Posted On August 21, 2016

Ten years ago we took a chance on an idea.

We believed we could create solutions that allowed entrepreneurs and innovators to increase visibility within their supply chains and get their products into the hands of customers in a faster, more-efficient way. Today, Flat World Holdings is home to some of the fastest-growing companies in the logistics sector.

That’s how it’s done, right? You have a good idea, you work hard, you hire and empower an excellent team, and then ten years later you celebrate an anniversary, the expansion of your headquarters, and everything you’ve accomplished. That’s the story everybody tells. It always gets summed up in a few sentences—even when the stories are much larger, longer, and more complicated than ours. Take for example, the story of two companies born in a garage.

Here’s the Apple story:

a cool company gets started by a few hippie computer geeks in a garage in California. They sell a bunch of computers before they mistakenly fire their visionary founder. Ten years are spent in the corporate wilderness before the visionary returns and invents everything our modern world uses to function. The result is a literal mountain of cash.

Or the Ford story:

A tinkerer with a passion for a new invention called the automobile develops a better way to manufacture them, and dominates the American industrial landscape for half a century, until cheaper, better-built competition makes its way into the market. Ford flounders for decades, until it gets its act together and becomes the only American automobile manufacturer who doesn’t need a bailout.

Except everyone who has ever built a company knows that it’s not that simple. It wasn’t that simple for our company. We had to figure things out as we went, and occasionally (more occasionally than we would like) learn the hard way. We had to solve problems—and sometimes solve the new problems our original solution created. That’s okay. That’s what building a business takes. It takes believing in something so much that you are willing to endure all of the hardship that comes with the territory.

Steve Jobs believed in a vision of accessible, elegant personal computing so much that he dedicated his entire life to it, and if all the stories and movies are true, treated it like a holy mission. Henry Ford believed in the future of the automobile so much so that he quit a good job at one of the biggest employers at the time, The Edison Company, to start the Detroit Automobile Company, which eventually became The Ford Motor Company. Along the way Jobs and Ford had to improvise. They had to create systems and tools to solve challenges that had never existed before. To do that they often had to work with partners that allowed them to focus on doing what they do best: innovating and creating.

And it’s not just famous innovators who need good partners. Everyday innovators—like you—need partners that allow you to focus on building your products and growing your business. At Flat World, we do that every day. We are constantly improvising, innovating, creating new solutions, growing our family of companies, and partnering with customers to increase visibility and efficiency within their supply chains.

No single customer’s supply chain is exactly the same. That means that our team needs to partner with your team to learn exactly what your challenges are, and what we can build together to help solve those problems. We are in the “garage” with you, tinkering, innovating, and helping develop ways to move your products across the country and across the world. You may not be Henry Ford, or Steve Jobs. Neither are we. But you are building things, creating jobs, and making the world a better place.

At the Flat World family of companies, we are proud to be in the garage with you.