For us, taking care of customers has always meant more than just closing a sale. That’s part of why we built an in-house team called Silvaris Complete Logistics. It’s been a gradual shift made over the years, with a goal of owning the whole experience ourselves instead of handing it off.
How the Team Got Built
About seven years ago, we pared down the list of brokers we’d work with from 25 down to four trusted brokerage companies. There wasn’t a final straw; no shipments that broke the system. Our Logistics team had simply tracked the same issues coming up again and again, and the time spent fixing them was no longer worth whatever the brokers were saving us. We were selective about who made the cut: only brokers who’d already proven themselves reliable and trustworthy stayed in the mix.
What Broker-Based Freight Actually Looked Like
Before this shift, freight ran on a roughly even split: about half brokers, half direct carrier relationships, handled lane by lane as orders came in. The recurring problem wasn’t any single failure; it was a lack of control and accountability once a broker was in the middle. Every carrier type came with a different follow-up process too, brokers handled differently than owner-operators, which meant no consistent way to track a load once it left the yard.
What Changed Once It Came In-House
Most brokers treat getting the load booked as the finish line. Once a truck is assigned, they consider the job done and trust the carrier to handle the rest, leaving the customer to chase down basic status updates on their own. Our Silvaris Complete Logistics team follows a shipment the whole way through instead.
A carrier books the load and receives a rate confirmation with the pickup address. Every load booked for pickup that day gets an automated check at 1 p.m. PST asking the carrier to confirm it’s loaded and rolling as scheduled. If there’s no response, we follow up again by phone the next day rather than assuming it went fine. And if a carrier goes quiet on the scheduled delivery date, our team calls to check the status instead of waiting to hear from the customer first.
That kind of follow-through shows up in small ways that a broker relationship usually wouldn’t catch. If a truck shows up to get loaded and the material isn’t quite ready, our team will check with the trader about a close substitute—something like 5/8″ OSB instead of 19/32″—that’s similar enough to make the trip worth the driver’s time instead of sending them back empty. (Also, our team has also worked with customers to schedule deliveries around holidays when possible, moving a Labor Day shipment up to the Saturday before, so a customer’s employee could stay home with family instead of coming in just to receive a truck.
One Team, Full Coverage
Our Silvaris Complete Logistics team is made up of five people, split by region, but every account’s information is shared across the whole group. If someone’s out, another team member can step in and cover that region without missing a beat, since nothing about a shipment lives within just one person’s memory.
Got questions about how this could work for your next order? Give us a call and we’ll walk you through it.
