{{first_name | default: "Hey"}} —
Quick one.
If you ask a freight forwarder how they grow, 9 out of 10 say the same thing: "Referrals and relationships."
And they're not wrong. They're just incomplete.
Here's what nobody tells you about the referral-and-relationship model:
It works great until it doesn't. And when it stops working, you don't notice for 6 months — because the existing book of business hides the fact that no new logos are coming in.
I call this Referral Roulette. You spin the wheel every month and hope. Sometimes a big one lands. Sometimes the wheel hits zero and you tell yourself "next month will be better."
The forwarders who break out of this don't replace referrals. They stack a second growth engine on top of them. Usually outbound. Sometimes content. Ideally both.
That's most of what I'll be writing about in this newsletter — what those second engines actually look like when they're built right, and the seven specific reasons most forwarders' outbound attempts fail.
Issue #1 lands this week. Keep an eye out.
— Jose
P.S. If you haven't already, I'd still love to hear what your biggest growth bottleneck is. Hit reply.