One of our favorite times each year is when we can host our annual awards meetings with our drivers and independent contractors. Thursday, January 18, we hosted the meeting for 2018 that celebrated our success from 2017.
We host similar informational meetings every quarter, but our annual meeting is special because it features our awards.
Each year, we award the Larry Merle Award to one of our outstanding independent contractors. Larry was one of our first couriers when we started in 2007 and was always an inspiration for high-quality service. This year’s Larry Merle Award was presented to Stanley Boyd, who has been with OTL since 2016.
We also present the Above & Beyond Award, which is for a company employee who demonstrates exemplary work. This year’s recipient was Anne Williams, who handles some of our dispatching and customer service from her home in the state of Washington. She started in our Springdale location and was our first blog personnel profile in 2013 (she was Anne Whittaker then!).
We also heard from our leadership team about the success of 2017 and learned about new insurance options available to our staff.
We feel honored to have been able to grow our business by 66 new clients and have had our biggest year of sales in company history. The new clientele is spread across all three offices, which are in Springdale, Tulsa and Little Rock. Opening the Little Rock office in 2017 was another major milestone for our company and we’ve been growing in that location even faster than initially anticipated.
We also now have a record number of employees and independent contractors at 42 company-wide. As Pam Jones, OTL founder Steve Jones’ wife, said, those 42 employees represent 42 families and we care about every single one!
We look forward to more growth in 2018 as we make our clients’ business goals come true with our last mile, medical courier, warehousing, and other logistics services.