This year marks a special milestone for Livo Logistics as the company celebrates its 10-year anniversary. To mark the occasion, we are pleased to feature Petr Naceradsky from Livo Logistics in Prague, Czech Republic, in this edition of Inside Alfa. In the interview, Petr reflects on the company’s journey over the past decade, the resilience behind its growth, and the value of trust, personal connections, and strong partnerships within the Alfa network.
Tell us a bit about how your journey in logistics began — was it something you always planned, or did it take you by surprise?
I come from a family of electricians. My grandpa was an electrician, my father and his brother became electricians, so the natural path for my older brother, our cousin and myself was to follow in their footsteps. I studied the same field, but it was a hard school and I did not enjoy it much. I could not see myself pursuing this career or continuing at such a technical college.
Around the time I finished high school, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Until then, there had been only one college with a logistics and supply chain curriculum, based in Slovakia, so a similar college opened in the Czech Republic — exactly in the year I graduated, and in my hometown of Pardubice. Many of my classmates decided to go there, so I did too.
After struggling through the first two years of math, statistics, operations research, graph theory and other technical subjects, we started having more practical classes and field trips. That’s when I started falling in love with logistics.
After a few years in a transport infrastructure company, military basic training and a 5-month trip to the US, I was looking for a job. My father had a subscription to a financial newspaper, which included job openings, and I found an ad for Allyn International, who were looking for an operations person. After several interviews, including one with the US owners, Julie and Allen, I was hired.
Looking back, I’m not sure why they hired me, but I guess they saw some potential. The rest is history. 25 years later, I’m still enjoying the industry and learning something new every day. I will always be grateful to Julie and Allen for giving me a chance and for being true leaders and fantastic human beings — the kind I strive to become every day in the company my fellow partners and I started ten years ago.
How have you seen technology transform logistics in the past five years, and what are you most excited about for the future?
Although the project freight forwarding industry seems a bit stagnant because every project is unique, I’m very excited about AI, I guess like everybody else these days. Besides some standard AI platforms to make our everyday life easier and work more efficient, we’ve been using a tool for reading vendor’s invoices and converting the information into our transportation management system. Because a lot of work being done and time spent is related to emails, we’re looking to implement a tool for helping us there, whether it is making sense of requests we receive and putting them into a standardized format, dividing them into individual legs per transportation modes, then to be sent to preselected partners, or receiving proposals, making sense of those and building drafts of proposals for our clients. Other tools we have been actively using for several years now are a cargo loading optimization tool for all the different truck and container types, as well as a cargo tracking tool via GPS devices we attach to high-value cargo we want to keep an eye on 24/7. There is still some work and fine-tuning to be done, but these are all great tools that not only can help us and our clients, but also can differentiate us from our competition.
If you could change one thing about the logistics industry, what would it be and what impact do you think it would have?
This is a tough question. I’m not Richard Branson or Elon Musk to challenge and change industries, but let me try to answer with something that will hopefully make sense. A lot of processes, especially those related to general cargo, will be automated, and the work of traditional freight forwarders will be reduced and, in some cases, eliminated. I guess this has been becoming apparent. We saw the same in the air travel industry 20 years ago. Unless travel agents provided unique offerings and delivered added value and a unique experience to customers, they were replaced by Online Travel Agencies like Expedia, Booking.com and similar. We’ve seen this trend in our industry for several years now too. All major container shipping lines offer online container rates, door-to-door service, road freight and air freight; they have also acquired several freight forwarding companies, including project cargo ones. We, small to medium-sized freight forwarding companies, have to focus on excellent customer experience — not only great technical knowledge, but also easiness to work with, flexibility, reliability, honesty and a personal touch are very important. Great communication skills and work ethics of our team members are essential to create long-lasting business relationships. At the end of the day, freight forwarding is a people business.
What do you enjoy most about the logistics industry, and what makes your role particularly fulfilling?
I really enjoy the international magnitude of our business. I love interacting with people from all around the world every day, whether it is over emails, phone calls, Teams meetings, and best of all, in person. I appreciate experiencing cultural differences, ways of thinking, values, travelling to different countries, chatting about business, technicalities of transport, as well as personal matters. I’m genuinely interested in others, hearing their stories and seeing where they are coming from. I guess I’m a people person.
Then, I also really enjoy business trips to loading places, ports and project sites, to make sure things are moving the right way, with proper care, and I’m happy to offer my hand, literally, or make decisions when needed. It’s very fulfilling to see cargo safely delivered and projects executed after months of planning, preparation and coordination. And yes, not everything is always rosy, there have been some sleepless nights and I’ve lost some hair over the years, but that’s part of the game, and I keep enjoying every day.
Is there a specific project or achievement in your career that you’re particularly proud of? Tell us about it.
Besides some significant projects executed for our clients, people say I should be proud of how far we’ve gotten with our company. Starting from scratch, well, after 15 years of being in the project cargo industry, but for the first time ever on our own. Over the last ten years, we’ve been through a lot, from a dishonest fellow partner causing a severe financial complication, through clients who went bankrupt and never paid their bills, to serious complications outside of our control that we had to face and solve. We’ve been a very resilient team and I’m very grateful to my fellow business partners for their dedication, hard work, ethics, loyalty and friendship during the last ten years and all we’ve been through together. To our next ten years!
What do you value most about being a member of our logistics network?
What I value the most are the personal connections, the honesty and trust we’ve been able to establish with some of the members. So far, over the last four years since we became members, we’ve built some good and strong relationships with fellow partners. We see more opportunities every month and will keep on developing further.
We also very much appreciate the great professional support of the management team. Always helpful and always friendly.
We also value the possibility of using the Atlas House Bill of Lading, which comes in handy several times a month, not only related to business we do with partners from ALFA, but with all our partners.
Last but not least, the whole online platform is very well designed and easy to use, especially when using the directory. Nice job there!
What’s the funniest or strangest item you’ve ever had to transport?
Not too many fun or strange cargo shipments over the last ten years, really. It’s more useful cargo that we move, like huge beer tanks for several breweries, such as Heineken.
But this filter separator that looks like a pig is pretty funny to look at:
https://www.livologistics.com/2017-08-24/
Thank you, Petr, for sharing your story and insights with us, and congratulations again to Livo Logistics on its 10-year anniversary.