SELF
PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: Dec. 24, 1965, Rumson, N.J.
Occupation: President and chief executive officer of CaseStack since 1999 Family: Wife Jane and sons Julian and Jon I don’t miss living in California, but I do miss the weather and the lifestyle, the ability to be outside all the time.
My style of leadership is that I like to have a collaborative style. I like everybody to understand what’s actually going on and share as much information as they can.
One thing I couldn’t live without is my iPhone or Blackberry.
I have a communications addiction.
I like to be connected. If I had to spend eight hours disconnected, I’d feel like I was on another planet.
A good saying is: “To own nothing is to be owned by nothing.” I don’t think I’ll ever feel like I’m successful.
I’ll always feel like I’m on the road to someplace, not actually there.
One word or phrase to sum me up is: collaborativeFAYETTEVILLE - Dan Sanker changed business in ways that were once thought impossible.
CaseStack, the logistics company he founded in late 1999, revolutionized the consumer products industry by helping midsize companies reduce shipping costs and improve reliability.
The company’s mission is both simple and incredibly complex. As Mike Anderson of Santa Cruz., Calif., CaseStack’s director of business development, puts it: “We take stuff to people with full trucks.”
Large companies generally have their own fleet of trucks to ship goods around the country. (Think of the countless Tyson trucks you’ve seen on Interstate 540 and beyond.) Because they can fill their trucks to capacity, shipping efficiency is maximized.
Midsize companies - those with less than $1 billion in annual sales - can’t afford to maintain their own fleets and are often faced with moving products in less-than-full trucks.
“We were able to level the playing field for the midsize, smaller guys, to give them what the billion-dollar-plus guys have without the millions of dollars of investment in the technology,” says Sanker, who moved to Fayetteville in 2007. “Back in 1999, that was a big deal.”
CaseStack ran 265,362 orders last year, doing business on every continent except Antarctica. The company has eight warehouses in the United States and Canada, with several million square feet of capacity, and can move goods by truck, train, ship and plane.
“We touch so many different industries in what we do,” says Craig Long, CaseStack’s director of transportation services. “We moved a meteorite last year - a quarter-million-dollar meteorite! - from Texas to California, and nothing could happen to it. We had to ship it almost armored-car style.
“We run a DC-10 up from South America three times a week, bringing asparagus, fish and flowers to casinos. We’ve delivered stuff into Iraq for the U.S. government.”
Sanker founded CaseStack in his house in Huntington Beach, Calif., then moved it to Brentwood and to its current headquarters in Santa Monica. CaseStack’s regional office in Fayetteville houses nearly half of the company’s 110 employees.
It had barely a dozen employees in March 2001, when Pei-Ching Ling came aboard as an operations controller. Even then, Ling says, it was clear the company had a strong foundation.
“Back in 2001, CaseStack had this proprietary software that was very unique, thatgrabbed a lot of information from different sources - from UPS, FedEx, a lot of major trucking companies that are out there - and also grabbed information that was related to inventory or marketing,” Ling says. “It pulls it all together so the customer has one place to go. The idea of it was very unique, and CaseStack was on the forefront of that.”
A BOY’S BUSINESS
Sanker was always fascinated by business.
He grew up in the wealthy suburb of Rumson, N.J., where his father, Joe, was a dentist and his mother, Eve, was a teacher. Sanker’s two siblings are eight and nine years older, so for much of his childhood, it was just he and his parents around the dinner table.
The topic of conversation was often business. Joe Sanker had a private practice, and after Eve lost her teaching job due to a budget cutback, she sought other lines of work. She worked as a real estate agent and owned an ice-cream shop.
In many ways, Sanker was a typical teenager. He played soccer in high school and loved to ski and go to the beach.
“I was a 3.6 student,” Sanker says. “In kindergarten I got a 3.6; that was my number. When I got my [master of business administration], it was a 3.6.”
However, his entrepreneurial spirit made him different.
“Dan was a man of all trades, from pumping gas to selling women’s shoes,” says Todd Katz of Ocean Township, N.J., a close friend since 1977. “When the White/Yellow Pages were coming out, they needed people to deliver them, and Dan said, ‘We’ll drive.’ Then we found out we had to deliver several thousand to the big military fort out here. ... He probably has the most diverse work resume of anyone I’ve ever known.”
Sanker worked in corporate finance in New York for two years after acquiring a degree in economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
He then headed to the West Coast, earning his master of business administration degree at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1992. Re-entering the business world, Sanker went from Procter & Gamble to Kashi, then to Nabisco and Deloitte before starting CaseStack.
All the while, he was coming up with business ideas. In 1996, Sanker started a company called Benefit Nutrition, which sold two lines of protein-packed cereal.
“He was always looking for something that would work,” says college friend Eric Freeman, who lives in Spain. “The rest of us would be talking about fun social events, and Dan was talking about nutritionists and caloric contents and the challenge of getting distributed.”
It was at Deloitte where Sanker’s concept of CaseStack really started to take shape.He was a managing director of corporate finance, often installing logistics packages for clients who were highly dissatisfied with their options.
At the same time, the dotcom boom was occurring. Sanker saw that companies didn’t need to spend millions of dollars on software packages they didn’t really want.
Companies wanted solutions - someone to handle their logistics for them. That someone was CaseStack.
“Back then there was this thought that people wanted to buy software,” Sanker says. “I don’t believe that. I don’t think anybody wants to buy software. I think they want a solution to something, and the software was sort of a necessary evil to make that happen. So our technology package is all bundled. It’s all available without a lot of work from the client. They don’t really have to do implementation oranything.”
The concept was sound, but the timing was awful. The dot-com bubble burst while Sanker was trying to raise capital, and CaseStack was $500,000 in debt one year in.
He invested $400,000 of his own money to keep the company going.
“We joke about having nine lives, and we’re on life 14,” says Sanker, who weathered the breakup of his first marriage during those early years. “I’ve never had concerns that we weren’t going to make it, but we’ve definitely had challenges along the way that were just huge.
“That mainly relates back to capital. It’s always been that. The capital markets are there for themselves, not for the functioning of businesses.”
The breakthrough year was 2003, when CaseStack’s revenues more than tripled from the year before. Inc.com rated CaseStack the 48th-fastest growing private company in the nation, a recognition Sanker calls the most meaningful of his career.
Considering the mountain of awards CaseStack has won since, that’s saying something.
GREENER PASTURES
Sanker’s first contact in Northwest Arkansas was with Wal-Mart in 2001, when CaseStack began working with the retailer to consolidate its less-than-truckload orders into full truckloads. He soon saw the need to open an office here and moved with his wife, Jane, and their two sons in 2007.
About that time, he founded Green Valley Initiative, hoping to put Northwest Arkansas at the center of the sustainable technology movement.
Sanker says sustainability was a major influence in hisdecision to move here. He admits he was initially skeptical about “green” technology - the science of lessening the effects of human industry on the natural environment - but the words of advocates like former President Bill Clinton, former Wal-Mart Chief Executive Officer Lee Scott and New York Times columnist and author Tom Friedman converted him.
“I was like ‘Wow, these guys are smarter than I am,’”Sanker says. “They travel around the world and they think the most important thing is sustainability.”
The more Sanker looked at Northwest Arkansas, the more he became convinced that this area could be a hub for sustainable business practices the way California’s Silicon Valley is a hub for the Internet.
“He’s a person with extraordinary vision [who] can see the potential in Northwest Arkansas,” says Steve Rust, president and chief executive of Green Valley Development, a component of Green Valley Initiative. “He sees what a tremendous opportunity there is in promoting Green Valley, to bring new jobs and technology to [Northwest Arkansas].”
Sanker has promoted sustainability at the Arkansas Legislature and practices it within his own company.In one warehouse alone, a change from high-pressure sodium lights to a compact modular lighting platform produced greenhouse-gas emission cuts that were the equivalent of taking 562 cars off the road, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
There are no paper cups used in the office - everyone brings his own mug - and the California office rewards employees who carpool. Even the vending machines have motion sensors that cause them to light up only when people walk by.
CaseStack was named “One of the Best Places to Work in Los Angeles” by the Los Angeles Business Journal in 2007, and it was named an Energy Star Partner in 2008. Earlier this month the company was designated a Smart-Way Transportation Partner by the EPA.
“I think a lot of the reason he got involved and started to care about sustainability is that he never really approached it from a green angle,” says Liz Abrams, a marketing manager with CaseStack in Fayetteville. “He approached it from it being about improving the process and reducing waste. He naturally gravitated toward whathe was interested in.”
Some CaseStack employees speak almost reverentially about Sanker’s business acumen, and yet at the same time, they view him as incredibly approachable and easy to deal with.
That’s by design. Sanker has always encouraged collaboration and open communication, and he generally disdains meetings, preferring instead that someone walk into his office if they want to talk.
“In industry we have people called dinosaurs, who don’t like changes,” says Ling, the operations controller. “[Sanker] is always like, ‘How can we improve this company and how can we improve this industry?’ He’s always looking five years ahead.”
Northwest Profile, Pages 40 on 05/16/2010