An interview with David Yokeum, the founder and CEO of the WCA Family of Logistic Alliances. This is a tale of two cities, Miami and Bangkok… and a decade in between. Can you go home again? Yokeum had a chance to reflect on the notion as he returned to Miami USA almost exactly ten years after he moved himself and his organization to Bangkok, Thailand. By George Lauriat, Editor-in-Chief, AJOT David Yokeum, founder and CEO of the WCA Family of Logistics Networks, was hosting the conference (June 13-16) for the Americas at the Intercontinental Miami. He left the podium and buzzed through the crowd on the floor shaking hands and directing traffic, just like he’s done for over fourteen years. Yokeum, who’s just a shade over 60, seems to have a boundless energy for the task and catching up with him and trying to slow him down, even for an interview, takes some doing. The WCA Family hosts a lot of meetings and an awfully large number of freight forwarders from nearly every conceivable corner of the globe attend in a cavalcade worthy of the UN. There are some 4,556-member offices in 188 countries. This is particularly true of the annual meetings held in Bangkok, where attendance of around 2,000 is the norm.
David Yokeum – founder & CEO of the WCA Family of Logistics Networks
Here and There In comparison the Florida meeting was more modest, but perhaps one of the most satisfying of Yokeum’s career, because Miami is where it really started. This was a homecoming of sorts, the place where everything started had now come full circle. Back in 1998, Yokeum launched the World Cargo Alliance (WCA), which was the first privately owned and managed neutral forwarder network. “We are truly neutral,” Yokeum has said on more than one occasion, emphasizing the difference between member-managed organizations and his own business model. Neutral was a key element to the new group. The WCA doesn’t engage or profit from the movement of the cargo, what the WCA provides is management structure, an umbrella of ever expanding services, that enable the independent forwarders and the membership to develop their own business contacts through the network. The signature trait of the WCA’s conferences is the one-on-one, meetings that work like speed dating for forwarders. The forwarders fill out a pre-conference meeting agenda and meet at tables “one-on-one” and with the ringing of the chimes rush off to me with the next scheduled member. Many first-timers are exhausted after the first day, and the process goes on for up to three days, punctuated with receptions and dinners. The one-on-ones reflect Yokeum’s own business style as he prefers face-to-face meetings. By 2000, WCA was doing very well, but as Yokeum explains, “ I was helping (five) other networks, and it became evident [both to himself and the members] we had to change, to develop…” and in 2002,Yokeum and the WCA moved from Miami to Bangkok. Miami and SoBe won’t be confused with Bangkok. Miami and South Beach are the East Coast’s answer to LA and Hollywood, and Bangkok (also the City of Angels) is Thailand’s capital and largest city with an estimated population of 5 million packed in districts set between klongs (canals). Besides cultural differences, language, weather, housing and just about everything else, Bangkok really was a good fit for the WCA. Yokeum knew the transition to Bangkok from Miami would be challenging, but the advantages of the new location were substantial, and the WCA wasn’t a startup. Even back then the network was in a good financial state and had a strong base membership. On the plus side, Bangkok office space was readily available as was the staff to support the WCA’s expanding backroom functions. On the down side, everything doesn’t always work in Thailand quite the same way as Miami, and the annual monsoons can make a regular workday interesting. But Yokeum was moving the network closer to the freight. A