We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mark Becker a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

We started in a 10,000 square foot airplane hangar in Lake Geneva in 2009, and the early days were what you’d probably expect, a little bit chaotic and humbling.

The origin story is actually pretty simple. I had a colleague at Milwaukee Tool who got a job selling Milwaukee products to Amazon back when Amazon was trying to go from being the bookstore to the everything store, and they were running into a real problem. Manufacturers didn’t know how to package products correctly, they weren’t putting UPCs on things, the content was wrong, there was channel conflict everywhere, and Amazon needed someone to come in the middle and solve those problems fast. My friend called me and said someone could start a company doing exactly this.
I happened to be at a point in my life where I had a few people around me who could help make it happen.

We started with GE appliance parts, grinding through order lists every week, and what we figured out early was that every time Amazon raised the bar, most people saw it as a pain point, and we saw it as a way into the business. Every new hard thing they asked for was another reason a manufacturer needed a partner like us.

The first real inflection point came when we expanded from distribution into 3PL services, and our existing software couldn’t handle owned and non-owned inventory at the same time. That forced a hard conversation about whether we patch the problem or fix it permanently, and we chose a highly customizable warehouse management system and integration layer, which became ChannelPoint. That decision cost us time and money upfront but gave us something most 3PLs don’t have, which is complete control over our own tech stack and the ability to respond to platform changes in weeks rather than waiting on a vendor.

Adding hazmat and dangerous goods capabilities in 2019 follows the same pattern of making a bet before the demand was obvious. Most 3PLs avoid hazmat because the compliance burden is a difficult hurdle to continuously overcome. We saw where those product categories were heading and invested early. None of that happens if we stay comfortable, and staying comfortable is probably the most dangerous thing a growing business can do.

If I’m honest about what scaling actually felt like, it was mostly a series of decisions made with the information we had on hand, followed by a lot of execution. The strategy sounds very clean in hindsight but in the moment, it didn’t always feel that way.

Mark, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up watching my grandfather fix tractors and help with calf deliveries, solving whatever problem was in front of him with whatever he had available, and that image stuck with me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until I was running my own business. After college I spent a couple years scanning lift tickets in Breckenridge with no real plan, and eventually finding my way into sales and operations. When my colleague called me in 2009, I had enough conviction about where Amazon was heading to take the leap. That’s really where G10 began.

Broadly speaking, G10 Fulfillment is a third-party logistics provider and distributor. That means we handle the physical infrastructure of commerce for brands that would rather focus on building their products and growing their customer base. On any given day, that means we’re picking and packing direct-to-consumer orders, preparing pallets for Walmart and Amazon’s routing guides, managing hazmat products that require specialized compliance, and shipping products that weigh thousands of pounds alongside products that weigh a few ounces. We have over 36 million cubic feet of warehouse space across seven facilities in Wisconsin, South Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, with the geographic spread designed to put inventory close enough to most of the U.S. population to enable two-day delivery without air freight costs.

What I’m most proud of is the team and the culture we’ve built. The awards and revenue figures are validation, but the thing that actually drives this company is people who take ownership of problems. We have more than 400 employees, and the expectation is that everyone operates as a partner to our clients, not just an order processor. Our 99.9% fulfillment accuracy rate is a byproduct of that mindset.

The capabilities that tend to differentiate us most are hazmat fulfillment, same-day shipping, and the ability to handle both large-format and complex B2B retail compliance alongside high-volume D2C operations within the same network. Those aren’t services every 3PL offers and they certainly aren’t services every 3PL executes well.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Referrals built this company more than anything else, and those come from clients who genuinely feel like you’re invested in their success. We made a decision early on to give every client direct access to a dedicated account executive who actually knows their business and their priorities. While that sounds like a basic service commitment, it’s surprisingly rare in an industry where client communication often gets treated as a cost or time suck to minimize.

The other piece that really compounded our growth was building out capabilities before clients came asking for them. When we invested in hazmat infrastructure we didn’t have a warehouse full of hazmat clients ready to move in. We made the investment based on where we saw product categories moving and then had something real to offer when brands in those categories started needing a home.

Being a genuine partner is the mindset that runs through all of it. When Amazon cut back on prep services and started penalizing slow-moving inventory, we helped clients pivot so they could maintain Prime-level service without absorbing the hit on their own. That kind of problem-solving in a moment of disruption is what clients remember and what they tell other founders about, and those conversations have consistently been our best source of new business.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

For a long time, I believed that the key to running a great operation was finding the most efficient system and relentlessly optimizing it. That belief came from a legitimate place because in logistics waste is expensive and margin is everything. The lesson I’ve had to unlearn is that rigid efficiency is a liability, and that flexibility what makes a company durable.

When the supply chain disruptions of 2020 and 2021 hit, the operations built around perfectly tuned models were the ones that struggled most to adapt, and the businesses that came through it best had built some real adaptability into how they operated. That changed how I think about almost every decision we make now. We stopped leading with the question of what is the most efficient configuration and started asking what configuration gives us the most options going forward, and those turn out to be very different questions that point you toward very different answers.

Our robotic picking system with Skild Robotics is a good recent example. We chose a cart-agnostic system because it gave us flexibility across different order profiles and warehouse setups, even though a more locked-in system might have looked better on a pure efficiency benchmark.

The backstory is really just where I spent years optimizing for a version of the business that kept getting disrupted by things I hadn’t planned for. Eventually the pattern became clear enough that I couldn’t ignore it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://g10fulfillment.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/g10-fulfillment

Image Credits

G10 Fulfillment