Titanium Transportation Group’s U.S. expansion took a brief pause for the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Canadian transportation and logistics firm’s Nashville freight brokerage office has wasted little time since quietly opening on July 1.
“Nashville is already moving freight, which is great,” Titanium Transportation Chief Operating Officer Marilyn Daniel told FreightWaves. It marks Titanium’s second U.S. location after it launched its Charlotte, North Carolina brokerage in 2019.
The brokerage office will focus on moving domestic U.S. freight like its Charlotte counterpart. Titanium staffs both offices with U.S. personnel who know the domestic market well, Daniel said. But both locations are digitally integrated with Titanium’s Canadian locations.
Titanium Transportation’s asset-light expansion into the U.S. has already started paying off. The single brokerage office in Charlotte helped increase Titanium’s revenue by 13.6% during the first quarter of 2020, more than making up the impact of COVID-19 on its core cross-border truckload business.
Titanium’s recipe for success in U.S. expansion doesn’t include price-gouging, COO says
While the expansion is ultimately about helping Titanium generate more revenue, Daniel said the company wants to do it through building relationships with carriers and shippers by providing superior service and transparency.
“We all went through this in 2018, when there was price-gouging,” Daniel said. “Our focus has always been on sustainability for the business. You balance serving your customer and making money. Sometimes you make more. Sometimes you make less. But you can’t be price-gouging.”
Titanium is a highly tech-forward company that embraces real-time visibility of freight. It also has a mobile app for carriers and drivers moving their loads.
Titanium’s U.S. brokerage business has little overlap with its Canada-based cross-border trucking operations.
“But it doesn’t mean we won’t move something across the border,” Daniel said.
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