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MOVIN’ UP UCW Logistics president Evan Cramer has led the company to 3,116 percent revenue growth since 2014.
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PHOTO BY WILL CROOKS
TRUCKIN’ UCW Logistics earns spot in the Inc. 500 listing
WORDS BY NEIL COTIEAUX | PHOTOS BY WILL CROOKS
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he week of Sept. 16, 2018 stands as a pivotal one on the calendar at UCW Logistics, the full-load freight broker that helps businesses ship, track, and deliver over-the-road merchandise across North America. Hurricane Florence had slammed the Carolinas and the company’s Greenville headquarters was operating at a very brisk pace, remembers Evan Cramer, president of the third-party logistics firm, who said the slow-moving threat posed by the hurricane prompted his firm to “treat it like it’s going to have a big impact … so we were moving shipments up, pushing
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shipments back” even before Florence came ashore, he said. After landfall, as flooding blocked roads and as cotton warehouses, some textile mills and other businesses remained closed, Cramer and his team rescheduled deliveries and helped some of the company’s 254 shipping clients avoid unexpected storage charges. As all that was happening, UCW held a series of meetings with McLeod Software, an industry vendor that was helping the firm go live with its new transportation management system. Among other things, the system ag-
gregates industry rates, tracks shipments, helps carriers keep loads full, and generates automated, granular reports of interest to customers. Transitioning customer data to the new system while addressing issues stemming from the hurricane created “double work” that left the staff “scrambling,” Cramer said. By that point, the Aug. 15 announcement that UCW had placed 126th on this year’s Inc. 5000 list may have seemed like a distant memory. Yet the recognition – a bit of a surprise to UCW’s management – still gives off a reassuring glow.