I started a list instead.
Eighteen Years, Selected
I came to Morgan Freight Coordination two weeks after my twenty-fourth birthday, when the company was five years old and operating out of a shared office suite with a freight brokerage on the second floor and a tax firm below. My father had six employees and a phone system that required everyone to memorize a different ring pattern for each extension.
I had a business administration degree from a state school and the particular energy of someone who has watched a parent build something from nothing and wants, badly, to be useful to it.
Victor handed me what he called a “client support role” that was, in practice, a catch-all position: I answered calls from carriers and clients alike, processed documentation, tracked shipment status for about forty active accounts, and made coffee twice daily because someone had to. I did not complain about the coffee. I was twenty-four and I understood that entry-level meant entry-level.
What I didn’t know at twenty-four was that entry-level in a family business is a category that requires active renegotiation, because the work expands faster than the title does.
By the time I was twenty-seven, I had quietly become the person who managed every client relationship that required follow-through rather than front-end selling. Victor was the closer. He loved the pitch, the handshake, the room. What he was less interested in was the ten weeks after the contract signed, when the actual coordination happened and the actual problems surfaced. That part fell to me.