Inbound Logistics | July 2023

LEADERSHIP Conversations with the Captains of Industry

Ecommerce Plug and Play

Allan Marshall gured his days as a CEO were complete. He’d founded several successful logistics rms, including Segmentz, which eventually became XPO Logistics. Satised with all he had accomplished, Marshall then spent about 15 years providing seed capital for promising startups. One of those startups, called Grove, struck Marshall as a particular standout. Grove offered a corporate infrastructure for direct-to-consumer merchants. The potential was strong, but the rm needed better management. “I decided to put in a little more money, take control of the company, and give everyone who invested a chance to be successful,” he says. Marshall became CEO and, in 2022, changed the rm’s name to Upexi. In 2023, it’s poised to make a prot on $100 million in revenues. Marshall talked with us about his leadership trajectory and his rapidly growing enterprise. IL: What opportunities made Upexi so interesting to you? Amazon had created a launching pad for small brands. But if you start a brand today, you reach a point where you don’t know how to get bigger. You can’t afford a development team, an advertising team, and a marketing team. So you hire agencies, and they eat up all your cash. We offer an alternative, acquiring ecommerce and Amazon brands and providing a plug-and-play model to make them protable and more efcient. IL: Tell us about an event from early in your career that helped to shape you as a leader. Early on, I learned that you have to understand every aspect of your business. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I started a temporary agency for truck drivers. I learned the business by making deliveries. Then I moved into sales, where my conversations with customers clued me in to new opportunities. They needed trucks as well as drivers. They needed linehaul services. Even at XPO, I used to drive the forklifts on some days, or unload. At Upexi, I’ve worked on the oor; I’ve xed our packaging machines. We have our own third-party logistics services and our own pick-and-pack. I walk through there regularly, asking about the problems and about what we could do better.

Allan Marshall CEO, Upexi

Allan Marshall by the numbers: He wakes up at 5 a.m., responds to 100-300 Slack messages daily, and has calls five or six days each week with his teams. In 2023, his company is poised to make a profit on $100 million in revenue.

by Merrill Douglas

20 Inbound Logistics • July 2023

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