Part 2. Beyond the pathway that led me to freight forwarding over 33 years ago with the incorporation of what became ETC International Freight System in the summer of 1984. (Part 1 www.etcinternational.com "About us" at the bottom of the page)
In July of 1984 the international freight corporation was set up. The corporate name is still P Malinbaum Company with our first doing business as (DBA): Euro Transport Connections. I started as a one-man show on Hindry Avenue in Inglewood having one private office inside a bigger office space occupied by a customhouse broker. The business arrangement was that I would direct as many customs clearances from the import traffics through their office under my billing against a free space. We had the warehouse downstairs and this set-up worked pretty well. It was a time where type writers and a telephone line were kings. My biggest expense & aside from feeding my family was the telephone bills & the Yellow Pages ads.
This savvy set-up succumbed to a lease termination too quickly and led the way to a Japanese freight forwarder moving in. I lost the private office & rented a desk space near the bathroom. The broker was gone & I re-established a rapport with Edward P. Tallon Customhouse broker, which to this day, we still work together. My wife Lori joined me, and mostly sat down at the desk handling the accounting while I was standing by her on the telephone and typing up my air waybills & invoices away. At that time, I successfully applied for my International Administration Transportation Agency (IATA) license & slowly added to my air import shipments some air export shipments. I do not remember how long we survived next to the bathroom, but, the business grew everyday along with my wife’s belly, pregnant with our daughter Sacha.
Sometimes, in 1985, I moved down the street to 1 story new office building & warehouse. I added an employee and our baby Sacha with her play pen next to my wife in her office for 1 year. We evolved into some ocean import freight & purchased our first word processor (a type writer with a screen to its side). I was my own warehouse worker and used to off-load ocean containers of latex gloves among other commodities by myself. I had to do this after hours to keep handling the sales & documentation going during the daytime. Moses Posada joined our company, he was 21 years old, he is 47 years old now and still with us sharing great stories and a history. Along with Moses in the office, Dimitri our latest newborn jumped in the play-pan the first 6 months of his life. I had to fire him, early as he was too loud and disturbed our telephone communications. By then or maybe sooner, we had a telex machine to communicate with the agents, which perished with the birth of the facsimile machine and first archaic computer.
By 1988, we became licensed by the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC). About that time, we also obtained our Non-Vessel Operational Common Carrier (NVOCC) bond offering import, export consolidation as well as straight container load services for industrial, commercial & household goods customers.
In the few years that followed, we added a few employees & handled quiet more monthly shipments. We also had personal effects & automobiles for export & import shipping. We felt it a natural progression to add the packing & loading using our own crew on-site or in-house. We handled the trucking, the insurance, the warehouse, packing, loading, shipping, letter of credit & overseas clearance & delivery whether shipping household goods, commercial, industrial shipments as well as oversized permit cargo.
In 1993, we moved to our new location in Compton with about 12000 square feet of warehouse. We were loading weekly containers of autos (multiple cars doubled decked) among other products & were involved for years with the wheel & medical industries. Shipping a plant (Tatabanya, Hungary) and getting involved with their import & export shipments that followed. At that time, we also were involved in partial chartering. The 90s were fabulous under the Clinton era for most businesses. Our first hard hit was like the rest of the country on September 11, 2001. Our air department saw the sales decreasing by 1 million dollars. And so, we had to recoup from that and adjust like many other companies with new rampant regulations. The ocean exports were growing & kept us afloat through 2005. Then, under the George W. Bush (son) era, we started to feel the decline in business and by 2006 through 2010 it got from bad to worse. We had lost 50% of the personnel, moved out of the bigger building and regrouped in a smaller office with the emphasis on marketing & sales, keeping our overhead down.
In 2009, Dimitri was re-hired; my son joined the firm, he was 22 years old and experienced the hard time as well as the re-bounce we experienced since then. Like myself, he was trained in all the venues of ETC and he is presently our VP Sales. I can say that since 2010, we are growing, expending again.
In 2010 Danna Creal joined us in the management team and Danna is making a great personal contribution to ETC International Freight System, Danna is like family, caring & trust-worthy.
Happy together, now a second generation business about to celebrate 30 years since our creation, more ready than ever to make a difference in our lives as well as our customers’ shipments. To conclude here, we want to express our sincere thanks to our customers, especially the ones that have been helping us since the early years by entrusting their goods to our dedicated staff that is making ETC International Freight System family that we are.
