It was easy to start a 3PL during COVID and it is hard to grow one now. Demand isn't the constraint. Everything past a certain size needs process, and the operators who got there on hustle have never had to write any down.
Justin Smith had me on episode 99 of Industrial Insights in February 2026, coming out of peak, which is when this conversation actually happens.
Every quote block below is me, on the episode, condensed for reading.
Survived, Now What
Peak was heads down, lots of work, trying to get through the period. There's a lot of white knuckling, a lot of manual brute force to get through. Now what I've seen is a lot of folks picking their head up and looking around to figure out how do we not repeat this last peak.
It was very easy, in quotes, to start a 3PL a few years ago during COVID. You started something, you got a few clients, and then you bump into that ceiling of it's easy to start, hard to grow, because now you need process. You need people all working in the same direction, and you need the systems to enforce how you want to operate.
For one month after peak an operator has both the memory of what broke and the capacity to fix it. That window closes fast.
You Will Scale Whatever You Have
Justin put it in five words that I've been using since. You're going to scale your dysfunction.
There's this notion of if our operation is manual and a bit chaotic, we can buy technology and it's going to solve our problems. The vendor's going to know what to do. But that's not how it works. You're basically going to enshrine that chaotic environment in a piece of software, and now you can't be creative and work around it anymore.
Software makes an operation repeatable. That's only good news if what it repeats was worth doing twice.
It's the same reason workarounds keep multiplying before the system arrives, and why they get more expensive after it does. The dysfunction that scales worst is the part of the operation that lives in one person's head, because configuration is the first thing that ever asks for it in writing.
Is Your Business Sellable?
This is the part of the conversation I hadn't said publicly before, and it reframes the whole investment:
To the 3PL owner, is my business sellable? Technology and systems play a huge role there. There are buyers that will come in if they can get it very cheap. They don't care if it's manual, because they're buying it for some self-serving reason, maybe a client list, maybe the building. But a lot of the buyers want something more turnkey. That's where you're going to get your multiple from.
That's the hurtful thing with a lot of business owners, not even 3PL space. They have this inflated sense of the company and the market shows them reality. It's demoralizing. But there's that path of, let's do some investment, and now you have something that's sellable and there's a lot more buyers for that type of asset.
An operation that runs on a handful of people's judgment is an asset only to a buyer who wants the building or the client list. Everyone paying a multiple is paying for something that keeps working after the founder stops answering the phone.
It cuts the other way too. Get the systems in and you may find you'd rather keep it. Either way the point is having the option, and that's a different reason to do this work than efficiency.
Ready, or Just Under-Using What You Bought
I've had way more 3PLs that have already bought a WMS discover me and say, I wish I would have known you back then. They get in and they only use twenty, thirty percent of the system and they don't know where to go, what's available to them, what the trade-offs are.
That's two different questions, and conflating them wastes money in both directions. Readiness asks whether you should buy at all and what you'd need first, which is what the diagnostic is for. Leverage asks what's still sitting unused in the system you already own.
Most operations running a WMS badly do not have a software problem, and buying a second system carries the same unexamined assumptions into a more expensive contract.
Quarterback, Not Project Manager
I've used the term quarterback way more than program manager or project manager, because those are less used. I'm your guy. There's a lot of coordination, there's a lot of people, there's moving things forward, there's knowing what play to call.
The word matters because of what the other ones imply. A project manager tracks a plan somebody else made. The role that's actually missing sits between the vendor, the integrator, the ERP consultant and the operation, and decides what happens when those four want incompatible things in the same week.
In that seat, somebody is accountable to the business rather than to a scope of work. No vendor supplies it, because it was never theirs to supply.
