Ryan Carter, Executive vice-president and co-founder of ScotLyn USA and ScotLynnTransport is the 2020 winner of Florida’s small business person of the year award. The honor is bestowed by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Carter says his company is primarily a freight brokerage.
"That is coordinating and accepting shipments from … shippers , receivers, wholesalers, brokers, you name it. Anybody that is in control of shipping truckloads of freight. We manage that from pickup and delivery and coordinate the route, and deal with any issues that come along the way and ensure ontime delivery. We focus primarily in refrigerated products, perishables. It’s all by truck," Carter said.
37-year-old Carter and his co-founders started the company in March 2010. it has grown substantially. Mostly, he says, through good customer service.
"Every year we’ve grown probably 10 to almost 45 percent, just in sales," he said. "We’ve done it through doing a great job for our clients, in an industry where a lot of times people don’t do what they say they’re going to do and don’t follow through. We always follow through."
The company has about $220 million in top-line revenue and 260 employees, and Carter says although those numbers sound large, in this industry, that still puts them in the small business category.
Like nearly every other company, ScotLynn faced major challenges when the coronavirus pandemic hit in the spring.
"We saw some pretty major delays at shippers and receivers, getting trucks loaded and unloaded, and just confusion on how to manage the process early on," Carter said. "I think everybody was kind of scrambling. It took a couple of months and I think shippers and receivers got their processes down, and also understood how to manage a COVID outbreak in their facility, by having backup people ready to come in and cleaning crews ready to come in and disinfect and just keep the supply chain rolling."
The changes brought on by COVID caused the company to rethink some processes.
"We were always very skeptical of working from home," said Carter. "Shipping time-sensitive things with serious deadlines. If it’s a couple days late, all of a sudden you own $100,00 worth of organic blueberries. You always have to be on point. So we were skeptical of that, but we found we could actually work really well from home.”
As for the company’s future, Carter says they have broken ground on a new headquarters building in Fort Myers, near the intersection of I-75 and Alico Road. They hope to have the building completed by summer 2021.
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