Arrive Logistics opens up new office in Chattanooga

Freight brokerage and transportation management services provider Arrive Logistics recently announced it has opened up a new office in Chattanooga, Tenn. This is the company’s third location, as it also has offices in its corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas, and Chicago, Ill.

Arrive officials said this new Chattanooga office was established in order for the company to accommodate its strong growth, as well as to leverage the significant freight market in Chattanooga.

The company has experienced major growth going back to its inception in 2014, going from $30.5 million in 2015 to $58.9 million in 2016 to $143.4 million in 2018. Company officials said that Arrive expects to have 2018 revenues topping $360 million.

“Opening our third office in Chattanooga is an exciting accomplishment for us,” said Matt Pyatt, CEO and co-founder of Arrive Logistics, in a statement. “Having an office in the heart of the Freight Alley is a huge step for the expansion of Arrive Logistics and will provide vast growth opportunities for us and our customers.”

Arrive initially started out as a freight management company, with its initial investors coming from Nutrabolt Corp., a large distributor of health supplements in the United States.  And when Arrive began operations, it managed all of Nutrabolt’s $5 million annual freight spend at that time.

“We started in freight management and that allowed us to get going with a lot of carriers,” Pyatt told LM in an interview. “At that time, in 2014, the market was tight and carriers were getting a lot of revenue per load. We were able to get set up on kind of a dedicated basis, and that was kind of our differentiator from a traditional brokerage, and we had guaranteed freight from day one, which allowed us to cover our operating expenses in the business so we were not burning a lot of cash.”

From those beginnings, Arrive has seen steady growth, going from ten people in 2014 to more than 600 employees today, he said.

“We have done a good job of attracting talent from all over the industry, and we are really focusing on identifying people straight out of college and people looking for a second career,” explained Pyatt. “When we first got started, we focused on people with two-to-seven years of experience and that allowed us to scale up quickly, as they were able to get on the phones and hit the ground running and deal with the business and the carriers. The hardest part about scaling up so fast is you need to be able to train people effectively.”

When asked what influenced Arrive to expand into Chattanooga, Pyatt noted how there are several smaller brokers located there, with several of them coming from Access America, which was sold to Coyote Logistics in 2014.

And since then, he said, there have been roughly 20-plus companies that have spun out of Access America that have become small brokerages.

“That gave us the opportunity to secure some really strong leadership, and we thought Chattanooga was a really great market, because there are a lot of experienced individuals, as well as a great recruiting ground for colleges, and people like living in that part of the country, too. The real driving reason was that Access America was a company that was able to do heavy haul, over dimensional, and flatbed, areas in which we have previously struggled. They were also strong in power-only. Those are four modes we were able to beef up with Arrive, and the talent we were able to bring in allowed us to expand into those verticals. With consolidation in the market, you need to do everything and everything well if you want to continue to scale as a broker partner to all these customers.”  

By the end of 2018, Pyatt said he expects Arrive’s Chattanooga office to have around 25 employees, with a goal of 75 employees by the end of 2019.

As for customer benefits with this new office, Pyatt said that the flatbed market tends to be one in which it can be challenging for brokers to be successful in, as it is highly fragmented and can be very owner-operator-centric.

“The cradle-to-grave model has been the most successful,” he said. “If you look at a lot of the other brokers, they have a flatbed division that can be really hard to scale. We can manage relationships with all the carriers and find freight for them and move them around the country, and we want to create a brokerage that does really well in the flatbed market. That is going to be our biggest value-add, as we are looking to get into new commodities we were not shipping, whether it is construction, the steel and metals sectors, and others. Those are things we want to get into to, and we are trying to do it be being a broker that is able to handle the scale and volume that shippers require.”