Warehousing has been a particularly important area of expansion for the Bennett Family of Companies, a Georgia-based logistics and transportation provider, says Kris Rzepkowski, vice president of corporate business development. The company has its own warehousing facilities and operates other facilities. The move to warehousing emerged organically from the needs of Bennett’s customers. “Once carriers build that expertise, with labor and warehouse operational services, they can enter and operate in other environments where those services are needed,” Rzepkowski says. “For example, some of our bigger customers came through the trucking side, and we talked to them about their other needs,” he says. “The conversations moved straight toward, ‘We have a warehouse issue. We have a supply chain hiccup right here, and we need your team to help us with the best possible way to store, ship, and manage the inventory inside the warehouse.’” CUSTOMERS ASK FOR HELP Over the years, Averitt has gradually formed ve vertical business units under its umbrella: LTL, truckload, a dedicated eet division, a distribution and ful llment group, and a non-asset group. The distribution and ful llment group is the youngest of the verticals; it started about ve years ago primarily in port cities. Averitt’s expansion into distribution and ful llment started in part because “our customers were out of space and asked us for help,” Williams says. Averitt helped those customers and quickly found it to be a successful business model. “Then in our coastal markets, speci cally Savannah and Charleston, many of our LTL customers asked for help with drayage and transload,” Williams says. “That led us to start doing the dray work and later transload work in our coastal facilities. “We listened to what customers needed,” he adds. “And as we started to get more and more requests, we realized PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BENNETT FAMILY OF COMPANIES
Founded in the 1970s as an over-the-road van freight company, the Bennett Family of Companies has often expanded its services based on the changing needs of its customers.
we’ve got something here and need to make this a separate business unit.” Trucking companies may dabble in a service as a natural outgrowth of their services and the needs of their customers—and then see that service line rapidly gain momentum and become a robust business area. For instance, non-asset-based providers are “all over the place,” according to Rzepkowski, “and that is something that Bennett has grown into as well. “Our brokerage has grown from a small entity covering over ow requests that our assets couldn’t handle into a quarter-billion-dollar business just servicing customers that need trucks procured and vetted, whether they’re a blend of Bennett trucks and outside trucks, or just outside trucks,” he says. THE VALUE OF FLEXIBILITY Bennett was founded in the 1970s as an over-the-road van freight company and has evolved perpetually in the years since. “We keep diversifying because of the cyclical nature of freight,” Rzepkowski says. “Nothing surprises us at this point, whether there’s a downtrend or an uptrend. When freight is down in general, or there’s a freight recession, one of the other industries or trucking modes that we offer usually tends to offset some of that.”
As an example of the dynamic ways that services surface in importance as trends and the marketplace change, is that international freight forwarding has been in demand for Bennett this year “because navigating the tariff world has truly been an adventure and our customers can’t keep up on their own,” Rzepkowski says. “We bring a niche in international capability that keeps track of all the tariffs and tries to help customers procure the right containers at the right time and use the right mode to keep freight costs at the right level. They nd that service helpful,” he adds. Bennett follows what the federal government is investing in when developing its project-speci c efforts. For instance, when the government was committed to green energy, “our wind business exploded, with multiple wind farm installations,” Rzepkowski says. “When you do a project, it is far more predictive,” he notes. “For example, we know we will tie up x number of trucks in the eet for the next three or four months, and that provides some regularity to the freight. “Project-speci c efforts also give drivers the ability to nd a rhythm and be able to deliver cost savings and cost metrics rather than being wide open on random freight lanes and spot bids,” Rzepkowski says.
September 2025 • Inbound Logistics 33
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