Cargo Chat: Hassett Logistics’ Michelle Halkerston on agile operations

When Illinois-based freight forwarder Hassett Logistics reorganized its corporate structure around industry verticals such as gaming, e-commerce, manufacturing, publishing and retail in early 2019, company leadership had no idea how fortuitous the timing would be. Just a year later, several verticals served by the company — including trade shows and events — would cease to exist due to the COVID-19 pandemic. [caption id="attachment_95961" align="alignright" width="400"] Michelle Halkerston, owner, president and CEO of Hassett Logistics[/caption] The forwarder is also primarily U.S.-focused, rather than favoring the in-demand trans-Pacific trade lane as many of the Power 25 forwarders for 2020 do. But thanks to the previous restructuring, and Hassett’s investment in technologies geared toward facilitating agility in providing tailored services to its customers, the logistics company was able to quickly reposition its resources to serve areas in high demand, such as e-commerce, while reducing the focus on verticals like events, which the pandemic had sent into relative hibernation. Air Cargo World spoke to Michelle Halkerston, owner, president and CEO of Hassett Logistics, to learn more about how the forwarder refocused during the pandemic and its plans to revitalize its events-focused verticals as COVID’s effects begin to wane in the United States. ACW: One thing that stood out to me about Hassett Logistics is your focus on technology and digitalization in logistics. How do you prioritize digitalization? Michelle Halkerston: Our background is heavily focused on service and customer service. We’re fantastic operationally, but we needed to focus on our technology platform — that was definitely an area that we needed to improve upon, and we've been working hard at it. What we've been focusing on for the last couple of years, and we're seeing the fruits of that, is becoming more agile. People talk about agile technology, but we look at it as transforming our processes, and the technology that enables that, so that we can be flexible because our customers have different needs, and those needs change. We think that's where we bring the most value, where it's not fitting in one box as far as our solution. So when I talk about that, it's really saying, how do we make things a little easier. That's been proven to be really valuable over the last year. And I think as more changes come, things like touchless and paperless [processes] are important. We're not 100% there, and I don't know that anybody ever will be. But it could be things behind the scenes, like getting away from cutting checks or receiving checks. In pandemic times when people were not in the office, and you saw paper checks coming in and out, that makes it tougher to process, especially with smaller companies. ACW: You restructured your business around service verticals early in 2019. How has that changed the way you operate, and how did that affect you during the pandemic? MH: The timing of that restructuring was really good for us. Without knowing what was ahead of us, it really was a fortunate thing for us and our customers. It allowed us to take our team, and really let them focus more deeply into certain areas, instead of trying to know every customer, and being able to work on a lot of different things. We [established] those verticals from a service standpoint, and said, “What is the service we're offering here? That's how we're going to group our customers,” and aligned them that way. We aligned our teams that way, too. It really helped during the pandemic, because our one vertical almost came to a screeching halt — tradeshows, events, concerts, all the things that that are just cranking in 2019, kind of stop. But for us, that worked, because we were able to shift people very quickly. Because on the other side of it, our e-commerce business just surged, and all sorts of specialized services really cranked up; there was a lot of project work, other things. We were able to that because we did have common practices across all verticals, that was important to us. Then we could take the team that business kind of dropped off on and realign those people to support the other verticals, because they needed the help. That also meant that we didn't have to do any reductions in staff, or any kind of changes that way. ACW: Now that we are seeing in the U.S. some business travel and trade shows starting to resume, what are you doing to prepare for business to resume in those verticals? MH: We actually have been doing a little bit of hiring to make sure we're ready for that. And throughout the past year, even though they've been silent, we have maintained contact with all those customers. Even if they weren't doing any kind of work, we’re still having online meetings or we’re keeping in touch via email and phone calls. With some of these customers, we’ve still been doing quarterly reviews — just kind of touching base so we would understand where they were and so that we know when they're ready, who has plans, who's actually putting tours back together, what they're anticipating so that we can ramp up our teams and be ready. We've been doing all that to make sure that it wasn't silent — that we didn't hear from anyone for eight months, and suddenly hear, “We're back!” Because what we find that is really the key to what this business is all about — and I think it's what we're really good at — is not only service, but the communication. That was just that much more critical during all this, finding ways to communicate if you couldn't see people in person. So we made that extra effort, especially in the areas where they were hurting, with the customers whose businesses were impacted, to try to keep those connections going. And they knew that we were there to support them in any way possible. There were a few of those customers on the early end [of the pandemic] because they were merchandise customers, they ended up starting to produce masks. We were able to help transport some of that for them, and we actually bought [masks] from some of them in the early days, from some of those customers. Little things like that, it's like, “Oh, you have masks, great, we'll buy some,” and they were donating part of the proceeds to the local restaurants and businesses here in Chicago that had to go dark and close up. You try to find those kinds of things, just to keep the relationships going.

Cargo Chat: Hassett Logistics’ Michelle Halkerston on agile operations

Thriving express market drives DHL capacity expansion in Australia

The Power 25: 3 Forwarders to watch in 2021

The Power 25: 3 Forwarders to watch in 2021

Cargo Facts Free Newsletters

Cargo Facts Connect Podcast

Follow Us

Welcome Back!

Retrieve your password