Category: Uncategorized

A forwarder can have its best year ever and still fail to make payroll, and nothing has to go wrong for it to happen. The two kinds of money on every freight invoice, why you front about thirty naira for every one you earn, and why the gap belongs to no department.

Four of the eleven trade terms cannot legally apply to an air shipment, and people use them every day. Which seven actually work for air, what each one means at an airport, and the traps that belong to air alone.

Most container shipments in the world are sold on FOB, and almost none of them should be. The four sea-only trade terms, when each is genuinely right, and the container mistake that leaves a three-day gap nobody has agreed on.

I read a stack of real freight quotations from more than a dozen companies on four continents, not to catch anyone out but to answer one question: where does the money actually leak? Ten patterns, and most of them had nothing to do with the rate.

A trader budgeted eighteen thousand dollars for a shipment quoted “CIF Lagos”. He was wrong by about half, and he was not careless. Incoterms explained in plain words, with the seven mistakes that cost people the most.

You budgeted for the duty. The bill arrived at nearly twice that. It is not corruption and it is not a mistake: it is six charges where you planned for one, and one of them is calculated on top of all the others.

For half of your shipment’s journey, your forwarder is not there. A company you have never heard of is handling your cargo. What a decade of working with overseas partners taught me about who to trust and why.

Most people think importing starts when the ship arrives. By then almost every decision that determines your cost has already been made. Here is one container from factory to warehouse, in order, with the clock running.

Most careers in logistics run vertical. Mine ran sideways, and that turned out to be the point.

I came into freight as a digital marketer, and for over a year my campaigns barely worked. The reason turned out to be the most useful lesson of my career, and I had to learn it twice.