Exciting fast growth, but we need to be sure to focus on our paying customer
Pros
- Great culture that encourages innovation and hard work. - Smart, yet down to earth colleagues that will support you in your goals - Excellent senior leadership, even though the majority is white males (we are trying to change that!) - Desire to change the world, but not from a business to consumer perspective. We are trying to make global trade easier with transparency and efficiency for business to business transactions. An amazing women leader started Flexport.org that partners with Flexport.com to create good in the world. Our senior leadership then vowed to pledge 1% of our time and profits toward at-cost logistics services for non-profits and carbon offset programs for our clients. This project was completely driven from the ground up. This is an example of amazing empowerment from senior leadership as the work was solid and strategy was well designed. - Personally, working here has felt like I have gotten an MBA in a short time - grown a team, managed P/L, developed commercial strategy, designed investment strategies, etc. There are growing pains with such fast paced environment, but it is definitely rewarding work experience with lots of problems to tackle.
Cons
- Global Trade is a massive industry. At times, we are trying to boil the ocean with our platform's target market. We need to remain focused on the key business strategies (digital freight forwarding) before going up and down the market too fast (i.e. order management, fulfillment, etc). - Misalignment between the demand (sales + operations) and product. We need to focus on the paying customer for our product instead of internal supply functions that only focus on reducing the cost to serve (which is important, but the goals are not aligned with commercial strategy). This misalignment has caused a rift between commercial and product that needs to be addressed as soon as possible if we are going to scale effectively in 2018.
