lives of many of our employees and it brings us daily joy to see that.  We have also been instrumental in the growth and functioning of many of our clients.  With the growing mergers of large forwarders and more and more impersonal service than even 20 years ago, the room for providing the Highland level of service has never been greater.

I want to personally thank all of our employees and customer for making this success story possible.