Suddath Works to Emerge as a Leader in Hospitality Services

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (Mar. 10, 2017) – In late 2016, a group of Suddath leaders came together to discuss our local logistics and hospitality businesses to see what steps could be taken to better align with our branch locations and drive significant revenue growth in this critical area. After evaluating the synergies between Workplace Solutions and the Global Logistics hospitality project business, coupled with the retirement of Bob Thomas, a decision was made to shift hospitality to Workplace Solutions. Before his retirement, Bob Thomas did a great job opening our eyes to the hospitality market and established a winning track record for us to build on. 

Some of the synergies we identified that drove our decision are as follows:     

• Hospitality projects exist in all of our Suddath markets creating an attractive opportunity to drive more local revenue
• Workplace Solutions has a sales management infrastructure in place focused on local market growth
• In primary hospitality markets, Workplace has existing resources and process to recruit, hire, train and manage new salespeople
• In secondary hospitality markets, Workplace can leverage existing salespeople to pursue hospitality customers
• Workplace Solutions utilizes Movers Suite, allowing for a streamlined service management and billing process versus the SGL third-party model  
• Workplace Solutions has a national account infrastructure and vendor network in place to service non-Suddath cities

In sync with the decision to shift the hospitality business to Workplace, we are pleased to announce the hiring of Tony Little as Director of Operations for our newly-formed Suddath Hospitality Solutions. Prior to joining Suddath, Tony spent 13 years as the Managing Director of Hospitality Services for the Kane Company in Washington, DC. During his tenure with Kane, Tony started their hospitality division and grew it to become an integral part of the Kane portfolio with annual revenues exceeding $13 million. Prior to joining Kane, Tony grew up in the moving business and spent over 15 years in various roles including Account Manager, Terminal Manager and Dispatch Manager. 

In his new role, Tony will work closely with the High Jump team and our network operations leaders to establish a standard hospitality process for pricing, contracting, project management, warehousing, delivery, installation and invoicing as we significantly expand the business in Suddath markets. Tony will also leverage our network of agent partners around the world to deliver projects in areas where we do not have a local location. Our primary goal is to drive hospitality business to Suddath markets while also recognizing that there is an opportunity to move up the value chain by providing national and even global solutions where all of our commercial and SGL capabilities become a powerful combination in the marketplace. With Tony leading the operation, we are also increasing our sales team to include dedicated sales executives covering Florida, Atlanta, Texas and California and we will be training select members of our existing workplace sales team to pursue hospitality business across our national footprint. 

We are also happy to share that our Hospitality team moving forward will include some great former Global Logistics employees including Chris Iseley (Sales), Amy Little (Pricing) and Travis Eslinger (Project Management). In addition, we have added new sales talent to jumpstart the business including Adam Kaplan in Miami and Jordan Martin in Orlando. Finally, to strengthen our project management capabilities we have also added Doug Thompson. Prior to joining Suddath, Doug was with the Kane Companies for over 20 years where he spent ten years working directly with Tony Little in the Hospitality Division. It is exciting to have Tony and Doug back together bringing their knowledge and history to Suddath to strengthen our team.    

This is an exciting time and we are looking forward to seeing Suddath emerge as a national market leader in hospitality services.