Pro Group Logistics’ main warehouse is located at 1291 E. Glendale Ave. in Sparks.
Courtesy Photo
Kayla Anderson | Special to the NNBW
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Sparks-based crossdock, warehouse, transload and transportation company JFC Logistics recently changed its name to Pro Group Logistics to better reflect expanded offerings.
Greg Sanguinetti acquired JFC Logistics in December 2018 and has since expanded the company to operate four warehouse facilities that span nearly 300,000 square feet (all within the Sparks area) while upgrading its fleet of tractor/trailers.
“I acquired JFC Logistics from the Jones family, and they had one crossdock, one warehouse and two trucks,” Sanguinetti says. “I bought the company and renamed the trucks to JFC because we didn’t have time to rebrand. However, we’ve completely reinvented the company since the acquisition.”
Sanguinetti has spent over 20 years in the packaging business in Northern Nevada. In 2014, he founded Resource Packaging, a packaging startup in Reno, which was acquired by Ernest Packaging Solutions in 2016. He worked as a manager at Ernest before acquiring JFC in 2018.
In the three years since Sanguinetti took it over, he says Pro Group Logistics has grown five-fold.
“We took it from two trucks to eight trucks and now are up to 300,000 square feet of space. We eliminated the crossdock service and are focusing on third-party logistics (3PL), fulfillment and distribution,” he told the NNBW. “We reinvented ourselves because we want to reflect what we do now.”
When asked, Sanguinetti declined to provide the company’s revenue totals since 2018.
Among other services, Pro Group Logistics provides full truckload, less-than-truckload, refrigerated freight, box truck and intermodal transportation, as well as overflow/overstock inventory storage and local distribution.
At a time when the pandemic is disrupting the supply chain, Pro Group Logistics also goes beyond by offering services such as ocean container devanning, rail-to-truck transload, truck-to-rail transload and more.
Pro Group Logistics works with B2B and B2C clients of all levels, from small startups to Fortune 500 companies.
The company has 26 employees, and while Sanguinetti admits the country’s ongoing labor shortage has affected business, Pro Group Logistics has raised wages, offered more benefits and implemented flexible schedules to hire and retain good employees, including upping the starting wage for a forklift position to $18 an hour.
“We’re still a small company making big waves, competing at really big levels,” Sanguinetti says. “We do warehousing and transportation, and have dozens of clients that we carry freight for locally and regionally. A lot of people think we have multiple locations in other areas, and we’ve looked at expanding, but we’re not there yet.”
Aside from labor challenges, Sanguinetti also spoke about how national supply chain challenges have affected business.
“One hundred percent, the supply chain/port issues (are) driving the need for warehousing, and we’re getting a lot of requests for help processing and unloading shipping containers,” he says. “There’s a shortage of warehouse facilities in our market because people are ordering more supplies than they normally would because they can’t count on lead times, so we help them.”
He added that the company is actively looking to obtain more warehouse space to fulfill larger orders in the future.
“It’s real. Everything you see in the news about the supply chain challenges is all very very real, so we’re just trying to help however we can,” Sanguinetti says. “At some point we’ll have to find another facility or start telling people ‘no’ … and we’d rather find another facility.”
He further explains the pandemic has created both Pro Group Logistics’ biggest challenges and biggest successes.
“We were already growing rapidly and then COVID came. With the demand of COVID and port disruptions we had to be able to pivot very quickly to meet the demand,” he says. “We didn’t have the luxury to sit down to write out a business plan … we had to be in the heat of the moment and stick to our values and it’s allowed us to get through this period.”
