[Illustration: thitivong/iStock]
If you wrote a mystery novel about why the Dallas region has become a hub for logistics and digital supply chain companies, it would be one page long.
Here’s what it would say: Dallas-Fort Worth is literally and metaphorically in the middle of everything in the U.S., and digital logistics and supply chain companies are moving to take advantage of what’s here.
The number of supply chain and logistics firms relocating to DFW is growing, including Omnitracs, Apptricity, Mercado Labs, and Slync.io.
Slynic CIO Chris Kirchner: “It doesn’t surprise us that businesses are coming to Dallas.”
“It doesn’t surprise us that businesses are coming to Dallas,” says Chris Kirchner, CEO and co-founder of Slync.io, a digital supply chain and logistics company that moved to North Texas in June 2020.
Kirchner says that Slync.io’s fast growth—the company’s adding an average of two to five employees weekly—required a family-friendly environment, including good schools, so he could recruit talent more easily. He needed quick access to both U.S. and international clientele, and he wanted more good weather than bad. He didn’t want individual state income taxes. He wanted a place that was business-friendly.
Dallas-Fort Worth checked all those boxes for Slync.io, which employed 50 workers full-time as of November 2020, and whose customers include major global shippers DHL and Kuehn+Nagel.
“We’re not the first company to move from California,” he says. “If you look at Charles Schwab and McKesson, they’re far bigger than us. And I actually played golf a few weeks ago with Jim Lentz,” referring to the retired CEO of Toyota Motors North America. That firm completed its move from the West Coast to Plano in 2016.
The reasons Kirchner lists for relocating Slync.io from California aren’t much different than most other companies that have moved.
Slync.io’s need for easy access to air travel is especially important, he says.
“The airport had a lot to do with it,” Kirchner says. “I can get to Hong Kong or a lot of places in Europe in a single flight. That’s important, for our business in particular.”
Though Slync.io is a digital company, he says, customer service and human interaction are integral to its business, especially in conducting site visits to observe shipping operations and loading docks, making sure Slync.io’s software is configured properly to match on-the-ground operations, and confirming that the company is operating as it should for each customer.
Slync.io’s employees were virtual as of December due to COVID, but the firm is looking at opening an office in the Roanoke/Southlake area when the pandemic recedes, Kirchner says.
A version of this story was originally published in Dallas Innovates 2021: The Resilience Issue.
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Our fourth annual magazine, Dallas Innovates 2021: The Resilience Issue, highlights Dallas-Fort Worth as a hub for innovation. The collective strength of the innovation ecosystem and intellectual capital in Dallas-Fort Worth is a force to be reckoned with.
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