It wasn't his problem to solve. He was the trucking guy. But he knew someone,
made a call, and within a week had sourced the cranberries at a price that fit their budget.
Jacob Waller was already handling logistics for a client when they mentioned, almost
as an aside, that a deal for cranberries had fallen through. He had no obligation to fix
it. What he had was a phone number, a network, and a habit of not walking away from
problems he could solve.
That was the first procurement deal Waller ever did. The client didn't ask for a
sourcing partner — they just had a problem, and Jacob fixed it because he could.
That moment opened a door that hasn't closed since.
What makes the story unusual isn't the cranberries. It's where Jacob came from.
A Chemistry degree. The best-selling ad salesman his college newspaper had seen in a
century. A first-generation college graduate whose first logistics job
paid barely above minimum wage — more than anyone in his family had ever made, and not
enough to predict where he'd end up.
The scientific mind came with him. The sales instinct came with him. The work ethic
of someone who had something to prove — that came too. He learned freight from the
inside: the carriers, the margins, the corners people cut. When the cranberry call
came, he already knew who had what, at what price, and how to move it. The leap from
trucking to sourcing wasn't a leap. It was the next logical step.
The combined model — Waller handling both sourcing and shipping — is now the firm's
most differentiated offering. It wasn't designed that way. It was discovered,
the way most real things are.