In 2019, Alder expanded its service territory. Diane called me before she called Victor. She said, “I want to understand if your network can handle what we’re planning before I bring this formally to your father.”
I told her what we could do and what we’d need to build. I told her honestly where our carrier relationships were thin. We spent forty minutes on the phone working through it. She signed the expanded contract two months later.
I wrote up the network expansion plan myself. Victor signed off on it.
He presented it to Alder Home Supply as a Morgan Freight Coordination capability.
This is not a complaint. It is context.
Luke’s Promotion and the Deteriorating Transition
Luke joined the company at twenty-six, six years after me. He was bright and charming in the way our father was bright and charming: the room-reading intelligence, the easy confidence, the ability to walk into a pitch and own it within ten minutes.
He was also, in specific and observable ways, not oriented toward operations. This is not a character flaw. It is a professional tendency, and it mattered enormously in a freight coordination business where operations is most of what there is.
When Luke joined, Victor gave him a business development role that suited him genuinely. Luke could walk a trade show floor and come back with six qualified leads. He could cultivate a new client relationship in the first ninety days better than I could, because I have never been the person who lights up a room. I organize rooms. The distinction matters.