A new chapter for CBJ’s all-time fastest growing company

The past few years have brought extraordinary success and explosive growth to BLX Expedited Carriers Inc.

And while the Hiawatha third-party logistics company’s latest chapter is marking the culmination of the company’s independent journey, it’s a decidedly fortunate development for BLX’s founders.

To characterize BLX’s growth as explosive could be considered an understatement. In 2019, the company posted 1263.7% growth in the Corridor Business Journal’s annual Fastest Growing Companies rundown, in the process becoming the fastest-growing company in the award’s 15-year history.

It has more than doubled revenue several times since its founding in 2014, growing nearly 600% between 2017 and 2018, and finished third this year with a 220.78% growth rate.

But this year has brought even more dramatic change.

In late January, BLX closed on the sale of the company to Dallas-based Worldwide Express, one of the country’s largest third-party logistics companies with more than 60 locations across the United States.

BLX president and owner Josh Polansky said he is in the midst of a one-year transitionary role as vice president of expedited services for Worldwide Express, while company founder Brice Lukasko is serving as a company consultant.

Mr. Polansky said the move had been in the works for several years, beginning with a business relationship that formed between BLX and GlobalTranz, another large 3PL logistics company, which merged with Worldwide Express in June 2021 to create a company with more than $4 billion in annual revenue.

“They had been courting us for a while,” Mr. Polansky said. “Brice and I were basically holding out until they agreed to the number that we wanted.”

That price, which Mr. Polansky declined to specify, was finalized in August 2022, and wrapped up in January after about five months of due diligence and research.

“Five months is still a pretty short timeframe to wrap everything up,” he said. “There’s so much insecurity in the process of being acquired, because you don’t actually know it’s going to happen until the day that it does happen. The acquiring company is protected in so many different ways. They can always back out if they find anything questionable. There are any number of ways that they get out of something if they want to.”

The agreement came at a perfect time for BLX, as the period from late 2020 through the end of 2022 marked one of the hottest shipping markets in history, Mr. Polansky said.

“We came into an agreement toward the end of that,” he said. “We could see things cooling down, and we knew there were some projections of a market downturn. We were very nervous about that affecting the deal, but fortunately, it did not.”

With a successful track record spanning nearly a decade, BLX’s reputation forged a legacy ripe for acquisition.

Mr. Lukasko, whose family had a background in logistics, founded BLX in 2014 after discovering that the expedited shipping market — a segment characterized by time-critical or high-value specialized shipments, often using cargo vans or straight trucks, as opposed to full-size semi-trailer trucks — was largely untapped.

“The rest of the logistics market is pretty brutally competitive,” he said. “When Brice went out on his own, he took one client, and that client was in the expedited market.”

At the time, Mr. Polansky was still a junior in college.

“We were buddies from high school,” he said. “Then Brice reached out and asked if I wanted to help him, and I said sure, just as a part-time gig while I’m in school. That quickly escalated into an all-consuming lifestyle, and then a couple of years later into a true partnership.”

The two joined forces as equal partners in BLX in January 2017.

“We were having a lot of success selling to the type of companies that need this service, and we just saw all the opportunities out there for growth,” Mr. Polansky said.

The company grew significantly every year thereafter, with the exception of the COVID-hindered year of 2020, topping out with $113 million in revenue in 2022.

Yet even in those halcyon days, BLX was fielding overtures from potential suitors — including many from BLX’s own customer base — as the company’s experience in expedited shipping became a more desirable asset.

“We were having so much success with our clients, we would just spread like wildfire, and most of our clients have at least 50 offices around the country or around the world,” he said. “So we started getting the attention of people at the top who would ask ‘who is this BLX spreading through all of our offices and starting to become a huge cost for us? Why are we spending so much money with them?’ From a cost perspective, in their minds, they were spending so much on this service that it made sense for them to look at having that service in-house.”

The first acquisition inquiry came in mid-2018, Mr. Polansky said.

“We were just mind-blown, because we had never even considered that as a possibility,” he said. “Neither of us went to school for business. We were just doing the daily grind. But then we started having several clients reach out to us, because they had the same experience. We started thinking ‘wow, this is actually a possibility’ and switched our mindset. We decided we would get this thing to the point where it would be valuable.”

The firm is now known as “BLX, a WWEX company,” and contrary to potential expectations, Mr. Polansky said Worldwide plans to keep the company’s Hiawatha facility and its Iowa employees in the state, rather than relocating and consolidating BLX’s operations.

The company currently has 52 employees, nearly all of which work from the Hiawatha office, either in-person or virtually, and Mr. Polansky said Worldwide recognized the synergies of BLX’s existing company culture.

“All of our employees kept their jobs in the transition, which was absolutely a condition of mine,” he said. “I made that clear that [cuts weren’t] an option. And they were totally fine with that. They weren’t going to try to fix what’s not broken. They weren’t going to mess with the way we were operating. Our margin to EBITDA was the highest percentage that they had ever seen.”

Both Mr. Polansky and Mr. Lukasko now live in the Dallas area, and Mr. Polansky said he’s not sure how his professional career will evolve, though he did indicate it may well be outside the 3PL industry.

“Sometimes I tell people that I sold my business, and they’re like, what happened?” he said. “But this is kind of a dream outcome, to be honest. I have no regrets. At this point, I don’t have any specific plan for my life. I have a lot of different things that I do with different investments, venture capital, real estate and stuff like that. But I don’t have a grand plan. I’m just open to see where everything goes.”