The first year was phones and filing and learning the carrier network from the inside. Victor introduced me to carriers the way someone introduces a new family member — here’s my daughter, she’ll be working with me. The carriers were generally polite. The ones I called most often became familiar over time, which became trust over time, which became the ability to call Marcus at Lakeland Trucking at seven on a Wednesday morning when something had gone sideways and expect an actual answer and not a callback queue.
That trust took approximately four years to build and was worth, conservatively, the resolution of eleven specific exceptions over the next fourteen years that would otherwise have escalated to service failures. I tracked these. I am someone who tracks things.
The exception log began as a private document. I started keeping it in my second year because I realized I was answering the same questions about the same account-specific situations over and over, and I do not like inefficiency in systems I can control. The first version was a spreadsheet with three columns: what happened, what I did, what the outcome was. Over time it grew columns. It grew notes. It grew the institutional knowledge of a freight coordination operation that had been solving specific problems for specific clients for eighteen years.
When I had been at the company for six years, Victor hired an operations coordinator to help with the administrative workload. This was Jana, who was then twenty-six and is now thirty-four and who is, in my honest assessment, one of the most organized people I have ever worked with. Jana managed the documentation side of our operations — the actual administrative side, the paperwork, the data entry, the confirmation emails, the system records. She is excellent at it.