He led a group of 40 men and women as
part of the operation, an endeavor which
provided a confidence level he’d not have
attained elsewhere while simultaneously
allowing him to establish the logistics street
cred that he ultimately decided to put to use
upon returning home in late 2006.
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.
“Wewere 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
74 | BusinessWorld |
July-August 2014
