Imagine you're an international freight forwarder operating out of Canada. A U.S.-bound shipment comes in with a declaration slip identifying it as kitchen cutlery. Looks pretty routine. So you accept the load and send it rolling south on a big rig.

Then the truck arrives at the border, gets inspected and the shipment turns out to be hunting knives. Now visualize the special kind of post-9/11 hell that breaks out.

Linda Collier doesn't have to imagine that tense scenario. She lived it as president/CEO of Tri-ad International Freight Forwarding Ltd., thanks to a customer's ill-fated attempt to avoid steep import duties.

But the hunting-knives fiasco was just one of the thorny challenges Collier has handled with admirable aplomb since 1988 when, at the age of 25, she launched her company in Mississauga - becoming and remaining one of a scant number of high-powered women in a rough and tumble, male-dominated industry.

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge
Tri-ad International Freight Forwarding Ltd. CEO Linda Collier has seen her industry's profit margins erode, but says she still loves her chosen career.

"This business used to be very cutthroat," she says. "You would move freight for anybody, for any reason, to make some money. Since Sept. 11, we can't do that any more."

Instead, the "known-shipper" rules that were imposed on freight forwarders forestall any surprises at the U.S. border. They also oblige employees at companies such as Tri-ad to spend many hours and mountains of paperwork verifying the identities of every individual involved in every shipment.

"We also have to do a lot more pre-notices, faxing or e-mailing all the details about every load to our customs brokers at least an hour before a shipment arrives at the border," Collier adds. "This is to allow Homeland Security enough time to prescreen (the shipper and the contents) and decide whether to flag a shipment for inspection or allow it into the country."

But security issues are only one of the challenges in an industry that's now chockful of pitfalls Collier couldn't possibly have anticipated when she first embarked on a career she says she "absolutely loves to this day."

Although she doesn't say so, that love must seem a tad unrequited, given the escalating border hassles and skyrocketing overhead produced by ever-higher fuel costs, dishonest fly-by-night competitors who damage freight forwarding's reputation and erode its profit margins - plus such unforeseeable factors as the recent decision by the authorities to not only curtail truck drivers' work hours, but to subtract from that total the time they spend not driving but merely waiting.

"Sitting around during loading and unloading can take up to four hours per trip," Collier says, "so the extra cost to us now is unbelievable. The run between L.A. and Toronto, for example, used to cost us $3,500 US per truck per trip and now it's $5,400. And passing that kind of expense along to our customers is much harder for them to accept than rising fuel prices."

But those problems were far in the future when Collier, who was born and raised in Toronto, spent her teens working at the city's international airport during school vacations, joining her mother, who was in the customs-brokerage business. She still remembers "enjoying the hustle and bustle of the airport and the interaction with customs officials and learning about all the different commodities and types of businesses I was dealing with."

That's why, like a single-minded homing pigeon, Collier went straight into the freight-forwarding industry after high school. While working her way up to managing the Toronto operations of a major European company called Olympic Forwarders, she says she "realized there wasn't anything I was doing for them that I couldn't do for myself. And I guess that's when I turned into an entrepreneur."

Collier's newly minted Mississauga company, strategically located near Pearson International Airport, got off to a strong start because so many Olympic customers decided to follow the young professional who had won their confidence. But Tri-ad also hit the ground running because its owner zeroed in on the then-emerging computer industry.

"I knew this was definitely a growing sector and that there was an awful lot of money involved because suddenly everybody wanted computers. So I developed a niche market shipping just-in-time inventory," she says.

But Collier also came up with another competitive pitch. "Security was a huge concern for computer companies like my first customer, which was Compaq. Laptops were still selling for $5,000. So I offered superior safety and anti-pilfering measures and ended up landing a lot of business."

How did she do that? One strategy was enveloping shipments in multiple layers of opaque, thief-discouraging shrink-wrap and steel strapping. The other was developing what she calls "signature service," by which only managers - not ramp or warehouse handlers - are allowed to sign for departing and arriving shipments.

During the years that followed, Collier and a staff that has now grown to 82 devised additional innovative customer offerings that paid off in double-digit annual growth.

From $500,000 in its first year, Tri-ad zoomed to $17.5 million in 2005, meanwhile opening a second office in Calgary (with additional offices in Montreal and Vancouver now on the horizon).

All that wouldn't have happened if Tri-ad hadn't kept adding to its portfolio of services, drawing ever more customers and keeping them happy. These satisfied companies now encompass the aerospace, pharmaceutical and electronic components industries as well as the computer sector, from which Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba and Tech Data, among others, remain loyal clients.

Psion Tecklogix, a global provider of wireless data collection devices, is another of Collier's prime clients. Says Canadian logistics manager Allan Chambers: "We've been with Tri-ad since 2002 because they can handle things as we need them handled and that's saying a lot because we're a very demanding company."

Another vote of confidence comes from Blair Barber, vice-president of logistics for Toshiba Canada. He says his company has patronized Tri-ad for the past 15 years, ever since "Linda stepped up and designed a solution for our third-party logistics needs."

Following that, Barber says Toshiba kept giving Tri-ad more and more of its business. About five years ago, after Collier took what she calls the "giant step" of investing $250,000 in a 168,000-sq.-ft., state-of-the-art warehouse facility, Toshiba shifted some of the storage requirements that had been costing almost $1 million a year to Tri-ad's warehouse, shaving about 23 per cent off its balance sheet.

"That savings was significant for us," Barber says, "but more than anything else, it's the smooth and timely flow Tri-ad guarantees that's the real benefit for us."

Lest this litany of successes paint too rosy a picture of her progress, Collier points to one major misstep - opening offices in Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2000. Sounds like a logical move, but within six months, she says she had nine "totally frivolous" lawsuits on her hands, which her lawyer said would cost $15,000 to $20,000 US each to litigate.

Still quietly fuming about U.S. laws that reward litigants with easy money, Collier says she decided to settle the suits (for sums she declines to disclose). She still wonders whether she might have handled these situations better in person. But a complicated first pregnancy prevented her from travelling and her multiple professional problems likely contributed to the premature birth of the now-five-year-old son she is raising on her own.

How did Collier handle her disappointing foray into the U.S.?

She shut down all three of Tri-ad's American offices and then negotiated a strategic partnership with Pilot Air Freight, which she says is the largest American freight forwarder in the world. Today, Tri-ad ships to and from 169 countries.

So, having not just survived but thrived during such a bumpy journey - and won an astounding number of prestigious honours along the way, including a Leading Women Entrepreneurs of the World award this year alongside U.S. moguls Jenny Craig and Donna Karan - what does Collier consider the most rewarding aspect of her career?

"It's hearing people, especially women, say that I'm their inspiration, that I'm the one they're cheering for because of everything I've done and everything I've gone through," she says.

"When I'm having a tough day and I hear that, it makes me feel great."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)