LIVING TO WORK
turnover,” he says. “To mitigate that, we
make sure the applicant really knows as
much as they can about what it is that we
do. So that’s why we provide as much in-
formation [as we can] and they shadow
brokers throughout the job and the appli-
cation process.”
In pre-pandemic days, TQL also pro-
vided a variety of antidotes aimed at de-
stressing its mostly millennial employees,
including monthly and holiday-themed
patio parties at headquarters, Friday after-
noon office “beer drops” (or water or soda,
if you prefer) when the sales force exceeded
its weekly revenue goal, and fund-raising
shenanigans like a semi-tractor pull for
cancer research, trivia night contests for
the Cincinnati Youth Collaborative, and a
“Toss the Boss” event when Oaks and 14
other employees rappelled down the com-
pany’s four-story headquarters to raise
money for Big Brothers Big Sisters. The
“TQL Cares” webpage says the company
and its employees have an annual impact
of more than 6,000 volunteer hours and $2
million donated to more than 2,800 chari-
table organizations.
Online reviews of the company’s work
culture are decidedly mixed among former
and current TQL employees. A longtime
employee who gave the firm five out of five
stars posted this on Glassdoor: “Pros: Clear
goals for Sales with training to succeed.
High energy. Clear direction by Sr Lead-
ership with open access to ask questions.
Great perks (beer drops, patio parties, re-
laxed dress code, employee appreciation
events and even had a camel and kangaroo
visit). Cons: Fair amount of turnover. Pay
and benefits are good but not great.” But
an employee who worked there less than
a year posted a one-star review under the
headline “Don’t do it!”: “If you are desper-
ate enough and believe that after 26 weeks
of training making $35,000 you will be able
to make $100,000 then you are crazy. First
of all you work for a Broker who is basically
training you. You make all his calls and do
all his work while he is supposed to be try-
ing to get more. . . . After 6 months when
your training is up, if you are not hitting the
revenue, and you won’t be, then you will be
terminated....”
Chris Bregger, a former TQL trainee
who went on to sell paper products for
7 0 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M J U N E 2 0 2 0
Millcraft, offers an opinion somewhere in
the middle. Bregger joined the company
after graduating from the University of
Cincinnati in 2012 and left just six months
later, but credits TQL’s “unparalleled” sales
training with launching his career. “People
pay thousands of dollars to get that kind of
training,” he says. “But if you hate it, you
hate it. It’s just about logging hours and
hours making calls, and you have to be will-
ing to answer the phone any time of the day
or night. It wears on you.”
PERHAPS THE STRONGEST TESTAMENT
to TQL’s training program is that so many
of its competing logistics companies were
started by former TQL employees. “If you
talk to other brokerage firms in the area,
most of [their owners] have worked for
TQL at some point,” says Lacy Starling,
who calls herself “President and Fearless
Leader” of Florence-based Legion Logis-
tics. Starling launched the company 10
years ago with then-husband Tony Cout-
softides, who had been one of TQL’s top
sales people. He’s billed as Legion’s “CEO
and Freight Guru.”
Starling says she and Coutsoftides, who
divorced eight years ago but still work and
raise their daughter together, decided they
wanted to build a more family-friendly
work culture than other companies in the
region. At TQL, brokers operate like in-
dividual businesses, competing for their
own customers and then taking “cradle-to-
grave” responsibility for all of their trans-
portation needs, day or night. “We wanted
to create an environment that offers a little
bit more balance for employees, that you
don’t have to be working 24/7 every single
day,” Starling says. “So we have a team ap-
proach to our sales. Our team works to-
gether to service all of our customers, and
then we’ve got one person [from the team]
on call for a week and we rotate that as well.
If you’re going to attract people with fami-
lies, if you want to retain employees, you
have to create an environment where they
feel like they can do this job and take a vaca-
tion with the family.”
Despite the growing competition—in-
cluding recent entries into the industry of
national heavyweights like Uber Freight
and Amazon—TQL continues to grow
with its hard-charging business model.
“There’s a lot of discussion about poten-
tial disruption in brokerage with some of
the new players,” says company president
Byrne. “How do we compete? Like we’ve
always competed. Be very good at what we
do. Offer superior customer service. And
make sure that we are on the front lines
of technology. We don’t want to be the
first ones to develop everything, because
we want to make sure people want it. So
we’re in the process now of getting out to
our top customers and carriers and asking,
What do you really like? What do you want?”
Byrne says he’s confident the com-
pany will continue to adapt and grow. In
recent years, TQL has boosted growth by
expanding its brokerage service to include
less than full truckloads and intermodal
transport that uses both trucks and trains.
A key component, too, has been the com-
pany’s continuing focus on developing
new technologies, including automated
dispatch for carriers, enhancements to
its mobile app for customers who want to
book and track their own shipments, and
the use of artificial intelligence to handle
back office tasks like billing and schedul-
ing. The new $20 million addition to the
current headquarters building will accom-
modate a booming IT department, grow-
ing its 230 employees to 300 by year’s end,
says TQL’s Millikin.
On the sales side, Byrne says TQL will
stick to its tried-and-true approach of
“single source accountability” in which
brokers, with the help of trainees, vie for
their own customers and then handle all
their needs 24/7/365. Coordinating all
tasks in one point of contact rather than
dividing and rotating the workload among
teams prevents miscommunication and
lost loads, he says. “Folks told us early
on that we couldn’t scale with that [ap-
proach], but we have been able to scale.
I guess there are pluses and minuses to
both, but this is what we’ve always done,
and it’s worked for us.”
But perhaps not for the thousands of
employees who have departed TQL over
the years. “I’m not someone who likes to
speak poorly of a place where I learned a
lot,” says Reilly, owner of Custom Pro Lo-
gistics. “But certainly the individual isn’t
someone that’s really cared for [at TQL].
They’re treated more like plug and play.”