As it turned out, a would-be job at Wright-
Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton
didn’t pan out and subsequent research into
opportunities with other companies didn’t
exactly inspire him, so he decided instead to
take the knowledge he’d assembled in the
military into anoperationof his own.
“I feel like I could be a corporate guy, but I
just didn’t want to be a corporate guy,” he
said. “I started doing a bunch of research
and I knew I could do it, so I went ahead and
I just startedup.”
Integrity Express Logistics was officially
born on Feb. 14, 2007, and its arrival
hastened a rapid-fire familiarizationprocess
with nuts and bolts like licensing and
insurance. Steger brought in a partner, Matt
Ventura, five months later to firm up the
sales side and get things running at full
speed.
“We were doing a few sales, nothing really
to write home about, and that’s when I
brought Matt in and I told him ‘I think I’ve
got something going here,’” Steger said.
“The timing was right for him as well. We
just started winging stuff and figuring out
stuff on the go. There was a lot of trial by
error and a lot of lessons learned the hard
way, but we knew after 2007 that we had
something here and what we ultimately
wanted todowas grow it.”
To say the least, the subsequent years have
been accomplished thatmission.
The company swelled from two employees
in 2007 to more than 100 this year, and the
aim is for the workforce to grow past 130
Integrity Express Logistics
| BusinessWorld-
Magazine
| 3
