The Briefing

Robert J. Goodman knew things had to change when orders for his Woodland Hills-based packing and shipping company Box Brothers Corp., which he started in 1985, began streaming in over the Internet faster than he could say duct tape. As customer demand for bicoastal service grew, it became clear that, to keep a tighter lid on operations without having to revert to the services of a middleman, the company would have to set up offices on the East Coast. Goodman had been using outside help to fill the gap on coast-to-coast shipments, but that threatened to chip away at the reputation he felt he had developed for quality customer service. So, in January he opened up a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in New Jersey as the company’s first East Coast location. Goodman spoke to reporter Jacqueline Fox recently about how he’s managed to balance the desire for growth with the need for service and quality control. “We opened up a warehouse (in Hackensack, N.J.) to facilitate our freight businesses from one coast to the other because a lot of our customers are corporate customers, and their (colleagues) are on either coast at any given time. So they just wouldn’t accept that we weren’t set up there. “It was a little difficult to keep up with because we are a predominantly West Coast operation. And meanwhile our orders were growing. A lot of them were coming over the Internet, but we were losing a lot of time and we were losing money in shipping. “What we are doing now is renting trailers and sending full trailers back and forth from one coast to the other. Before we were simply taking up partial space inside trailers that were transporting goods for other companies at the same time. So now our people on the other end do the unloading and delivery from there, which puts us in control of the shipment from start to finish. “But we now are looking at the bigger picture again because we are outgrowing our location already in just six months. That was the difficult part and we’ve learned from it. But finding a location, knowing where to go we didn’t really know what to anticipate. Now our challenge is to find a new location that will satisfy our needs and costs as well as our future growth. And, we have now made enough capital to further expand to Chicago by the end of the third quarter or the beginning of the fourth quarter, which will give us a presence in the Midwest.”