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At just 24 the founder of freight forwarding company Verus Global Jackson Meyer (pictured) has achieved a major milestone - turning over $42 million in the company's first financial year of operation.
The young entrepreneur says the business managed to overcome a myriad of disruptions including the Hong Kong protests and COVID-19 to witness 700 per cent growth in FY20.
Since opening its doors in 2019 the company has since quickly established 15 offices in Australia, Hong Kong, mainland China and the UK.
Earlier this year the Verus Global announced it had turned over $24 million in just its first year of operation, smashing out Meyer's own prediction that the company would achieve $12 million in revenue during that same period of time.
Speaking to Jack Corbett, the host of Business News Australia's Talking to Trailblazers podcast, Meyer said this first full financial year of operation has been a wild ride.
"There's been a bit of doubt in people's minds, so there's been a fair few events that we've had to ride through and it's certainly been a learning curve," he said.
"Obviously the number one priority was to survive, particularly going through this, and the second was to maintain the team that we have. It was kind of battling it on all fronts, so I was stabilising and making sure we would ride it through together."
For a man of his age Meyer has been extremely successful, which he attributes to identifying the risks associated with the ailing retail space at an early stage.
"It was part of the strategy when setting up to steer well clear of fashion and retail, we identified those risks," Meyer said.
"Right now we're finding that a lot of our competitors are actually struggling to lift the cargo due to credit risks etc."
Being a disruptor in the freight forwarding space is difficult, especially when coming up against established, multi-national players. Meyer says being the new kid on the block helps in terms of differentiating Verus Global from those already dominating the industry.
"To be honest, you can't really compete against the likes of DHL or UPS," says Meyer.
"What we try and do is we run a very asset-light business that allows us to operate from a very low cost base. We haven't inherited any legacy systems, we don't have fixed massive overheads in terms of computer servers and stuff like that.
"So what we want to do, we want to offer our customers a very top notch customer service point, as well as accelerated logistics."
To listen to the entire conversation between Jack and Meyer click here.
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Business News Australia
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