On Aire Ep. 14 w/ Dee Pack and Matt Frerking of Cargo Largo Transcript

[Intro – Host: Team Jensen]

Host: teaching you the art of industrial real estate this is on air with Team Jensen hi hello hello welcome to episode 14 of on air with Team Jensen we have today the Cargo Largo team with us we have President Matt Frerking and we have CEO Dee Pack thank you guys for coming on with us.

Dee & Matt: thanks for having us good to be here.

Host: lucky 14 excited to kind of dive into things and talk about everything Cargo Largo… we are here in the Cargo Largo retail store so if you’re not with us visually that’s the noises you’re hearing.

[The Origin of Cargo Largo]

Dee: i grew up in the insurance salvage business… my dad started off buying goods from insurance companies that would insure large commercial enterprises like car dealerships and lumber yards when they would have a loss.

Dee: in 1985 we had an opportunity to work with our first freight carrier, Yellow Freight who was based here in Kansas City… shortly after that i joined the company… in 1991 my wife and i bought the freight carrier assets of my dad’s company and Recovery Management Corporation was born.

Dee: around the turn of 2000 we had a couple initiatives… launching an internet business… and a remote location out in Sacramento… Cargo Largo was born at that time… one of the bylines was “RSO [Recovery Sales Outlet] with the cherry on top.”

[The New Headquarters and Growth]

Matt: i’ve been with the team coming on 12 years… been president for the last three… we’ve been saying no to new customers for three or four years because we just didn’t have the space.

Dan: you went from seven facilities and now you’re down to three… the mother ship [headquarters] is about 525,000 foot print and another 120,000 feet of mezzanine.

Matt: we are more productive in this space than we were in previous spaces… associate engagement is massive now, everybody is on the same page.

[The Business of Reverse Logistics]

Dee: logistics is the act of getting product from one location to another… product gets to where it’s supposed to go overwhelming majority of the time… we focus on the 1% that doesn’t get where it’s supposed to go.

Matt: we have a lot of team members that have been here over 20 years… when we notice that something is a live shipment or shouldn’t have come to us, we figure out where it still needs to go and we get those items back for our clients… a couple hundred thousand times a year we get something that we get back to the original recipient.

[The Famous Bid Sale]

Dee: the bid sale is essentially a live auction that takes place every Thursday from 2:30 to 8:00 here at the headquarters… anybody over 18 can participate.

Matt: there’s about 1500-1600 lots right now… pallets of hardware, plumbing, or cleaning items… we sell single items too: laptops, power tools, literally everything.

[Community and “Cargo for Kids”]

Dee: we’ve been part of Independence for 39 years now… 13 years ago we started Cargo for Kids… there were 600 children that during the course of the year were homeless in the Independence School District.

Dee: we provide students backpacks full of their grade-specific school supplies… we’ve been giving about a thousand backpacks a year.

Matt: the backpack count is somewhere over 12,000 that we’ve provided in 13 years… we’ve started doing a lot more in the winter with coats and hats and gloves.

[Wrap-Up]

Matt: we’re here to stay… there’s just a lot more in front of Cargo Largo.

Host: if someone’s looking to apply or wants to join the team, what’s the best way?

Matt: cargolargo.com and there’s a career path on the top right of that page.

Host: thanks for inviting us in.