In 1994, as a twenty-four year old, Siddique Khan with $25,000 in seed money founded the Kazakhstan-based logistics company Globalink Logistics Group. From the beginning he made a strategic choice: DIY (Do It Yourself). By George Lauriat, AJOTGlobalink’s founder and CEO Siddique Khan has been in the transportation business virtually his entire life. “I started in the transportation business in my father’s company,” he related to the AJOT in an interview. “We had a short-sea operations in Southeast Asia and regional trucking,” Khan added. Khan went to work in the logistics business for multinational oil companies that had recently entered the region to develop the extensive oil and gas reserves. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Republic of Kazakhstan (the last of the former Soviet Republics to establish and independent state) it occurred to Khan that this was a wide open market for a logistics company. Initially, he began doing a little consultancy work with the oil companies, and in 1994, three years after the establishment of Republic of Kazakhstan, Khan launched Globalink with $25,000 in seed money. It’s the first private logistics company to open in a former Soviet state. Strategy From the very beginning Khan had a major decision to make. He had first hand knowledge of how things had been done, some right many others wrong, and early on decided on a business strategy that would emphasize building the company from the ground up. Khan didn’t want to go the traditional route of hiring foreign expatriates. He wanted to build his own management team. In a sense a DIY, do-it-yourself, approach to building not only a business but a home grown logistics industry. The people Khan hired were likely to become the basis for the logistics industry in Kazakhstan for years to come. In real terms the very first task was to recruit talented home grown candidates from which to build an employee base and to turn these candidates from “unskilled to skilled labor.” The first order of business was to develop and implement a training program. This included exchange programs and other management studies that would enable the staff to be not only effective regionally, (for example, many spoke Russian already) but to global business standards. To do this, many of his staff studied management abroad. “Exchange programs are an excellent way to learn the business,” Khan said of the approach. Over the years since the program started, the Globalink staff has been recognized, as Khan says, as “the gold standard” for logistics management in the region. Since the founding of Globalink the forwarder has expanded both in terms of geography and services. Khan told the AJOT that he adopted what amounted to a three-ring approach. “From 1994 to 2000, we expanded throughout the Caspian region. By 2004 we had circled around the Baltic region and Black Sea. Now we have a hub in Dubai and Amsterdam for air. And we have expanded throughout the Middle East, CIS and Europe,” Khan explained. The company now has offices in diverse locations such as Qingdao, China, Moscow and Dubai. Kazakhstan, the largest landlocked country in the world, as a crossroads has been important from the onset to that expansion. Because the Eurasian country sits astride so many crossing routes, the company has direct reach into China, the Middle East, and east and west Russia. For example, Kazakhstan is an important jumping off point for freight moving into Afghanistan or freight moving to and from Western China (Urumchi). After 2006, the company consolidated its various enterprises under Globalink Logistics Group. The logistics company began offering four prime route services: Trans-China Route (TCR); Trans-Siberian Route (TSR); Trans Iran Route (TIR); Trans Baltic Route (TBR); Brest - Malaszewicze Rail Route. In addition to these routes the company offered the air services. One of Globalink’s special services is full container load “FCL” service betwee